Pale Blue Dot

Rating:
Summary: Informative and engaging
Review: Sagan's view of our past, present and future relations with space is accessible and enthusiastic. Always looking for life, Sagan explains the criteria that might indicate life on earth to a prospecting alien and applies the principles to data from other planetary bodies.

Beautiful color-enhanced space photography and scientific paintings illustrate Sagan's journey through the solar system as he visits each world and describes how speculation and expectation changed with new information from various space probes. Each planet remains shrouded in mystery, however, as Sagan explores the questions that remain as well as those that have been answered.

Along with a thorough look at the planets, moons and asteroids of our system, Sagan fits them into their solar environment, explaining the interactions of sun, gravity, temperatures and atmospheres.

Sagan's conversational style and willingness to speculate makes this thorough, cogent discussion of space program accomplishments and failures, the politics and philosophy of space exploration, and where we might go in the future, an informative treat.

Rating:
Summary: Another Sagan Masterpiece
Review: Sagan's work is tainted by a needless criticism of religion. He devotes early chapters of this book to debunking a religious worldview that posits man as a unique creature and the earth as a unique God given place.
This angry stance towards religion is unnecessary, misplaced and detracts from his work...afterall, how many Sagan readers need to be convinced that the earth wasn't created in seven days?
Furthermore, the religious straw man that Sagan constructs is restricted just to fundamentalist viewpoints. Sagan doesn't acknowledge the possibility of a spirtual viewpoint that is compatible with science.
Sagan eventually gets onto brilliant descriptions of distant planets and other worldly environments...but without exception his descriptions are of situations that can't harbor life...yet he never states the obvious fact that the paucity of life giving situations, makes human life and earth's environment seem all the more unique and miraculous...a position that undermines Sagan's earlier anti-religious position.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Vision Dulled.
Review: To the original version of this book I would have certainly given five stars; it is a wonderfully inspiring book, by a man who was not only a fine scientist but a great humanitarian, a man who had worked hard to persuade governments of the danger of 'nuclear winter'. Sagan's astute mind, and his compassion, is brought to bear on his vision of our futures in Pale Blue Dot. This is not a utopian vision, Sagan is certainly cognizant of human frailty and our propensity for violence: "If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom we will surely destroy ourselves." It is, however, ultimately a hopeful vision, and one based largely upon what we know of our universe, the physics underpinning its behaviour. His thinking is thus more than merely speculative. When, however, I received my own paperback version...I found that all the photographs, images, and graphs - an important part of the book, still referenced in the index - had been removed from the text, hence the four stars, not five. These images in the original book had helped to elucidate what we had achieved already, our discoveries of strange new worlds, as well as what the author and others believed we might achieve in the future. The removal of this material, for reasons which I can only guess, is to be regretted. Would Carl Sagan have supported such editing of his work? What do you think?