# The Science of Sagan

An episode of [TheThinkingAtheist](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/412308695), 10 Dec 2024, 58 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/e/711/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/63002221/podcast775_scienceofsagan.mp3

We lost the great cosmologist and science educator Carl Sagan in the month of December...way back in 1996. His words resonate and inspire as much as ever. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/thethinkingatheist--3270347/support.

## Transcript

[0:05] Speaker 1: The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
[0:09] Speaker 1: an idea.
[0:10] Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
[0:13] Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
[0:19] Speaker 1: tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not because.
[0:22] Speaker 3: I put my hand on a book and made a.
[0:24] Speaker 1: Wish and working together for a more rational world.
[0:29] Speaker 3: Take the risk of thinking.
[0:30] Speaker 4: Feel so much more happiness.
[0:32] Speaker 3: Truth, Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
[0:35] Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
[0:43] Speaker 1: Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
[0:56] Speaker 3: The late astronomer and cosmologist and science can communicator Carl
[1:01] Speaker 3: Sagan wrote this in The Demon Hunted World in nineteen
[1:05] Speaker 3: ninety five. He said, science is more than a body
[1:08] Speaker 3: of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. I have
[1:11] Speaker 3: a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time,
[1:16] Speaker 3: when the United States is a service and information economy,
[1:21] Speaker 3: when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away
[1:25] Speaker 3: to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the
[1:30] Speaker 3: hands of a very few and no one representing the
[1:33] Speaker 3: public interest can even grasp the issues, When the people
[1:38] Speaker 3: have lost the ability to set their own agendas or
[1:41] Speaker 3: knowledgeably question those in authority. When clutching our crystals and
[1:47] Speaker 3: nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline. Unable
[1:52] Speaker 3: to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide,
[1:58] Speaker 3: almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing
[2:04] Speaker 3: down of America is most evident in the slow decay
[2:08] Speaker 3: of substantive content in the enormously influential media. The thirty
[2:14] Speaker 3: second sound bites now down to ten seconds or less,
[2:18] Speaker 3: lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition,
[2:26] Speaker 3: but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. It's like
[2:32] Speaker 3: Carl Sagan wrote it yesterday. It is the month of December,
[2:37] Speaker 3: of course, and we lost this great man in the
[2:41] Speaker 3: month of December back in nineteen ninety six, which is
[2:44] Speaker 3: one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about
[2:47] Speaker 3: him today. Somehow, even in death, he remains one of
[2:51] Speaker 3: the best science communicators on the planet. A March twenty
[2:56] Speaker 3: fourteen article by Joel Achenbach said no, no one has
[3:00] Speaker 3: ever explained space in all its bewildering glory, as well
[3:05] Speaker 3: as Sagan did, he's been gone now for nearly two decades.
[3:09] Speaker 3: That's going to be three now, but people old enough
[3:12] Speaker 3: to remember him will easily be able to summon his voice,
[3:16] Speaker 3: his fondness for the word billions, and his boyish enthusiasm
[3:21] Speaker 3: for understanding the universe we are so lucky to live in.
[3:25] Speaker 3: He led a feverish existence, with multiple careers tumbling over
[3:29] Speaker 3: one another, as if he knew he wouldn't live to
[3:32] Speaker 3: an old age. Among other things, he served as an
[3:36] Speaker 3: astronomy professor at Cornell, wrote more than a dozen books,
[3:40] Speaker 3: worked on NASA robotic missions, edited the scientific journal Icarus,
[3:46] Speaker 3: and somehow found time to park himself repeatedly, arguably compulsively
[3:52] Speaker 3: in front of TV cameras. He was the house astronomer
[3:56] Speaker 3: basically on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Then, in an astonishing
[4:01] Speaker 3: burst of energy in his mid forties, he co created
[4:05] Speaker 3: and hosted a thirteen part PBS television series, Cosmos. It
[4:10] Speaker 3: aired in the fall of nineteen eighty and ultimately reached
[4:14] Speaker 3: hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Sagan was the most
[4:19] Speaker 3: famous scientist in America, the face of science itself. Another
[4:27] Speaker 3: world famous scientist, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was on the
[4:32] Speaker 3: Star Talk broadcast and he was talking about his own
[4:36] Speaker 3: Carl Sagan encounter. Here's what he said.
[4:39] Speaker 5: My interests predated my knowledge of him in that sense.
[4:43] Speaker 5: My interests were sort of homegrown within me. After a
[4:46] Speaker 5: first visit to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City,
[4:49] Speaker 5: my local planetarium, which is where I now serve as director.
[4:54] Speaker 5: So that trip I became starstruck. So by age eleven,
[5:00] Speaker 5: as I've said before, I had an answer to that
[5:02] Speaker 5: annoying question that adults ask kids, what do you want
[5:06] Speaker 5: to be when you grow up? So I would say astrophysicist.
[5:09] Speaker 5: So it was deeply anchored there. And meanwhile I was
[5:13] Speaker 5: in the astronomy club. I bought a telescope with money
[5:17] Speaker 5: I earned by walking other people's dogs, went to an
[5:20] Speaker 5: astronomy camp over the summer. So I'm all in on
[5:23] Speaker 5: the universe. And so I'm applying to colleges. And one
[5:27] Speaker 5: of the colleges I applied to and who accepted me
[5:30] Speaker 5: was Cornell. And Cornell was where Carl Sagan was a professor,
[5:34] Speaker 5: and apparently unknown to me, the admissions office said, you know,
[5:39] Speaker 5: he might still be hemming and on about this decision.
[5:41] Speaker 5: Do you think you can help us? And they sent
[5:43] Speaker 5: him my application. He read my application, saw that it
[5:47] Speaker 5: was dripping with the universe, and he wrote me a
[5:49] Speaker 5: letter hand sign Wow. It said, dear Neil, I see
[5:53] Speaker 5: you're interested in the universe. So am I. I'm patiating
[5:56] Speaker 5: here of course, but why don't you come visit the campus.
[5:59] Speaker 5: I'll show you around to help you decide if you
[6:01] Speaker 5: want to attend. It was like, because he was already
[6:05] Speaker 5: famous then, all right, he'd been on The Tonight Show
[6:08] Speaker 5: with Johnny Carson and so he had written books. So
[6:11] Speaker 5: I knew about the guy. But who am I? I'm
[6:14] Speaker 5: just a seventeen year old high school senior. Why what?
[6:19] Speaker 5: So I showed it to my parents and said, let's
[6:22] Speaker 5: do it.
[6:23] Speaker 2: Yes.
[6:23] Speaker 5: So I got on a bus from New York City
[6:28] Speaker 5: to Ithaca, New York in December, and he meets me
[6:31] Speaker 5: in front of his building. And by the way, it's
[6:34] Speaker 5: on a Saturday. Nobody else was there, no support staff.
[6:38] Speaker 5: And he shows me around and he does a badass thing.
[6:41] Speaker 5: He did a no look reach behind him and pulled
[6:44] Speaker 5: one of his books that he then signed to me.
[6:47] Speaker 5: So a no look reach means you wrote so many books.
