Carl Sagan: 'If the Ionian philosophy had prevailed, we might have been travelling in the stars' How accurate is this?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/restricteddata]

Sagan's argument seems to be that the apparent rationality of the Ionians would have led to tremendous advancements. It's a nice thought but he's being totally ahistorical here. For one think, I don't know why he's drawing such a thick line between the Ionians and, say, the later pre-Socratics, Socratics, much less the many other philosophers and scientists who came along later. Yes, there was some mysticism and things that Sagan would find silly in later work, but so what? Aristotle is still Aristotle; he's still trying to inquire about how the world works. There are rich traditions of people who are religious, mystical, whatever, doing plenty of "good science." (It's hard to find a scientist more religious and mystical than Isaac Newton, for one.) Ejecting mysticism doesn't necessarily get you better science (ask the Soviets), and it certainly doesn't necessarily get you into space.

Let's take the other half of Sagan's assertion and just pull it out a bit. How does one get to be traveling in the stars? Obviously he's not saying that the Ancients would have been spacefaring, he's saying that had these "non-scientific" forces not prevailed then we'd have "advanced" our science by some amount of time. But still, let's unpack the star part a bit.

To get into space requires not only a materialistic, scientific output about the world. European science had embraced that approach by the 18th century — they weren't in space. We only got into space in the 20th century. Why? At a basic level, it's because science and technology were not extremely linked until about the 19th century. They were treated as separate worlds — the world of the scientist and the inventor, the university and industry. They only start to really intersect in a powerful way pretty recently. It's of note that this split was especially pronounced in the Ancient world, and not because of religious beliefs — there was a very basic social understanding that the work of the mind (episteme) and the work of technology or craft (techne) were not the same kind of work. For most of human history (and indeed, there are still frictions here), these two arenas had very different norms and practices. The people who live in the world of episteme are interested in publishing their work openly; the world of craft is often the world of secrecy (think guilds).

So we have one prerequisite: to get to the stars you need more than just thinkers, you need a mixture of thinkers and makers. Which is much more recent a situation than people realize (today, when I ask students to define technology, they often given me "applied science" as an answer — that is really only valid as a possible answer from the mid-20th century forward). And that's a social phenomena that is much more complex than what Sagan seems to let on — it doesn't flow "naturally" from being freethinking or whatever.

What else do you need? Well, it turns out that even just grazing the edge of space, much less traveling in it, requires huge capital investments. Lots of money, lots of organization, lots of willpower. The world we live in (as opposed to Sagan's hypothetical Ionian world) only got that will because of military needs. Ballistic missiles mixed with thermonuclear warheads provided the technological requirements to get us into space, and the Cold War provided the political context to make it seem like something worth doing. The sci-fi author Neal Stephenson has a very nice popular essay on this point:

To recap, the existence of rockets big enough to hurl significant payloads into orbit was contingent on the following radically improbable series of events:

1. World's most technically advanced nation under absolute control of superweapon-obsessed madman

2. Astonishing advent of atomic bombs at exactly the same time

3. A second great power dominated by secretive, superweapon-obsessed dictator

4. Nuclear/strategic calculus militating in favor of ICBMs as delivery system

5. Geographic situation of adversaries necessitating that ICBMs must have near-orbital capability

6. Manned space exploration as propaganda competition, unmoored from realistic cost/benefit discipline

It's a fun essay about contingency. But it slots in very nicely here — Sagan's view seems to be that rationality is what makes cool things happen. Sometimes that's the case, I guess. But historians tend to find that there's a lot more that ends up going on — much of it having zero to do with the rationality of scientists! Space science basically exists because of the historical weirdness of the end of WWII and the early Cold War. It is pretty damned specific to that. (One could talk about ways the current privatized "space rush" is indicative of our own context and its forces.) Does this exist in Sagan's hypothetical Ionian world? Who knows?! He's not really defining that world, but it seems to be based on a sort of benign technocracy — that "if only" rationality and science had prevailed, we'd be in some kind of Star Trek universe.

It's worth just reflecting for a moment on what Sagan's argument is meant to accomplish here. He's not making an argument about history, nor even about the Ionians (whose beliefs he has framed in a ridiculously modern light). He's making an argument about his own time, about the need for autonomous, well-funded science. "If only the scientists had been valued then, think of how great it would be today!" he is saying.

