What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." [from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]
The amazing American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, science communicator, author, and professor Carl Sagan passed away in 1996, long before the publication of Ronald Wright's "A Short History of Progress" which is an absolute must-read, provocative, illuminating and disturbing as it is, for anyone who cares about the future. His prophetic book ends with these words:
"We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past. Now is our last chance to get the future right."
I don't care if you have never read and will never read any kind of book at all, but you must read this one. If you can't read it, pay someone to read it to you - or listen to the audio recording at the top of this post.
I guarantee you it'll be better than watching tonight's FOUR CORNERS and Q&A on ABC television (to say nothing of the commercial channels).