[6:50] Speaker 5: No matter what you touch is going to be something
[6:52] Speaker 5: you wrote. Okay, I still have that book, of course,
[6:56] Speaker 5: it says to Neil, future astronomer Carl. So I did
[7:00] Speaker 5: all this, and we go for hours and hours, and
[7:03] Speaker 5: then it time and for me to go back to
[7:04] Speaker 5: New York. He drives me to the bus station and
[7:08] Speaker 5: it begins to snow, not an uncommon reality and ext
[7:12] Speaker 5: and as it began to snow, he said, I don't
[7:15] Speaker 5: know if the bus will make it through. Here's my
[7:18] Speaker 5: home phone.
[7:19] Speaker 2: Wow.
[7:20] Speaker 5: If the bus is stalled, can't get through, call me.
[7:24] Speaker 5: You can spend the night with my family. And I
[7:28] Speaker 5: thought to myself, who am I for him to treat
[7:32] Speaker 5: me this way?
[7:33] Speaker 2: Why?
[7:34] Speaker 6: Who?
[7:35] Speaker 5: And then I you know what I said to myself
[7:37] Speaker 5: the whole time. This is almost surreal. I said to myself.
[7:40] Speaker 5: If I am ever as remotely famous as Carl Sagan,
[7:44] Speaker 5: I will treat the next generation of students the way
[7:48] Speaker 5: he has treated me.
[7:51] Speaker 3: You will hear Carl Sagan's voice, and just if you first,
[7:53] Speaker 3: I want to read an article in Parade magazine back
[7:57] Speaker 3: in September of nineteen eighty nine. I was going to
[8:01] Speaker 3: read just a few paragraphs, but Honestly, the more I
[8:04] Speaker 3: got into it, the more I became convinced I should
[8:07] Speaker 3: just give you the whole thing. It's going to take
[8:09] Speaker 3: me well over twenty minutes to do so. Just think
[8:12] Speaker 3: of it as a short form. Carl Sagan audiobook narrated
[8:18] Speaker 3: by me. It's titled Why we Need to Understand Science.
[8:22] Speaker 3: Ignorance of science threatens our economic wellbeing, national security, and
[8:28] Speaker 3: the democratic process. We must do better. And it's interesting
[8:34] Speaker 3: that this was written thirty five years ago. Carl Sagan
[8:39] Speaker 3: wrote this as I got off the plane. He was
[8:43] Speaker 3: waiting for me, holding up a sign with my name
[8:46] Speaker 3: on it. I was on my way to a conference
[8:49] Speaker 3: of scientists and TV broadcasters, and the organizers had kindly
[8:54] Speaker 3: sent a driver. Do you mind if I ask you
[8:57] Speaker 3: a question? He said, as we waited from my bag.
[9:01] Speaker 3: Isn't it confusing to have the same name as that
[9:05] Speaker 3: science guy? It took me a moment to understand. Was
[9:09] Speaker 3: he pulling my leg? I am that science guy?
[9:14] Speaker 4: I said?
[9:15] Speaker 3: He smiled, Sorry, that's my problem. I thought it was
[9:19] Speaker 3: yours too. He put out his hand. My name is
[9:23] Speaker 3: William F. Buckley. Well, his name wasn't exactly William F.
[9:28] Speaker 3: Buckley but he did have the name of a contentious
[9:31] Speaker 3: TV interviewer, for which he doubtless took a lot of
[9:35] Speaker 3: good natured ribbing. As we settled into the car for
[9:39] Speaker 3: the long drive, he told me he was glad I
[9:42] Speaker 3: was that science guy. He had so many questions to
[9:45] Speaker 3: ask about science. Would I mind? And so we got
[9:49] Speaker 3: to talking, but not about science. He wanted to discuss
[9:54] Speaker 3: UFOs channeling, a way to hear what's on the minds
[9:58] Speaker 3: of dead people. Not much, it turns out, Crystal's astrology.
[10:05] Speaker 3: He introduced each subject with real enthusiasm, and each time
[10:09] Speaker 3: I had to disappoint him. The evidence is crummy. I
[10:13] Speaker 3: kept saying, there's a much simpler explanation. As we drove
[10:19] Speaker 3: on through the rain, I could see him getting glummer.
[10:23] Speaker 3: I was attacking not just pseudoscience, but also a facet
[10:27] Speaker 3: of his inner life. And yet there is so much
[10:30] Speaker 3: in real science that's equally exciting, more mysterious, a greater
[10:36] Speaker 3: intellectual challenge, as well as being a lot closer to
[10:40] Speaker 3: the truth. Did he know about the molecular building blocks
[10:45] Speaker 3: of life? Sitting out there in the cold, tenuous gas
[10:49] Speaker 3: between the stars. Had he heard of the footprints of
[10:53] Speaker 3: our ancestors found in four million year old volcanic ash
[10:59] Speaker 3: about the raising of the Himalayas when India went crashing
[11:03] Speaker 3: into Asia, or how viruses subvert cells, or the radio
[11:09] Speaker 3: search for extra terrestrial intelligence, or the ancient civilization of Ebla.
[11:16] Speaker 3: Mister Buckley, well spoken, intelligent, curious, had heard virtually nothing
[11:22] Speaker 3: of modern science. He wanted to know about science. It's
[11:26] Speaker 3: just that all the science got filtered out before it
[11:30] Speaker 3: reached him. What the society permitted to trickle through was
[11:35] Speaker 3: mainly pretense and confusion, and it had never taught him
[11:39] Speaker 3: how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. All
[11:45] Speaker 3: over America there are smart, even gifted people who have
[11:49] Speaker 3: a built in passion for science, but that passion is unrequieted.
[11:56] Speaker 3: A recent survey suggests that ninety four of Americans are
[12:02] Speaker 3: scientifically illiterate. We live in a society exquisitely dependent on
[12:08] Speaker 3: science and technology in which hardly anyone knows anything about
[12:13] Speaker 3: science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.
[12:19] Speaker 3: It's dangerous and stupid for us to remain ignorant about
[12:23] Speaker 3: global warming, say, or ozone depletion, toxic and radioactive wastes,
[12:30] Speaker 3: acid rain, jobs and wages depend on science and technology.
[12:36] Speaker 3: If the United States can't manufacture at high quality and
[12:40] Speaker 3: low price products people want to buy, then industries will
[12:45] Speaker 3: drift out of the United States and transfer a little
[12:49] Speaker 3: prosperity to another part of the world. Because of the
[12:53] Speaker 3: low birth rate in the sixties and seventies, the National
[12:56] Speaker 3: Science Foundation projects a shortage of nearly a million professional
[13:01] Speaker 3: scientists and engineers by twenty ten. Where will they come from?
