Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Anne Drouin, writer, producer, director, and one
00:00:06 of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time.
00:00:10 She co wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she
00:00:16 married in 1981 and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brainwaves
00:00:24 on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched
00:00:29 into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still
00:00:36 active, reaching out farther into deep space than any human made object ever has.
00:00:43 This was a profound and beautiful decision Anne made as the creative director of NASA’s
00:00:48 Voyager Interstellar Message Project.
00:00:51 In 2014 she went on to create the second season of Cosmos, called Cosmos A Space Time Odyssey,
00:00:58 in 2020 the new third season called Cosmos Possible Worlds, which is being released this
00:01:05 upcoming Monday, March 9th.
00:01:07 It is hosted, once again, by the fun and the brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson.
00:01:14 Carl Sagan, Anne Drouin, and Cosmos have inspired millions of scientists and curious minds across
00:01:21 several generations by revealing the magic, the power, the beauty of science.
00:01:27 I am one such curious mind, and if you listened to this podcast, you may know that Elon Musk
00:01:33 is as well.
00:01:35 He graciously agreed to read Carl Sagan’s words about the pale blue dot in my second
00:01:40 conversation with him.
00:01:42 If you listened, there was an interesting and inspiring twist at the end.
00:01:48 This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, if you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give
00:01:53 it 5 stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at
00:01:58 Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
00:02:02 As usual, I’ll do one or two minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that
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00:03:19 And now, here’s my conversation with Anne Drouin.
00:03:24 What is the role of science in our society?
00:03:26 Well, I think of what Einstein said when he opened the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
00:03:35 He said, if science is ever to fulfill its mission the way art has done, it must penetrate.
00:03:46 Its inner meaning must penetrate the consciousness of everyone.
00:03:53 And so for me, especially in a civilization dependent on high technology and science,
00:04:00 one that aspires to be democratic, it’s critical that the public, as informed decision makers,
00:04:12 understand the values and the methods and the rules of science.
00:04:18 So you think about what you just mentioned, the values and the methods and the rules and
00:04:24 maybe the technology that science produces, but what about sort of the beauty, the mystery
00:04:30 of science?
00:04:31 Well, you’ve touched on what I think is for me, that’s how my way into science is that
00:04:37 for me, it’s much more spiritually uplifting.
00:04:42 The revelations of science, the collective revelations of really countless generations
00:04:50 of searchers and the little tiny bit we know about reality is the greatest joy for me because
00:04:58 I think that it relates to the idea of love.
00:05:02 What is love that is based on illusion about the other?
00:05:07 That’s not love.
00:05:08 Love is seeing, unflinching the other and accepting with all your heart.
00:05:16 And to me, knowing the universe as it is, or the little bit that we’re able to understand
00:05:21 at this point is the purest kind of love.
00:05:25 And therefore, you know, how can our philosophy, our religion, if it’s rootless in nature,
00:05:32 how can it really be true?
00:05:35 I just don’t understand.
00:05:36 So I think you need science to get a sense of the real romance of life and the great
00:05:47 experience of being awake in the cosmos.
00:05:50 So the fact that we know so little, the humbling nature of that, and you kind of connect love
00:05:59 to that, but isn’t it also, isn’t it scary?
00:06:04 Why is it so inspiring, do you think?
00:06:06 Why is it so beautiful that we know so little?
00:06:10 Well, first of all, as Socrates thought, you know, knowing that you know little is knowing,
00:06:16 really knowing something, knowing more than others.
00:06:19 And it’s that voice whispering in our heads, you know, you might be wrong, which I think
00:06:27 is not only it’s really healthy because we’re so imperfect, we’re human, of course, but
00:06:32 also, you know, love to me is the feeling that you always want to go deeper, get closer.
00:06:38 You can’t get enough of it.
00:06:41 You can’t get close enough, deep enough.
00:06:44 So and that’s what science is always saying is science is never simply content with its
00:06:50 understanding of any aspect of nature.
00:06:53 It’s always saying it’s always finding that even smaller cosmos beneath.
00:06:59 So I think the two are very much parallel.
00:07:04 So you said that love is not an illusion.
00:07:08 No, it’s not.
00:07:09 What is love?
00:07:12 What is love is, is knowing, for me, love is, is knowing something deeply and still
00:07:21 being completely gratified by it, you know, and wanting to know more.
00:07:28 So what is love?
00:07:30 What is loving someone, a person, let’s say deeply is not idealizing them, not putting
00:07:40 some kind of subjective projection on them, but knowing them as they are.
00:07:48 And so for me, for me, the only aperture to that knowing about nature, the universe is
00:07:55 science because it has that error correcting mechanism that most of the stuff that we do
00:08:00 doesn’t have.
00:08:01 You know, you could say the Bill of Rights is kind of an error correcting mechanism,
00:08:05 which is one of the things I really appreciate about the society in which I live to the extent
00:08:12 that it’s upheld and we keep faith with it and the same with science.
00:08:17 It’s like we will give you the highest rewards we have for proving us wrong about something.
00:08:25 It’s genius.
00:08:27 That’s why, that’s why in only 400 years since Galileo’s first look through a telescope,
00:08:36 we could get from this really dim, vague, this vague apprehension of another world to
00:08:46 sending our eyes and our senses there or even to going beyond.
00:08:52 So it is, it is, it delivers the goods like nothing else, you know, it really, it delivers
00:08:59 the goods because it’s always, it’s always self aware of its fallibility.
00:09:06 So on that topic, I’d like to ask your opinion and a feeling I have that I’m not sure what
00:09:12 to do with, which is the, the skeptical aspect of science.
00:09:18 So the modern skeptics community and just in general, certain scientists, many scientists,
00:09:24 maybe most scientists that apply the scientific method are kind of rigorous in that application.
00:09:30 And they, it feels like sometimes miss out some of the ideas outside the reaches, just
00:09:35 slightly outside of the reach of science.
00:09:37 And they don’t dare to sort of dream or think of revolutionary ideas that others will call
00:09:43 crazy in this particular moment.
00:09:45 So how do you think about the skeptical aspect of science that is really good at sort of
00:09:50 keeping us in check, keeping us humble, but, but at the same time, sort of the kind of
00:09:55 dreams that you and Carl Sagan have inspired in the world, it kind of shuts it down sometimes
00:10:01 a little bit.
00:10:02 Yeah.
