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Carl Sagan's 1995 Warning About America and Truth Resurfaces
Original: Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)
Carl Sagan's 1995 warning about America is circulating again: the astronomer argued that a public unable to distinguish what is true would slide, 'without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.' Written nearly three decades ago in an era before social media, his prediction about science illiteracy and credulity is being read by many as strikingly prescient about today's debates over misinformation, distrust of expertise and the erosion of shared facts.
Why now: His decades-old warning about the collapse of shared truth feels newly relevant amid current concerns about misinformation and science denial.
Carl SaganUnited StatesOpen Culture
Evidence
- Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995) · Open Culture
Image by Kenneth Zirkel, via Wikimedia Commons There have been many theories of how human history works. Some, like German thinker G.W.F.
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