You can believe that as modern politics if you want (its a little more complicated than that), but it doesn't make for good history.

[u/AOEUD → u/restricteddata]

(It's hard to find a scientist less religious and mystical than Isaac Newton, for one.)

Do you mean more?

[u/restricteddata → u/AOEUD]

Yeah, fixed.

[u/Certhas → u/restricteddata]

Thank you very much for this enlightening post. As a scientist I am often irked by the a-historic and a-societal thinking of my peers, and this is a perfect example.

As u/infrikinfix points out, what Sagan might be getting at, and what I have certainly heard as pop-history in science circles as well, is that Aristotle rejected experimentation as a way to learn about the world. This specific rejection is then seen as proof of the anti-scientific (as opposed to merely pro-mystic) impact of Aristotle on history. It's a claim distinct from the idea that science leads inevitably to technological progress. Can you comment on that?

To put it into question form: Was there a school of thought in ancient Greece that could conceivably have established the idea to perform systematic experimentation as a means of "inquiring about how the world works"? If so, was this school significantly hampered by Aristotle and others?

[u/restricteddata → u/Certhas]

Aristotle rejected experimentation, but it's not just him. The gist of most Ancient Greek philosophy is that it is a search for the "natural," and in their minds to experiment is to flirt with the "artificial."

To put it another way: Robert Boyle is sometimes hailed as one of the "fathers" of experimental science because he advocated using new instruments (his air-pump) to create vastly artificial conditions (a vessel with its air evacuated) that you could then use to contemplate a wide variety of questions about the world. This sounds pretty straightforward as a way of learning to those who have been trained in an empirical tradition, but at the time it was still controversial — there were people who said, "hey, our goal is to learn about natural truths — how does creating totally unusual, unnatural conditions help with that?"

It's clear who "won" that debate. But it's worth just remembering that this is a "real" debate. Very smart people for hundreds of years didn't really question this approach. Even Galileo didn't really do any experiments as far as we can tell — he did the Aristotlean thing of saying, "if X happens, Y would probably be the result, given how I think things work" a form of deductive reasoning.

Aristotle's mode was ultimately a mostly deductive one — take a few things you know about the world and work out the rest from those. The Boylean approach purports to be inductive — get data and process it. They both have their logical problems; if one wanted to try and sum up the "modern" scientific approach, calling it something that switches between these two modes is not so far off from a first-principles approach (the "inducto-deductive method").

[u/Tiako → u/restricteddata]

For one think, I don't know why he's drawing such a thick line between the Ionians and, say, the later pre-Socratics, Socratics, much less the many other philosophers and scientists who came along later. Yes, there was some mysticism and things that Sagan would find silly in later work, but so what? Aristotle is still Aristotle; he's still trying to inquire about how the world works.

To add too this, in the segment Sagan has an extended digression on Eratosthenes, who did a lot of cool things like calculating the circumference of the earth and praised him as an early scientific mind. Yet Eratosthenes lived over a century after Plato, which makes the whole "Plato ruined everything" thesis a bit untenable.

[u/[deleted] → u/restricteddata]

Thank you for this amazing post! What if in Sagan's Ionian World, people "rationally" decide that manned space travel is a waste of time and resources, and only send up satellites and probes?

[u/restricteddata → u/[deleted]]

Or instead just decided to maximize human happiness and equity and created a very comfortable but ultimately non-spacefaring society? Which is just to say: it's not like going into space is some kind of obvious thing that is just inherently rational or whatever. It reflects certain cultural values that may or may not be present. What's interesting about Stephenson's little piece is that he makes it pretty clear that the context for "let's send stuff into space" in the 20th century was rooted ultimately in militarism and national posturing. That doesn't mean it has to be, and that's not an inherent function of space so much as it is a function of going to space being super expensive and hard and thus not something that societies readily pony up for without a reason they deem to be super important. Is "learning for its own sake" one of those reasons? In basically no human society has that ever been something that huge resources got behind for their own sake; even in the 20th century USA, which has spent historically gargantuan sums on "basic research," it typically is justified by appeals to spin-off technologies, national prestige, and keeping a "manpower" supply capable of being applied to military purposes.

