(04-22-2025, 11:23 PM)imitator Wrote: I think Carl Sagan was one of the first to think of this.
Sagan and others also used pulsars to triangulate our place in the galaxy on the Pioneer plague.[Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...1621-x.jpg]
Sagan was a slippery bird, a double agent. William Poundstone, Sagan's official biographer, in his book details how immensely Sagan, as an undergrad, was taken with believing in UFOs. He dragged his roommate out on UFO "watches." He even wrote a letter to Dean Achierson, the Secretary of State, asking what we were going to do about the them. A fresh Ph.D, he was tapped by Edward Condon to work on the notorious
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. Sagan is mentioned once in the work, but it was not mentioned anywhere that he was on Condon's team. Sagan was a clever man. He made a name for himself early with reworking the original work of I.S. Shklovskiii,
Intelligent Life in the Universe, in 1966. Some called him a "gad-fly scientist." He was loved by the public, but hated by many scientists. I did a lengthy article on him after his death. His favorite saying in his anti-UFO talks was "Yes, they are out there, but they can't get here." I heard him say those words in a 1973 Chicago symposium on The Future of Man. He used Einstein's argument for the limit of velocity (under the typical view that the SOL was a limiting barrier. He was brilliant and clever, but very much the shill the government needed to slowly open the public up to the inevitable truth about UFOs. I'm sure that his early passing was due in some respects to not being able to welcome the public to the real situation of the UFOs. Was he a hero? I don't know, but he had a role to play and did it well.