Fragility Reminders
Existential geopolitical lessons from Carl Sagan's Contact and Greg Bear's Eon
I've been reading two books from roughly the same era over the last couple of weeks: Greg Bear's Eon and Carl Sagan's Contact. (Now that I've flipped them open to check the dates, they're both from the same year: 1985, making them as old as I am). They're both wonderful stories so far and they have some interesting overlaps.
Contact is Sagan's only novel, about humanity after radio astronomers intercept a signal from deep space, our first indication that there's life elsewhere in the universe, and their efforts to engage in contact. Eon is also something of a first contact novel: a hollowed-out asteroid appears over Earth with vast cities and libraries – and a concerning message about a catastrophic future for the planet.
I haven't finished either novel yet, but there's something that's struck me about both. In 1985, the US and USSR were still heavily engaged in the Cold War, and both novels really reflect that geopolitical environment. Sagan's Contact has quite a bit of discussion from the US perspective about how they really need to bring Soviet scientists into the conversation, given that there's a) no way to keep them from getting the message, and 2), what they've encountered is something that really concerns all of humanity.
Given that we're talking about a story from the same person who coined the phrase "pale blue dot" as a shorthand for how we're just tiny specks of dust in the larger universe, it's not surprising to hear the message that even something as consuming as the Cold War is insignificant in the greater scheme of things.
Flipping over to Eon, there's a lot of congruity here. Bear's novel features the arrival of this giant asteroid, and as the scientific community engages in its work figuring out where it came from (spoilers: an alternate universe), they're also trying to figure out how to bring the Soviets in as partners. It feels like there's more geopolitical nuance here: maybe Bear was more of a realist for how human actors would operate, but (spoilers), it doesn't entirely go well for the teams on the asteroid: just as they're learning that there was a devastating war between the US / USSR in this alternate world, they're helpless to stop a similar event from boiling over in their own. The Soviet Union sends a strike force into the Stone and down below, a thermonuclear war erupts.
Ultimately, both books are talking about the same thing: the overwhelming threat of war because of long-simmering tensions between global powers shows just how fragile our existence on the planet is. It's not a comforting thought.
It's been interesting to read these two books 38 years after they were published and in the midst of a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine (and its proxies). Many of those same lessons that Sagan and Bear were highlighting back nearly four decades ago are still pressing in 2023: tribalism and nationalism are toxic to our long-term survival as a civilization (if not species), and if we don't navigate these paths carefully, all we'll inherit is a pile of smoking, radioactive rubble.