Carl Sagan -- What If?

What if the scientific tradition of the ancient Ionian Greeks had prospered and flourished? It would have required many social factors of the time to have been different, including the common feeling that slavery was right and natural. But what if that light that had dawned on the eastern Mediterranean some 2,500 years ago had not flickered out? What if the scientific method and experiment had been vigorously pursued 2,000 years before the industrial revolution, our industrial revolution? What if the power of this new mode of thought, the scientific method, had been generally appreciated? I think we might have saved ten or twenty centuries. Perhaps the contribution that Leonardo made would have been made a thousand years earlier and the contribution of Einstein 500 years ago. Not that it would have been those people who would have made those contributions, because they live only in our timeline.

If the Ionians had won, we might now, I think, be going to the stars. We might at this moment have the first survey ships returning with astonishing results from Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star, Sirius and Tau Ceti. There would now be great fleets of interstellar transports being constructed in earth orbit, small unmanned survey ships, liners for immigrants, perhaps, great trading ships to ply the spaces between the stars. On all of these ships there would be symbols and inscriptions on the side. The inscriptions, if we look closely, would be written in Greek. The symbol, perhaps, would be the dodecahedron, and the inscription on the sides of the ships to the stars something like Starship Theodorus of the Planet Earth.