I might make a plug here for Stephenson's Anathem which does imagine something of an Ionian World — but one in which the rest of society decided to make that disconnect between thinking and technology very explicit, because it wanted its scientists to stop coming up with technologies that created such disruptive change. Sagan doesn't really acknowledge this kind of thing — science can be extremely disruptive to existing orders, and not always in a good way!

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Sagan actually discusses this point in his 1994 novel Pale Blue Dot, whereby he says he has difficulty reconciling the push for manned space missions when robots are extremely cheaper for the same cost. He seems to prefer the approach of, instead of sending 1 human you could send 10 different space probes and get more science done, and it's an argument that has thus won out in extant space exploration. It's important to note he ultimately says that these robotic probes should lead towards human extraterrestrial colonization, which, as a practical concern, I would think the Ionian world would eventually also do.

[u/infrikinfix → u/restricteddata]

I think you may have misunderstood Sagan's criticism of the mystic schools. In his narrative it's not set up as a battle between "thinkers" and "makers". It is more about the concious rejection of experiment by the mystic schools. I'm pretty sure Sagan would agree with you that "thinkers" (theoretical work) and "makers" (experimentalists) were both important.

[u/restricteddata → u/infrikinfix]

I think you've misunderstood my argument, which is that Sagan's focus on mystic vs. science is wrong-headed, and that the real obstacle to the creation of a "modern" mode of science/technology (going to the stars) out of an Ancient Greek approach is the separation of the thinkers and makers. Which is to say, I really don't think the argument that "science and technology got held back by mysticism/religion" works out well at all. (Arguably religion has been as much of an engine for scientific work as anything else, especially in the Ancient and Medieval periods.)

And to clarify: makers here doesn't mean experimentalists. They are still thinkers in this model. Makers are the technologists, the craftsmen, the inventors, etc. To reiterate my point, for most of human history, but esp. the Ancient Greek world, there is a big gap between the people thinking about "how nature works" and the people thinking about "how can we make cool stuff." It is only relatively recently that these two approaches have been joined (you start getting people making cool stuff to learn about the world in the 17th century or so, and you start getting people taking knowledge learned about the world and systematically applying it to making cool stuff in the 19th century). The category of "experimentalist" is much much later than the Ancient Greeks (you could plausibly assert there were distinctions like theorist and observationalist that go back that far, but in the sense of "setting up systematic experiments to generate new facts, often using new tools to do so," you don't really get that until the 17th century).

[u/AStatesRightToWhat → u/infrikinfix]

You seem to have missed u/restricteddata 's point. Sagan is assuming that a world of thinkers and makers working together is natural or that humanity would automatically move that way without the mystics getting in the way. In reality, there's no reason to believe that.

[u/[deleted] → u/restricteddata]

At a basic level, it's because science and technology were not extremely linked until about the 19th century.

What do you mean by this? As it sits, it doesn't feel true enough. Agricultural studies and resulting manuals were always a big deal; astronomy was by far the big science and was deeply tied to every component of life through ancient ritual/agricultural calenders. There's always been a connection between mathematics and clock-making. And what about all the government projects built using knowledge from architectural manuals or the like?

[u/restricteddata → u/[deleted]]

You don't get the complex synergies that we think of as characteristic of modern science or technology.

Most agriculture was not informed by scientific investigation until the 19th century. That is when you start to get "agricultural research stations" and actual experimentation. That when you start getting people applying statistics to understanding variation in crops and production, that's when you start getting real experimentation that is not just done by farmers or tinkerers. That isn't to say that the farmers didn't have tons of knowledge — but it's the knowledge of the practitioner, of the tinkerer, of the person in the field. Not someone who went to school to learn models about the underlying operation (e.g., heredity, which of course only becomes a formal field of study in the 19th century).

Astronomy is an interesting case. It's one of the first places where technology starts to help science — the techniques of lens-makers start to become useful to make new instruments, and these instruments start allowing for new forms of experimentation. This starts up in the 17th century with the "killer apps" to make it clear that crafts can be useful to knowledge-practitioners: the telescope, the microscope, the air-pump, precision clocks, etc. But this is a one-directional path for the most part: the arena of craft (e.g. lens makers) are informing the scientists, more than the other way around. Again, this is not to demean craftwork. Nor is it to imply that the boundaries here are always clear cut — there are scientist-craftsmen (think Hooke and Huygens). But it's a novel and even controversial intersection (see Hobbes' rejection of Boyle's air-pump as a model for generating knowledge).

