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Carl Sagan - Scientist and Astronomer Who Dared To Dream Big · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everybody.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of Dirt Knap City, the podcast about interesting dead people.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Alex, and I'm here with my friend Kelly.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Kelly, how are you?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Doing great, Alex.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing today?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing great.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_04: I see you're all set up in your new mansion there.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the mansion is.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_04: We got our cardboard, uh, we got our extension cords, we got everything we need here.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_04: Got your hash pipe.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_04: All ready to go.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Got my hash pipe.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Weezer.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've got a good one for you today.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to talk about somebody who lived in the 20th century, and he was a white guy.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, perfect.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to get them all.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to get them all.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a lot of them.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is there?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, um, it was the um it was a century, they had a good run in the in the 20th century.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: Sure, sure.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_04: And and and did he die in the 20th century as well?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, never made it to the 21st.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I think he would have really liked to on one hand, I think he would have really liked to see the future.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but on the other hand, I think he um um well, I think he kind of predicted that uh we're we'd be in the mess that we're in uh right now.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: Oh okay.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um so um not uh not Nostradamus.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've already done him, but um also a little bit of a you know uh uh could could see the future a little bit.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um like like uh Stephen Hawking, is he still alive?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, but that's a really close guess because this guy is a was a brilliant guy, also.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: He was born in New York City in 1934, pre-war, um, and died in Seattle, although that clue won't really help you.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in 1996.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: 96, okay.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think the biggest clue that I could give you is that if you were to ask him how many people lived in Dirtnap City, he'd probably be likely to say billions and billions.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, we're talking Carl Sagan.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_04: Carl Sagan.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: Billions and billions.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you seem like a PBS guy.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you remember I remember Cosmos.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, that seems like right up your alley.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_04: You love that kind of stuff, right?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, my my my dad and I watched that together.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_04: What do you remember about Carl Sagan?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, my dad would make fun of him because he looked like he was talking without moving his lips.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_04: So he he looked like he was kind of ventriloquizing.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_04: Billions and billions, he kind of talked, his lips were kind of close together like this.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what's funny is that not once during the Cosmos series did he ever say billions and billions.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a lot of like Johnny Carson would say that he a lot of people would imitate him and say he said billions upon billions, but he never said billions and billions.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Billions upon billions.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: He liked that that was kind of his thing that he was known for so much that his very his final book was called Billions and Billions.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, okay.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: But um, no, when you picture this guy, you'd picture him wearing like a turtleneck and a sports coat, right?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: Kind of Leonard Nimoy looking guy, like yeah.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, Leonard Nimoy famously uh in search of.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, in search of yeah, yeah.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Another another show, yeah.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: The ripoff of Cosmos.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man, remember when there were very few channels, and that was the kind of stuff um that you just get engrossed, but the high quality too, not like you know, some of the crap that's on now that they just you know slap together a documentary in an hour about Mormon wives.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, sure.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I I even mean even some of the history shows or some of the things, just just kind of uh as we watch the jiggle, we can see that each one is salivating for love.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_04: I like how you're not moving your lips, buddy.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I wish people could see that.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Ah so um, so yeah, Carl Sagan was uh a TV personality, but also an astronomer, and really shaped the way people of our generation um got them to be interested, I guess, in the in astronomy.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the maybe the generation before us, the baby boomers, as you've talked about on this show before, were really into the space race.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of that um excitement kind of died down once we had been to the moon a few times.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think by the time that we got of age, that space program was, you know, um until until the space shuttle kind of revived it.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: But like in the 70s, I think, yeah, it was a little tired.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and just interest in science in general was kind of um going away.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: He he had a lot to say about that.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: He thought that the education system in the in America was uh lacking good uh education, good science education.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think um um Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, who's kind of taken over the cosmos, but also taken over the mantle of the latter-day um uh Carl Sagan.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're not old enough to remember Carl Sagan, think Neil deGrasse Tyson, he was kind of the the forerunner of that.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And they actually um um had a had a connection that I'll get into in a okay.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up uh Neil deGrasse Tyson because he he is I you know I was just thinking about if uh Carl Sagan had been around today, would he be on YouTube?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: Because yeah, well he would be Neil deGrasse Tyson, right?