00:10:03 I mean, I think it’s up to the individual, but for me, you know, I was so ridiculously
00:10:08 fortunate in that I, my tutorial in science, because I’m not a scientist and I wasn’t trained
00:10:14 in science, was 20 years of days and nights with Carl Sagan.
00:10:20 And the wonder, I think the reason Carl remains so beloved, well, I think there are many reasons,
00:10:26 but at the root of it is the fact that his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder
00:10:33 and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism.
00:10:38 So he couldn’t fool himself into believing something he wanted to believe because it
00:10:42 made him feel good at the other.
00:10:45 But on the other hand, he recognized that what science, what nature is, it’s really,
00:10:52 it’s good enough, you know, it’s way better than our fantasies.
00:10:57 And so if you, if you’re that kind of person who loves happiness, loves life and your eyes
00:11:04 are wide open and you read everything you can get your hands on and you spend years
00:11:09 studying what is known so far about the universe, then you have that capacity, a really infinite
00:11:18 capacity to be alive, but all, and also at the same time to be very rigorous about what
00:11:27 you’re willing to believe.
00:11:28 For Carl, I don’t think he ever felt that his skepticism cost him anything because again,
00:11:36 it comes back to love.
00:11:37 He wanted to know what Nietzsche really was like, not to inflict his, you know, preconceived
00:11:44 notions on what he wanted it to be.
00:11:46 So you can’t go wrong because it doesn’t, you know, I mean, you know, I think the pale
00:11:51 blue dot is the, is a perfect example of this, of his massive achievement is to say, okay,
00:12:01 or the Voyager record is another example is here we have this mission, our first reconnaissance
00:12:07 of the outer solar system.
00:12:09 Well, how can we make it a mission in which we absolutely squeeze every drop of consciousness
00:12:19 and understanding from it?
00:12:21 We don’t have to be scientists and then be human beings.
00:12:25 I think that’s the tragedy of Western civilization is that it’s, you know, when it’s one of its
00:12:33 greatest gifts has been science and yet at the same time, it believing that we are the
00:12:42 children of a disappointed father, a tyrant who puts us in a maximum security prison and
00:12:50 calls it paradise, who looks at us, who watches us every moment and hates us for being our
00:12:57 human selves, you know?
00:13:00 And then most of all, what is our great sin?
00:13:03 It’s partaking of the tree of knowledge, which is our greatest gift as humans.
00:13:09 This pattern recognition, this ability to see things and then synthesize them and jump
00:13:17 to conclusions about them and test those conclusions.
00:13:21 So I think the reason that in literature, in movies, the scientist is a figure of alienation,
00:13:31 a figure, you know, oh, you see these biopics about scientists and yeah, he might’ve been
00:13:37 great, but you know, he was missing in ship.
00:13:41 You know, he was a lousy husband.
00:13:44 He lacked, you know, the kind of spiritual understanding that maybe, you know, his wife
00:13:52 had and it’s always in the end and they come around, but to me, that’s a false dichotomy
00:13:59 that we are, you know, to the extent that we are aware of our surroundings and understand
00:14:05 them, which is what science makes it possible for us to do, we’re even more alive.
00:14:10 So you mentioned a million awesome things there, let’s even just, can you tell me about
00:14:16 the Voyager one and two spacecraft and the interstellar message project and that whole
00:14:22 just fascinating world leading up to.
00:14:24 One of my favorite subjects, I love talking about it.
00:14:27 I’ll never get over it.
00:14:29 I’ll never be able to really wrap my head around the reality of it, the truth of it.
00:14:35 What is it first of all?
00:14:36 What’s the Voyager spacecraft?
00:14:37 Okay, so Voyagers one and two were our first reconnaissance mission of what was then considered
00:14:44 the outer solar system and it was a gift of gravity.
00:14:49 The idea that swinging around these worlds gives you a gravitational assist, which ultimately
00:14:58 will send you out of the solar system to wander the Milky Way galaxy for one to five billion
00:15:06 years.
00:15:08 So Voyager gave us our first close up look of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
00:15:19 It discovered new moons.
00:15:21 It discovered volcanoes on Io.
00:15:28 Its achievements are astonishing.
00:15:31 And remember, this is technology from the early to mid 1970s.
00:15:37 And it’s still active.
00:15:38 And it’s still active.
00:15:39 We talked to Voyager a few days ago.
00:15:42 We talked to it, in fact, a year ago, I think it was.
00:15:46 We needed to slightly change the attitude of the spacecraft.
00:15:50 And so we fired up its thrusters for the first time since 1987.
00:15:55 Did they work?
00:15:57 Instantly.
00:15:58 It was as if you had left your car in the garage in 1987.
00:16:04 And you put the key in the ignition because you use keys then in the ignition and it turned
00:16:09 over the first time you stepped on the gas.
00:16:12 And so that’s the genius of the engineering of Voyager.
00:16:17 And Carl was one of the key participants in imagining what its mission would be because
00:16:26 it was a gift actually of the fact that every 175 years, plus or minus, there is an alignment
00:16:35 of the worlds.
00:16:36 And so you could send two spacecraft to these other worlds and photograph them and use your
00:16:44 mass spectrometer and all the other devices on Voyager to really explore these worlds.
00:16:54 And it’s the farthest spacecraft, it’s the farthest human creation away from us today.
00:17:00 Voyager 1.
00:17:01 Voyager 1.
00:17:02 These two spacecraft not only gave us our first close up look at hundreds of moons and
00:17:08 planets, these four giant planets, but also it told us the shape of the solar system as
00:17:17 it moves through the galaxy because there were two of them going in different directions
00:17:23 and they finally, and they arrived at a place called the heliopause, which is where the
00:17:28 wind from the sun, the solar wind dies down and the interstellar medium begins.
00:17:35 And both Voyagers were the first spacecraft that we had that could tell us when that happened.
00:17:41 So it’s a consummate, I think it’s the greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century.
00:17:50 And engineering in some sense.
00:17:51 Engineering, I mean really, you know, Voyager is doing this on less energy than you have
00:17:59 in your toaster, something like 11 Watts.
00:18:04 So okay, but because of this gravitational assist, both Voyagers were destined, as I
00:18:10 say, to, first of all, they were supposed to function for a dozen years and now it’s
00:18:16 42 years since launch and we’re still talking to them.
00:18:20 So that’s amazing.