[13:07] Speaker 3: What about fusion, supercomputers, abortion, massive reduction in strategic weapons, addiction,
[13:16] Speaker 3: high resolution TV, airline and airport safety, food additives, animal rights,
[13:23] Speaker 3: super conductivity, midgetman versus rail garrison, MX missiles, going to Mars,
[13:30] Speaker 3: finding cures for AIDS and cancer? How can we decide
[13:35] Speaker 3: national policy if we don't understand the underlying issues. I
[13:41] Speaker 3: know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring
[13:45] Speaker 3: good deeds out into the world. Scientists not only conceived
[13:50] Speaker 3: nuclear weapons, they also took political leaders by the lapels,
[13:55] Speaker 3: arguing that their nation, whichever it happened to be, had
[13:59] Speaker 3: to have one first. Then they arrange to manufacture sixty
[14:04] Speaker 3: thousand of them. Our technology has produced tholidamide, CFCs agent, orange,
[14:13] Speaker 3: nerve gas, and industry so powerful they can ruin the
[14:17] Speaker 3: climate of the planet. There's a reason people are nervous
[14:21] Speaker 3: about science and technology, and so the image of the
[14:25] Speaker 3: mad scientist haunts our world. From Doctor Faust to Doctor Frankenstein,
[14:30] Speaker 3: to Doctor Strangelove to the white coated loonies of Saturday
[14:35] Speaker 3: morning children's TV. All of this doesn't inspire budding scientists,
[14:41] Speaker 3: but there's no way back. We can't just conclude that
[14:44] Speaker 3: science puts too much power into the hands of morally
[14:48] Speaker 3: feeble technologists or corrupt, power crazed politicians and decide to
[14:54] Speaker 3: get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have
[14:59] Speaker 3: saved more life than have been lost in all the
[15:02] Speaker 3: wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have
[15:09] Speaker 3: transformed the world. The sword of science is double edged. Rather,
[15:14] Speaker 3: its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians,
[15:19] Speaker 3: a new responsibility, more attention to the long term consequences
[15:25] Speaker 3: of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to
[15:32] Speaker 3: avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming
[15:38] Speaker 3: too expensive. Science is much more than a body of knowledge.
[15:44] Speaker 3: It is a way of thinking. This is central to
[15:48] Speaker 3: its success. Science invites us to let the facts in,
[15:53] Speaker 3: even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels
[15:58] Speaker 3: us to carry alternative high hypotheses in our heads and
[16:02] Speaker 3: see which best match the facts. It urges on us
[16:06] Speaker 3: to find balance between no holds barred openness to new ideas,
[16:11] Speaker 3: however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything
[16:16] Speaker 3: new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of
[16:22] Speaker 3: this kind of thinking. It works. It's an essential tool
[16:27] Speaker 3: for a democracy in an age of change. Our task
[16:31] Speaker 3: is not just to train more scientists, but also to
[16:35] Speaker 3: deepen public understanding of science. How bad is it? Very bad?
[16:43] Speaker 3: Its official reads one newspaper headline, we stink in science.
[16:50] Speaker 3: Less than half of all Americans know that the Earth
[16:53] Speaker 3: moves around the Sun and takes a year to do it,
[16:58] Speaker 3: a fact established a few centuries ago. In tests of
[17:02] Speaker 3: average seventeen year olds in many world regions, the US
[17:06] Speaker 3: ranked dead last in algebra. On identical tests, the US
[17:12] Speaker 3: kids averaged forty three percent and their Japanese counterpart seventy
[17:17] Speaker 3: eight percent. In my book, seventy eight percent is pretty good.
[17:22] Speaker 3: It corresponds to a c plus or maybe even a
[17:26] Speaker 3: B minus forty three percent is an F. In a
[17:31] Speaker 3: chemistry test, students in only two of thirteen nations did
[17:36] Speaker 3: worse than the US. Compared to US, Britain, Singapore, and
[17:40] Speaker 3: Hong Kong were so high they were almost off scale,
[17:44] Speaker 3: and twenty five percent of Canadian eighteen year olds knew
[17:48] Speaker 3: just as much chemistry as a select one percent of
[17:52] Speaker 3: American high school seniors in their second chemistry course, and
[17:57] Speaker 3: most of them in advanced programs. The best of twenty
[18:01] Speaker 3: fifth grade classrooms in Minneapolis was outpaced by every one
[18:06] Speaker 3: of the twenty classrooms in Sendahl, Japan, and nineteen out
[18:11] Speaker 3: of twenty in Taipei. Taiwan, South Korean students were far
[18:16] Speaker 3: ahead of American students in all aspects of mathematics and science,
[18:20] Speaker 3: and thirteen year roles in British Columbia in Western Canada
[18:25] Speaker 3: outpaced their US counterparts across the boards. In some areas,
[18:30] Speaker 3: they did better than the Koreans. The US kids twenty
[18:35] Speaker 3: two percent say they dislike school, only eight percent of
[18:40] Speaker 3: the Koreans do. Yet two thirds of Americans, but only
[18:44] Speaker 3: a quarter of the Koreans, say they are good at mathematics.
[18:50] Speaker 3: How do British, Columbia, Japan, Britain and Korea manage so
[18:55] Speaker 3: much better.
[18:55] Speaker 2: Than we do.
[18:56] Speaker 3: During the Great Depression, teachers enjoyed job secure, good salaries, respectability.
[19:03] Speaker 3: Teaching was an admired profession, partly because learning was widely
[19:08] Speaker 3: recognized as the road out of poverty. Little of that
[19:12] Speaker 3: is true today, and so science and other teaching is
[19:16] Speaker 3: too often incomfidently or uninspiringly done, its practitioners astonishingly having
[19:24] Speaker 3: little or no training in their subjects, sometimes themselves unable
[19:30] Speaker 3: to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Those who do have the
[19:35] Speaker 3: training often get higher paying jobs elsewhere. We need more
[19:40] Speaker 3: money for teachers, training and salaries, and for laboratories so
[19:45] Speaker 3: kids will get hands on experience rather than just reading
[19:49] Speaker 3: what's in the book. But all across America's school bond
[19:53] Speaker 3: issues on the ballot are regularly defeated. US parents are
[19:58] Speaker 3: much more satisfied with what their children are learning in
[20:02] Speaker 3: science and math, and are say Japanese and Taiwanese parents,
[20:07] Speaker 3: whose children are doing so much better. No one suggests
[20:12] Speaker 3: that property taxes be used to provide for the military budget,
[20:16] Speaker 3: or for agriculture, or for cleaning up toxic wastes.
[20:21] Speaker 5: Why just education?
[20:23] Speaker 3: Why not support it from general taxes on the local
[20:26] Speaker 3: and state levels. What about a special education tax for
[20:31] Speaker 3: those industries with special needs for technically trained workers. American
[20:37] Speaker 3: kids don't do enough school work. The average high school
[20:41] Speaker 3: student spends three point five hours a week on homework.
[20:45] Speaker 3: The total time devoted to studies in and out of
[20:49] Speaker 3: the classroom is about twenty hours a week. Japanese fifth
[20:53] Speaker 3: graders average thirty three hours a week. But most American
[20:58] Speaker 3: kids aren't stupid. Part of the reason they don't study
[21:01] Speaker 3: hard is that they've received few tangible benefits when they do. Competency,
[21:08] Speaker 3: that is, actually knowing the stuff in verbal skills, mathematics,
[21:13] Speaker 3: and science these days doesn't increase earnings for average young
[21:17] Speaker 3: men in their first eight years out of high school,
[21:21] Speaker 3: many of whom take service rather than industrial jobs in
[21:26] Speaker 3: the productive sectors of the economy. Though the story is different.
