On Friday, March 2, 2018 at 12:03:33 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote: > > > On <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: > >> >>>> >>>>> > >>>>> >> >>>>> * * >>>>> *"A Statistical Analysis of the Martian Wave of Darkening and Related >>>>> Phenomena", Planetary and Space** Science , 15, (1967) 817-24. * >>>> >>>> >>>> >> >>>> *So you must be either * >>>> *James B.Pollack or Edward H.Greenberg. But... I thought your name >>>> was Alan Grayson.* >>>> >>> >>> *> You thought. Is that what you do?* >>> >> > Yep, > > thinking is what I do. > > * > Let me help. Pollack died in 1994 of cancer of the spin.* >> > > > So one of two things must be true: > > 1) > > You are > > Edward H.Greenberg > > and for some inscrutable changed your name to > > Alan Grayson. > 2) You are as phony as a three dollar bill and never wrote a paper with > Carl Sagan > , much less 2 > . > > >> > >> I worked with him >> [Sagan] >> directly for 18 months. He didn't regard me as a crackpot. > > > I can say with great confidence that if Sagan knew you at all (a big if) > and if you took the > > Roswell > > idiocy as seriously then as you do now then he did regard you as a > crackpot, although Sagan was always very polite and had more > > patience with fools than I do. > > John K Clark > >
I saw Sagan at a conference, where he was a celebrity and I was just a grad student grunt. He was a lot older than I was, and anyone claiming to have worked with him is proclaiming their senior citizen status. I looked up in Wikipedia on Sagan to look at papers he published. I ran into this little quote Sagan's Paradox Sagan's contribution to the 1969 symposium was an attack on the belief that UFOs are piloted by extraterrestrial beings: Applying several logical assumptions (see Drake equation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation>), Sagan calculated the possible number of advanced civilizations capable of interstellar travel to be about one million. He projected that any civilization wishing to check on all the others on a regular basis of, say, once a year would have to launch 10,000 spacecraft annually. Not only does that seem like an unreasonable number of launchings, but it would take all the material in one percent of the universe's stars to produce all the spaceships needed for all the civilizations to seek each other out. To argue that the earth was being chosen for regular visitations, Sagan said, one would have to assume that the planet is somehow unique. And that assumption "goes exactly against the idea that there are lots of civilizations around. Because if there are then our sort of civilization must be pretty common. And if we're not pretty common then there aren't going to be many civilizations advanced enough to send visitors." which is sort of interesting. Chock up another of these "paradoxes" that point to the rarity or paucity of ETs out there. LC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