00:18:22 But prior to launch, almost a year, eight, nine months prior to launch, it was decided
00:18:31 that since Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and Linda Solzman Sagan had created something
00:18:36 called the Pioneer 10 Plaque for the Pioneer spacecraft that preceded Voyager, which was
00:18:44 kind of like a license plate for the planet Earth, you know, man and a woman, hands up,
00:18:50 you know, very, very basic, but very effective.
00:18:55 And it captured the imagination of people all over the world.
00:18:59 And so NASA turned to Frank and to Carl and said, we’d like you to do a message for Voyager
00:19:08 because if it’s going to be circumnavigating the Milky Way galaxy for one to five billion
00:19:16 years, you know, it’s like 20 trips around the galaxy.
00:19:20 And there’s a very small chance that a space faring civilization would be able to flag
00:19:27 one of them down.
00:19:29 And so on board, you see this exquisite golden disc with scientific hieroglyphics explaining
00:19:37 our address and various basic scientific concepts that we believe that would be common to any
00:19:48 space faring civilization.
00:19:51 And then beneath this exquisite golden disc is the Voyager record, the golden record.
00:20:00 And it contains something like 118 photographs, images of life on Earth, as well as 27 pieces
00:20:14 of music from all around the world.
00:20:19 Many people describe it as the invention of world music.
00:20:22 World music was not a concept that existed before the Voyager record.
00:20:27 And we were determined to take our music, not just from the dominant technical cultures,
00:20:33 but from all of the rich cultural heritage of the Earth.
00:20:39 And there’s a sound essay, which is a kind of using a microphone as a camera to tell
00:20:47 the story of the Earth, beginning with its geological sounds and moving into biology
00:20:57 and then into technology.
00:21:00 And I think what you were getting at is that at the end of this sound essay, I had asked
00:21:08 Carl if it were, in the making of the record, it was my honor to be the creative director
00:21:15 of the project, if it was possible to, if I had meditated for an hour while I was hooked
00:21:23 up so that every single signal that was coming from my brain, my body, was recorded and then
00:21:34 converted into sound for the record.
00:21:39 Was it possible that these putative extraterrestrials of the distant future, of perhaps a billion
00:21:44 years from now, would be able to reconstitute this message and to understand it?
00:21:51 And he just, big smile, you know, and just said, well, hey, a billion years is a long
00:21:56 time.
00:21:57 It’s a long time.
00:21:58 Go do it.
00:21:59 And so I did this.
00:22:01 And what were you thinking about in the meditation?
00:22:03 Like what, I mean, it’s such an interesting idea of recording as you think about things.
00:22:09 What were you thinking about?
00:22:10 So I was blindfolded and couldn’t hear anything.
00:22:17 And I had made a mental itinerary of exactly where I wanted to go.
00:22:23 I was truly humbled by the idea that these thoughts could conceivably touch the distant
00:22:33 future.
00:22:34 Yeah, that’s incredible.
00:22:35 So in 1977, there are some 60,000 nuclear weapons on the planet.
00:22:41 The Soviet Union and the United States are engaged in a, you know, to the death competition.
00:22:51 And so I began by trying to tell the history of the planet in, you know, to my limited
00:22:59 ability what I understood about the story of the early existence of the planet, about
00:23:06 the origin of life, about the evolution of life, about the history of humans, about our
00:23:16 current at that time predicament, about the fact that one in five of us was starving or
00:23:25 unable to get potable water.
00:23:29 And so I sort of gave a kind of, you know, as general a picture as I possibly could of
00:23:37 our predicament.
00:23:39 And I also was very newly within days of the moment when Carl and I fell in love with each
00:23:50 other.
00:23:51 We had fallen in love with each other long before because we’d known each other for years,
00:23:55 but it was the first time that we had expressed our feelings for each other.
00:23:59 Acknowledged it, the existence of this love.
00:24:01 Yes, because we were both involved with other people and it was a completely outside his
00:24:09 morality and mine to even broach the subject.
00:24:13 But it was only days after that it happened.
00:24:17 And for me, it was a eureka moment.
00:24:20 It was in the context of finding that piece of Chinese music that was worthy to represent
00:24:28 one of the oldest musical traditions on earth when those of us who worked on the Voyager
00:24:34 record were completely ignorant about Chinese music.
00:24:38 And so that had been a constant challenge for me, talking to professors of Chinese music,
00:24:46 listening to musicologists everywhere and all through the project, desperately trying
00:24:51 to find this one piece.
00:24:54 Found the piece, lived on the Upper West Side, found the piece, a professor at Columbia University
00:25:02 gave it to me.
00:25:04 And of all the people I talked to, everyone had said, that’s hopeless.
00:25:08 You can’t do that.
00:25:09 There can’t be one piece of Chinese music.
00:25:12 But he was completely, no problem, I’ve got it.
00:25:17 And so he told me the story of the piece, which only made it an even greater candidate
00:25:24 for the record.
00:25:27 And I listened to it, called Carl Sagan, who was in Tucson, Arizona addressing the American
00:25:35 Society of Newspaper Editors.
00:25:40 And I left him a message, hotel message center.
00:25:45 And he called me back an hour later.
00:25:51 And I heard this beautiful voice say, I get back to my hotel room, and I find this message
00:25:58 that Annie called.
00:26:00 And I asked myself, why didn’t you leave me this message 10 years ago?
00:26:05 My heart was beating out of my chest.
00:26:09 I, it was for me a kind of eureka moment, a scientific breakthrough, a truth, a great
00:26:19 truth had suddenly been revealed.
00:26:24 And of course, I was awkward and didn’t really know what to say.
00:26:27 And so I blurted something out like, oh, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl,
00:26:32 which wasn’t really true.
00:26:33 I never would have talked to him about it.
00:26:34 We had been alone countless times.
00:26:36 We humans are so awkward in these moments and these amazing moments.
00:26:41 And I just said, for keeps.
00:26:45 And he thought for a very brief, like a second and said, you mean get married?
00:26:51 And I said, yeah.
00:26:52 And he said, yeah.
00:26:55 And we put down the phone.
00:27:00 And I literally was jumping around my apartment like a lunatic, because it was so obvious,
00:27:10 you know, it was something like, of course.
00:27:12 And then the phone rang again.
00:27:14 And I thought, damn, no, he’s going to say, I don’t know what I was saying.
00:27:19 I am married.
00:27:20 I have a kid.
00:27:21 I’m not going to do this, you know?