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_04: I get tons of feed of Neil deGrasse Tyson, I get tons of uh clips of him on YouTube, like all the time that comes up.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: That uh that show that he does.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I get that too.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: I like Neil deGrasse Tyson.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think pop astronomy is important, pop science is important.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now in the academic world, that kind of stuff is frowned upon.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Those kind of people that speak to the masses.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in my field, that would be like Adam Grant, for example.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Bill Gott, Bill Nye.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, the science in in serious academia, those kind of people sometimes are looked down upon and thought of as not being not being able to take seriously.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the problem.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the problem that academics sit in their ivory tower and and don't often do things that can be consumed by the masses.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Are you thinking of yourself here, Alex?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um you're in your ivory tower right now.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm on the second floor, so I don't know how much of a tower that would be.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um modern building.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: More of a more of a wooden brick tower.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a brick building.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on the second floor.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um not so much of a of a tower, but yeah, it's something that that we have to watch for as academics to make sure that um our stuff uh is relatable to the to the masses.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not gonna say like we usually do on Dirt Knapp City that he was a poor student, he was a great student.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, um breaks the mold.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he was but he was marked by curiosity.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, he said, my parents weren't scientists, they knew nothing about science, but they introduced me to skepticism and to wonder, and those two things are the most important things in the scientific method.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think wonder and skepticism is what marked this guy's kind of brand and should mark any good scientist's brand.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: The most influential thing to him was when he was four years old, he went to the World's Fair in 1939.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned he grew up in New York.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think we've maybe have talked about World's Fairs uh before.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when we talked about uh I think when we talked about Edison, we talked about the World's Fair, Disney that 1939 one, yeah, had both of those things.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was the one that introduced that world of tomorrow.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about with Disney, where they kind of uh had a set about what the world would look like in 1960.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Pre-runner to Epcot.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, exactly.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it also um introduced uh uh TVs for the first time to the masses uh synthesizers, another uh episode that we had on here were introduced at at the World's Fair, and they had this General Motors had an exhibit of 1960 America, what that would look like, and it was called Futurama.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the show Futurama was based on that.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and actually, if you think about the beginning of Futurama, like that that that um beginning of that flyover of that city, yeah, that's kind of what the model of 1960s America kind of looked like, not in space, but kind of like very like sweeping, futuristic uh um lots of glass domes and and uh plexiglass.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, lots of skyscrapers, skyscrapers, and it's and in fact that model was so well received, and people said, Yeah, that's what I want America to look like, that that was actually the forebearer of the interstate highway system in the in the US.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: So they had they had an interstate that's the interstate system was kind of developed from that futuroma thing.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: But but one of the other things that they had at that World's Fair was they had a time capsule.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I love a good time capsule.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do you like time capsules?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_04: We buried a time capsule in 2013 in our old backyard.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_04: Did I tell you that?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, yeah.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_04: We we dug it up uh over the Christmas break this year.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_04: It was um a PVC pipe that we filled with little toys and letters to ourselves and a few pictures, and um, I don't know, my kids put a lot of pencils and stuff in it for some reason from 2013.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_04: Why did you decide to dig it up?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_04: Because you knew you were gonna move?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we knew we were moving and we didn't want to leave it there, so we so we dug it up.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_04: It was 2013, we buried it, so it was 12 years underground, and it stayed in pretty good shape.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_04: And it was interesting to see what we had written to ourselves, you know, from 2013 Us had written to 2025 US.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: We had kind of a similar thing when my son was in the second grade.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: His teacher gave him an assignment to have his family members write him a letter upon graduation, so 10 years, right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so um he had all four grandparents, and his parents we wrote so there was uh six letters that went, and then we put it in a they gave us like um a tube to put it in and seal it up and say open this on graduation day.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really sweet and special.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: He read all the letters.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately, all four grandparents were still there to hear the letters.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's awesome.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um, it was really special, but it was funny because some of the letters they were all different, and we didn't show them to anybody, but some of the letters were like asking him questions.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, do you still like football?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you still yes, yes, no, yes.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the other letters were like I I revealed um that uh I hope that um that he wasn't just finding out about Santa Claus through this letter.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's pretty good.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, so so it was it was cool.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: I remember writing the letter and I remember how emotional I was, and I remember the coolest thing was I remember thinking I can use words that he doesn't understand now.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because he'll be he'll be just graduated from high school, so I can use big words.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see how good system is.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right, exactly.