back to indexAnn Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #78
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The following is a conversation with Anne Drouin, writer, producer, director, and one
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of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time.
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She co wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she
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married in 1981 and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brainwaves
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on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched
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into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still
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active, reaching out farther into deep space than any human made object ever has.
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This was a profound and beautiful decision Anne made as the creative director of NASA's
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Voyager Interstellar Message Project.
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In 2014 she went on to create the second season of Cosmos, called Cosmos A Space Time Odyssey,
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in 2020 the new third season called Cosmos Possible Worlds, which is being released this
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upcoming Monday, March 9th.
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It is hosted, once again, by the fun and the brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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Carl Sagan, Anne Drouin, and Cosmos have inspired millions of scientists and curious minds across
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several generations by revealing the magic, the power, the beauty of science.
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I am one such curious mind, and if you listened to this podcast, you may know that Elon Musk
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He graciously agreed to read Carl Sagan's words about the pale blue dot in my second
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conversation with him.
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If you listened, there was an interesting and inspiring twist at the end.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, if you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give
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it 5 stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at
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Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
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As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that
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I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
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that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world.
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And now, here's my conversation with Anne Drouin.
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What is the role of science in our society?
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Well, I think of what Einstein said when he opened the 1939 New York World's Fair.
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He said, if science is ever to fulfill its mission the way art has done, it must penetrate.
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Its inner meaning must penetrate the consciousness of everyone.
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And so for me, especially in a civilization dependent on high technology and science,
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one that aspires to be democratic, it's critical that the public, as informed decision makers,
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understand the values and the methods and the rules of science.
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So you think about what you just mentioned, the values and the methods and the rules and
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maybe the technology that science produces, but what about sort of the beauty, the mystery
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Well, you've touched on what I think is for me, that's how my way into science is that
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for me, it's much more spiritually uplifting.
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The revelations of science, the collective revelations of really countless generations
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of searchers and the little tiny bit we know about reality is the greatest joy for me because
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I think that it relates to the idea of love.
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What is love that is based on illusion about the other?
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Love is seeing, unflinching the other and accepting with all your heart.
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And to me, knowing the universe as it is, or the little bit that we're able to understand
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at this point is the purest kind of love.
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And therefore, you know, how can our philosophy, our religion, if it's rootless in nature,
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how can it really be true?
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I just don't understand.
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So I think you need science to get a sense of the real romance of life and the great
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experience of being awake in the cosmos.
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So the fact that we know so little, the humbling nature of that, and you kind of connect love
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to that, but isn't it also, isn't it scary?
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Why is it so inspiring, do you think?
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Why is it so beautiful that we know so little?
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Well, first of all, as Socrates thought, you know, knowing that you know little is knowing,
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really knowing something, knowing more than others.
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And it's that voice whispering in our heads, you know, you might be wrong, which I think
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is not only it's really healthy because we're so imperfect, we're human, of course, but
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also, you know, love to me is the feeling that you always want to go deeper, get closer.
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You can't get enough of it.
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You can't get close enough, deep enough.
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So and that's what science is always saying is science is never simply content with its
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understanding of any aspect of nature.
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It's always saying it's always finding that even smaller cosmos beneath.
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So I think the two are very much parallel.
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So you said that love is not an illusion.
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What is love is, is knowing, for me, love is, is knowing something deeply and still
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being completely gratified by it, you know, and wanting to know more.
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What is loving someone, a person, let's say deeply is not idealizing them, not putting
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some kind of subjective projection on them, but knowing them as they are.
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And so for me, for me, the only aperture to that knowing about nature, the universe is
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science because it has that error correcting mechanism that most of the stuff that we do
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You know, you could say the Bill of Rights is kind of an error correcting mechanism,
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which is one of the things I really appreciate about the society in which I live to the extent
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that it's upheld and we keep faith with it and the same with science.
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It's like we will give you the highest rewards we have for proving us wrong about something.
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That's why, that's why in only 400 years since Galileo's first look through a telescope,
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we could get from this really dim, vague, this vague apprehension of another world to
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sending our eyes and our senses there or even to going beyond.
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So it is, it is, it delivers the goods like nothing else, you know, it really, it delivers
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the goods because it's always, it's always self aware of its fallibility.
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So on that topic, I'd like to ask your opinion and a feeling I have that I'm not sure what
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to do with, which is the, the skeptical aspect of science.
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So the modern skeptics community and just in general, certain scientists, many scientists,
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maybe most scientists that apply the scientific method are kind of rigorous in that application.
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And they, it feels like sometimes miss out some of the ideas outside the reaches, just
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slightly outside of the reach of science.
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And they don't dare to sort of dream or think of revolutionary ideas that others will call
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crazy in this particular moment.
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So how do you think about the skeptical aspect of science that is really good at sort of
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keeping us in check, keeping us humble, but, but at the same time, sort of the kind of
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dreams that you and Carl Sagan have inspired in the world, it kind of shuts it down sometimes
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I mean, I think it's up to the individual, but for me, you know, I was so ridiculously
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fortunate in that I, my tutorial in science, because I'm not a scientist and I wasn't trained
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in science, was 20 years of days and nights with Carl Sagan.