00:27:23 But he was like, I just want to make sure that that really happened.
00:27:27 And I said, yeah.
00:27:28 And he said, we’re getting married.
00:27:30 And I said, yeah, we’re getting married.
00:27:32 Now this was June 1st, 1977.
00:27:36 The records had not been affixed to the spacecraft yet.
00:27:42 And there had been a lot of controversy about what we were doing.
00:27:47 I should say that among the 118 pictures was an image of a man and a woman, frontally,
00:27:58 completely naked.
00:28:00 And there was, I believe, a congressman on the floor that said, NASA to send smut to
00:28:07 the stars, you know?
00:28:09 And so NASA really, they got very upset and they said, you can’t send a picture.
00:28:14 And we had done it so that it was so brilliant.
00:28:16 It was like this lovely couple, completely naked.
00:28:20 And then the next image was a kind of overlay schematic to show the fetus inside this woman
00:28:29 that was developing.
00:28:30 And then that went off into, you know, additional imagery of human reproduction.
00:28:36 And it really hit me that how much we hate ourselves, that we couldn’t bear to be seen
00:28:44 as we are.
00:28:46 So in some sense that congressman also represents our society.
00:28:53 Perhaps his opposition should have been included as well.
00:28:55 Yes.
00:28:56 Well, that was one of the most vigorous debates during the making of the record with the,
00:29:02 you know, the five, six people that we collaborated with was, do we show, do we only put our best
00:29:08 foot forward?
00:29:09 Or do we show Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Congo, what we have done?
00:29:17 What do you think represents humanity?
00:29:20 If you kind of, if you think about it, do our darker moments, are they essential for
00:29:26 humanity?
00:29:27 All the wars we’ve been through, all the tortures and the suffering and the cruelty.
00:29:32 Is that essential for happiness, for beauty, for creation, generally speaking?
00:29:37 Well, certainly not essential for happiness or beauty, that’s for sure.
00:29:40 I mean, it’s part of who we are, if we’re going to be real about it, which is, you know,
00:29:45 I think we tell on ourselves, even if we don’t want to be real, we, you know, I think that
00:29:51 if you’re a spacefaring civilization, and you’ve gotten it together sufficiently, that
00:29:58 you can move from world to world, then I think they probably took one look at this derelict
00:30:05 spacecraft and they knew that these were people in their technological adolescence, and they
00:30:11 were just setting forth, and they must have had these issues, you know, because it’s,
00:30:18 and so it really, you know, that’s the great thing about lying is that a lie only has a
00:30:24 shelf life.
00:30:25 It’s like, if like a great work of art that’s a forgery, people can be fooled immediately,
00:30:32 but 10 or 15 years, 20 years later, they start to look at it and, you know, they begin to
00:30:37 realize the lens, our lens of our present is coloring everything that we see.
00:30:45 So you know, I think it didn’t matter that we didn’t show our atrocities.
00:30:52 They would fill in the blanks.
00:30:54 They would fill in the blanks.
00:30:55 So let me sort of ask, you’ve mentioned how unlikely it is that you and Carl did two souls
00:31:02 like yours would meet in this vast world.
00:31:06 What are your views on how and why incredibly unlikely things like these nevertheless do
00:31:12 happen?
00:31:13 It’s purely to me, chance.
00:31:15 It’s totally random.
00:31:17 It’s a just, I mean, but, and the fact is, is that some people are, and it’s happening
00:31:24 every day right now.
00:31:26 Some people are the random casualties of chance and that, and I don’t just mean the people
00:31:33 who are being, you know, destroyed in childhood, in wartime, I’m also, or the people who starved
00:31:41 to death because of famine, but also the people who, you know, who are not living to the fullest,
00:31:52 all of these things.
00:31:53 And I think there’s a, my parents met on the subway in rush hour.
00:31:57 And so I’m only here with you because of the most random possible situation.
00:32:03 And so I’ve had this, a sense of this, even before I knew Carl, I always felt this way
00:32:08 that I only existed because of the generosity of the rush hour, no, of just all of the things,
00:32:17 all of the skeins of causality.
00:32:21 It’s interesting because, you know, the rush hour is a source of stress for a lot of people,
00:32:26 but clearly in its moments, it can also be a source of something beautiful.
00:32:32 That’s right.
00:32:33 Of strangers meeting and so on.
00:32:35 So everything, everything is, has a possibility of doing something beautiful.
00:32:43 So let me ask sort of a quick tangent on the Voyager, this, this beautiful romantic notion
00:32:50 that Voyager One is sort of our farthest human reach into space.
00:32:55 If you think of what, I don’t know if you’ve seen, but what Elon Musk did with putting
00:33:00 the Roadster, letting it fly out into space, there’s a sort of humor to it.
00:33:07 I think that’s also kind of interesting, but maybe you can comment on that.
00:33:12 But in general, if now that we are developing what we were venturing out into space again
00:33:20 in a more serious way, what kind of stuff that represent since Voyager was launched,
00:33:26 should we send out as a followup?
00:33:28 Is there things that you think that’s developed in the next, in the 40 years after that we
00:33:35 should update the spacefaring aliens?
00:33:38 Well, of course now we could send the worldwide, we could send everything that’s on the worldwide
00:33:44 web.
00:33:45 We could send, I mean, you know, that was a time when we’re talking about photograph records
00:33:50 and transistor radios and, you know, so we tried to be, to take advantage of the existing
00:33:59 technology to the fullest extent, you know, the computer that was hooked up to me from
00:34:04 my brainwaves and my heart sounds while I was meditating was, you know, the size of
00:34:09 a gigantic room.
00:34:11 And I’m sure it’s not that, it didn’t have the power of a phone, as the phone has now.
00:34:17 So you know, now we could just, I think we could let it all hang out and just like send,
00:34:22 you know, every week.
00:34:23 I mean, that’s the wonder, like I would send, you know, Wikipedia or something and not be
00:34:30 a gatekeeper, but show who we are.
00:34:34 You were also, it’s interesting because one of the problems of the internet of having
00:34:40 so much information is it’s actually the curation, the human curation is still the powerful,
00:34:47 beautiful thing.
00:34:48 Yes.
00:34:49 So what you did with the record is actually, is exactly the right process.
00:34:54 It’s kind of boiling down a massive amount of possibilities of what you could send into
00:34:58 something that represents, you know, the better angels of our nature or represents our humanity.
