He produced Cosmos as the world faced a permanent threat of global annihilation on a hair-trigger. Homeboy wouldn't have lost hope one billionth of one bit.
This is a plea for public support funding for a government agency that does some valuable (about billion for science funding and astronomy/exploration) and some scientifically negligible work (The balance of billion for manned spaceflight and administration) work.
The most important space exploration technology of the last decade? The IKAROS solar-sail propelled probe, developed by Japan's space agency. Sort of a crotch rocket to NASAs SUVs.
Humans are capable of great things. They just aren't willing and they won't be willing until they develop a collective consciousness or a hive mind. People will lie, murder, cheat and steal from each other for as long as they have something to gain or lose from someone else.
When we finally manage to travel into and colonize deep space, we will be at the crossroads between prioritizing individuality or hardwiring ourselves into the über-brain.
On one side we'd always have wars and death and capitalism. On the other side there's the chance that our collective consciousness turns out to be a masochist and wipes out entire planets just to see what it feels like.
Either way, this Carl Sagan hyper-enthusiasm for space exploration doesn't do it for me.
You make the fallacious assumption that humans are more bad than good and need 'correcting'. This is not valid logic as it does not take scarcity and the conquest of scarcity into account.
Human conflict inevitably comes from one kind of scarcity or another. Most often this is material, but it can manifest in other ways.
What is important to remember is that when scarcity is conquered, when people have what they need to flourish, conflict and crime and all of the horrible things that scarcity brings out in people always decline.
The declaration that human beings are innately flawed in a destination for what we consider to be 'bad' and need to have this 'bad' removed from them by a benevolent authority is fallacious and rooted in our ancient past through the manipulation of masses by religious authority.
Humans do not need authority to be good. They need to conquer scarcity and their natural goodness shines. Conflict will never ever reach a 0 percent incidence rate, but it will always drastically decline when people are not forced to exist in a state of fighting for scarce resources.
Or, to put it simply, if people were innately flawed in such a destructive manner that those conflicts were conscious decisions even when unnecessary, the human race would not have made it this far.
We take things for granted far more than we can possibly imagine. Stop a moment and think about the intense beauty we have created when our needs are met, appreciate every tiny thing we have, and there is no way you can logically think that humans are accurately described by your first paragraph.
p.s. Kill your television and life becomes beautiful again.
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