[21:30] Speaker 3: There are furniture factories, for example, in danger of going
[21:34] Speaker 3: out of business, not because there are no customers, but
[21:38] Speaker 3: because few entry level workers can do simple arithmetic. A
[21:44] Speaker 3: major electronics company reports that eighty percent of its job
[21:48] Speaker 3: applicants can't pass a fifth grade math test, and that's
[21:52] Speaker 3: an American not a Korean fifth grade test. The United
[21:57] Speaker 3: States is already losing some twenty five five billion dollars
[22:01] Speaker 3: a year, mainly in lost productivity and the cost of
[22:05] Speaker 3: remedial education, because workers to too great a degree can't read, write, count,
[22:13] Speaker 3: or think. Parents should know that their children's livelihoods may
[22:17] Speaker 3: depend on how much math and science they know. Now,
[22:22] Speaker 3: while the kids are in school, is the time for
[22:24] Speaker 3: them to learn. Parents might encourage their schools to offer
[22:29] Speaker 3: and their kids to take comprehensible, well taught, advanced science courses.
[22:35] Speaker 3: They might also limit the amount of my numbing TV
[22:40] Speaker 3: their children watch. Those in America with a most favorable
[22:45] Speaker 3: view of science tend to be young, well to do,
[22:48] Speaker 3: college educated white males. But three quarters of new American
[22:54] Speaker 3: workers between now and two thousand and one will be women,
[22:58] Speaker 3: non whites, and imats. Discriminating against them isn't only unjust,
[23:04] Speaker 3: it's also self defeating. It deprives the American economy of
[23:09] Speaker 3: desperately needed skilled workers. Black and Hispanic students are doing
[23:15] Speaker 3: better in standardized science tests now than in the late
[23:18] Speaker 3: nineteen sixties, but they're the only ones who are The
[23:22] Speaker 3: average math gap between white and black US high school
[23:25] Speaker 3: graduates is still huge two to three grade levels, but
[23:30] Speaker 3: the gap between white US high school graduates and those
[23:34] Speaker 3: in say, Japan, Canada, Great Britain, or Finland is more
[23:39] Speaker 3: than twice as big. If you're poorly motivated and poorly educated,
[23:45] Speaker 3: you won't know much. No mystery here. Suburban blacks with
[23:50] Speaker 3: college educated parents do just as well in college as
[23:54] Speaker 3: suburban whites with college educated parents. Enrolling a poor child
[23:59] Speaker 3: in a headstart program doubles his or her chances to
[24:03] Speaker 3: be employed later in life. One who completes an upward
[24:07] Speaker 3: bound program is four times as likely to get a
[24:11] Speaker 3: college education. If we are serious, we know what to do.
[24:17] Speaker 3: What about college and university? There are obvious steps similar
[24:22] Speaker 3: to what should be done in high school salaries for
[24:25] Speaker 3: teachers that approach what they could get in industry. More scholarships,
[24:30] Speaker 3: fellowships and laboratory equipment, laboratory science courses required of everyone
[24:36] Speaker 3: to graduate, and special attention paid to those traditionally steered
[24:41] Speaker 3: away from science. We should also provide the financial and
[24:46] Speaker 3: moral encouragement for academic scientists to spend more time on
[24:51] Speaker 3: public education lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, TV appearances. This
[24:58] Speaker 3: requires scientists to make themselves understandable and fun to listen to.
[25:05] Speaker 3: To me, it seems strange that some scientists who depend
[25:09] Speaker 3: on public funding for their research are reluctant to explain
[25:13] Speaker 3: to the public what it is that they do. Fortunately,
[25:17] Speaker 3: the number of scientists willing to speak to the public
[25:20] Speaker 3: and capably has been increasing each year, but there are
[25:25] Speaker 3: not nearly enough. Virtually every newspaper in America has a
[25:30] Speaker 3: daily astrology column. How many have a daily science column.
[25:36] Speaker 3: When I was growing up, my father would bring home
[25:39] Speaker 3: a daily paper and consume, often with great gusto, the
[25:43] Speaker 3: baseball box scores.
[25:46] Speaker 2: There.
[25:46] Speaker 3: They were to me dry as dust, with obscure abbreviations WSSSO,
[25:54] Speaker 3: w dash ol, ab RBI, but they spoke to him.
[26:00] Speaker 3: Newspapers everywhere printed them. I figured maybe they weren't too
[26:04] Speaker 3: hard for me. Eventually I got too caught up in
[26:08] Speaker 3: the world of baseball statistics. I know it helped me
[26:12] Speaker 3: in learning decimals, and I still cringe a little when
[26:15] Speaker 3: I hear that someone is batting a thousand, but one
[26:20] Speaker 3: point zero zero zero is not one thousand. The lucky
[26:24] Speaker 3: player is batting one. Or take a look at the
[26:28] Speaker 3: financial page. Any introductory material, explanatory footnotes, definitions of abbreviations, none,
[26:37] Speaker 3: it's sink or swim. Look at those acres of statistics.
[26:42] Speaker 3: Yet people voluntarily read the stuff. It's not beyond their ability.
[26:47] Speaker 3: It's only a matter of motivation. Why can't we do
[26:50] Speaker 3: the same with math, science and technology? By far, the
[26:55] Speaker 3: most effective means of raising interest in science is television.
[27:00] Speaker 3: There's lots of pseudoscience on TV, a fair amount of
[27:04] Speaker 3: medicine and technology, but hardly any science, especially on the
[27:09] Speaker 3: Big three commercial networks, whose executives think science programming means ratings,
[27:15] Speaker 3: declines and lost profits and nothing else matters. Why in
[27:20] Speaker 3: all America is there no TV drama that has as
[27:24] Speaker 3: its hero someone devoted to figuring out how the universe works.
[27:30] Speaker 3: Stirring projects in science and technology attracts and inspires youngsters.
[27:36] Speaker 3: The number of science PhDs is peaked around the time
[27:40] Speaker 3: of the Apollo program and declined thereafter. This is an
[27:45] Speaker 3: important potential side effect of such projects as sending humans
[27:49] Speaker 3: to Mars or the super Conducting super Collider to explore
[27:54] Speaker 3: the fine structure of matter, or the program to map
[27:58] Speaker 3: all human genes. Every now and then, I'm lucky enough
[28:02] Speaker 3: to teach a class in kindergarten or the first grade.
[28:06] Speaker 3: Many of these children are curious, intellectually vigorous, ask provocative
[28:12] Speaker 3: and insightful questions, and exhibit great enthusiasm for science. When
[28:18] Speaker 3: I talk to high school students, I find something different.
[28:22] Speaker 3: They memorize facts, quote unquote facts, but by and large,
[28:28] Speaker 3: the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has
[28:32] Speaker 3: gone out of them. They're worried about asking dumb questions.
[28:37] Speaker 3: They're willing to accept inadequate answers. They don't pose follow
[28:42] Speaker 3: up questions. The room is a wash with sidelong glances
[28:46] Speaker 3: to judge, second by second the approval of their peers.