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And the wonder, I think the reason Carl remains so beloved, well, I think there are many reasons,
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but at the root of it is the fact that his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder
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and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism.
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So he couldn't fool himself into believing something he wanted to believe because it
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made him feel good at the other.
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But on the other hand, he recognized that what science, what nature is, it's really,
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it's good enough, you know, it's way better than our fantasies.
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And so if you, if you're that kind of person who loves happiness, loves life and your eyes
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are wide open and you read everything you can get your hands on and you spend years
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studying what is known so far about the universe, then you have that capacity, a really infinite
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capacity to be alive, but all, and also at the same time to be very rigorous about what
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you're willing to believe.
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For Carl, I don't think he ever felt that his skepticism cost him anything because again,
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it comes back to love.
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He wanted to know what Nietzsche really was like, not to inflict his, you know, preconceived
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notions on what he wanted it to be.
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So you can't go wrong because it doesn't, you know, I mean, you know, I think the pale
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blue dot is the, is a perfect example of this, of his massive achievement is to say, okay,
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or the Voyager record is another example is here we have this mission, our first reconnaissance
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of the outer solar system.
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Well, how can we make it a mission in which we absolutely squeeze every drop of consciousness
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and understanding from it?
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We don't have to be scientists and then be human beings.
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I think that's the tragedy of Western civilization is that it's, you know, when it's one of its
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greatest gifts has been science and yet at the same time, it believing that we are the
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children of a disappointed father, a tyrant who puts us in a maximum security prison and
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calls it paradise, who looks at us, who watches us every moment and hates us for being our
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human selves, you know?
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And then most of all, what is our great sin?
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It's partaking of the tree of knowledge, which is our greatest gift as humans.
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This pattern recognition, this ability to see things and then synthesize them and jump
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to conclusions about them and test those conclusions.
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So I think the reason that in literature, in movies, the scientist is a figure of alienation,
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a figure, you know, oh, you see these biopics about scientists and yeah, he might've been
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great, but you know, he was missing in ship.
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You know, he was a lousy husband.
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He lacked, you know, the kind of spiritual understanding that maybe, you know, his wife
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had and it's always in the end and they come around, but to me, that's a false dichotomy
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that we are, you know, to the extent that we are aware of our surroundings and understand
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them, which is what science makes it possible for us to do, we're even more alive.
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So you mentioned a million awesome things there, let's even just, can you tell me about
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the Voyager one and two spacecraft and the interstellar message project and that whole
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just fascinating world leading up to.
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One of my favorite subjects, I love talking about it.
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I'll never get over it.
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I'll never be able to really wrap my head around the reality of it, the truth of it.
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What is it first of all?
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What's the Voyager spacecraft?
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Okay, so Voyagers one and two were our first reconnaissance mission of what was then considered
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the outer solar system and it was a gift of gravity.
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The idea that swinging around these worlds gives you a gravitational assist, which ultimately
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will send you out of the solar system to wander the Milky Way galaxy for one to five billion
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So Voyager gave us our first close up look of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
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It discovered new moons.
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It discovered volcanoes on Io.
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Its achievements are astonishing.
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And remember, this is technology from the early to mid 1970s.
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And it's still active.
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And it's still active.
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We talked to Voyager a few days ago.
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We talked to it, in fact, a year ago, I think it was.
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We needed to slightly change the attitude of the spacecraft.
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And so we fired up its thrusters for the first time since 1987.
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It was as if you had left your car in the garage in 1987.
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And you put the key in the ignition because you use keys then in the ignition and it turned
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over the first time you stepped on the gas.
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And so that's the genius of the engineering of Voyager.
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And Carl was one of the key participants in imagining what its mission would be because
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it was a gift actually of the fact that every 175 years, plus or minus, there is an alignment
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And so you could send two spacecraft to these other worlds and photograph them and use your
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mass spectrometer and all the other devices on Voyager to really explore these worlds.
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And it's the farthest spacecraft, it's the farthest human creation away from us today.
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These two spacecraft not only gave us our first close up look at hundreds of moons and
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planets, these four giant planets, but also it told us the shape of the solar system as
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it moves through the galaxy because there were two of them going in different directions
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and they finally, and they arrived at a place called the heliopause, which is where the
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wind from the sun, the solar wind dies down and the interstellar medium begins.
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And both Voyagers were the first spacecraft that we had that could tell us when that happened.
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So it's a consummate, I think it's the greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century.
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And engineering in some sense.
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Engineering, I mean really, you know, Voyager is doing this on less energy than you have
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in your toaster, something like 11 Watts.
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So okay, but because of this gravitational assist, both Voyagers were destined, as I
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say, to, first of all, they were supposed to function for a dozen years and now it's
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42 years since launch and we're still talking to them.
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So that's amazing.
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But prior to launch, almost a year, eight, nine months prior to launch, it was decided
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that since Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and Linda Solzman Sagan had created something
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called the Pioneer 10 Plaque for the Pioneer spacecraft that preceded Voyager, which was
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kind of like a license plate for the planet Earth, you know, man and a woman, hands up,
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you know, very, very basic, but very effective.