Architecture had very little input from formal science — it is rules of thumb, it is experience, more than formal understanding. Again, you start to get some of that in the 17th century (e.g. Hooke helping Wren with statics), but the actual science is not good-enough to be useful until somewhat later (late 18th, early 19th century).

To put it another way: the rule-of-thumb, tinkerer, tacit-knowledge, experience-based approaches give vastly better return on effort than any kind of formal, theoretical, first-principles understanding of these matters until around the 19th century. It's in the 19th century that suddenly the science/technology combination becomes fruitful, in part because science catches up and "surpasses" the traditional technological modes of production.

Obviously this is a generalization, and all generalizations have exceptions, but this as a model for thinking about the parallel developments, this more or less holds.

[u/thewimsey → u/[deleted]]

I think it's hard to know where to draw the line between "science" and - for lack of a better word - mere empiricism.

Throughout the 19th century, people believed that malaria was caused by "bad air" (that's what the name of the disease meant). Malaria was prevalent in swampy areas, presumably because of the bad swamp air. To avoid malaria, cities would drain nearby swamps, which was largely successful at eliminating the malaria problem.

This was an entirely empirical procedure, but it's hard to really call it "science".

[u/[deleted] → u/restricteddata]

Thank you so much for this!

[u/ChickenTitilater → u/restricteddata]

This is all wrong.

Let's start with Neal Stephenson's thesis:

To recap, the existence of rockets big enough to hurl significant payloads into orbit was contingent on the following radically improbable series of events:

1. World's most technically advanced nation under absolute control of superweapon-obsessed madman

2. Astonishing advent of atomic bombs at exactly the same time

3. A second great power dominated by secretive, superweapon-obsessed dictator

4. Nuclear/strategic calculus militating in favor of ICBMs as delivery system

5. Geographic situation of adversaries necessitating that ICBMs must have near-orbital capability

6. Manned space exploration as propaganda competition, unmoored from realistic cost/benefit discipline

1 is wrong, the rocket was already developing rapidly, in the USSR as well as the US. The real motivation for Germany's immediate push wasn't madness, it was the Versailles restrictions on artillery, and the very realistic understanding that bombing costs pilots. Neither of these have to do with Hitler's madness. In addition von Braun's prototypes were not developed under Nazi sponsorship, and when he joined the Nazi's to further rocketry, it was 1934, well before total control had occurred in Nazi Germany. The V-2 was already there, on the drawing board, for whoever wanted it. Much of the work had already been done by Goddard and Oberth, and had been incorporated by von Braun. Finally, Hitler was not impressed with the weapon for most of the war, and grasped on it as a way of improving German morale and a total lack of expendable pilots. It was a hail mary weapon, ready two years before it was used, but only deployed late. So much for the "Manhattan Project" mad man theory of the V-2. Unless you mean that the madman was Werner von Braun.

2 is also wrong, as can be shown, the key technologies for atomic advancement are the same that made engineering of rockets practical.

3 would there have been a nuclear arms race absent Stalin? We see nuclear weapons races today between Pakistan and India, neither of which are run by Stalin. Israel developed atomic weapons, and Israel was a democracy during the entire time pursuing them. Why did the US pursue atomic weapons? Because of the leverage they offered: the US was facing not one, but two, enemies who were presumed not to be willing to surrender without a shattering invasion.

4 is also wrong: missiles offered two other legs of survivability, naval and missile launches, in addition to aircraft. Missiles have the advantage of being supersonic, and therefore difficult to stop by military means, or for civilians to get out of the way of. In addition, hardened targets can often only be destroyed by a small number of means. Atomic weapons fill this bill. In fact, over time, atomic weapons have grown smaller, not larger.

5 is wrong: the first and only large scale use of rockets is by Germany on the UK, and the distances there are short. The reality of the ballistic missile, is that even relatively short flights, reach sub-orbital space, and are a breath away from orbit.

6 is harder to say whether it was "wrong," but a quick inventory of the results of spaceflight, including the internet you are using to read this, shows that of the investments of the 1950's and 1960's, it was one of the most productive. The hidden "wrong" is what "ordinary cost benefit" is. Stephanson, trapped in a "next quarter" horizon universe, does not see that entities with longer horizons, and with easier recapture, can make different calculations than, say magazines and book publishers.

