The Cosmos Excerpt Summary

The Cosmos excerpt contained a lot of humbling information about the ways animals communicate. The article focused on whales and how many years they have had to perfect their communication routes but reading how easily humans tampered with their hard work was upsetting. Sagan suggest that before we try to communicate with extraterrestrial beings, we should try harder to communicate and understand the other animals on Earth. He then goes on to describe how much information smaller organisms such as viruses and bacteria contain and how the information stored from them has helped us gain the advantages we have now. The fate of the dinosaurs also highlights how arbitrary the success of humanity to be. Before the extinction of the dinosaurs,
Had it not been for a random event that altered the climate of Earth, dinosaurs could be the ones building societies instead of humans. It is possible that they would not have allowed us the opportunity to increase our brain size and humans would have been used similarly as cattle or simply not survived as time went on. The events that Sagan describes in the excerpt are amazing because they show just how random and chaotic the universe is, but the chaos does not mean that “order” cannot be achieved. An example would be humans having five fingers on each hand because of our ancestor having five bones in its fins. Humans have developed thinking that having the number of fingers we do is normal, but if our ancestor was another type of fish, we would find that other outcome to be “normal” as well. The same idea can be applied to language. Many people find English to be better or easier to learn because of the conquest that occurred in the past and colonization. Language used by people with more money is considered more acceptable even if the person is not saying anything of immense importance or factual. We apply meaning to random objects such as chairs, but nothing about the design of chairs led to them being called “chairs”. There could have