Carl Sagan interview - Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

here's your host and moderator Milton Rosenberg, one of the great clichés when introducing someone to say here's a man who needs no introduction and I don't say it more than once or twice a year, but it's certainly appropriate because our night because our guest is Carl Sagan and as they say enough is said however I offer Carl Sagan who is the author of the new book

pale

blue

dot a

vision

of the

human

future

in

space

two quotes this is a trick that I sometimes play on Carl and you You can choose what you think is the appropriate heading for our conversation tonight.

The first is a quote I'm sure you know from EE Cummings. Listen, there's an incredibly good universe out there. Come on, and the second one is. by Peter Cook, one of the British comics who did Beyond the Fringe years ago, who says that I'm very interested in the universe and that I'm specializing in the universe and everything around it. Which one do you choose well? I like both, but I would say the first is much closer to what the

pale

blue

dot is about. In fact, you say that man is a wanderer and you say that there is an incredibly good universe and also a necessary universe next to it, let's prepare to leave. because we go and you predict a lot about what the nature of our adventure in the universe will be, you know, the basic argument that exists is that we have talked about this before.

I wouldn't say that man is a

human

because he is both sexes, but we are Wanderers, I mean you humans, our species is a few hundred thousand years old. our genus, the Homo genus, the human family, if you will, is a few million years old. we have had civilization only for the last eight. or ten thousand years, then we are Wanderers who have reached a brief sedentary pause and the desire to wander to follow the game has to be strongly built in us because millions of years are enough for genetic propensities to be assigned, so there is thought In Darwinian terms, we are Wanderers by nature because wandering was the trait in us that nature selected for and it selected for it because the Wanderers were the ones who survived, that's right, they played along, who came to the trees when they were in fruit or nuts. , and so.

That's how we knew it before farming, that's how we lived and there's a word like wanderlust mmm that conveys some of that, but the land is completely explored, there's nowhere else to go and we're sedentary and we don't go to nowhere. and a lot of people feel, I think a lot of people, maybe more men than women feel it as a kind of itchy, vague discontent that they haven't gone and that's why sports and war and occasional exploration and adventure are actually very attractive. , but it shows. Also in our daily lives we continue to be Wanderers.

I'm sure they are in high demand. I know that across the country and around the world you have two invitations, one to a very interesting conference in Cleveland and one to a possibly less interesting conference. conference in Bucharest you will probably go to Bucharest depends on if I have been to Cleveland before, but yes of course you are right, it affects every aspect of our being and the entire earth is explored except the bottom of the ocean, there is no place to go go, but right at this moment exactly the technology that has allowed us to explore Earth is now about to allow us to go to the world we live in, as your EE quote is reaching the size of a hellish solar system. glorious magnificent with the nine planets about 70 or so the very different moons very interesting tens of thousands of asteroids billions of comets and no two are exactly the same with all kinds of things about the origins to learn from them origin of our world origin of ourselves and some of them we can foresee the ability for us to live and have self-sufficient communities in the French when they were investigating or rather colonizing or at least surveying North America in the 70s to the early 17th century, perhaps even before the men who them sent up and down the rivers of Central America and Canada etc., we are known as lave Voyager, the travelers are right and it seems to me that we have certainly had Voyager in our time, although for the most part we have not yet solved any problem. another planet, but surely in our time and you have had a lot to do with the construction of this aspect of our time.

We have sent Voyager into

space

. They have landed on at least one other major stellar body, so to speak. planetary body, that is, the moon, and you have sent, you have been involved with people from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and you have sent explorers of various types, mechanical explorers but loaded with equipment designed by human beings to explore all the planets in the system solar, so we are already there. launched into our extraterrestrial expanse or we know very well and in fact two of the most successful robotic explorers were called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and in fact it is Voyager one that took the distant image of the Earth as a pale blue dot that gives the book its title pales and I learned from this book that I didn't know the story behind this that it was you who pushed for the valuable camera and total crew time to take that photograph of some of the other people, particularly the people of the government, he didn't want to bother using his equipment simply to take a photograph of the Earth.