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And it captured the imagination of people all over the world.
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And so NASA turned to Frank and to Carl and said, we'd like you to do a message for Voyager
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because if it's going to be circumnavigating the Milky Way galaxy for one to five billion
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years, you know, it's like 20 trips around the galaxy.
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And there's a very small chance that a space faring civilization would be able to flag
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And so on board, you see this exquisite golden disc with scientific hieroglyphics explaining
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our address and various basic scientific concepts that we believe that would be common to any
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space faring civilization.
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And then beneath this exquisite golden disc is the Voyager record, the golden record.
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And it contains something like 118 photographs, images of life on Earth, as well as 27 pieces
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of music from all around the world.
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Many people describe it as the invention of world music.
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World music was not a concept that existed before the Voyager record.
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And we were determined to take our music, not just from the dominant technical cultures,
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but from all of the rich cultural heritage of the Earth.
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And there's a sound essay, which is a kind of using a microphone as a camera to tell
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the story of the Earth, beginning with its geological sounds and moving into biology
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and then into technology.
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And I think what you were getting at is that at the end of this sound essay, I had asked
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Carl if it were, in the making of the record, it was my honor to be the creative director
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of the project, if it was possible to, if I had meditated for an hour while I was hooked
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up so that every single signal that was coming from my brain, my body, was recorded and then
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converted into sound for the record.
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Was it possible that these putative extraterrestrials of the distant future, of perhaps a billion
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years from now, would be able to reconstitute this message and to understand it?
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And he just, big smile, you know, and just said, well, hey, a billion years is a long
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And so I did this.
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And what were you thinking about in the meditation?
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Like what, I mean, it's such an interesting idea of recording as you think about things.
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What were you thinking about?
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So I was blindfolded and couldn't hear anything.
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And I had made a mental itinerary of exactly where I wanted to go.
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I was truly humbled by the idea that these thoughts could conceivably touch the distant
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Yeah, that's incredible.
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So in 1977, there are some 60,000 nuclear weapons on the planet.
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The Soviet Union and the United States are engaged in a, you know, to the death competition.
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And so I began by trying to tell the history of the planet in, you know, to my limited
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ability what I understood about the story of the early existence of the planet, about
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the origin of life, about the evolution of life, about the history of humans, about our
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current at that time predicament, about the fact that one in five of us was starving or
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unable to get potable water.
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And so I sort of gave a kind of, you know, as general a picture as I possibly could of
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And I also was very newly within days of the moment when Carl and I fell in love with each
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We had fallen in love with each other long before because we'd known each other for years,
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but it was the first time that we had expressed our feelings for each other.
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Acknowledged it, the existence of this love.
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Yes, because we were both involved with other people and it was a completely outside his
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morality and mine to even broach the subject.
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But it was only days after that it happened.
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And for me, it was a eureka moment.
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It was in the context of finding that piece of Chinese music that was worthy to represent
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one of the oldest musical traditions on earth when those of us who worked on the Voyager
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record were completely ignorant about Chinese music.
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And so that had been a constant challenge for me, talking to professors of Chinese music,
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listening to musicologists everywhere and all through the project, desperately trying
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to find this one piece.
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Found the piece, lived on the Upper West Side, found the piece, a professor at Columbia University
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And of all the people I talked to, everyone had said, that's hopeless.
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You can't do that.
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There can't be one piece of Chinese music.
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But he was completely, no problem, I've got it.
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And so he told me the story of the piece, which only made it an even greater candidate
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And I listened to it, called Carl Sagan, who was in Tucson, Arizona addressing the American
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Society of Newspaper Editors.
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And I left him a message, hotel message center.
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And he called me back an hour later.
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And I heard this beautiful voice say, I get back to my hotel room, and I find this message
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that Annie called.
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And I asked myself, why didn't you leave me this message 10 years ago?
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My heart was beating out of my chest.
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I, it was for me a kind of eureka moment, a scientific breakthrough, a truth, a great
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truth had suddenly been revealed.
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And of course, I was awkward and didn't really know what to say.
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And so I blurted something out like, oh, I've been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl,
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which wasn't really true.
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I never would have talked to him about it.
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We had been alone countless times.
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We humans are so awkward in these moments and these amazing moments.
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And I just said, for keeps.
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And he thought for a very brief, like a second and said, you mean get married?
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And he said, yeah.
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And we put down the phone.
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And I literally was jumping around my apartment like a lunatic, because it was so obvious,
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you know, it was something like, of course.
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And then the phone rang again.
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And I thought, damn, no, he's going to say, I don't know what I was saying.
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I'm not going to do this, you know?
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But he was like, I just want to make sure that that really happened.
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And he said, we're getting married.
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And I said, yeah, we're getting married.
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Now this was June 1st, 1977.
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The records had not been affixed to the spacecraft yet.
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And there had been a lot of controversy about what we were doing.
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I should say that among the 118 pictures was an image of a man and a woman, frontally,
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And there was, I believe, a congressman on the floor that said, NASA to send smut to
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the stars, you know?
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And so NASA really, they got very upset and they said, you can't send a picture.
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And we had done it so that it was so brilliant.
