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 Drewian, 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 cowrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married
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in 1981 and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brainwaves on a golden
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record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched into space on the Voyager
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1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still active, reaching out farther
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into deep space than any human made object ever has.
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This was a profound and beautiful decision and made as a 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 Spacetime
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Odyssey, and in 2020, the new third season called Cosmos Possible Worlds, which is being
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released this 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 Drewian, and Cosmos have inspired millions of scientists and curious
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minds across 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 listen 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.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it 5,000 Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon,
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or connect with me on Twitter at 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 can
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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 Drewian.
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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.
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It's critical that the public, as informed decision makers, understand the values and
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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, the revelations of science, the collective
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revelations of really countless generations of searchers.
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And the little tiny bit we know about reality is the greatest joy for me because I think
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it relates to the idea of love, like, what is love that is based on illusion about the
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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, how can our philosophy, our religion, if it's rootless in nature, how
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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 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, knowing that you know little is knowing, really knowing
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something, knowing more than others.
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And it's that voice whispering in our heads, so you might be wrong, which I think is not
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only it's really healthy because we're so imperfect, we're human, of course.
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But also, 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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And that's what science is always saying, and 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 knowing, for me, love is knowing something deeply and still being completely
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gratified by it and wanting to know more.
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So 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, the only aperture to that, knowing about nature, the universe, is science
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because it has that error correcting mechanism that most of the stuff that we do doesn't
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You could say the Bill of Rights is kind of an error correcting mechanism, which is one
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of the things I really appreciate about the society in which I live, to the extent that
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it's upheld and we keep faith with it.
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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 in only 400 years since Galileo's first look through a telescope, we could get
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from this really dim, vague apprehension of another world to sending our eyes and our
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senses there or even going beyond.
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So it delivers the goods like nothing else.
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It really delivers the goods because it's always self aware of its fallibility.
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So on that topic, I'd like to ask just your opinion and the feeling I have that I'm not
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sure what to do with, which is 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 this scientific method are kind of rigorous in that application.
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And it feels like sometimes miss out some of the ideas outside the reach of, just slightly
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outside 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 at the same time, sort of the kind of dreams
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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, I was so ridiculously fortunate
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in that my tutorial in science, because I'm not a scientist and it wasn't trained in
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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.
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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, it's way better than our fantasies.
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And so if you're that kind of person who loves happiness, loves life and your eyes are wide
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open and you read everything you can get your hands on and you spend years studying what
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is known so far about the universe, then you have that capacity, a really infinite capacity
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to be alive, but also at the same time to be very rigorous about what you're willing
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For Carl, I don't think he ever felt that his skepticism cost him anything, because
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again, it comes back to love.
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He wanted to know what Nietzsche really was like, not to inflict his preconceived notions
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on what he wanted it to be.
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So you can't go wrong because it doesn't, I mean, I think the pale blue dot is a perfect
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example of his massive achievement is to say, okay, or the Voyager record is another example.
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Here we have this mission, our first reconnaissance 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, it's one of its greatest
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gifts has been science and yet at the same time, it believing that we are the children
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of a disappointed father, a tyrant who puts us in a maximum security prison and calls
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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, 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, this pattern
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recognition, this ability to see things and then synthesize them and jump to conclusions
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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, or you see these biopics about scientists and yeah, he might have been
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great, but, you know, he was missing a chip, 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 they come around.
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But to me, that's a false dichotomy, that we are, you know, to the extent that we are
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aware of our surroundings and understand them, which is what science makes it possible for
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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 1 and 2 spacecraft and the interstellar message project and that whole just fascinating
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world leading up to this.
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One of my favorite subjects, I love talking about it, I'll never get over it, I'll never
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be able to really wrap my head around the reality of it, the truth of it.
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What is it for so, what's the Voyager spacecraft?
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Okay, so Voyagers 1 and 2 were our first reconnaissance mission of what was then considered the outer
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And it was a gift of gravity, the idea that swinging around these worlds gives you a gravitational
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assist which ultimately will send you out of the solar system to wander the Milky Way
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galaxy for one to five billion years.
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So Voyager gave us our first close up look of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, it discovered
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new moons, it discovered volcanoes on Io, 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, 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, we needed to slightly change the attitude
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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 and you put the key in the ignition
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because you used keys then in the ignition.
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And it turned 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
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alignment of the worlds.