It wasn't essential science, but it seemed to me that the perspective of seeing the Earth as a point, yes, from beyond the outermost planet. It was worth something and for me at least it is so moving and beautiful and speaks to the vulnerability and fragility of our planet that I am really so happy that together we could think that, so that little pale blue dot is practically lost in space. and space is so vast that we still have trouble understanding it, it would be worth reviewing once again for our listeners the extent of the known universe, okay, let's do it for a moment, this is how we live on Earth, which is a fairly small world, no so big. as large as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in that panoply of other worlds that I have just described orbiting a rather monotonous Sun that is in the third or fourth spiral arm outside the center of the Milky Way, which is a collection of about four hundred thousand million stars, there's that famous word you're stuck with billions, not millions, billions, they didn't really invent it, the universe invented it and this galaxy of four hundred billion stars is just one of about a hundred billion galaxies. and beyond that there is now a respectable, but unproven, view that our universe is one among a large number, perhaps an infinite number of other mutually closed universes, that is the most exciting thought I have heard before, Of course, I don't understand what it really means or the science or theory by which the notion is generated, but when I first heard this kind of speculation from David Shriman Factors, a colleague of mine at the University of Chicago, I was surprised that There is possibly an infinite supply of universes contiguous to ours but unreachable, that is correct. that's from our well said building, in light of these huge possibly literally infinite numbers, but if not, we don't care about the other universes, just think of yourself, a hundred billion stars in a galaxy, a hundred billion galaxies in That perspective, now consider the human presumption that we are at the center of the universe or, worse yet, that we are the reason a universe exists.

This is something that is a cross-cultural illusion for most of human history. Almost every book and in this book, and not for the first time, your mind and your speculations change. Regarding what religion makes of our situation in ultimate reality, you suggest that there is tremendous anthropomorphism reflected in our religions and that our God, being so focused on us, cannot be an adequate representation of God, but perhaps If God is there, whatever it is, God whatever it is. God, ultimately, perhaps God is interested in organic life and perhaps he has done the same with all the other modes of being that can be found elsewhere distributed not only in the near reaches of the Milky Way but throughout this universe, maybe in the whole world. universes, an omnipotent and omniscient God could be very busy dealing with life in all those conceivable abodes of life, that is true, but that is well, it is speculation and the question is, what do we mean by God in the first place? and, secondly, what is the evidence.

For whatever kind of God you're talking about, let me, for clarity, give at the end members of a continuum of possibilities for what people mean when they talk about God. One end of the continuum is the idea of ​​a large male human with light skin and a long beard who sits on a throne in the sky and counts the fall of every sparrow opens the bells and makes a microintervention in human history, says the God. on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in fact, yes, now for that god. I know absolutely no evidence now I'm not saying no maybe the throne is where no one has looked but there is no evidence with a garden like this it looks like a Peyton tree flows the action of our own hopes and fears and the types of political systems that I am Speaking of kings we used to have on the other end of the spectrum, it's the kind of God that Einstein or Benedict Spinoza talked about, who is very close to the sum total of the laws of nature.

Now there are laws of nature. It would be foolish to deny it and, furthermore, it need not have been that way the laws of nature that apply here apply ten billion light years away the same laws of gravity the same laws of quantum mechanics so there certainly are universal laws of nature if that's what you mean by God then of course God exists now it's a little difficult to pray to this last type of God. Now I wish to pray to the Newtonian gravitational constant. It is not satisfactory. It is easier to praise and/or praise that God than to pray. yes, because praise instead of prayer, the order that these laws of nature induce in the universe is magnificent, elegant, subtle, so on this topic of God many people are very happy to pose the question: Do you believe in God and then drink? an answer yes or no, you have not learned absolutely anything, the question is what kind of God is being discussed within that great Universal or cosmic order created or presided over by God or not, as the case may be, we can leave that question aside because surely it will not be we'll resolve here tonight, but within that cosmic order there is that interesting species Homo sapiens sapiens and it's probably and it's the Voyager species, it's probably already gone beyond this planet, it's probably felt like that.

Not ultimately, but in the conceivable

future

it will likely begin to spread out into the universe and try to populate other places. The first place we would populate, I suppose, is the Moon or, rather, at least, the seasons established on the Moon would not be in my opinion. The first correct target is near-Earth asteroids for several reasons, for one thing, some of them are even easier to hit than the Moon, they require less rocket skill, which are, for example, well, first of all , there are hundreds of them. We know it and there are thousands of them that we don't know about, but we have one of reasonable size, but for example there is one called Nereus any re us, which is very easy to get to.

The only downside is that if something went wrong it would be difficult to get. get back to earth quickly but it's easy to get to easy to get out gravity is much lower than that of the moon even say so you can get back much more easily and these objects are of interest for several reasons one is that a fascinating number of They seem to be two double worlds in a kind of rubbing contact and that seems to some of us as if we were seeing the process by which worlds are built, the joining of smaller worlds to form a larger one and larger ones, and That is very important. how to reform how close Nereus is I don't have it in my head, but at its closest point it is a small fraction of an astronomical unit, an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, yes, and what is its volume, how big? the place where both worlds are kilometers wide or ten kilometers small is big.