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It was like this lovely couple, completely naked.
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And then the next image was a kind of overlay schematic to show the fetus inside this woman
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that was developing.
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And then that went off into, you know, additional imagery of human reproduction.
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And it really hit me that how much we hate ourselves, that we couldn't bear to be seen
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So in some sense that congressman also represents our society.
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Perhaps his opposition should have been included as well.
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Well, that was one of the most vigorous debates during the making of the record with the,
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you know, the five, six people that we collaborated with was, do we show, do we only put our best
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Or do we show Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Congo, what we have done?
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What do you think represents humanity?
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If you kind of, if you think about it, do our darker moments, are they essential for
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All the wars we've been through, all the tortures and the suffering and the cruelty.
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Is that essential for happiness, for beauty, for creation, generally speaking?
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Well, certainly not essential for happiness or beauty, that's for sure.
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I mean, it's part of who we are, if we're going to be real about it, which is, you know,
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I think we tell on ourselves, even if we don't want to be real, we, you know, I think that
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if you're a spacefaring civilization, and you've gotten it together sufficiently, that
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you can move from world to world, then I think they probably took one look at this derelict
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spacecraft and they knew that these were people in their technological adolescence, and they
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were just setting forth, and they must have had these issues, you know, because it's,
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and so it really, you know, that's the great thing about lying is that a lie only has a
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It's like, if like a great work of art that's a forgery, people can be fooled immediately,
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but 10 or 15 years, 20 years later, they start to look at it and, you know, they begin to
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realize the lens, our lens of our present is coloring everything that we see.
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So you know, I think it didn't matter that we didn't show our atrocities.
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They would fill in the blanks.
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They would fill in the blanks.
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So let me sort of ask, you've mentioned how unlikely it is that you and Carl did two souls
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like yours would meet in this vast world.
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What are your views on how and why incredibly unlikely things like these nevertheless do
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It's purely to me, chance.
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It's totally random.
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It's a just, I mean, but, and the fact is, is that some people are, and it's happening
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every day right now.
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Some people are the random casualties of chance and that, and I don't just mean the people
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who are being, you know, destroyed in childhood, in wartime, I'm also, or the people who starved
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to death because of famine, but also the people who, you know, who are not living to the fullest,
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all of these things.
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And I think there's a, my parents met on the subway in rush hour.
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And so I'm only here with you because of the most random possible situation.
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And so I've had this, a sense of this, even before I knew Carl, I always felt this way
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that I only existed because of the generosity of the rush hour, no, of just all of the things,
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all of the skeins of causality.
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It's interesting because, you know, the rush hour is a source of stress for a lot of people,
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but clearly in its moments, it can also be a source of something beautiful.
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Of strangers meeting and so on.
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So everything, everything is, has a possibility of doing something beautiful.
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So let me ask sort of a quick tangent on the Voyager, this, this beautiful romantic notion
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that Voyager One is sort of our farthest human reach into space.
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If you think of what, I don't know if you've seen, but what Elon Musk did with putting
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the Roadster, letting it fly out into space, there's a sort of humor to it.
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I think that's also kind of interesting, but maybe you can comment on that.
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But in general, if now that we are developing what we were venturing out into space again
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in a more serious way, what kind of stuff that represent since Voyager was launched,
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should we send out as a followup?
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Is there things that you think that's developed in the next, in the 40 years after that we
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should update the spacefaring aliens?
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Well, of course now we could send the worldwide, we could send everything that's on the worldwide
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We could send, I mean, you know, that was a time when we're talking about photograph records
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and transistor radios and, you know, so we tried to be, to take advantage of the existing
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technology to the fullest extent, you know, the computer that was hooked up to me from
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my brainwaves and my heart sounds while I was meditating was, you know, the size of
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And I'm sure it's not that, it didn't have the power of a phone, as the phone has now.
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So you know, now we could just, I think we could let it all hang out and just like send,
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you know, every week.
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I mean, that's the wonder, like I would send, you know, Wikipedia or something and not be
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a gatekeeper, but show who we are.
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You were also, it's interesting because one of the problems of the internet of having
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so much information is it's actually the curation, the human curation is still the powerful,
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So what you did with the record is actually, is exactly the right process.
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It's kind of boiling down a massive amount of possibilities of what you could send into
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something that represents, you know, the better angels of our nature or represents our humanity.
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So if you think about, you know, what would you send from the internet as opposed to sending
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all of Wikipedia, for example, all human knowledge, is there something just new that we've developed,
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you think, or fundamentally we're still the same kind of human species?
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I think fundamentally we're the same, but we have advanced to an astonishing degree
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in our capacity for data retrieval and for transmission.
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And so, you know, I would send YouTube, I would send, you know, really like think of
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all the, you know, I still feel so lucky that there's any great musical artist of the last
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hundred years who I revere, I can just find them and watch them and listen to them.
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And you know, that's fantastic.
link |
I also love how democratic it is that we each become curators and that we each decide those
link |
Now, I may not agree with, you know, the choices that everyone makes, but of course not because
link |
that's not the point.
link |
The point is, is that we are, you know, we have discovered largely through the internet
link |
that we are an intercommunicating organism and that can only be good.
link |
So you could also send now, Cosmos.
link |
I would be proud to.