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a little bit weird because I wasn't talking to my second grade son, I was talking to somebody that didn't exist yet.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but that was fun.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: But he was captivated by the time capsule.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there was recently a time capsule opened at the Sugarland Um Town Square.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was really I got a lot of information about that they were gonna open it, but I haven't been able to find anything about what happened when they did open it.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of times it's underwhelming.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of newspapers are kind of they can't read them anymore, or a lot of things you don't understand.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's a time capsule at Lamar High School, I just learned, um, in Houston, that was placed there in October 1987, that's gonna be opened in 2037, uh, on the school's 100th anniversary.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow, that's cool.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's gonna have it's gonna be like what it was like to be a teenager in the 1980s.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think I want to be there for that.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I wanna yeah, I think I I wish we would have buried a time capsule in 1987.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think our time capsule is our old films and pictures, uh five studs in a stall, you know.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a national millennium time capsule in Washington, D.C.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: that was placed there in 2000, and they're gonna open it in 2100.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um some of the things in there, I don't know.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Ray Charles sunglasses are in there.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, do you think people in 2100 are gonna care about that?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, to some degree.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_04: I think Ray Charles is pretty pretty well known and still will be.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a combat helmet from World War II that's gonna be in there and a Twinkie.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, loved it how see how that does over that time.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the kind of the conventional wisdom is that you can you'd be able to still be able to eat the Twinkie.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all the preserves.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think anybody'll actually eat it?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I don't know.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_04: It kind of seems like the thing I might try.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_04: A hundred-year-old Twinkie.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_04: If I if I I mean just a tiny little bit just to see, you know, if it doesn't make you sick, I'd keep going.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_04: But I would I mean, you think about it, people drink hundred-year-old wine.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, sure, why not?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: They pay a lot for it.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if this time capsule is buried or if it's like you know hermetically sealed.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: So back to Carl.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Carl was a brilliant kid, but he was kind of bored in school.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: He went to public school, his family wasn't well off, and the teachers tried to convince his parents to send him to a private school, but they just couldn't afford it.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: So he just he just put everything into this into this public school.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he taught himself about molecules by using like cardboard boxes, he taught himself chess, taught himself astronomy.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Teaching yourself back in the 1940s isn't like now where you can just Google something.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I would think it'd be easier to teach yourself now.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you felt like you weren't getting your and a good education and you're really smart, it's so much more accessible today.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you back then, that was difficult.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like teaching yourself about molecules by using cardboard boxes seems like a real effort.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: He probably had to use microfilm and microfiche.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he was a real outside the box thinker, too.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't because maybe because he was kind of self-taught, and because he used cardboard boxes for for uh well that's yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he was outside, literally outside all those boxes.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, he won a writing contest um about writing how human contact with aliens might be a disaster with aliens, yeah, because it might turn out it's kind of similar to how the Native Americans' contact with Europeans were.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like he was just that was the kind of thinking he would do, and um kind of uh different than the little green men thinking at the time that we would, you know, it'd be like colonizing a a country when when we come in contact with uh aliens.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_04: That's a pretty that's actually, I mean, it seems obvious now that you say it, but it's a pretty uh good, good um possibility.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, very like even ahead of Twilight Zone and you know those kind of things.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the kind of kid he was just always kind of thinking differently than others.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was able to graduate at the age of 16, but then there was a lot of universities back then that wouldn't take a 16-year-old.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: But the University of Chicago was very forward-thinking, and he went there at the age of 16.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: He got his degree in physics, he got a PhD later on in astronomy and astrophysics.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: He graduated, uh, got his PhD, and then he worked for the Air Force on a secret plan called Project A119.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever heard of Project A119?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: I have not.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like this is something that we should know about.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was a plan to detonate a small nuclear warhead on the moon.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that they the US government was gonna launch a nuclear weapon on the moon that was gonna drop a bomb that was about maybe a tenth of the size of the one that we dropped in Japan.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, we dropped in Japan.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they were gonna do it on the dark side of the moon.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when was this?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: In the 50s?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: 1958.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: They said that you were gonna be able to you were they were gonna detonate on the dark side, but you would be able to see like the mushroom cloud anyways from the earth.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_04: How were they gonna get to the dark side of the moon?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, because we hadn't even been to the moon yet.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we hadn't landed people on the moon.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think we had even orbited the moon in 1958.