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And so you can 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 arrived at a place called the Heliopause, which is where the wind from the sun, the solar
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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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I mean, really, Voyager is doing this on less energy than you have in your toaster.
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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, they were destined, they were, first of all, they were supposed to function for
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And now it's 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 Salzman Sagan had created something called
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the Pioneer 10 plaque for the Pioneer spacecraft that preceded Voyager, which was kind of like
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a license plate for the planet Earth, a man and a woman, hands up, very basic, but very
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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 spacefaring civilization would be able to flag one of
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And so on board you see this exquisite golden disk 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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spacefaring civilization.
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And then beneath this exquisite golden disk 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 kind of using a microphone as a camera to tell the
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story of the Earth beginning with its geological sounds and moving into biology and then into
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And like I think what you were getting at is that at the end of this sound essay, I
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had asked Karl if it were in the making of the record, it was my honor to be the creative
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director of the project.
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If it was possible to, if I had meditated for an hour while I was hooked up so that
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every single signal that was coming from my brain, my body, was recorded and then converted
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into sound for the record, was it possible that these putative extraterrestrials of
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the distant future of perhaps a billion years from now would be able to reconstitute this
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message and to understand it?
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And he just big smile, you know, and just say, well, hey, a billion years is a long time.
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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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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 Karl and I fell in love with each
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We fell 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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The existence of this.
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Yes, because we're both involved with other people and it was completely outside his morality
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in mind to even broach the subject.
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But it was the 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.
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Looking to professors of Chinese music as no music colleges everywhere and all through
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the project desperately trying to find this one piece, found the piece, lived on the Upper
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West Side, found the piece a professor at Columbia University gave it to me.
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And he's 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, and I left him a message, Hotel Message Center.
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And he called me back an hour later, and I heard this beautiful voice say, I get back
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to my hotel room, and I find this message 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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It was for me a kind of Eureka moment, a scientific breakthrough, a truth, a great truth suddenly
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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 beautiful moments.
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Yeah, in 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, and I literally was jumping around my apartment like a lunatic.
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Because it was so obvious, you know, it was something like, of course.
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And then the phone rang again, and I thought, damn, no, he's going to say, I don't know
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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 1, 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 there, you know, among the 118 pictures was an image of a man and a woman
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frontally, completely naked.
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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, and then the next image was a kind
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of overlay schematic to show the fetus inside this woman 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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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, you
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know, the five or six people that we collaborated with was, do we show, do we only put our best
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foot forward, 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, are darker moments, are they essential for humanity?
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All the wars we've been through, all the torches and the suffering and the cruelty, is that
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essential for happiness, for beauty, for creation, generally speaking?
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Well, it's 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,
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and they were just setting forth, and they must have had these issues, 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
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a shelf life, 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, you know, they begin to realize
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that 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,
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It's purely to me a 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, who are not living to
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And these things, I think there's a, my parents met on the subway in rush hour, and so I'm
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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 of the, of our, no, of just
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all of the things, all of the skeins of causality.
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Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, the rush hour is a source of stress for a
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lot of people, 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 far, farthest human reach into space.
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If you think of what, I don't know if you've seen, but Elon Musk did with the putting the
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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, the space varying aliens?
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Well, of course now we could send the worldwide.
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We could send everything that's on the worldwide web.
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We could send, I mean, you know, that was a time when we were talking about photograph
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records and transistor radios and, you know, so we tried to be, to take advantage of the
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existing technology to the fullest extent, you know, the computer that was hooked up
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to me from my brainwaves and my heart sounds while I was meditating was, you know, the size
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of a gigantic room and I'm sure it's not, it didn't have the power of a phone has,
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the phone has now.
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So, you know, we could just, I think we could let it all hang out, we could just send, you
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know, every, I mean, that's the wonder, like, I would send, you know, Wikipedia or something
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and not be a gatekeeper, but show who we are.
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We 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, it's kind of
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boiling down a massive amount of possibilities of what you could send into something that
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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 of human knowledge?
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Is there something just new that we've developed, do you think, or if fundamentally we're still
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the same kind of human species?
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I think fundamentally we're the same, but we have a kind of great, we are, we have
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advanced to an astonishing degree 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.
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I also love how democratic it is that we each become curators and that we each decide those
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Now, I may not agree with, you know, those, the choices that everyone makes, but of course
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not, because that's not the point.
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The point is, is that we are, you know, we have discovered largely through the internet
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that we are an intercommunicating organism.
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And that can only be good.