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I mean, you've spoken about a very specific voice that Cosmos had in that it reveals the
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I think you said shamanic journey of it and not the details of the latest breakthroughs
link |
Just revealing the magic.
link |
Can you try to describe what this voice of Cosmos is with the follow up and the new Cosmos
link |
that you're working on now?
link |
Yes, well, the dream of Cosmos is really like Einstein's quote, you know, it's the idea
link |
of the awesome power of science to be in absolutely everyone's hands.
link |
You know, it belongs to all of us.
link |
It's not the preserve of a priesthood.
link |
It's just the community of science is becoming more diverse and being less exclusive than
link |
it was guilty of in the not so recent past.
link |
The discoveries of science, our understanding of the Cosmos that we live in has really grown
link |
by leaps and bounds and probably we've learned more in the last hundred years about it.
link |
You know, the tempo of discovery has picked up so rapidly.
link |
And so the idea of Cosmos from the 1970s when Carl and I and Steven Soder, another astronomer,
link |
first imagined it was that interweaving not only of the scientific concepts and revelations
link |
and using, you know, cinematic VFX to take the viewer on this transporting, uplifting
link |
journey but also the stories of the searchers.
link |
Because the more I have learned about, you know, the process of science through my life
link |
with Carl and sense, the more I am really persuaded that it's that adherence to the
link |
facts and to that adherence to that little approximation, that little bit of reality
link |
that we've been able to get our hands around is something that we desperately need and
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it doesn't matter if you are a scientist.
link |
In fact, the people, it matters even more if you're not.
link |
And since, you know, the level of science teaching has been fairly or unfairly maligned
link |
and the idea that once there was such a thing as a television network, which of course has
link |
now evolved into many other things, the idea that you could in the most democratic way
link |
make accessible to absolutely everyone and most especially people who don't even realize
link |
that they have an interest in a subject or who feel so intimidated by the jargon of science
link |
and its kind of exclusive history.
link |
The idea that we could do this and, you know, in season two of Cosmos, the Space Time Odyssey,
link |
we were in 181 countries in the space of two weeks.
link |
It was the largest rollout in television history, which is really amazing for a, there is no
link |
science based programming.
link |
By the way, just to clarify, the series was rolled out, so it was shown in not that many
link |
You said we were in.
link |
Well, our show was in 180 countries.
link |
Yeah, the show, which is incredible.
link |
I mean, the hundreds of millions, whatever that number is, the people that watched it,
link |
it's just, it's crazy.
link |
It's so crazy that, for instance, my son had a cerebral hemorrhage a year ago and the doctor
link |
who saved his life in a very dangerous situation.
link |
When he realized that, you know, that Sam and I were who we were, he said, that's why
link |
You know, he said, if you come of age in a poor country like Colombia and Carl Sagan
link |
calls you to science when you're a child, then, then, you know, you go to medicine because
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that's the only avenue open to you, but that's why I'm here.
link |
And I've heard that story and I hear that story, I think every week.
link |
How does that make you feel?
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I mean, the number of scientists, I mean, a lot of it is quiet, right?
link |
But the number of scientists Cosmos has created is just countless.
link |
I mean, it probably touched a lot of, I don't know, probably it could be a crazy number
link |
of the 90% of scientists or something that have been.
link |
I would love to do that census because I, because that's the greatest gratification,
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because that's the dream of science.
link |
That's the whole idea is that if it belongs to all of us and not just a tiny few, then
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we have some chance of determining how it's used.
link |
And if it's only in the hands of people whose only, whose only interests are the balance
link |
sheet or hegemony over other nations or things like that, then it'll probably end up being
link |
a gun aimed at our heads.
link |
But if it's distributed in the widest possible way, a capability that we now have because
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of our technology, then the chance is that it will be used with wisdom.
link |
That's the dream of it.
link |
So that's why we did the first Cosmos.
link |
We wanted to take not just, as I say, the scientific information, but also tell the
link |
stories of these searchers.
link |
Because for us, and for me, carrying on this series in the second and third seasons, the
link |
primary interest was that we wouldn't tell a story unless it was a kind of a threefer.
link |
It was not just a way to understand a new scientific idea, but it was also a way to
link |
understand what, if it matters what's true, how the world can change for us and how we
link |
And if it doesn't matter what's true, then we're in grave danger because we have the
link |
capability to not only destroy ourselves and our civilization, but to take so many species
link |
And I'd like to talk to you about that particular, sort of the dangers of ourselves in a little
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bit, but sort of to linger on Cosmos.