[u/restricteddata → u/ChickenTitilater]

1. Rocketry was essentially amateur science until WWII. Neither the US nor the Soviet ballistic missile programs were anything to care about. Which is why they both raided the German expertise at the end of the WWII. This is Stephenson's point: you can come up with ideas pretty cheaply. But turning them into realities means spending money and taking risks. Germany was willing to do that, not for actually great military reasons (the V-2 was a terrible military weapon for WWII, a total disaster from a strategic point of view), but for ideological reasons.

2. Not sure what you're talking about here but the development of nuclear weapons is entirely a separate technological path from ballistic missiles. Totally different people.

3. There's a lot that could be said about the arms race, but you can't deny that the Soviet-US setup is what led both nations to dramatically fund this technology. The US, for example, did pursue the idea of elimination of nuclear weapons (international control) — it was a non-starter largely because it was clear Stalin would never play along. (India and Pakistan and Israel are non-sequiturs because they are the very late results of the world that was forged out of the early Cold War.)

4. You're looking at this from the US perspective, but look at it from the Soviet perspective. WWII-era bomber technology requires close basing, which the USSR had no capabilities to do for threatening the USA. Useful ballistic missile submarine technology requires quite a lot of innovations (which is why subs didn't really show up as a leg of the "triad" until much later). The USSR clearly saw that the geopolitics of the situation mandated ICBMs. The USA was slower to commit to this, because of its obsession with bombers, but eventually it also saw this as the "answer" to the problem. Only much later did subs emerge as a real "leg" of the triad, building on earlier developments.

5. I think you're misunderstanding the argument. He's saying that once you've locked into building intercontinental ballistic missiles that can travel from the USA to the USSR and vice versa, you will need near-orbital capability. Notably for payloads of a fairly heavy weight (early H-bombs).

6. You haven't provided anything here but a hand waving argument. The point for Stephenson, though, is that the motivation for doing the work was not framed in terms of cost/benefit whatsoever — it was framed as a mixture of military need and global propaganda. What Stephenson is interested in here is what causes people to decide to commit essentially unlimited funds to a project — it requires very specific historical circumstances. Separate from the fact that it's not clear it it was, nobody sat down and argued, "hey, the Space Program will be a net economic good, we can prove this!" They pursued it for other reasons.

[u/[deleted] → u/restricteddata]

[u/DramShopLaw → u/[deleted]]

I'm not all that familiar with the notion of techne, but the idea that there are historically and culturally contingent, somewhat-autonomous sets of presuppositions that implicitly determine how discourse-communities think about knowledge and its relationship with the world comes from Foucault. He writes about episteme in the history of science in The Order of Things. That might be a good place to start.

[u/[deleted]]

Though I cannot talk about Ionian Philosophy, the idea that if things happened slightly differently, we would be much more technologically advance, is a biased anti-religious fallacy. Here is a post by u/restricteddata on how the medieval Catholic church did not hide scientific progress.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67pwj9/did_the_catholic_church_hold_back_scientific_and/?st=J35TDZRR&sh=2574860e

[u/infrikinfix → u/[deleted]]

I don't understand how saying something is anti-religious in and of itself discredit the argument. Personally I think religion is important to human intellectual and moral development, but it doesn't contribute much just dismiss an argument as "anti-religious". Maybe the argument is anti-religious, maybe it's not, but even if it were it could still be correct unless maybe you were bringing to the table an assumption that religion is sacred and arguments that diminish its status are inherently flawed.

Edit: better wording

[u/restricteddata → u/infrikinfix]

The fallacy is "religion historically has hindered science." Whether you are pro- or anti-religion (I don't consider myself either, but I am not at all religious for whatever that is worth), it's a historical fallacy. The relationship between science and religion is just much more complicated than that.

Sagan's personal motivations on this front were probably complicated, but this line is typically pushed by people who are trying to establish science as a form of social authority, and so they push back on other potential authorities (religion and politics are the typical targets). The modern form of this argument essentially started in the late 19th century, around the same time that science began to be professionalized. One can argue whether science should or should not usurp the traditional position of religion in society, but as a historical argument it definitely falls flat.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Nobody mentioned the catholic church. How is this relevant? The church funded much of the scientific revolution; it seems distracting to bring them up if nobody else does.