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So you could also send now Cosmos.
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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
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It's just revealing the magic.
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Can you try to describe what this voice of Cosmos is with the, with the follow up and
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the new Cosmos that you're working on now?
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Well, the dream of Cosmos is really like Einstein's quote, you know, it's the idea of the awesome
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power of science to be in absolutely everyone's hands.
link |
You know, it belongs to all of us.
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It's not the preserve of a priesthood.
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It's just the community of science is becoming more diverse and being less exclusive than
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it was guilty of in the not so recent past.
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The discoveries of science, our understanding of the Cosmos that we live in has really grown
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by leaps and bounds and probably would learn more in the last hundred years about it.
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You know, the, the, the tempo of discovery has picked up so rapidly.
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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
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and using, you know, cinematic VFX to take the viewer on this transporting, uplifting
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journey, but also the stories of the searchers.
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Because the more I have learned about, you know, the process of science through my life
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with Carl and sense, the more I am really persuaded that it's that adherence to the
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facts and to that adherence to that little approximation, that little bit of reality
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that we've been able to get our hands around is something that we desperately need.
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And it doesn't matter if you are a scientist.
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In fact, the people, it matters even more if you're not.
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And since, you know, the level of science teaching has been fairly or unfairly maligned.
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And the idea that once there was such a thing as a television network, which of course has
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now evolved into many other things, the idea that you could, in the most democratic way,
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make accessible to absolutely everyone and most especially people who don't even realize
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that they have an interest in a subject or who feel so intimidated by the jargon of science
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and its kind of exclusive history, the idea that we could do this.
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And you know, in season two of Cosmos, Space Time Odyssey, we were in 181 countries in
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the space of two weeks.
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It was the largest rollout in television history, which is really amazing for a, there is no
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science based programming.
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By the way, just to clarify, the series was rolled out, so it was shown in that many countries.
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You said we were in the show.
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Well, our show was in 180 countries.
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Yeah, the show, which is incredible.
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I mean, the hundreds of millions, whatever that number is, the people that watched it,
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it's just, it's crazy.
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It's so crazy that, for instance, my son had a cerebral hemorrhage a year ago.
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And the doctor who saved his life in a very dangerous situation.
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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
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calls you to science when you're a child, then, you know, you go to medicine because
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that's the only avenue open to you.
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But that's why I'm here.
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And I have heard that story, and I hear that story, I think every week.
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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?
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But the number of scientists Cosmos has created is just countless.
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I mean, it probably touched the lives, I don't know, probably, it could be a crazy number
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of the 90% of scientists or something that have been.
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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.
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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.
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And if it's only in the hands of people whose only, whose only interests are the balance
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sheet or hegemony over other nations or things like that, then it'll probably end up being
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a gun aimed at our heads.
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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'll be used with wisdom.
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That's the dream of it.
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So that's why we did the first Cosmos.
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We wanted to take not just, as I say, the scientific information, but also tell the
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stories of these searchers, because for us and for me, carrying on this series in the
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second and third seasons, the primary interest was that we wouldn't tell a story unless it
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was kind of a threefer.
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It was not just a way to understand a new scientific idea, but it was also a way to
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understand what, if it matters what's true, how the world can change for us and how we
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And if it doesn't matter what's true, then we're in grave danger because we have the
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capability to not only destroy ourselves and our civilization, but to take so many species
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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
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memorable moments from the creation of either of those seasons?
link |
Well, the critical thing really was the fact that Seth MacFarlane became our champion because
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I had been with three colleagues, I had been schlepping around from network to network
link |
with a treatment for Cosmos and every network said they wanted to do it, but they wouldn't
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give me creative control and they wouldn't give me enough money to make it cinematic
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and to make it feel like you're really going on an adventure.
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And 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,
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especially in the modern world.
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It's wonderful that you saw control that you did not really push it.
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And I think they know.
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And my partners, I'm sure, I know they would look at me like I was nuts, you know, and
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they probably must have entertained the idea that maybe I didn't really want to do it,
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you know, because I was afraid or something.
link |
But I kept saying no, and it wasn't until I met Seth MacFarlane.
link |
And he took me to Fox and Peter Rice and said, you know, I'll pay for half the pilot
link |
if I have to, you know, and Peter Rice was like, put your money away.
link |
And Seth said that, yeah.