[28:52] Speaker 3: Something has happened between first and twelfth grade, and it's
[28:56] Speaker 3: not just puberty. I'd guess that it's partly peer pressure
[29:00] Speaker 3: not to excel except in sports, partly that the society
[29:05] Speaker 3: teaches short term gratification, partly the impression that science or
[29:11] Speaker 3: math won't buy you a sports car, partly that so
[29:15] Speaker 3: little is expected of students, and partly that there are
[29:19] Speaker 3: so few role models for intelligent discussion of science and technology,
[29:24] Speaker 3: or learning for its own sake. But there's something else.
[29:29] Speaker 3: Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions.
[29:35] Speaker 3: Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a
[29:38] Speaker 3: dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole?
[29:42] Speaker 3: Or when is the world's birthday? Or why we have toes?
[29:47] Speaker 3: Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule,
[29:52] Speaker 3: or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should
[29:56] Speaker 3: pretend to omniscience before a five year old? I can't,
[30:00] Speaker 3: for the life of me understand what's wrong with admitting
[30:04] Speaker 3: that you don't know? Children soon recognize that somehow this
[30:10] Speaker 3: kind of question anoise many adults. A few more experiences
[30:15] Speaker 3: like this than another child has been lost to science.
[30:19] Speaker 3: There are many better responses. If we have an idea
[30:24] Speaker 3: of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don't,
[30:28] Speaker 3: we could go to the encyclopedia or library. Or we
[30:32] Speaker 3: might say to the child, I don't know the answer.
[30:35] Speaker 3: Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up you
[30:39] Speaker 3: will be the first to find out. But mere encouragement
[30:43] Speaker 3: isn't enough. We must also give children the tools to
[30:46] Speaker 3: winnow the wheat from the chaff. I'm haunted by the
[30:51] Speaker 3: vision of a generation of Americans unable to distinguish reality
[30:56] Speaker 3: from fantasy, hopefully clutching their pistols for comfort. Unequipped even
[31:03] Speaker 3: to frame the right questions or to recognize the answers.
[31:07] Speaker 3: I want us to rescue mister Buckley and the millions
[31:11] Speaker 3: like him. I also want us to stop turning out leaden, incurious,
[31:17] Speaker 3: unimaginative high school seniors. I think American needs and deserves
[31:23] Speaker 3: as citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding
[31:28] Speaker 3: of how the world works. Public understanding of science is
[31:33] Speaker 3: more central to our national security than a half a
[31:36] Speaker 3: dozen strategic weapons systems. The sub mediocre performance of American
[31:42] Speaker 3: youngsters in science and math, and the widespread adult ignorance
[31:47] Speaker 3: and apathy about science and math should sound an urgent alarm.
[31:54] Speaker 3: And again, this is from a reprint of a nineteen
[31:57] Speaker 3: eighty nine article in Parade magazine, Why we need to
[32:02] Speaker 3: Understand Science. You can feel the fact that it's a
[32:08] Speaker 3: thirty five year old article in some ways as he
[32:10] Speaker 3: talks about the three major television networks and the reading
[32:14] Speaker 3: of newspapers. But beyond some of those details, it is
[32:18] Speaker 3: alarmingly close to the bullseye as we head into twenty
[32:23] Speaker 3: twenty five. Let me take a short break and we'll
[32:27] Speaker 3: come back and listen to the actual voice from recordings interviews, speeches,
[32:33] Speaker 3: Q and a's featuring Carl Sagan next this month. I
[32:42] Speaker 3: just thought maybe you and I could benefit from hearing
[32:45] Speaker 3: the calming voice, the wonderfully educated voice, the inspired voice
[32:51] Speaker 3: of the late great Carl Sagan. This storyteller of science
[32:56] Speaker 3: died of cancer on the twentieth of December nineteen ninety
[33:00] Speaker 3: He was only sixty two years old. Yet fortunately for us,
[33:06] Speaker 3: his writings and his voice and his work live on
[33:10] Speaker 3: thanks to the very technology that he so often wrote
[33:14] Speaker 3: and spoke about. May twenty seventh, nineteen ninety six, he
[33:19] Speaker 3: was being interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show about science
[33:24] Speaker 3: and science literacy or lack of.
[33:28] Speaker 2: My feelings, Earlie, is that.
[33:31] Speaker 6: It's not that pseudoscience and superstition and new age so
[33:38] Speaker 6: called beliefs and fundamental zelotry are something new. They've been
[33:43] Speaker 6: with us for as long as we've been human. But
[33:47] Speaker 6: we live in an age based on science and technology
[33:51] Speaker 6: with formidable technological powers.
[33:54] Speaker 7: Science and technology are propelling us forward at accelerating rates.
[33:58] Speaker 2: That's right. And if we don't understan standard.
[34:00] Speaker 6: By we, I mean the general public, if it's something
[34:03] Speaker 6: that oh I'm not good at that, I don't know
[34:05] Speaker 6: anything about it. Then, who is making all the decisions
[34:08] Speaker 6: about science and technology that are going to determine what
[34:11] Speaker 6: kind of future our children live in?
[34:13] Speaker 2: Just some members of Congress.
[34:16] Speaker 6: But there's no more than a handful of members of
[34:18] Speaker 6: Congress with any background in science at all. And the
[34:21] Speaker 6: Republican Congress has just abolished its own Office of Technology Assessment,
[34:27] Speaker 6: the organization that gave them bipartisan competent advice on science
[34:31] Speaker 6: and technology.
[34:32] Speaker 2: They say, we don't want to know.
[34:35] Speaker 3: Same interview. Just a few minutes later, Charlie Rose asked
[34:39] Speaker 3: Carl Sagan about religion. This clip runs about three minutes.
[34:45] Speaker 6: It's after the way the universe really is and not
[34:48] Speaker 6: what makes us feel good. And a lot of the
[34:51] Speaker 6: competing doctrines are after what feels good and not what's true.
[34:58] Speaker 8: Okay, but you got to make I'm sure you go
[34:59] Speaker 8: this far with me.
[35:00] Speaker 7: But I mean, there's a lot of that there's about
[35:02] Speaker 7: feeling good, and there's a lot of that that's about
[35:04] Speaker 7: focus pokers.
[35:05] Speaker 8: But at the same time.
[35:06] Speaker 7: There are millions of people who understand science does not
[35:11] Speaker 7: prove religion.
[35:13] Speaker 8: But because religion.
[35:14] Speaker 7: Is faith based, and therefore you should not deny.
[35:18] Speaker 2: The value of it.
[35:19] Speaker 8: Because it is faith based and not science.
[35:21] Speaker 6: But let's let's let's look a little more deeply into that.
[35:24] Speaker 2: What is faith?
[35:26] Speaker 6: It is belief in the absence of evidence. Now, I
[35:29] Speaker 6: don't propose to tell anybody what to believe, but for me,
[35:34] Speaker 6: believing when there's no compelling evidence is a mistake.
[35:38] Speaker 8: The idea is to withhold belief until.
[35:42] Speaker 6: There is compelling evidence. And if the universe does not
[35:45] Speaker 6: comply with our predispositions, okay, then we have the wrenching
[35:50] Speaker 6: obligation to accommodate to the way the universe really is.
[35:54] Speaker 7: I mean, but I mean, so you step forward to
[35:56] Speaker 7: say I deny all religion because I can't see it
[35:59] Speaker 7: prove science. No, no, no, no, You see religious experience and
[36:03] Speaker 7: the value of reaching for higher experiences.