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Maybe for the first, the 1980 and the 2014 follow up, what's a, or one of the, or several
link |
memorable moments from the creation of either of those seasons?
link |
Well, you know, the critical thing really was the fact that Seth MacFarlane became art
link |
champion because I had been with three colleagues, I had been schlepping around from network
link |
to network with a treatment for Cosmos and every network said they wanted to do it, but
link |
they wouldn't give me creative control and they wouldn't give me enough money to make
link |
it cinematic and to make it feel like you're really going on an adventure.
link |
And so I think both of those things, sorry to interrupt, both of those things are given
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what Cosmos represents, the legacy of it and the legacy of Carl Sagan is essential control,
link |
especially in the modern world.
link |
It's wonderful that you sought control, that you did not really push it.
link |
And I kept saying no.
link |
And my partners, I'm sure, you know, they would look at me like I was nuts, you know,
link |
and they probably must have entertained the idea that maybe I didn't really want to do
link |
it, you know, because I was afraid or something, but I kept saying no.
link |
And it wasn't until I met Seth MacFarlane and he took me to Fox and to Peter Rice and
link |
said, you know, I'll pay for half the pilot if I have to, you know, and Peter Rice was
link |
like, put your money away.
link |
And in every time since, in the 10 years since, at every turn, when we needed Seth to intervene
link |
on our behalf, he stood up and he did it.
link |
And so that was like, in a way, that is the watershed for me of everything that followed
link |
And I was so lucky because, you know, Steve Soder and I written the original Cosmos with
link |
Carl and collaborated on the treatment for season two.
link |
And then Brennan Braga came into our project at the perfect moment and has proven to be
link |
just the, really, I have been so lucky my whole life.
link |
I've collaborated, I've been lucky with the people, my collaborators have been extraordinary.
link |
And so that was a critical thing.
link |
But also to have, you know, for instance, our astonishing VFX supervisor who comes from
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the movies, who heads the global association of VFX people, Jeff Okun.
link |
And then, you know, I could rattle off 10 more names, I'd be happy to do that.
link |
And it was that collaboration.
link |
So the people were essential to the creation of...
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I mean, when it came down, I have to say that when it came down to the vision of what the
link |
series would be, that was me sitting in my home, looking out the window and, you know,
link |
really imagining like what I wanted to do.
link |
Can you pause on that for a second?
link |
Like what's that process?
link |
Because it, you know, Cosmos is also, it's grounded in science, of course, but it's also
link |
incredibly imaginative and the words used are carefully crafted.
link |
If you can talk about the process of that, the big picture, imaginative thinking, and
link |
sort of the rigorous crafting of words that like basically turns into something like poetry.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
For me, these are rare occasions for human self esteem.
link |
The scientists that we bring to life in Cosmos are people, in my view, who have everything
link |
we need to see us through this current crisis.
link |
They're, very often they come, they're poor, they're female, they're outsiders who are
link |
not expected to have gifts that are so prodigious, but they persevere.
link |
And so you have someone like Michael Faraday, who comes from a family, dysfunctional family
link |
of like 14 people and, you know, it never goes to, university never learns the math.
link |
But, you know, is the, you know, there's Einstein years later looking up at the picture of Faraday
link |
So it's, you know, if we had people with that kind of humility and unselfishness who didn't
link |
want to patent everything, as, you know, Michael Faraday created the wealth of the 20th century
link |
with his various inventions.
link |
And yet he never took out a single patent at a time when people were patenting everything
link |
because that was not what he was about.
link |
And to me, that's a kind of almost a saintliness that says that, you know, here's a man who
link |
finds in his life, this tremendous gratification from searching.
link |
And it's just so impressive to me.
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And there are so many other people in Cosmos, especially the new season of Cosmos, which
link |
is called Possible Worlds.
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Possible, beautiful title.
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Possible Worlds, well, I stole it from an author and a scientist from the 1940s.
link |
But it, for me, encapsulates not just, you know, the exoplanets that we've begun to discover,
link |
not just, you know, the worlds that we might visit, but also the world that this could
link |
be, a hopeful vision of the future.
link |
You asked me what is common to all three seasons of Cosmos or what is that voice?
link |
It's a voice of hope.
link |
It's a voice that says there is a future which we bring to life in, I think, a fairly dazzling
link |
fashion that we can still have, you know?
link |
And in sitting down to imagine what this season would be, the new season would be, I'm sitting
link |
where I live in Ithaca, beautiful, just gorgeous place, trees everywhere, waterfalls, I'm sitting
link |
there thinking, well, you know, you can't, how do you, how do you awaken people?
link |
I mean, you can't yell at them and say we're all going to die, you know?
link |
But I think if you give them a vision of the future that's not pie in the sky, but something,
link |
ways in which science can be redemptive, can actually remediate our future.
link |
We have those capabilities right now, as well as the capabilities to do things in the Cosmos
link |
that we could be doing right now, but we're not doing them.
link |
Not because we don't know how to, how, you know, with the engineering or the material
link |
sciences or the physics, we know all we need to know, but we're a little bit paralyzed
link |
And you know, we're like, I always think we're like the toddler, you know, like we, we left
link |
our mother's legs, you know, and scurried out to the moon.
link |
And we had a moment of, wow, we can do this.
link |
And then we realized, and somehow we had a failure of nerve and we went scurrying back
link |
to our mother and, you know, did things that really weren't going to get us out there,
link |
like the space shuttle, things like that, because it was a kind of failure of nerve.
link |
So Cosmos is about overcoming those fears.
link |
We're now as a civilization, ready to be a teenager venturing out into college.
link |
We're returning back.