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And in every time since, in the 10 years since, at every turn, when we needed Seth to intervene
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on our behalf, he stood up and he did it.
link |
And so that was like, in a way, that is the, you know, the watershed for me of everything
link |
that followed since.
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And then I was so lucky because, you know, Steve and I, Steve Soder and I, written the
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original Cosmos with Carl and collaborated on the treatment for season two.
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And then Brad and Braga came into our project at the perfect moment and has proven to be
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just a really, I have been so lucky my whole life.
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I've collaborated, I've been lucky with the people, my collaborators have been extraordinary.
link |
And so that was a critical thing.
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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 Oaken.
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And, and then, and, and, you know, I can rattle off 10 more names.
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I'd be happy to do that.
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And it was that collaboration.
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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
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series would be, that with me sitting in my home, looking out the window and, you know,
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really imagining like what I wanted to do.
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Can you pause on that for a second?
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Like, what's that process?
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Because it, you know, Cosmos is also, it's grounded in science, of course, but it's also
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incredibly imaginative and the words used are carefully crafted.
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And it's, if you can talk about the process of that, the big picture imaginative thinking
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and sort of the rigorous crafting of words that like basically turns into something
link |
Thank you so much.
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For me, these are rare occasions for human self esteem, the scientists that we bring
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to life in Cosmos are people in my view who have everything we need to see us through this
link |
It's there very often they come, they're poor, they're female, they're outsiders who are
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not expected to have gifts that are so prodigious, but they persevere.
link |
And so you have someone like Michael Faraday who is, comes from a family, dysfunctional
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family of like 14 people and, you know, it never goes to university, never learns the
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But, you know, is the, you know, there's Einstein years later looking up at the picture of Faraday
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So it's, you know, if we had people with that kind of humility and unselfishness who didn't
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want to patent everything as, you know, Michael Faraday created the wealth of the 20th century
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with his various inventions, and yet he never took out a single patent at a time when people
link |
were patenting everything 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
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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
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is called Possible Worlds.
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Well, I stole it from an author and a scientist from the 1940s, but it, for me, encapsulates
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not just, you know, the exoplanets that we've begun to discover, not just, you know, the
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worlds that we might visit, but also the world that this could be, a hopeful vision of the
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You asked me, what is common to all three seasons of Cosmos, or what is that voice?
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It's a voice of hope.
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It's a voice that says there is a future, which we bring to life in, I think, fairly
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dazzling fashion that we can still have, you know, and in sitting down to imagine what
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this season would be, the new season would be, sitting where I live in Ithaca, beautiful,
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gorgeous place, trees, everywhere, waterfalls, I'm sitting there thinking, well, you know,
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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, it doesn't help.
link |
But I think if you give them a vision of the future that's not pie in the sky, but something
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ways in which science can be redemptive, can actually remediate our future, we have those
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capabilities right now, as well as the capabilities to do things in the cosmos that we could be
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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 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, we're
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, 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
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on to be more wise.
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And that's what my hope is for our civilization.
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On a sort of darker and more difficult subject in terms of, you just talked about the cosmos
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being an inspiration for science and for us growing out of our messy adolescence.
link |
But nevertheless, there is threats in this world.
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So do you worry about existential threats, like you mentioned nuclear weapons.
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Do you worry about nuclear war?
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And if you could also maybe comment, I don't know how much you've thought about it, but
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there's folks like Elon Musk who are worried about the existential threats of artificial
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intelligence, sort of our robotic computer creations, sort of resulting in us humans
link |
So can you speak to the things that worry you in terms of existential concerns?
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Yeah, all of the above.
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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, not end to see how sick so much
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of the planet is not to be concerned.
link |
Sick isn't 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 that's
link |
coming out of the ocean floor that was sequestered because of the permafrost, which is now melting.
link |
You know, I think there are other effects besides our greed and short term thinking,
link |
you know, that we are triggering now with all the greenhouse gases we're putting into
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 brave the challenge is to our civilization and to
link |
the other species that are, it's a mass, it is a mass extinction event that we're living
link |
through and we're seeing it, we're seeing news of it every day.
link |
So what do you think about another touchy subject?
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What do you think about the politicization of science on topics like global warming and
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Brionic stem cell research and other topics like it?
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What's your sense?