[36:06] Speaker 6: Let me say, religion deals with history, with poetry, with
[36:15] Speaker 6: great literature, with ethics, with morals, including the morality of
[36:23] Speaker 6: treating compassionately the least fortunate among us. All of these
[36:28] Speaker 6: are things that I endorse wholeheartedly. Where religion gets into
[36:32] Speaker 6: trouble is in those cases that it pretends to know
[36:36] Speaker 6: something about science.
[36:38] Speaker 2: The science in.
[36:39] Speaker 6: The Bible, for example, was acquired by the Jews from
[36:43] Speaker 6: the Babylonians during the Babylonian captivity of six hundred BC.
[36:49] Speaker 6: That was the best science on the planet. But we've
[36:51] Speaker 6: learned something since then. Roman Catholicism, Reform, Judaism. Most of
[36:58] Speaker 6: the mainstream Protestant denominations have no difficulty with the idea
[37:04] Speaker 6: that humans have evolved from other creatures, that the Earth
[37:08] Speaker 6: is four point six billion.
[37:10] Speaker 2: Years old with the Big Bang. They don't have any
[37:12] Speaker 2: trouble with that.
[37:14] Speaker 6: The trouble comes with people who are Biblical literalists, who
[37:18] Speaker 6: believe that the Bible is dictated by the creator of
[37:23] Speaker 6: the universe to an unerring stenographer.
[37:27] Speaker 8: And therefore then and has no metaphor allegory.
[37:31] Speaker 7: And from there they make their political and economic choices.
[37:34] Speaker 2: And social choices, and scientific.
[37:36] Speaker 7: And scientific choices and scientific And that's part of your
[37:39] Speaker 7: problem with that idea anxiety, is that because.
[37:42] Speaker 8: For the wrong reasons, we make the wrong choices about science.
[37:44] Speaker 2: That's right.
[37:45] Speaker 6: So who is more humble the scientist who looks at
[37:51] Speaker 6: the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the
[37:54] Speaker 6: universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything
[37:57] Speaker 6: in this book must be concer the literal truth, and
[38:02] Speaker 6: never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved
[38:05] Speaker 6: in the writing of this book.
[38:07] Speaker 3: In the article I read at the beginning of the broadcast,
[38:10] Speaker 3: Carl Sagan talked wistfully about perhaps exploring Mars, and I
[38:16] Speaker 3: know this is a hot one in the age of
[38:18] Speaker 3: Elon Musk and space X. Here is Sagan talking about Mars.
[38:24] Speaker 3: This was from nineteen eighty eight. It was part of
[38:27] Speaker 3: a program called God, the Universe and Everything Else. He
[38:30] Speaker 3: was on stage with Stephen Hawking and Arthur C.
[38:33] Speaker 2: Clark.
[38:34] Speaker 3: The host asked this question.
[38:37] Speaker 7: Now, it's very nearly twenty years ago since man landed
[38:41] Speaker 7: on the Moon.
[38:42] Speaker 8: Do you think that we've.
[38:43] Speaker 3: Basically stopped trying to get Man any further?
[38:47] Speaker 6: Is there any.
[38:47] Speaker 4: Chance that another Neil Armstrong will set foot on Mars
[38:51] Speaker 4: in our lifetime?
[38:52] Speaker 6: The United States and the Soviet Union have managed to
[38:55] Speaker 6: booby trap the planet with about sixty thousand nuclear weapons,
[38:59] Speaker 6: with a little health from Britain, France, China, and Israel.
[39:02] Speaker 6: A tiny fraction of those weapons is enough to destroy
[39:06] Speaker 6: the participating nations, certainly, the global civilization, possibly and the
[39:13] Speaker 6: human species, just maybe. It is now time for the
[39:16] Speaker 6: United States and the Soviet Union to demonstrate that they
[39:18] Speaker 6: can undo this specter, that they can demonstrate their ability
[39:24] Speaker 6: to work together on high technology for peaceful, hopeful purposes
[39:29] Speaker 6: that carry us into a benign twenty first century. And
[39:33] Speaker 6: that is why I support the idea of joint US
[39:37] Speaker 6: Soviet cooperation and the exploration of Mars leading up to
[39:41] Speaker 6: in international manned and by the way, womaned mission to
[39:44] Speaker 6: the planet. Americans and Soviets as representatives of the human species,
[39:49] Speaker 6: are the nations I presume would also be involved. And
[39:52] Speaker 6: then a glorious whatever it would be, few month period
[39:56] Speaker 6: in which Mars I have a globe of it right
[39:59] Speaker 6: next to me, in which Mars would be explored. There
[40:02] Speaker 6: are hundreds, for example, hundreds of ancient river valleys on Mars.
[40:06] Speaker 6: Mars is today bone dry. It was once much warmer,
[40:10] Speaker 6: much wetter, much denser atmosphere, much more earth like.
[40:14] Speaker 2: What were those conditions? Like?
[40:16] Speaker 6: Why did an earth like planet get converted into this
[40:19] Speaker 6: deep ice age condition that Mars has today?
[40:23] Speaker 2: And is their life?
[40:24] Speaker 3: There?
[40:25] Speaker 6: Could there once have been life? Are their fossil forms?
[40:28] Speaker 6: There are extraordinary, enigmatic geological features on the planet. What
[40:33] Speaker 6: is their nature? There is a huge amount of exploration
[40:36] Speaker 6: to do, and all of it every step that I've
[40:39] Speaker 6: described could be before the television cameras of the world,
[40:43] Speaker 6: and we could all participate in such exploration.
[40:47] Speaker 3: Now again, that was nineteen eighty eight. It's interesting to
[40:49] Speaker 3: think about what Sagan might say rovers on Mars, you know,
[40:55] Speaker 3: cruising around taking sample, sending us photos and video from
[40:59] Speaker 3: the surface of Mars. What would he have thought about
[41:03] Speaker 3: this idea that Elon Musk has colonizing Mars. Yeah, we
[41:08] Speaker 3: especially given all the needs that we have here on
[41:11] Speaker 3: the planet. But I found most interesting him referencing.
[41:14] Speaker 4: The Soviet Union.
[41:15] Speaker 3: This was pre Perestroika, so it was the United States
[41:19] Speaker 3: versus Soviet Russia, the Cold War and all that underway.
[41:24] Speaker 3: What if he could look forward to twenty twenty four
[41:27] Speaker 3: and see what's going on with Putin and everything else,
[41:31] Speaker 3: you know, this crazy situation, global strife and Putin acting
[41:36] Speaker 3: in such destructive ways. Would he have been so optimistic
[41:40] Speaker 3: about US joining forces as shared humanity to explore another
[41:45] Speaker 3: planet and in doing so, explore ourselves.
[41:49] Speaker 4: I don't know.
[41:50] Speaker 3: Here is Sagan. This was from a lost lecture from
[41:56] Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four, recently recovered. He was doing some cue
[42:00] Speaker 3: at a university and somebody asked him about finding meaning
[42:05] Speaker 3: in our lives.