All you call them worlds instead of or worlds, worlds, yes, tiny, diminutive worlds and what else interesting, in parentheses, is because the gravity is so low that you could do. a wide standing jump ten miles into the sky or you could throw a baseball into orbit, in fact you could play a game of baseball by yourself, throw the ball with the gun parallel to the surface, then it will go around the world and then he will pick it up. your bat and half an hour later you stand in the opposite direction, hit the ball and then go running after I suddenly have a memory of and this is a kind of metaphor for what we are not talking about our campaign in the Pacific during In World War II was called "island hopping" to finally reach the Japanese mainland, we had to eliminate the Japanese in some particular place, establish airfields on one or another island and on one or another Pacific archipelago and,Finally, we would reach our goal. it was just Japan and we actually got there by dropping the nuclear bomb or the atomic bomb which short-circuited and short-circuited the whole process, but here we have a kind of world jumping absolutely fine, what is the course, what are the few jobs in Kozma like in the command center of the cosmos what would be the probable course that you would chart, in fact, you plot it in the new book, pale blue dot, let's first use them, use them, use another thing that is melting that we have We have not yet inventoried the near-Earth worlds, ah, we don't know where they all are, we just know statistically that there have to be so many of them at the rate at which we are discovering new ones, and so on, so that no one can map that out there.

There may still be undiscovered asteroids and comets that are the perfect target to go after, but generally speaking, I think I'm leaving out the Moon. I'll come back to explain why we should leave it out later, if you wish. I think near-Earth asteroids and then Mars are the obvious near-term targets. Let me say something else. about near-Earth asteroids, it's not just that we're going to learn a lot from them, it's not just that you can break Olympic records with them, the average person could, it's that they pose a serious danger to the Earth, and that's it.

Wait long enough and the near-Earth asteroid or an asteroid will crash into Earth as they have in the past. Now the thing is that there are many more small ones than big ones, so a small one hits. The fact that the earth burns up in the atmosphere does not cause much damage, but on the other hand 65 million years ago the earth was hit by a comet or asteroid ten kilometers in diameter and that extinct all the dinosaurs and 75% of the rest species of life. and if it happened again, it would be absolutely certain that we are mixed in the Yeman race, we are more vulnerable than most species because of our dependence on agriculture, which is a very safe, very delicate flower, so to speak, so wait long enough, you won't have to wait for a 10 kilometer guy a 1 kilometer asteroid to hit the earth of which there are many, many more seems to be enough to do it and this last summer we saw a succession of 1 kilometer objects hit the planet Jupiter mm-hmm and They produced blemishes, dark blemishes in the clouds of Jupiter that were about the size of the Earth and if we get a foothold on some of these asteroids with them in a position to control their movement, that's right or we won't have than to have a foothold on them if we are just out there competently in near space, yes, and that's okay, we can deflect an offensive asteroid, we can deflect it with what technology, in fact, we are now the latest in a long succession of double-edged swords that modern technology provides.

I mean, we still have We don't master fire and we have for over a million years. We have fire departments because we can't handle it yet. The easiest way with existing technology to deflect a near-Earth asteroid is with nuclear weapons. Teller shadows, this is a very peculiar situation because Edward Teller and I have been on opposite sides of that hurricane, I know him on many issues, Star Wars, nuclear winter, but he always saw the nuclear weapon of the bomb nuclear as an engineering device, among other things, my opinion is that dr. . Teller, who has played a major role in the development of thermonuclear weapons, has spent the rest of his life trying to prove that they really are good, and now we have the opportunity to join nuclear weapons to the bandwagon of saving the Earth and, in In a sense, I find myself on the same side of the barricades as him and the irony of this has not been lost on any of us, clearly at a time when the Cold War has ended, the Soviet Union has collapsed , nuclear arsenals are in sharp decline.

Weapons designers are eagerly looking for a way to keep job security in business for weapons designers and now American and Russian designers from the East and West have a common solution when supporting each other in this and that is to use weapons nuclear weapons to divert the astronauts and Of course, this is much more developed in a pale blue dot, but we have to hurry towards the rest of the universe and we will take the next step beyond those asteroids where we will conveniently be stationed to protect the Earth from a large asteroid The explosions and devastations based on them will take the next step right after you pause to read these words.

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The star's new name will be copyrighted along with its telescopic coordinates in the book Its Place in the Cosmos Volume 4 stored in the International Star Registry. Swiss Vog call today to name a star make the gift of a lifetime for $45,800 - 8 - 33 33 International Star Registry call toll-free at 800 - 8 - 33 33 from Radio 720 WGN Chicago you are listening to extension 720 once again you the host and moderator Milton Rosenberg and regarding the latest commercial, one really can't resist taking advantage of the American Astronomical Society's special opportunity. Know who did it, who names a National Astronomical Union and the International Astronomical Union names asteroids and other bodies in space. and they called it an asteroid: 709 Sagan, that's its official name, but what we just heard is a commercial that is published every year at this time because it is a kind of Christmas gift from the International Star Registry.