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What do you mean by the politicization of global warming?
link |
Meaning that if you say, I think what you just said, which is global warming is a serious
link |
concern, it's human cause, there might be some detrimental effects.
link |
Probably 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, or 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 fire events that we are experiencing with such frequency
link |
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 |
But I think actually that most people have really finally taken the reality of global
link |
climate change to heart.
link |
They look at their children and grandchildren and they don't feel good because they come
link |
from a world which was in many ways, in terms of climate, fairly familiar and benign.
link |
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 asked 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 United States and the Cold War and they're ready to kill
link |
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 |
That's part of the problem, is that we have to get a grip on reality and where we're headed
link |
and I'm not fatalistic at all.
link |
But I do feel like, and in setting out to do this series each season, we were talking
link |
about climate change in the original cosmos in episode four and warning about inadvertent
link |
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
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understanding of science?
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Can I just say one more thing about science is that its powers of prophecy are astonishing.
link |
You launched a spacecraft in 1977 and you know where each and every planet in the solar
link |
system is going to be in every moon and you rendezvous with that flawlessly and you exceed
link |
the design 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
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climate scientists, some of the people that we, whose stories we tell in cosmos, their
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predictions were, and they were working with very early computer modeling capabilities.
link |
They have proven to be so robust, nuclear winter, all of these things, this is a prophetic
link |
power and yet how crazy that, you know, it's like the Romans with their lead cooking pots
link |
and their lead pipes or the Aztecs ripping out their own people's hearts.
link |
This is us, we know better and yet we are acting as if its 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, everyone knows inspire me, but I'll have to say that to me, as I've
link |
gotten older, to me the origin of life has become less interesting.
link |
Because I feel, well, not because it's more, I think I understand, I have a better grasp
link |
of how it might have happened.
link |
Do you think it was a huge leap?
link |
I think it was that we are a byproduct of geophysics and I think it's not, my suspicion
link |
of course, which is, take it with a grain of salt, but my suspicion is that it happens
link |
more often and more places than we like to think because after all the history of our
link |
thinking about ourselves, it's been a constant series of demotions in which we've had to
link |
So to me that's...
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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.
link |
If you know that, then knowing what we know now is just, 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 things seem to me except one of the things
link |
Yeah, 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, you know, we tell the story of someone you have never heard of, I guarantee, and
link |
I think you're very knowledgeable on the subject who was more responsible for our ability to
link |
venture 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 |
What did you tell me?
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I'm going to make you watch the series, I'm going to make you buy my book, but just saying,
link |
this person would be forgotten, but the way that we do cosmos is that I ask a question
link |
I really want to get to the bottom to the answer and keep going deeper and deeper until
link |
we find what the story is, a story that I know because I'm not a scientist.
link |
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 |
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?
link |
I mean, let me ask you 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?
link |
Well, for Carl, definitely.
link |
In a nanosecond, I would take that deal.
link |
I mean, if Carl were alive, yes, I would want to live forever because, you know, it would
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 it
link |
feels like it would be fun.
link |
But no, I don't want to live forever.
link |
I have had a magical life.
link |
My, you know, my craziest dreams have come true, and I feel, you know, I forgive me,
link |
but this crazy quirk of fate that put my most joyful, deepest feelings, feelings that decades
link |
later, 42 years later, I know how real, how true those feelings were.
link |
Something 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 be much better, if instead of working on the immortality
link |
of the lucky few, of the most privileged people in the society, I would really like to see
link |
a concerted effort for us to get us our act together.
link |
You know, that to me is topic A, more pressing, you know, this possible world is the challenge.
link |
And we're at a kind of moment where if we can make that choice, so immortality doesn't
link |
really interest me.
link |
I really, I love nature, and I have to say that I, because I'm a product of nature, I
link |
recognize that it's great gifts and it's great cruelty.
link |
Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it, Annie.
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Thank you so much for talking to us.
link |
Oh, it's wonderful.
link |
I really appreciate it.
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I really enjoyed it.
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I thought your questions were great.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andruyan, and thank you to our presenting
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sponsor, Cash App.
link |
Download it, use code LEX Podcast, you get $10, and $10 will go to first.
link |
An organization that inspires and educates young minds to become science and technology
link |
innovators of tomorrow.
link |
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars in Apple Podcasts, support
link |
on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, at Lex Freedman.
link |
And now, let me leave you 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
link |
of funny dark squiggles.
link |
But one glance at it, and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead
link |
for thousands of years, across the millennia, an author speaking clearly and silently inside
link |
your head, directly to you.
link |
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.
link |
Joining together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epics.
link |
Books break the shackles of time.
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A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.