[42:06] Speaker 6: You see, the idea that our sense of self worth
[42:11] Speaker 6: comes not from anything that we've done, not from anything worthy,
[42:18] Speaker 6: but by an accident of birth, is where the crux.
[42:23] Speaker 2: Of the humiliation is.
[42:25] Speaker 6: In my opinion, I would say those of us worry
[42:30] Speaker 6: about being demoted, those of us.
[42:33] Speaker 9: Who wish for us to be important, should do something important.
[42:38] Speaker 9: We should make an easily understandable, achievable, and inspiring goal
[42:46] Speaker 9: for the human species and then set out and do
[42:50] Speaker 9: it that would give us the confidence that we sorely
[42:54] Speaker 9: lack by being dependent on our self esteem being based
[42:58] Speaker 9: on nothing we do.
[43:00] Speaker 2: We want to have self.
[43:02] Speaker 10: Esteem, Let's make a planet in which nobody is starving.
[43:06] Speaker 10: Let's make a planet in which men and women have
[43:09] Speaker 10: equal access to power. Let us make a planet in
[43:13] Speaker 10: which no ethnic group has it over another ethnic group.
[43:17] Speaker 10: Let's have a planet in which science and engineering is
[43:20] Speaker 10: used for the benefit of everybody on the planet. And
[43:24] Speaker 10: my personal idiosyncrasy, Let's have a world in.
[43:28] Speaker 2: Which we go to other worlds.
[43:31] Speaker 3: Same event from nineteen ninety four. During the Q and A,
[43:36] Speaker 3: someone in the audience asked Carl Sagan about the existence
[43:39] Speaker 3: of God. There's quite a bit of the audio from
[43:43] Speaker 3: the Questionnaer and then Carl Sagan takes over.
[43:47] Speaker 11: As we kind of make God almost go away through
[43:50] Speaker 11: these demotions. And I don't mean he, because who knows
[43:54] Speaker 11: what God is, but.
[43:57] Speaker 10: Still saying it makes it sight of ikey, doesn't it.
[43:59] Speaker 11: Yeah, Yeah, it's tough.
[44:02] Speaker 2: I like it to be a heat, don't we.
[44:04] Speaker 12: Yeah, We've been trained to think of it as a heat.
[44:12] Speaker 12: It seems that through the ages, humans have created a
[44:15] Speaker 12: mythological framework that has always involved some kind of often
[44:19] Speaker 12: involves some kind of higher spiritual powers. And as every
[44:23] Speaker 12: human culture has done that, as that goes away, as
[44:26] Speaker 12: we know more and more that, and it seems harder
[44:29] Speaker 12: and harder to.
[44:29] Speaker 11: Prove that anything might exist like that. Where does that
[44:33] Speaker 11: leave us.
[44:34] Speaker 6: On our own, which, to my mind is much more
[44:44] Speaker 6: responsible than hoping that someone will save us from ourselves,
[44:48] Speaker 6: so we don't have to make our best efforts to
[44:50] Speaker 6: do it ourselves. Yeah, and if we're wrong and there
[44:58] Speaker 6: is someone who steps in and say, okay, that's all right,
[45:02] Speaker 6: I'm for that, but we know hedged our bets. It's
[45:06] Speaker 6: Pascal's bargain run backwards. I'll say another word. The word
[45:13] Speaker 6: God covers an enormous range of different ideas, and.
[45:17] Speaker 2: You recognize that, and yeah, you're praising the question.
[45:20] Speaker 6: Running from an outsized, light skinned male with a long
[45:27] Speaker 6: white beard sitting in the throne in the sky and
[45:29] Speaker 6: tallying the fall of every sparrow for which there is
[45:32] Speaker 6: no evidence to my mind, if anybody has something, I
[45:35] Speaker 6: sure would like to see it to the kind of
[45:39] Speaker 6: God that Einstein or Spinosa talked about, which is very
[45:42] Speaker 6: close to the sum total of the laws of the universe. Now,
[45:46] Speaker 6: it would be crazy to deny that there are laws
[45:48] Speaker 6: in the universe. And if that's what you want to
[45:51] Speaker 6: call God, then of course God exists.
[45:53] Speaker 2: And there are all sorts of other nuances.
[45:55] Speaker 6: There is, for example, the deest God that many of
[45:59] Speaker 6: the founding fathers of this country believed in, although it
[46:03] Speaker 6: is a secret whose name may not be spoken in
[46:07] Speaker 6: some circles. A Finnian a do nothing king, the god
[46:14] Speaker 6: who creates the universe and then retires, and to whom
[46:19] Speaker 6: praying to is sort of pointless. He's not here, he
[46:23] Speaker 6: went somewhere else. He had other things to do. Now
[46:27] Speaker 6: that's also a god. So when you say do you
[46:29] Speaker 6: believe in God? If I say yes, or if I say, no,
[46:33] Speaker 6: you have learned absolutely nothing.
[46:35] Speaker 11: I guess I'm asking you to define yours if you
[46:37] Speaker 11: have one.
[46:38] Speaker 6: But why would we use a word so ambiguous that
[46:42] Speaker 6: means so many different things.
[46:43] Speaker 11: It gives you freedom, It gives.
[46:46] Speaker 6: You freedom to seem to agree with someone else with
[46:51] Speaker 6: whom you do not agree. It covers over differences. It
[46:57] Speaker 6: makes for social lubrication. But it is not an aid
[47:02] Speaker 6: to truth in my view.
[47:05] Speaker 2: Now.
[47:06] Speaker 3: Sagan was called to testify before Congress nineteen eighty five.
[47:11] Speaker 3: This was a year before I graduated high school, before
[47:14] Speaker 3: many of you were born. But the climate effect, climate change,
[47:19] Speaker 3: these were already starting to become big conversations, at least
[47:24] Speaker 3: in the scientific community. And Carl Sagan was right there
[47:27] Speaker 3: at the front of this. He was sitting in front
[47:29] Speaker 3: of a bunch of congressmen trying to explain the greenhouse effect,
[47:35] Speaker 3: and he expressed it in a way that for me,
[47:40] Speaker 3: for one of the first times, made sense. This was
[47:43] Speaker 3: a way for me to be able to play along.
[47:45] Speaker 3: I'm hoping that congressmen understood, even if Congress hasn't done
[47:49] Speaker 3: much about it. This is a longer clip Carl Sagan,
[47:53] Speaker 3: The Greenhouse Effect, nineteen eighty five, If you.
[47:56] Speaker 6: Ask what determines the Earth's climate, clearly the main thing
[48:00] Speaker 6: that determines it is sunlight. Sunlight is what heats the Earth.
[48:04] Speaker 6: Not all the light that arives at the Earth from
[48:06] Speaker 6: the Sun goes to heating the Earth.
[48:08] Speaker 2: Some of it is reflected back.
[48:09] Speaker 6: It's just the part that is absorbed. And what happens
[48:13] Speaker 6: is there's a certain rate at which sunlight is absorbed
[48:16] Speaker 6: by the Earth's surface, and there's a certain rate at
[48:19] Speaker 6: which the Earth's surface radiates to space. What comes from
[48:24] Speaker 6: the sun is in the ordinary visible part of the
[48:26] Speaker 6: spectrum that our eyes is sensitive to. What the Earth
[48:30] Speaker 6: radiates into space is in the infrared part of the spectrum,
[48:33] Speaker 6: longer waves than red that our eyes are not sensitive to.