00:35:05 So if you think about, you know, what would you send from the internet as opposed to sending
00:35:11 all of Wikipedia, for example, all human knowledge, is there something just new that we’ve developed,
00:35:17 you think, or fundamentally we’re still the same kind of human species?
00:35:24 I think fundamentally we’re the same, but we have advanced to an astonishing degree
00:35:32 in our capacity for data retrieval and for transmission.
00:35:37 And so, you know, I would send YouTube, I would send, you know, really like think of
00:35:41 all the, you know, I still feel so lucky that there’s any great musical artist of the last
00:35:52 hundred years who I revere, I can just find them and watch them and listen to them.
00:36:00 And you know, that’s fantastic.
00:36:02 I also love how democratic it is that we each become curators and that we each decide those
00:36:09 things.
00:36:10 Now, I may not agree with, you know, the choices that everyone makes, but of course not because
00:36:18 that’s not the point.
00:36:19 The point is, is that we are, you know, we have discovered largely through the internet
00:36:26 that we are an intercommunicating organism and that can only be good.
00:36:33 So you could also send now, Cosmos.
00:36:36 Yes, I’d love to.
00:36:38 I would be proud to.
00:36:40 I mean, you’ve spoken about a very specific voice that Cosmos had in that it reveals the
00:36:49 magic of science.
00:36:50 I think you said shamanic journey of it and not the details of the latest breakthroughs
00:36:56 or so on.
00:36:57 Just revealing the magic.
00:36:58 Can you try to describe what this voice of Cosmos is with the follow up and the new Cosmos
00:37:07 that you’re working on now?
00:37:09 Yes, well, the dream of Cosmos is really like Einstein’s quote, you know, it’s the idea
00:37:18 of the awesome power of science to be in absolutely everyone’s hands.
00:37:25 You know, it belongs to all of us.
00:37:27 It’s not the preserve of a priesthood.
00:37:31 It’s just the community of science is becoming more diverse and being less exclusive than
00:37:37 it was guilty of in the not so recent past.
00:37:41 The discoveries of science, our understanding of the Cosmos that we live in has really grown
00:37:50 by leaps and bounds and probably we’ve learned more in the last hundred years about it.
00:37:58 You know, the tempo of discovery has picked up so rapidly.
00:38:04 And so the idea of Cosmos from the 1970s when Carl and I and Steven Soder, another astronomer,
00:38:13 first imagined it was that interweaving not only of the scientific concepts and revelations
00:38:23 and using, you know, cinematic VFX to take the viewer on this transporting, uplifting
00:38:31 journey but also the stories of the searchers.
00:38:36 Because the more I have learned about, you know, the process of science through my life
00:38:44 with Carl and sense, the more I am really persuaded that it’s that adherence to the
00:38:54 facts and to that adherence to that little approximation, that little bit of reality
00:39:02 that we’ve been able to get our hands around is something that we desperately need and
00:39:08 it doesn’t matter if you are a scientist.
00:39:11 In fact, the people, it matters even more if you’re not.
00:39:15 And since, you know, the level of science teaching has been fairly or unfairly maligned
00:39:23 and the idea that once there was such a thing as a television network, which of course has
00:39:30 now evolved into many other things, the idea that you could in the most democratic way
00:39:37 make accessible to absolutely everyone and most especially people who don’t even realize
00:39:44 that they have an interest in a subject or who feel so intimidated by the jargon of science
00:39:50 and its kind of exclusive history.
00:39:54 The idea that we could do this and, you know, in season two of Cosmos, the Space Time Odyssey,
00:40:01 we were in 181 countries in the space of two weeks.
00:40:06 It was the largest rollout in television history, which is really amazing for a, there is no
00:40:13 science based programming.
00:40:15 By the way, just to clarify, the series was rolled out, so it was shown in not that many
00:40:20 countries.
00:40:21 You said we were in.
00:40:22 Well, our show was in 180 countries.
00:40:25 Yeah, the show, which is incredible.
00:40:27 I mean, the hundreds of millions, whatever that number is, the people that watched it,
00:40:31 it’s just, it’s crazy.
00:40:33 It’s so crazy that, for instance, my son had a cerebral hemorrhage a year ago and the doctor
00:40:43 who saved his life in a very dangerous situation.
00:40:50 When he realized that, you know, that Sam and I were who we were, he said, that’s why
00:40:59 I’m here.
00:41:00 You know, he said, if you come of age in a poor country like Colombia and Carl Sagan
00:41:06 calls you to science when you’re a child, then, then, you know, you go to medicine because
00:41:13 that’s the only avenue open to you, but that’s why I’m here.
00:41:17 And I’ve heard that story and I hear that story, I think every week.
00:41:24 How does that make you feel?
00:41:26 I mean, the number of scientists, I mean, a lot of it is quiet, right?
00:41:31 But the number of scientists Cosmos has created is just countless.
00:41:36 I mean, it probably touched a lot of, I don’t know, probably it could be a crazy number
00:41:40 of the 90% of scientists or something that have been.
00:41:43 I would love to do that census because I, because that’s the greatest gratification,
00:41:50 because that’s the dream of science.
00:41:52 That’s the whole idea is that if it belongs to all of us and not just a tiny few, then
00:41:58 we have some chance of determining how it’s used.
00:42:03 And if it’s only in the hands of people whose only, whose only interests are the balance
00:42:11 sheet or hegemony over other nations or things like that, then it’ll probably end up being
00:42:20 a gun aimed at our heads.
00:42:22 But if it’s distributed in the widest possible way, a capability that we now have because
00:42:30 of our technology, then the chance is that it will be used with wisdom.
00:42:38 That’s the dream of it.
00:42:39 So that’s why we did the first Cosmos.
00:42:42 We wanted to take not just, as I say, the scientific information, but also tell the
00:42:48 stories of these searchers.
00:42:53 Because for us, and for me, carrying on this series in the second and third seasons, the
00:43:03 primary interest was that we wouldn’t tell a story unless it was a kind of a threefer.
00:43:09 It was not just a way to understand a new scientific idea, but it was also a way to
00:43:17 understand what, if it matters what’s true, how the world can change for us and how we
00:43:24 can be protected.
00:43:27 And if it doesn’t matter what’s true, then we’re in grave danger because we have the
00:43:33 capability to not only destroy ourselves and our civilization, but to take so many species
00:43:41 with us.