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's why they didn't do it.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea was to study radiation in space.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Study the effects of, you know, at that time, the there was no there was no plan to go to the moon.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was very all those uh space plans were very much rooted in kind of Cold War military terms, and a lot of people, there was kind of two directions that space race could have gone in, right?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: One was very military trying to take over space, and the other was much more what it ended up being much more kind of collaborative.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was a race, but it made both uh US and the Soviet Union kind of both um heroes stretch stretch their limits, right?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: But this would have changed everything.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: If they had done this, then Russia might have responded, then we we would have been maybe shooting things at each other in space, and radiation probably would have rained down, probably wouldn't have been good.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, knowing what we know now, uh, I think that would have been a disaster, and um they decided very quickly not to do it.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, that was a secret project that they were gonna detonate a warhead on the moon.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: So glad they didn't do that.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Carl Sagan was supposed to be a part of that.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: He was a part of that, yeah.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: He worked on the project of how to how to do it, I think.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know or maybe he worked on the project of talking them out of it.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, maybe that's his uh you know, he was a brand new graduate, so I'm not sure um how much how much uh sway he had.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_04: But guys, I don't think this is a great idea.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_04: Guys, I uh billions and billions of people could be affected by this.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, he then he went, I think at that time he was at Harvard, but he was he was an assistant professor at Harvard.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't get tenure at Harvard.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he went over to Cornell, and he was at Cornell until he died.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oh wow.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um he he loved it at Cornell.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um and while he was there, he was an advisor at NASA.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what he would do is he would first he was uh briefing Apollo astronauts before they went to the moon about what they were, you know, about space and um all that.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then some of those post-Apollo missions, um, we haven't talked too much about those in our in our space uh talks, but um one of them was Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what those were?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um were those just orbiting Earth?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Those were probes that we sent to Jupiter.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: 1972, we sent Pioneer 10 to Jupiter and it took a long time to get there.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and Pioneer 11 went to Jupiter and Saturn, and they um he was in charge of putting the first physical message to extra uh aliens, I guess, extraterrestrials.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he put together an aluminum plaque.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You may have seen this before.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's got a a drawing, like a pretty rudimentary drawing of a naked man and a naked woman.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Looks like a rush album.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're kind of uh waving, and then he's got like a diagram of the solar system.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's got all the planets, and then like an arrow of Earth to show, and then like an arrow from Earth like to Jupiter.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's very funny because you'd have to know, like you'd have to be a human.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think it was aluminum.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think those are made of gold, weren't they?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, those were made of aluminum.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're thinking of the gold record, which I'll get to in a minute.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, it was um it was uh a naked man, a naked woman, and the planets, and um and that's in the aluminum plated thing that's in the space probe.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's near the antenna of the space probe.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone finds that, they'll um they'll see what nutty are.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: The what you were thinking of is the Voyager Golden Record.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we sent on Voyager, which was right, it's a sound record.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was made of gold, and it was a two-record set.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, remember how they used to have the two record sets?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, double album.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Voyager was sent in 1977.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: We just sent it out there, like it wasn't headed any place in particular, just go as far as you can.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's still way out there.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: But remember, these are both time capsules.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: That that aluminum plate, that golden record, these are the things that when he was four years old that he was captivated by at the World's Fair in 1939, he got to do in 1977, send a time capsule out into space.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or as he he he saw it as a bottle in the cosmic ocean.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: Oh beautiful metaphor.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: The voyage like I said, Voyager's not headed anywhere, it's going to come within 1.6 light years of a star in 40,000 years.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it is like out there.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_04: And and so maybe Pioneer 10 and 11 are still they're outside of the solar system, they're still cruisable.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're still out there.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_04: So to there's nothing to make them aside from cold, there's nothing to really decay them, right?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_04: There's no organic matter in space that we know of or nothing it can hit.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's just gonna go.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there is stuff that could hit, but it's it's so spread apart, odds are it won't.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, yeah, they'll just be going for it's kind of like in those space movies when somebody dies in space and they're and they're floating away from uh away from a gravitational pull, they're just gonna float until some some gravity catches them and pulls them in.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Voyager's already passed like the plasma um uh layer.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's gone through that.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's the furthest human-made object from Earth that exists.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's got this this double album with and it's it's a gold record.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's so cute because it's got a remember it.