[48:36] Speaker 6: But it's as legitimate a form of light as the
[48:39] Speaker 6: kind that we're used to. Now, if you calculate what
[48:44] Speaker 6: the temperature of the Earth ought to be from how
[48:46] Speaker 6: much sunlight is being absorbed, equally how much infrared radiation
[48:51] Speaker 6: would be radiated to space, you find that the Earth's temperature,
[48:55] Speaker 6: by this simple calculation is too low. It's about thirty
[48:59] Speaker 6: centigrade degrees too low. Why is it too low. It's
[49:02] Speaker 6: too low because something was left out of the calculation.
[49:05] Speaker 6: What was left out of the calculation the green ass effect.
[49:09] Speaker 6: The air between us is transparent except in Los Angeles
[49:13] Speaker 6: and places of that sort. In the ordinary visible part
[49:17] Speaker 6: of the spectrum, we can see each other. But if
[49:19] Speaker 6: our eyes were sensitive AT's say, fifteen microns in the infrared,
[49:23] Speaker 6: we could not see each other. The air would be
[49:25] Speaker 6: black between us. And that's because in this case carbon dioxide.
[49:29] Speaker 6: Carbon dioxide is very strongly absorbing at fifteen microns and
[49:33] Speaker 6: other wavelengths in the infrared. Likewise, there are parts of
[49:36] Speaker 6: the infrared spectrum where water vapor absorbs, where we could
[49:39] Speaker 6: not see each other if we were only as far
[49:42] Speaker 6: apart as we are in this room. If you add
[49:45] Speaker 6: these infrared absorbing gases to a planet, then what happens
[49:49] Speaker 6: is the sunlight comes in as before, but when the
[49:52] Speaker 6: surface tries to radiate the space in the infrared, it
[49:56] Speaker 6: is blocked. It is impeded by the absorbing gases, and
[50:00] Speaker 6: so the surface temperature has to rise so that there
[50:03] Speaker 6: is an equilibrium between what comes in.
[50:05] Speaker 2: And what goes out.
[50:06] Speaker 6: So this is the greenhouse effect. It is a misnomer
[50:09] Speaker 6: for more reasons than one. It's a misnomer in particular
[50:12] Speaker 6: because that's not how the Flooress greenhouse works. But that's
[50:15] Speaker 6: a very minor point. There are other gases which absorb
[50:18] Speaker 6: in the infrared, many of which have been mentioned already, nitrosoxide, methane,
[50:23] Speaker 6: the halocarbons, and these are products partly of agriculture. It's fertilizers, refrigeration,
[50:32] Speaker 6: aerosol spray and so on, all products of our technology.
[50:37] Speaker 6: We don't generate much water into the atmosphere, but we
[50:39] Speaker 6: certainly do generate a great deal of carbon dioxide through
[50:42] Speaker 6: the burning of wood and fossil fuels and apparently benign activity.
[50:46] Speaker 6: Who could object to humans burning oil and coal gas
[50:52] Speaker 6: and would? I'd like to stress that the greenhouse effect
[50:57] Speaker 6: makes life on Earth possible.
[51:00] Speaker 2: If there were not a.
[51:00] Speaker 6: Greenhouse effect, the temperature would, as I say, be thirty
[51:04] Speaker 6: centigrade degrees or so colder, and that's well below the
[51:06] Speaker 6: freezing point of water everywhere on the planet. The oceans
[51:09] Speaker 6: would be solid after a while. A little greenhouse effect
[51:12] Speaker 6: is a good thing, but there is a delicate balance
[51:15] Speaker 6: of these invisible gases, and too much or too little
[51:20] Speaker 6: green hoss effect can mean too high or too low.
[51:23] Speaker 2: A temperature.
[51:24] Speaker 6: And here we are pouring enormous quantities of CO two
[51:27] Speaker 6: and these other gases into the atmosphere every year with
[51:30] Speaker 6: hardly any concern about its long term and global consequences.
[51:36] Speaker 3: Okay, we can't talk about Carl Sagan without doing a
[51:40] Speaker 3: pale blue dot. Right, let me take one last break
[51:44] Speaker 3: and we will come back with arguably the most famous
[51:48] Speaker 3: words he ever wrote and spoke after this, if I can,
[52:04] Speaker 3: I want to leave on a high note. Carl Sagan's
[52:08] Speaker 3: arguably most famous work was inspired by the photograph taken
[52:13] Speaker 3: by Voyager one on the fourteenth of February nineteen ninety
[52:18] Speaker 3: a vast photograph in this tiny little dots that we
[52:23] Speaker 3: see almost invisible. And that dot, of course is us,
[52:29] Speaker 3: the pale blue dots. Carl Sagan actually wrote a book
[52:34] Speaker 3: by that title in nineteen ninety four. I took the
[52:38] Speaker 3: liberty of taking his voice and doing a video interpretation
[52:43] Speaker 3: of a pale blue dot. This is the audio of that,
[52:48] Speaker 3: and it's what I.
[52:48] Speaker 4: Will leave you with today.
[53:43] Speaker 13: Consider again that dot, that's here, that's home, that's us
[53:51] Speaker 13: on it. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you
[53:55] Speaker 13: ever heard of, every human being whoever was live. Doubt
[54:00] Speaker 13: their lives the argregate our.
[54:03] Speaker 2: Joy and suffering. Thousands of confident religions.
[54:08] Speaker 13: Ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero
[54:14] Speaker 13: and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king
[54:19] Speaker 13: and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father,
[54:24] Speaker 13: hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of marals, every
[54:30] Speaker 13: corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and
[54:36] Speaker 13: sinner in the history of our species lived there on
[54:41] Speaker 13: the motive dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is
[54:50] Speaker 13: a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think
[54:56] Speaker 13: of the rivers of blood spilled by all those general
[55:00] Speaker 13: rolls and emperors, so that in glory and triumph they
[55:04] Speaker 13: could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
[55:22] Speaker 13: Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of
[55:25] Speaker 13: one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants
[55:30] Speaker 13: of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager
[55:35] Speaker 13: they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds
[55:40] Speaker 13: our posturings. Our imagined self importance, the delusion that we
[55:45] Speaker 13: have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by
[55:49] Speaker 13: this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely
[55:54] Speaker 13: speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark in security. In
[56:01] Speaker 13: all this vastness, there is no hint that help will
[56:04] Speaker 13: come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth
[56:14] Speaker 13: is the only world known so far to harbor life.
[56:18] Speaker 13: There is nowhere else, at least in the near future,
[56:21] Speaker 13: to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes, settle, not
[56:28] Speaker 13: yet like it or not for the moment, the Earth
[56:35] Speaker 13: is where we make our stand. It has been said
[56:47] Speaker 13: that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There
[56:53] Speaker 13: is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human
[56:56] Speaker 13: conceits than this distant image of our tiny world world.
[57:02] Speaker 13: To me, it un to scoores our responsibility to deal
[57:07] Speaker 13: more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish
[57:13] Speaker 13: the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

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