00:43:42 And I’d like to talk to you about that particular, sort of the dangers of ourselves in a little
00:43:48 bit, but sort of to linger on Cosmos.
00:43:51 Maybe for the first, the 1980 and the 2014 follow up, what’s a, or one of the, or several
00:44:00 memorable moments from the creation of either of those seasons?
00:44:07 Well, you know, the critical thing really was the fact that Seth MacFarlane became art
00:44:14 champion because I had been with three colleagues, I had been schlepping around from network
00:44:21 to network with a treatment for Cosmos and every network said they wanted to do it, but
00:44:29 they wouldn’t give me creative control and they wouldn’t give me enough money to make
00:44:34 it cinematic and to make it feel like you’re really going on an adventure.
00:44:40 And so I think both of those things, sorry to interrupt, both of those things are given
00:44:45 what Cosmos represents, the legacy of it and the legacy of Carl Sagan is essential control,
00:44:52 especially in the modern world.
00:44:54 It’s wonderful that you sought control, that you did not really push it.
00:44:58 And I kept saying no.
00:44:59 And my partners, I’m sure, you know, they would look at me like I was nuts, you know,
00:45:04 and they probably must have entertained the idea that maybe I didn’t really want to do
00:45:08 it, you know, because I was afraid or something, but I kept saying no.
00:45:12 And it wasn’t until I met Seth MacFarlane and he took me to Fox and to Peter Rice and
00:45:21 said, you know, I’ll pay for half the pilot if I have to, you know, and Peter Rice was
00:45:25 like, put your money away.
00:45:27 And in every time since, in the 10 years since, at every turn, when we needed Seth to intervene
00:45:39 on our behalf, he stood up and he did it.
00:45:43 And so that was like, in a way, that is the watershed for me of everything that followed
00:45:51 since.
00:45:52 And I was so lucky because, you know, Steve Soder and I written the original Cosmos with
00:45:58 Carl and collaborated on the treatment for season two.
00:46:04 And then Brennan Braga came into our project at the perfect moment and has proven to be
00:46:13 just the, really, I have been so lucky my whole life.
00:46:17 I’ve collaborated, I’ve been lucky with the people, my collaborators have been extraordinary.
00:46:23 And so that was a critical thing.
00:46:26 But also to have, you know, for instance, our astonishing VFX supervisor who comes from
00:46:33 the movies, who heads the global association of VFX people, Jeff Okun.
00:46:39 And then, you know, I could rattle off 10 more names, I’d be happy to do that.
00:46:46 And it was that collaboration.
00:46:49 So the people were essential to the creation of…
00:46:52 Absolutely.
00:46:53 I mean, when it came down, I have to say that when it came down to the vision of what the
00:46:58 series would be, that was me sitting in my home, looking out the window and, you know,
00:47:04 really imagining like what I wanted to do.
00:47:06 Can you pause on that for a second?
00:47:07 Like what’s that process?
00:47:08 Because it, you know, Cosmos is also, it’s grounded in science, of course, but it’s also
00:47:13 incredibly imaginative and the words used are carefully crafted.
00:47:19 Thank you.
00:47:20 So what’s…
00:47:21 If you can talk about the process of that, the big picture, imaginative thinking, and
00:47:28 sort of the rigorous crafting of words that like basically turns into something like poetry.
00:47:35 Thank you so much.
00:47:37 For me, these are rare occasions for human self esteem.
00:47:44 The scientists that we bring to life in Cosmos are people, in my view, who have everything
00:47:55 we need to see us through this current crisis.
00:48:00 They’re, very often they come, they’re poor, they’re female, they’re outsiders who are
00:48:09 not expected to have gifts that are so prodigious, but they persevere.
00:48:19 And so you have someone like Michael Faraday, who comes from a family, dysfunctional family
00:48:26 of like 14 people and, you know, it never goes to, university never learns the math.
00:48:33 But, you know, is the, you know, there’s Einstein years later looking up at the picture of Faraday
00:48:42 to inspire him.
00:48:44 So it’s, you know, if we had people with that kind of humility and unselfishness who didn’t
00:48:54 want to patent everything, as, you know, Michael Faraday created the wealth of the 20th century
00:49:02 with his various inventions.
00:49:05 And yet he never took out a single patent at a time when people were patenting everything
00:49:09 because that was not what he was about.
00:49:13 And to me, that’s a kind of almost a saintliness that says that, you know, here’s a man who
00:49:20 finds in his life, this tremendous gratification from searching.
00:49:28 And it’s just so impressive to me.
00:49:30 And there are so many other people in Cosmos, especially the new season of Cosmos, which
00:49:34 is called Possible Worlds.
00:49:36 Possible, beautiful title.
00:49:37 Possible Worlds, well, I stole it from an author and a scientist from the 1940s.
00:49:44 But it, for me, encapsulates not just, you know, the exoplanets that we’ve begun to discover,
00:49:53 not just, you know, the worlds that we might visit, but also the world that this could
00:50:00 be, a hopeful vision of the future.
00:50:03 You asked me what is common to all three seasons of Cosmos or what is that voice?
00:50:08 It’s a voice of hope.
00:50:10 It’s a voice that says there is a future which we bring to life in, I think, a fairly dazzling
00:50:17 fashion that we can still have, you know?
00:50:21 And in sitting down to imagine what this season would be, the new season would be, I’m sitting
00:50:27 where I live in Ithaca, beautiful, just gorgeous place, trees everywhere, waterfalls, I’m sitting
00:50:35 there thinking, well, you know, you can’t, how do you, how do you awaken people?
00:50:41 I mean, you can’t yell at them and say we’re all going to die, you know?
00:50:45 It doesn’t help.
00:50:47 It doesn’t help.
00:50:49 But I think if you give them a vision of the future that’s not pie in the sky, but something,
00:50:59 ways in which science can be redemptive, can actually remediate our future.
00:51:06 We have those capabilities right now, as well as the capabilities to do things in the Cosmos
00:51:15 that we could be doing right now, but we’re not doing them.
00:51:19 Not because we don’t know how to, how, you know, with the engineering or the material
00:51:24 sciences or the physics, we know all we need to know, but we’re a little bit paralyzed
00:51:30 in some sense.
00:51:33 And you know, we’re like, I always think we’re like the toddler, you know, like we, we left
00:51:39 our mother’s legs, you know, and scurried out to the moon.
00:51:43 And we had a moment of, wow, we can do this.