link |
And that's one of my theories about our current situation is that this is our adolescence.
link |
And I was a total mess as an adolescent.
link |
I was reckless, irresponsible, totally.
link |
I didn't, I was inconsiderate.
link |
I, the reality of other people's feelings and the future didn't exist for me.
link |
So why should a technologically adolescent civilization be any different?
link |
But you know, the vast majority of people I know made it through that period and went
link |
on to be more wise.
link |
And that's what my hope is for our civilization.
link |
On a sort of a darker and more difficult subject in terms of, so you just talked about the
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Cosmos being an inspiration for science and for us growing out of our messy adolescence,
link |
but nevertheless, there is threats in this world.
link |
So do you worry about existential threats?
link |
Like you mentioned nuclear weapons, do you worry about nuclear war?
link |
And if you could also maybe comment, I don't know how much you've thought about it, but
link |
there's folks like Elon Musk who are worried about the existential threats of artificial
link |
Sort of our robotic computer creations sort of resulting in us humans losing control.
link |
So can you speak to the things that worry you in terms of existential concerns?
link |
You don't have to be silly, you know, like not to think and not to look at, for instance,
link |
our rapidly burgeoning capability in artificial intelligence.
link |
And to see how sick so much of the planet is not to be concerned.
link |
And sick is an evil potentially.
link |
Well, how much cruelty and brutality is happening at this very moment?
link |
And I would put climate change higher up on that list, because I believe that there are
link |
unforeseen discoveries that we are making right now, for instance, all that methane
link |
that's coming out of the ocean floor that was sequestered because of the permafrost,
link |
which is now melting.
link |
You know, I think there are other effects besides our greed and short term thinking
link |
that we are triggering now with all the greenhouse gases we're putting into the atmosphere.
link |
And that worries me day and night.
link |
I think about it every single, every moment, really, because I really think that's how
link |
We have to begin to really focus on how grave the challenge is to our civilization and to
link |
the other species that are.
link |
It's a mass, this is a mass extinction event that we're living through.
link |
And we're seeing it.
link |
We're seeing news of it every day.
link |
So what do you think about another touchy subject, but what do you think about the politicization
link |
of science on topics like global warming and bionic stem cell research and other topics
link |
What's your sense?
link |
What do you mean by the politicization of global warming?
link |
Meaning that if you say, I think what you just said, which is a global warming is a
link |
serious concern, it's human caused and maybe some detrimental effects.
link |
Certainly there's a large percent of the population of the United States that would, as opposed
link |
to listening to that statement, would immediately think, oh, that's just a liberal talking point.
link |
That's what I mean by politicization.
link |
I think that's not so true anymore.
link |
I don't think our problem is a population that's skeptical about climate change because
link |
I think that the extreme weather and fire events that we are experiencing with such
link |
frequency is really gotten to people.
link |
I think that there are people in leadership positions who choose to ignore it and to pretend
link |
it's not there, but ultimately I think they will be rejected.
link |
The question is, will it be fast enough?
link |
I think actually that most people have really finally taken the reality of global climate
link |
change to heart and they look at their children and grandchildren and they don't feel good
link |
because they come from a world which was in many ways, in terms of climate, fairly familiar
link |
and benign and they know that we're headed in another direction and it's not just that,
link |
it's what we do to the oceans, the rivers, the air.
link |
You ask me, what is the message of cosmos?
link |
It's that we have to think in longer terms.
link |
I think of the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cold War and they're ready to
link |
kill each other over these two different views of the distribution of resources.
link |
But neither of them has a form of human social organization that thinks in terms of a hundred
link |
years, let alone a thousand years, which are the time scales that science speaks in.
link |
And that's part of the problem is that we have to get a grip on reality and where we're
link |
headed and I'm not fatalistic at all, but I do feel like, and in setting out to do this
link |
series each season, we were talking about climate change in the original cosmos in episode
link |
four and warning about inadvertent climate modification in 1980.
link |
And of course, Carl did his PhD thesis on the greenhouse effect on Venus and he was
link |
painfully cognizant of what a runaway greenhouse effect would do to our planet.
link |
And not only that, but the climatic history of the planet, which we go into in great detail
link |
So yeah, I mean, how are we going to get a grip on this if not through some kind of understanding
link |
Can I just say one more thing about science is that its powers of prophecy are astonishing.
link |
You launch a spacecraft in 1977 and you know where each and every planet in the solar system
link |
is going to be and every moon and you rendezvous with that flawlessly and you exceed the design
link |
specifications of the greatest dreams of the engineers.
link |
And then you go on to explore the Milky Way galaxy and you do it, I mean, you know, the
link |
climate scientists, some of the people whose stories we tell in cosmos, their predictions
link |
were, and they were working with very early computer modeling capabilities, they have
link |
proven to be so robust, nuclear winter, all of these things.
link |
This is a prophetic power and yet how crazy that, you know, it's like the Romans with
link |
their lead cooking pots and their lead pipes or the Aztecs ripping out their own people's
link |
We know better and yet we are acting as if it's business as usual.