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like sounds of nature and sounds of music, and it's it's also got, of course, it's got a turntable that came with it because in 1977 that was all the you know, so it's got a record, it's got a record player, and then it's got like it's got the schematic of how to play a record, yeah.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: And again, if you're not a human being, I don't know how much luck you're gonna have with this with the schematic.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like uh something, it doesn't even look like IKEA, like it's like a higher level than IKEA.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think you might even if somebody found this record, the chances of them being able to put the stylus on exactly the right place, and then and then I don't know what it does for power.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, I don't know where to put it in.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they probably have the wrong chords like European, they have like a European outlet.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, the first thing that comes when you put on that record, it's uh spoken greeting in English by the uh UN secretary at the time, Kurt Waldheim.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, welcome, welcome.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, and you can, by the way, the Voyager Golden Record, you can hear it on it's on Spotify.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow, okay.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's out there.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, then there's greetings in 55 different languages.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um that was also supposed to be done by the UN, but the the audio got um messed up, and so he went to the Cornell like language department and had people record in 55 different languages, greetings from planet Earth, or whatever.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then it has uh Andy Bernard was on that because of Cornell, sure never heard of it.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um then it has all these sounds of earth like volcanoes, the wind, rain, crickets, birds, birds, dogs, trains, car, a kiss.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then it's got an hour of a heartbeat of his wife, her heartbeat.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And he was asking her, and and she was and she was like into meditation, and she'd say, Do you think that in a billion years?
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: They used to talk about billions a lot, I guess.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: You think in a billion years that people will be able to there anybody out there will be able to like read people's brain waves?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Well, a billion years is a long time, let's give it a shot.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: So there's an hour of a heartbeat and also an hour of her brain waves where she was thinking about like love and um different things, and she was at least that's what she told him she was thinking about, right?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: She might have been thinking about the uh the milkman down the street, you know?
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, the sassy milkman, the milkman always rings twice.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then it's got music, and it's got music from Bach and Mozart and and a lot of different countries, kind of their representative kind of music.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's music from you know Africa and from um Kazakhstan, and there's what do you think of the um well the um the US music representative um jazz, right?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's got Louis Armstrong, it's got some blues by blind Willie Johnson, and then it's got uh Johnny Be Good is the uh kind of the pop song, pretty American.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there was a rumor that the Beatles um that they wanted to put Here Comes the Sun, and then the Beatles wouldn't let them.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: That isn't really true.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't much truth to that, but they do play Here Comes the Sun a lot on uh in orbit, like on the uh space station.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_04: Uh pretty pretty appropriate.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's like a you know, as every double album has, it's got like a uh you know, the liner notes, the book.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh it's got 116 pages of Earth and different photos, mostly black and white photos.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh kind of hard to believe they couldn't spring for color photos.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: They spent all the money on the gold record and there's all these black and white photos.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: But like I say, if you want to hear the gold now, what you will able to hear on the gold record is only I mean on the Spotify version is only the music, none of the um the heartbeats or brain waves, the track listing is there, but it's grayed out.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um you're only allowed to hear the the music part, copyright.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, as a reminder, we have our own Spotify playlist from the Rock and Rolls Dead part one and uh part two uh episodes.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Every song that we talked about on that record, we have on the um list.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's it might not be something you want to shuffle, but it's something that maybe uh as a companion piece.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_04: Start the start the uh episode and then pause, listen to the song, then come back to the episode if you're a super fan.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_04: It'll take about 24 hours, probably.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, do you think we should make a gold version of that?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_04: I think if we ever get a spaceship, we should.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_04: If we ever get on in on something that's going out of the solar system, we should absolutely do that.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'll do you one better.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you donate$100,000 to our Patreon, we will make a gold record of rock and roll part one and two Spotify playlist.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: And dedicate it to you.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you'll put your face on the uh our number one Patreon.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: So outside of his uh golden record contributions, he did some things uh research-wise, like he found out in the early 60s that Venus was dry and hot.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there was a at back in the 60s, but you know, you know, in the 1960s, there was a hypothesis out there that people thought that Venus might be habitable and that it might be like this kind of a swampy place that we could go.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um, there was a lot of attraction about let's just get out of here and go to another planet, yeah, and re-populate and see what happens.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: And um, a lot of people thought that that Venus was the place to do that.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he debunked that and found that it was 900 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface of Venus.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but more importantly, and this was again in the late 60s, he was finding out that Venus might not have been like that from the beginning, but it was because of a runaway greenhouse effect that it had become that way, and that he that maybe we had a similar greenhouse effect going on here on Earth and connected kind of climate change, uh, what we were doing, man-made that uh from a man-made perspective, that we could end up like Venus in you know hundreds of thousands of years.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: He testified to Congress in 1985 that there was a greenhouse effect that could change the Earth's climate.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he was also the first to hypothesize that there might be water on um Titan, which is the moons of the moons of Saturn.