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Analysis Of The Dragon In My Garage By Carl Sagan

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The building was a marvel of modern engineering. A carbon neutral, solar and geothermal powered monument to the future. The outside of the building a sleek combination of recycled redwood and interlocking solar panels. The inside’s high vaulted ceilings and sleek white pillars formed a cavernous inner space. Three classrooms divided the building into working spaces. The bright L.E.D lighting and modern fixtures completed the buildings futuristic design. This building was the newest in a long line of additions to my middle school's campus. Walking through the front door and taking a hard right would put you in the classroom of our seventh grade science teacher, Mrs.Harmon, the kind of lady with frazzled gray hair and a couple of missing screws …show more content…

Ironically just two years later I owned a pair of my own pet rats in highschool, I know that they are not the monsters that I was made to believe but smart, clean and loving animals when raised properly. Unfortunately this kind of fallacy is not uncommon, we all hold beliefs that are wrong but have not been challenged or confronted before. Carl Sagan, a prominent astrophysicist and professor, touches on these topics in his essay “The dragon in my garage”, In this essay he confronts the idea that it’s possible to believe something that to others is obviously false by constructing an imaginary dragon as an illustration. Though it is well known that dragons are not real, he uses this as a thought experiment to describe the misplaced beliefs that people can hold. In his example Sagan’s dragon cannot be measured for all intents and purposes besides rare physical manifestations of it’s power, yet people choose to believe it’s existence based solely off these small and refutable pieces of evidence. Despite Sagan’s effort to disprove this dragon does all he can to disprove this dragon, by coming up with a myriad of ways to test its existence yet it is unsuccessful as the dragon is always one step ahead of

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