00:51:46 And then we realized, and somehow we had a failure of nerve and we went scurrying back
00:51:51 to our mother and, you know, did things that really weren’t going to get us out there,
00:51:56 like the space shuttle, things like that, because it was a kind of failure of nerve.
00:52:02 So Cosmos is about overcoming those fears.
00:52:07 We’re now as a civilization, ready to be a teenager venturing out into college.
00:52:12 We’re returning back.
00:52:13 Exactly.
00:52:14 Exactly.
00:52:15 And that’s one of my theories about our current situation is that this is our adolescence.
00:52:25 And I was a total mess as an adolescent.
00:52:28 I was reckless, irresponsible, totally.
00:52:31 I didn’t, I was inconsiderate.
00:52:34 I, the reality of other people’s feelings and the future didn’t exist for me.
00:52:41 So why should a technologically adolescent civilization be any different?
00:52:46 But you know, the vast majority of people I know made it through that period and went
00:52:55 on to be more wise.
00:52:59 And that’s what my hope is for our civilization.
00:53:02 On a sort of a darker and more difficult subject in terms of, so you just talked about the
00:53:10 Cosmos being an inspiration for science and for us growing out of our messy adolescence,
00:53:18 but nevertheless, there is threats in this world.
00:53:22 So do you worry about existential threats?
00:53:25 Like you mentioned nuclear weapons, do you worry about nuclear war?
00:53:30 Yes.
00:53:31 And if you could also maybe comment, I don’t know how much you’ve thought about it, but
00:53:34 there’s folks like Elon Musk who are worried about the existential threats of artificial
00:53:40 intelligence.
00:53:41 Sort of our robotic computer creations sort of resulting in us humans losing control.
00:53:49 So can you speak to the things that worry you in terms of existential concerns?
00:53:54 All of the above.
00:53:55 You don’t have to be silly, you know, like not to think and not to look at, for instance,
00:54:00 our rapidly burgeoning capability in artificial intelligence.
00:54:09 And to see how sick so much of the planet is not to be concerned.
00:54:16 And sick is an evil potentially.
00:54:18 Well, how much cruelty and brutality is happening at this very moment?
00:54:25 And I would put climate change higher up on that list, because I believe that there are
00:54:32 unforeseen discoveries that we are making right now, for instance, all that methane
00:54:39 that’s coming out of the ocean floor that was sequestered because of the permafrost,
00:54:47 which is now melting.
00:54:49 You know, I think there are other effects besides our greed and short term thinking
00:54:56 that we are triggering now with all the greenhouse gases we’re putting into the atmosphere.
00:55:02 And that worries me day and night.
00:55:04 I think about it every single, every moment, really, because I really think that’s how
00:55:10 we have to be.
00:55:11 We have to begin to really focus on how grave the challenge is to our civilization and to
00:55:23 the other species that are.
00:55:26 It’s a mass, this is a mass extinction event that we’re living through.
00:55:31 And we’re seeing it.
00:55:32 We’re seeing news of it every day.
00:55:35 So what do you think about another touchy subject, but what do you think about the politicization
00:55:40 of science on topics like global warming and bionic stem cell research and other topics
00:55:46 like it?
00:55:47 What’s your sense?
00:55:48 Why?
00:55:49 What do you mean by the politicization of global warming?
00:55:53 Meaning that if you say, I think what you just said, which is a global warming is a
00:56:00 serious concern, it’s human caused and maybe some detrimental effects.
00:56:05 Certainly there’s a large percent of the population of the United States that would, as opposed
00:56:10 to listening to that statement, would immediately think, oh, that’s just a liberal talking point.
00:56:20 That’s what I mean by politicization.
00:56:21 I think that’s not so true anymore.
00:56:22 I don’t think our problem is a population that’s skeptical about climate change because
00:56:30 I think that the extreme weather and fire events that we are experiencing with such
00:56:37 frequency is really gotten to people.
00:56:40 I think that there are people in leadership positions who choose to ignore it and to pretend
00:56:50 it’s not there, but ultimately I think they will be rejected.
00:56:55 The question is, will it be fast enough?
00:57:00 I think actually that most people have really finally taken the reality of global climate
00:57:09 change to heart and they look at their children and grandchildren and they don’t feel good
00:57:16 because they come from a world which was in many ways, in terms of climate, fairly familiar
00:57:24 and benign and they know that we’re headed in another direction and it’s not just that,
00:57:29 it’s what we do to the oceans, the rivers, the air.
00:57:35 You ask me, what is the message of cosmos?
00:57:40 It’s that we have to think in longer terms.
00:57:46 I think of the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cold War and they’re ready to
00:57:50 kill each other over these two different views of the distribution of resources.
00:57:57 But neither of them has a form of human social organization that thinks in terms of a hundred
00:58:05 years, let alone a thousand years, which are the time scales that science speaks in.
00:58:11 And that’s part of the problem is that we have to get a grip on reality and where we’re
00:58:19 headed and I’m not fatalistic at all, but I do feel like, and in setting out to do this
00:58:30 series each season, we were talking about climate change in the original cosmos in episode
00:58:37 four and warning about inadvertent climate modification in 1980.
00:58:46 And of course, Carl did his PhD thesis on the greenhouse effect on Venus and he was
00:58:52 painfully cognizant of what a runaway greenhouse effect would do to our planet.
00:58:58 And not only that, but the climatic history of the planet, which we go into in great detail
00:59:02 in the series.
00:59:03 So yeah, I mean, how are we going to get a grip on this if not through some kind of understanding
00:59:11 of science?
00:59:12 Can I just say one more thing about science is that its powers of prophecy are astonishing.
00:59:22 You launch a spacecraft in 1977 and you know where each and every planet in the solar system
00:59:32 is going to be and every moon and you rendezvous with that flawlessly and you exceed the design
00:59:39 specifications of the greatest dreams of the engineers.
00:59:44 And then you go on to explore the Milky Way galaxy and you do it, I mean, you know, the
00:59:51 climate scientists, some of the people whose stories we tell in cosmos, their predictions
00:59:59 were, and they were working with very early computer modeling capabilities, they have
01:00:08 proven to be so robust, nuclear winter, all of these things.
01:00:12 This is a prophetic power and yet how crazy that, you know, it’s like the Romans with
01:00:19 their lead cooking pots and their lead pipes or the Aztecs ripping out their own people’s
01:00:26 hearts.