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and Europa is one of the moons of uh Jupiter.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he hypothesized there might be water in 1989.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: That was confirmed by a satellite called Galileo.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: So he was really ahead of the curve on a lot of these things like climate change and is there water, is there life on other?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think when we were growing up, the question of whether or not there's life out there was a really interesting but also very open question.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's as open these days as it used to be.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think pretty much the consensus is there's gotta be life out there, whether it's a microbe uh or whatnot, that there's just too many galaxies, too many um and just the conditions, it would be unusual for this to be the only place that we have life as we know it.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was awarded the public welfare medal by the National Academy of Science in 1994, but denied membership to the National Academy of Science uh um prior to that because he because of what I said before about how he was an academic and he kind of jumped his place in line.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: He became famous before he got his academic credentials, and a lot of academics aren't cool with that stuff.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, what a club.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Cosmos started in 1980.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you watched it with your dad.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 13-part series.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was the most watched PBS show until like 1990.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was seen by 500 million people.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: 60 countries.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: There was a book that came that accompanied the series after that.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: He made it for a general public that had lost interest in in science.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh, there's actually a number out there called a Sagan, uh, in a tongue-in-cheek nod to his billions and billions.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: A Sagan is about four billion.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_04: I did not know that.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_04: That's an actual word, an actual mathematical term.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it I it's I think so.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing I read was that Sagan is a very large number, and then I read were generally accepted to be about four billion, but I don't so I don't know if it's about doesn't seem like a real number, so right.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a Sagan.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh then there's actual an actual thing called Sagan's number, but Sagan's number refers to the number of stars and the observable universe.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: So how many stars out there seems to be like uh a question that you could get an answer to, right?
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: How many stars in the sky?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in 1980, he thought the number was 10 sextillion, and they call that they call that Sagan's number, the number of stars in the 10 sextillion, which is 10 to the 20 second power.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um that number keeps going up.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean in the latest they uh I think in 2010 was the last time they revised this number, it was up to 300 sextillion.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I guess I guess the better the telescopes get, then the the more there's gonna be, right?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's how many we can observe from where we are.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: 300 sextillion is three times ten to the twenty-third power.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like you can't even envision that.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um he was a big believer in relating the value of the human race, but also showing how insignificant Earth is compared to the rest of the universe.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, people it it's like mind-blowing.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_04: You can't really you can't really comprehend just how tiny of a speck we are.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen that picture called Pale Blue Dot?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it was taken from Voyager, yeah, and it's of Earth, and it's just this tiny speck.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he, I gotta read this to you.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is what he says about the pale blue dot.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: This was 1994.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: So picture this.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: The George Foreman grill is new on the market.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um Carl.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_04: Carl Sagan is looking at the pale blue dot and grilling some chicken.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we're looking at this little dot, and that's us, right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, On this dot is everyone you've ever heard of, the aggregate of all of our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher and morals of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a moat of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, we should put that to music.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: And and I I should also mention he was a big proponent of marijuana legalization.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: In a maybe unrelated thing, but maybe totally related thing, like to think like that.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: He must have been uh smoking some weed.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's that kind of blows your mind, though, right?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: It does we're nothing, but at the same time, the human race is everything.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he wanted to search for extraterrestrial life, right?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: But he also said, you know, if there is life on Mars, I don't think we should do anything with Mars.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Mars belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't believe in going out and colonizing other planets.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he wanted to know if there's life out there, but then just leave them be.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, he was criticized.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't beloved by everybody, he was criticized.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he had this hypothesis about nuclear winter.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever heard of nuclear winter?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_04: It would be after a nuclear strike, and it would just be centuries of no sunlight and uh radiation.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that has been debunked, that it would be like that.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's um, but you know, that was like 19 in the 1980s, and I think that eroded a little bit of his credibility that um going out on a ledge, um, becoming political, I think that um, you know, scientists aren't supposed to be uh overly political, but that's where you know climate change has become like this political issue, and that's not how scientists see it.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that was kind of new.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote a his only novel that he ever wrote.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: He only he only wrote nonfiction except for this novel he wrote.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what book he wrote?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: 1985?