link |
Yeah, the beautiful complexity of human nature, speaking of which, let me ask a tough question
link |
I guess because there's so many possible answers, but what aspect of life here on earth do you
link |
find most fascinating from the origin of life, the evolutionary process itself, the origin
link |
of the human mind, so intelligence, some of the technological developments going on now
link |
or us venturing out into space or space exploration, what just inspires you?
link |
Oh, they all inspire me.
link |
Every one of those inspire me, but I have to say that to me at the origin of, as I've
link |
gotten older, to me, the origin of life has become less interesting because I feel, well,
link |
not because it's more, I think I understand, I have a better grasp of how it might've happened.
link |
Do you think it was a huge leap?
link |
I think it was a, we are a byproduct of geophysics and I think it's not, my suspicion of course,
link |
which is take it with a grain of salt, but my suspicion is that it happens more often
link |
and more places than we like to think because after all the history of our thinking about
link |
ourselves has been a constant series of demotions in which we've had to realize, no, no, so
link |
We're not at the center of the solar system.
link |
And the origin of consciousness is to me also not so amazing if you think of it as going
link |
back to these one celled organisms of a billion years ago who had to know, well, if I go higher
link |
up, I'll get too much sun and if I go lower down, I'll be protected from UV rays, things
link |
They had to know that or you, I eat, me, I don't.
link |
I mean, even that, I can see if you know that, then knowing what we know now, it's just,
link |
it's not so hard to fathom.
link |
It seems like, I've never believed there was a duality between our minds and our bodies
link |
and I think that even consciousness, all those interesting things seem to me, except one
link |
A byproduct of geophysics.
link |
Yeah, all of chemistry, yes, geochemistry, geophysics, absolutely.
link |
It makes perfect sense to me and it doesn't make it any less wondrous.
link |
It doesn't rob it at all of the wonder of it.
link |
And so, yeah, I think that's amazing.
link |
I think we tell the story of someone you have never heard of, I guarantee, and I think you're
link |
very knowledgeable on the subject, who was more responsible for our ability to venture
link |
out to other worlds than anyone else and who was completely forgotten.
link |
And so, those are the kinds of stories I like best for Cosmos because...
link |
Can you tell me who?
link |
No, I'm going to make you watch this series, I'm going to make you buy my book, but I'm
link |
just saying, this person would be forgotten, but the way that we do Cosmos is that I ask
link |
a question to myself, I really want to get to the bottom to the answer and keep going
link |
deeper, deeper until we find what the story is, a story that I know because I'm not a
link |
If it moves me, if it moves me, then I want to tell it and other people will be moved.
link |
Do you ponder mortality, human mortality, and maybe even your own mortality?
link |
I just turned 70, so yeah, I think about it a lot.
link |
I mean, it's, you know, how can you not think about it?
link |
What do you make of this short life of ours, I mean, let me ask a sort of another way,
link |
you've lost Carl, and speaking of mortality, if you could be, if you could choose immortality,
link |
you know, it's possible that science allows us to live much, much longer.
link |
Is that something you would choose for yourself, for Carl, for you?
link |
Well, for Carl, definitely.
link |
I would have, you know, in a nanosecond, I would take that deal.
link |
I mean, if Carl were alive, yes, I would want to live forever because I know it would be
link |
Would it be fun forever?
link |
That's the essential nature of the...
link |
It's just that the universe is so full of so many wonderful things to discover that
link |
it feels like it would be fun.
link |
But no, I don't want to live forever.
link |
I have had a magical life.
link |
I just, you know, my craziest dreams have come true.
link |
And I feel, you know, forgive me, but this crazy quirk of fate that put my most joyful,
link |
deepest feelings, feelings that decades later, 42 years later, I know how real, how true
link |
those feelings were.
link |
Everything that happened after that was an affirmation of how true those feelings were.
link |
And so, I don't feel that way.
link |
I feel like I have gotten so much more than my share, not just my extraordinary life with
link |
Carl, my family, my parents, my children, my friends, the places that I've been able
link |
to explore, the books I've read, the music I've heard.
link |
So I feel like, you know, if it would be much better if instead of working on the immortality
link |
of the lucky few of the most privileged people in this society, I would really like to see
link |
a concerted effort for us to get our act together, you know?
link |
That to me is topic A, more pressing, you know, this possible world, that is the challenge.
link |
And we're at a kind of moment where if we can make that choice.
link |
So immortality doesn't really interest me.
link |
I really, I love nature and I have to say that because I'm a product of nature, I recognize
link |
that it's great gifts and it's great cruelty.
link |
Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it, and thank you so much for talking
link |
Oh, it's wonderful.
link |
I really appreciate it.
link |
I really enjoyed it.
link |
I thought your questions were great.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ann Druyan, and thank you to our presenting
link |
sponsor, Cash App.
link |
Download it, use code LEXPODCAST, you'll get $10, and $10 will go to FIRST, an organization
link |
that inspires and educates young minds to become science and technology innovators of
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If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, support
link |
on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Carl Sagan.
link |
What an astonishing thing a book is.
link |
It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny
link |
But one glance at it, and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead
link |
for thousands of years.
link |
Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly
link |
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.
link |
Finding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.
link |
Books break the shackles of time.
link |
A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
link |
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.