/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16048398
>>16048406
>>16048409
Sagan was a kook
>The following excerpt is from the Sagan biography A Life in the Cosmos, by William Poundstone: One Sunday morning toward the end of summer, Abrahamson, his fiancée, and Sagan were washing the car the couple had been given as an engagement present. Sagan propounded a new theory: that Moses, Jesus, and all the great religious figures of ages past were really extraterrestrial beings. The miracles of the Bible had all happened as described. Moses parted the Red Sea, Jesus turned water into wine, and so forth. They used advanced technology that was perfectly normal on their planet—but which we earthlings could take only as proof of divinity.
>Abrahamson good-naturedly challenged him. Sagan refused to budge. He was either serious or acting as if he was serious. With Sagan, it was hard to tell which.
>That afternoon, Abrahamson took his fiancée and Sagan out to dinner at what was, for Bloomington in the 1950s, a very posh establishment. It was “the kind of restaurant where people went after church.” In the middle of dinner, without any warning, Sagan slammed his fist on the table, sending the dishes rattling. He looked Abrahamson in the eye and bellowed, “I tell you, Jesus Christ is extraterrestrial!”
>The restaurant fell silent. It took a subjective eternity for conversations to resume with something of their former spontaneity. Abrahamson and his fiancée wanted to crawl under the table