Reed Fagan’s Reviews > Contact > Status Update

It's fun reading & learning Sagan was obsessed w/ "noise", the idea that in any smattering of data, often acoustical, if you listen close enough you hear some story being told. When I learned about dendritic patterns, I got similarly obsessed w/ them & their ubiquity.
A good philosophical problem posed in this ch.: that the "Message" is plans for a Trojan Horse/Doomsday Machine. Plot hasn't resolved this yet.

"After 1945...leaders changed, weapons systems changed, strategy changed, but the # of [nuclear] weapons only increased. The time came when there were more than 25,000...10 for every city... Only so monumental a danger could undo so monumental a foolishness, endorsed by so many leaders in so many nations for so long... But a sentence of death, as Samuel Johnson had noted, concentrates the mind wonderfully." – p. 157

So far much of Sagan's symbolism has been very blatant/on the nose. I know many find such writing sophomoric but I appreciate it; my own art attempts have had similar overt symbols.
Coming to see more of his thoughts about religion & its role in history/society. It interests, maybe even appeals to, him. He deals with some of the inherent problems of Christian faith facilely, but may deal w/ more sophistication ahead.

""[Rudolph Otto] thought of the numinous as a thing 'wholly other,' and the human response to it as 'absolute astonishment'. Now, if that's what religious people talk about when they use words like sacred or holy, I'm with them. I felt something like that just in listening for a signal, never mind in actually receiving it. I think all of science elicits that sense of awe." - pp. 131-132

"She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another... If the 1-year-old, the 5yo, the 12yo, and the 20yo all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship."- p. 131