The Cosmos: An Interview With Carl Sagan
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” Carl Sagan stated on Cosmos, his recently broadcast thirteen-part series on public television. As he re-created journeys back in time and through the universe, speculating on its future and ours, Sagan continually reminded us that fresh knowledge of reality, even that which signals change, is inspirational, not dangerous.
In his essay “In Praise of Science and Technology,” Sagan writes: “The most effective agents to communicate science to the public are television, motion pictures and newspapers—where the science offerings are often dreary, inaccurate, ponderous, grossly caricatured or (as with much Saturday-morning commercial television programming for children) hostile to science.” Sagan has attempted to correct this balance in his best-selling books and frequent appearances on television talk shows, but Cosmos has been his most ambitious and sustained undertaking to date. In the series, he used extraordinary special effects and a remarkably uncondescending, popular approach to present scientific information, displaying what one poet defines as the Homeric style: “eminently rapid, plain, direct in thought, expression, syntax, words, matter, ideas, and eminently noble.” This proved to be an eminently suitable style with which to communicate deep and fundamental ideas about the universe to the close to 150 million people around the world who viewed the series.
In addition to his television work, Sagan is director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies and is the David Duncan professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University, where he also serves as associate director of the Center for Radio-physics and Space Research. He played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking and Voyager expeditions, and he is the author of such books as The Cosmic Connection; The Dragons of Eden, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize; Broca’s Brain; and Cosmos, which is based on the series.
Joining in the following interview is Ann Druyan, who, along with Steven Soter, contributed to the Cosmos scripts. The conversation took place at Sagan’s Los Angeles home in late August while he put the final touches on Cosmos.
The Interview
In your book ‘The Cosmic Connection,’ you quote T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” I want to focus on the word “know” and ask you about knowing things for the first time, since this seems to be a seminal notion in your work.
We start out a million years ago in a small community on some grassy plain; we hunt animals, have children and develop a rich social, sexual and intellectual life, but we know almost nothing about our surroundings. Yet we hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed—and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg, or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being. But we’re not fully satisfied with those stories, so we keep broadening the horizon of our myths; and then we discover that there’s a totally different way in which the world is constructed and things originate.
Today, we’re still loaded down, and to some extent embarrassed, by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed, as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed. It’s a critical moment in the history of the world.
The Eliot quote also seems to suggest that, as explorers, human beings may exist to explain the universe to itself.
Absolutely. We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. And we resonate to these questions. We start with the origin of every human being, and then the origin of our community, our nation, the human species, who our ancestors were and then the riddle of the origin of life. And the questions: where did the earth and solar system come from? Where did the galaxies come from? Every one of those questions is deep and significant. They are the subject of folklore, myth, superstition and religion in every human culture. But for the first time we are on the verge of answering many of them. I don’t mean to suggest that we have the final answers; we are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand.
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