![]() ![]() ![]() The message is reinforced in another quotation from Micromégas, in which Voltaire describes how the cosmic travellers eventually discovered ‘a small light, which was the Earth’, but even then were unable to find ‘the smallest reason to suspect that we and our fellow-citizens of this globe have the honor to exist’. In this quotation, a human philosopher tells two celestial visitors, one from Sirius and the other from Saturn, that they, their worlds and their stars were created solely for the use of man: ‘At this assertion our two travelers let themselves fall against each other, seized with a fit of inextinguishable laughter.’ A fitting introduction to a chapter relating how scientific discoveries have progressively marginalised humanity’s conception of its place in the universe – the Copernican revolution in thought, with which Voltaire was clearly in sympathy. Sagan’s chapter 3, ‘The Great Demotions’, is prefixed by an epigraph from Micromégas, a philosophical tale by Voltaire. ![]()
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