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: It became a movie.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no, I don't.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Contact.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he wrote Contact.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_04: I did not know that.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite movies.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Great movie with Jodie Foster.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh love that movie.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that giant uh they're listening on the giant uh Yeah, I love that movie.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_04: So so he also did um he also did a uh narration of Flatland, right?
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_04: Um do you remember this?
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's the first time.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_04: Are you familiar with Flatland?
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_04: No.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh if you look it up on um YouTube, Flatland is about two-dimensional creatures and how they don't understand that there's a third dimension.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_04: So imagine you're a little square and you're living in this flat surface, and then all of a sudden, um, you know, as you go along, when you see uh like a coaster, like a you know, a drink coaster, it's round, it just looks like a line to you, and you look like a line to it.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_04: But then a three-dimensional creature, which is in the third dimension, is above you.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you don't up, you don't comprehend up and down.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_04: You've never seen that before.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_04: No, wow.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um, yeah, it's definitely it's kind of mind blowing.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_04: If if you if you if there's one takeaway, um like homework assignment, um uh Google Cosmos, Carl Sagan, fourth dimension, flatland, that sort of thing.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_04: And it's it's pretty cool.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'll have to check that out.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned earlier Neil deGrasse Tyson and their communication.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Neil deGrasse Tyson um was applying to colleges when he when he um when he got out of high school, and um he his application to Cornell, he talked about you know how he always wanted to be a physicist or an astrophysicist or whatever.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: The admissions department sent that note directly to Carl Sagan and said, Here, somebody you need to check out.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote a personal note inviting Neil deGrasse Tyson to spend a day with him at Cornell.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: So a 17-year-old Neil deGrasse Tyson went to Cornell and spent the day.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Hey, if your housing doesn't work out, you can come crash with me tonight.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: He ended up not going to Cornell.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't enough to sell him.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: He went to Harvard instead.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: But he said that Neil deGrasse Tyson said that that day was really uh life-changing for him.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I already knew I wanted to become a scientist, but that afternoon I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: He kind of told him showed him what a what a scientist could look like.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's funny that he didn't end up going there, but I mean you gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so there's a couple more things I wanted to mention about this guy.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, one, um, in 1995, he wrote kind of a chilling today, 30 years later, kind of a chilling prediction of the future without um without science.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to read some of that to you 30 years later here.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um he says, I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time, when the United States is a service and information economy, when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues, when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority, when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites, now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think he freaking nailed it 30 years ago.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: He did nail it 30 years ago.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know if a lot of people were seeing that 30 years ago.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is before smartphones, the social media, the internet, really.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, as the real internet as we know it now, and he just saw like maybe he could see it in the way science was becoming less respected or people way people were responding, uh um with to to to his to his writings, but I think he kind of nailed what what's going on today, and it's uh it's it's really disturbing.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how we can get it back, really.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and and it also metaphorically, uh going back to that flatland thing, everybody living in a two dimensional world, um, he could see that third dimension, uh, you know, that the two dimensional creatures couldn't see.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe and and and in that in that thing, he also talks about a fourth dimension that we can't see.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_04: That as three dimensional creatures, we it's here, it's really obvious to them, but maybe.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_04: Things were just he was so brilliant.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_04: He was kind of like Neo in the Matrix.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_04: He could see all the ones and zeros and and could move beyond it.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, paradoxically, though, even though we're in a culture of ignorance now, we're also in a culture that celebrates nerds more than they ever did, right?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like back in the 1980s and 90s, being a nerd or being good at at you know being smart um or being really devoted to something kind of science-y wasn't at all celebrated.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of you know um looked down upon.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we're in this, maybe there's hope there.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's hope in that nerds, uh nerd culture can rise up, and um we need people like Neil deGrasse Tyson to take the and Bill Nye and people that can take this mantle and and communicate science to the masses.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well Neil deGrasse Tyson is kind of a cool nerd, right?