01:00:27 This is us.
01:00:28 We know better and yet we are acting as if it’s business as usual.
01:00:35 Yeah, the beautiful complexity of human nature, speaking of which, let me ask a tough question
01:00:45 I guess because there’s so many possible answers, but what aspect of life here on earth do you
01:00:49 find most fascinating from the origin of life, the evolutionary process itself, the origin
01:00:55 of the human mind, so intelligence, some of the technological developments going on now
01:01:02 or us venturing out into space or space exploration, what just inspires you?
01:01:07 Oh, they all inspire me.
01:01:09 Every one of those inspire me, but I have to say that to me at the origin of, as I’ve
01:01:14 gotten older, to me, the origin of life has become less interesting because I feel, well,
01:01:22 not because it’s more, I think I understand, I have a better grasp of how it might’ve happened.
01:01:31 Do you think it was a huge leap?
01:01:33 I think it was a, we are a byproduct of geophysics and I think it’s not, my suspicion of course,
01:01:42 which is take it with a grain of salt, but my suspicion is that it happens more often
01:01:50 and more places than we like to think because after all the history of our thinking about
01:01:56 ourselves has been a constant series of demotions in which we’ve had to realize, no, no, so
01:02:04 to me that’s…
01:02:05 We’re not at the center of the solar system.
01:02:06 And the origin of consciousness is to me also not so amazing if you think of it as going
01:02:12 back to these one celled organisms of a billion years ago who had to know, well, if I go higher
01:02:22 up, I’ll get too much sun and if I go lower down, I’ll be protected from UV rays, things
01:02:30 like that.
01:02:31 They had to know that or you, I eat, me, I don’t.
01:02:34 I mean, even that, I can see if you know that, then knowing what we know now, it’s just,
01:02:41 it’s not so hard to fathom.
01:02:43 It seems like, I’ve never believed there was a duality between our minds and our bodies
01:02:50 and I think that even consciousness, all those interesting things seem to me, except one
01:02:57 of the things…
01:02:58 A byproduct of geophysics.
01:02:59 Yeah, all of chemistry, yes, geochemistry, geophysics, absolutely.
01:03:07 It makes perfect sense to me and it doesn’t make it any less wondrous.
01:03:12 It doesn’t rob it at all of the wonder of it.
01:03:19 And so, yeah, I think that’s amazing.
01:03:21 I think we tell the story of someone you have never heard of, I guarantee, and I think you’re
01:03:27 very knowledgeable on the subject, who was more responsible for our ability to venture
01:03:34 out to other worlds than anyone else and who was completely forgotten.
01:03:40 And so, those are the kinds of stories I like best for Cosmos because…
01:03:44 Can you tell me who?
01:03:45 No, I’m going to make you watch this series, I’m going to make you buy my book, but I’m
01:03:53 just saying, this person would be forgotten, but the way that we do Cosmos is that I ask
01:04:03 a question to myself, I really want to get to the bottom to the answer and keep going
01:04:08 deeper, deeper until we find what the story is, a story that I know because I’m not a
01:04:14 scientist.
01:04:15 If it moves me, if it moves me, then I want to tell it and other people will be moved.
01:04:22 Do you ponder mortality, human mortality, and maybe even your own mortality?
01:04:28 Oh, all the time.
01:04:30 I just turned 70, so yeah, I think about it a lot.
01:04:34 I mean, it’s, you know, how can you not think about it?
01:04:37 What do you make of this short life of ours, I mean, let me ask a sort of another way,
01:04:48 you’ve lost Carl, and speaking of mortality, if you could be, if you could choose immortality,
01:04:58 you know, it’s possible that science allows us to live much, much longer.
01:05:02 Is that something you would choose for yourself, for Carl, for you?
01:05:05 Well, for Carl, definitely.
01:05:07 I would have, you know, in a nanosecond, I would take that deal.
01:05:12 But not for me.
01:05:13 I mean, if Carl were alive, yes, I would want to live forever because I know it would be
01:05:17 fun.
01:05:18 But no.
01:05:19 Would it be fun forever?
01:05:20 I don’t know.
01:05:21 That’s the essential nature of the…
01:05:22 I don’t know.
01:05:23 It’s just that the universe is so full of so many wonderful things to discover that
01:05:29 it feels like it would be fun.
01:05:31 But no, I don’t want to live forever.
01:05:33 I have had a magical life.
01:05:37 I just, you know, my craziest dreams have come true.
01:05:42 And I feel, you know, forgive me, but this crazy quirk of fate that put my most joyful,
01:05:54 deepest feelings, feelings that decades later, 42 years later, I know how real, how true
01:06:00 those feelings were.
01:06:02 Everything that happened after that was an affirmation of how true those feelings were.
01:06:09 And so, I don’t feel that way.
01:06:12 I feel like I have gotten so much more than my share, not just my extraordinary life with
01:06:20 Carl, my family, my parents, my children, my friends, the places that I’ve been able
01:06:31 to explore, the books I’ve read, the music I’ve heard.
01:06:36 So I feel like, you know, if it would be much better if instead of working on the immortality
01:06:44 of the lucky few of the most privileged people in this society, I would really like to see
01:06:51 a concerted effort for us to get our act together, you know?
01:06:55 That to me is topic A, more pressing, you know, this possible world, that is the challenge.
01:07:04 And we’re at a kind of moment where if we can make that choice.
01:07:11 So immortality doesn’t really interest me.
01:07:14 I really, I love nature and I have to say that because I’m a product of nature, I recognize
01:07:23 that it’s great gifts and it’s great cruelty.
01:07:27 Well, I don’t think there’s a better way to end it, and thank you so much for talking
01:07:33 to us.
01:07:34 It was an honor.
01:07:35 Oh, it’s wonderful.
01:07:36 I really appreciate it.
01:07:37 I really enjoyed it.
01:07:38 I thought your questions were great.
01:07:39 Thank you.
01:07:40 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ann Druyan, and thank you to our presenting
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01:08:09 And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Carl Sagan.
01:08:14 What an astonishing thing a book is.
01:08:17 It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny
01:08:23 dark squiggles.
01:08:24 But one glance at it, and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead
01:08:29 for thousands of years.
01:08:32 Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly
01:08:37 to you.
01:08:39 Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.
01:08:43 Finding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.
01:08:50 Books break the shackles of time.
01:08:53 A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
01:08:59 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.