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Amid talk of alternative facts and a post-truth world that dominated the news directly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, a quote from astrophysicist and science communicator Carl Sagan emerged as a viral meme: This is the excerpt from the passage containing that quote which was shared most frequently: This excerpt was taken from Sagan’s 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. In a May 1997 review of that work, Smithsonian magazine described Sagan's motivation for writing it: In The Demon-Haunted World, the late astronomer Carl Sagan writes in defense of science and reason in a world he sees as darkened by ignorance, superstition, pseudoscience, deceitful advertising and mindless television. Sagan, for his part, described the book as a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science. The discussion of a loss of manufacturing jobs, an inability for public officials to grasp issues, and increasing distrust in science led many to assert that Sagan was predicting our current political and scientific climate — although, as Matt Novak articulated in a piece for Gizmodo, it’s often easy to view predictions of the future in a way that biases one's reading of the them: Relevancy of the movie Dumb and Dumber notwithstanding, themes regarding the erosion of trust in favor of one's own deeply entrenched views appear repeatedly in the book. For example: Whether or not 2017 was the fulfillment of a Carl Sagan nightmare is a subjective matter, but the proffered description of that nightmare was authentic.
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