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_04: He's he's uh you know, we wear a lot of things.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a few of those, right?
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think that like it's it's yeah, I think that nerd culture is is is not uh as uh uh a taboo as it used to be, right?
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, I agree.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_04: I agree.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's also I just think that everything there's a lot more specialization now.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_04: Like we aren't we aren't as generalized about the types of people that we are uh you know, back in the day you were kind of put into these big buckets.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_04: Now with the internet, with people being able to communicate with like-minded people, there's a lot more unity among these groups that wasn't there before.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_04: And so the groups are more powerful.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you're turk talking about the kind of people that like um think that the earth is flat.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_04: Sure, sure.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_04: They're all they're all together, but also the kind of people that um that like science and that like as uh astronomy and and study that.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there's lots of outlets and channels for that.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_04: So it's it's it's both sides of the coin, or all sides of the coin, really.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'll end with this.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: That he um he came up with this so this question about his life out there.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, like I said, I think science pretty much says that now there's there's enough evidence that there's water out there and that probably you know, maybe it's not people that look like us or whatever, but there's enough there's enough galaxies and all that.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: The probability is very high.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: But he was an adopter of um this idea.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this thing called the Fermi paradox that uh that's like if there's if life is out there, why haven't we seen it, right?
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the big question.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we know about it, right?
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea is that he that Sagan subscribed to was that any uh intelligent life out there that had uh the pe intelligent civilizations uh destroy themselves and there's never enough time for them to develop or to find us because uh a civilization lasts about on Earth civilization lasts about 6,500 years.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if civilizations last about that long and then they destroy themselves, they never have enough time to get to technology to find us.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: I personally think it's just really, really far.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And like it's that you would have to have a life form that live for uh a million years in order for us to find each other.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_04: Or a way to travel through space that is not known to us right now.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right, right.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: But why haven't any of them found that?
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the idea is maybe they have, maybe they live among us.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_04: Humongous fungus among us.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden this has turned into an art bell.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well um well, yeah, I love thinking about this kind of stuff.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love thinking about is there life out there?
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, not is there, but why don't we know about it?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like if they're out there and if they're so damn intelligent, why haven't they found us?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's one hypothesis that says maybe they just don't care.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like maybe it hasn't occurred to them that like we're the kind of people that always have to explore.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's another hypothesis that says, well, dolphins have had 20 million years to to develop telescopes and they haven't done it.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why should we expect that another kind of species would develop dolphins are highly intelligent, right?
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: But you could give dolphins a million more years, a hundred million more years, and they're never gonna develop a telescope.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I wouldn't say never.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_04: I wouldn't say never.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Alex, I think there's a little show I'd like you to watch.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's called The X-Files.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_04: I think this will open up a lot of uh answer a lot of these questions for you.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_04: The truth is out there.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, you know, um Project One uh A119 was out there too, and thank God we didn't uh go through with that.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_04: Or or so you think we didn't do it.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_04: To the best of your knowledge.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think this guy was an interesting dead person.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_04: I agree, I agree.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody, I would have never thought to pick him, but I'm glad you did.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, man.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going down my PBS rabbit hole, one person at a time.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get to you, Bob Ross, eventually.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: So far, so far, aliens proven by the light of the star.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: Fancy feet, ready to jump He's got moves a planetary glide across the Milky Way, he takes a ride with the line this way, Cause got the way.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: All that's something, calls on the mix it, it's twelve, I think galaxy.