I think they call this and if you pay 25 bucks you ask them to name something somewhere in the space for the person you designate and it's in a book they'll deposit it's in a book they have in a Swiss vault a great place to keep it's a scam complete, which usually doesn't bother the commercials, but I probably have a big problem with this, but I want to, but I have to invite you to see that it is a scam, first of all, this has no official information. Whatever, it's just that if you want this company to name a star after you, then it's between you and the company, but it has nothing to do with astronomers, it has nothing to do with what people will do in the future. , but they do not claim that this is the case and not only that all the stars we know already have designations, they must do so because how would astronomers refer to them if they did not have them when there was no way to talk about them?

So this is one of the many forms of greed that arises around the Christmas season around us imagine this for someone who knows the people who run this team and they said: yeah, well, they know everything, they don't promise anything that isn't true , they say they will give it a name and deposit. It's there, so we talk, there's an implication that it's much more than it is, like an asteroid at 7:09 Sagan is known as the Sagan asteroid of all time and it's known that well, I mean, I don't. I asked. having my name built it, but it's an honor that it is and I'm very good, although, of course, because you live on some planet that revolves around some Sun in Andromeda and you know the same asteroid, you don't call it Sagan.

If you're an alien, you have quite a different set of designations, of course, now, so how do we become experts? We ourselves became aliens so far, we have only reached the asteroids, where do we go from there and why, well, there is another reason. why I think in the long term it is important for humans to be in space and that has to do with the fact that our technology has now reached formidable, perhaps even astonishing proportions, so that we are a danger to ourselves and, through nuclear war, global warming or depleting the ozone layer or something that we are not smart enough to understand but will discover to our shock and horror next week that we are a danger and live in an environment that is very fragile the Earth's atmosphere is extremely thin compared to the The size of the Earth, the thickness of our atmosphere is about the same as the thickness of the shellac layer on a large school globe, there is not much of it and the ozone layer falling due to temperature pressure, this room is three millimeters thick. about the thickness of a well-cut fingernail, so there's not much there.

We're playing with powerful technology in ways we don't fully understand. We are not very good at long-term thinking. I don't propose to suggest that long before the sun goes out and we can leave this planet essentially uninhabited. There's a possibility. I am not suggesting that Earth is a disposable planet. In any case, we could not launch any significant fraction of the human species into space. There are 250,000 more. be born than die every day, but it seems to me that it is good to take out an insurance policy diversify our portfolio, that means planting human colonies not putting all our eggs in one basket, almost literally, yes, so self-sustaining human colonies in others places would be a long-term insurance policy of our Where is the first?

We can establish a new company. Do it. You can dig them up. You can create habitats there. asteroids and Mars, which is a world of absolute wonders, a glorious place and which by the way has an extremely interesting characteristic and that is that four billion years ago exactly at the time when the origin of life on Earth occurred, in Mars rivers flowed. Earth-like environment with liquid water there is no liquid water on Mars today, by the way, we don't know what caused that climate change and the fact that an Earth-like world could end up in such an inhospitable environment is very helpful, it is a warning. cautionary lesson, but Mars has a lot of things that are exciting, but the point is that it was an Earth-like environment 4 billion years ago and life emerged on Earth 4 billion years ago.

There is a possibility that life arose on Mars 4 billion years ago. and if it is occasionally hanging in the underground of an owaisi or something like that or if it became extinct, morphological or chemical fossils are waiting for us there, we don't know, but this is a very important topic, but in case Mars is a good place, it was There is some ambiguity in the Mars Lander of the pointed result, the vibe, yes, in general it was said that well, the results show that there is no evidence of biological material, organic material on Mars, but there was a guy in Washington, probably know who Hilbert is living exactly.

I once spoke to him on air, in fact, on the phone, and he told me that the results essentially tend to confirm the presence of at least single-celled life on Mars. I think a fair way to put it is that most of the scientists who worked on that program believe that there are no signs of life there even though there are tantalizing and peculiar results that are not fully understood. I mean, in a way, the argument against life is that if the signatures that are detected instruments were due to life, life had to be very, very competent and able to do things at high and low temperatures and that Omni competent seemed too good to be true which is the prevailing opinion and almost certainly explains some of these results.

Their important finding is that the surface of Mars, the surface of Mars itself is plundered with things like hydrogen peroxide oxidizers and you know you use hydrogen peroxide as an anesthetic sterilizing agent because it oxidizes like crazy. Now Mars is hit, as we've been saying, by asteroid fragments, meteorites, lots of them. Of which are organic, there should be many asteroids with organic matter on the surface and Viking found none, not one molecule in a billion, so there has to be something there that is preferentially destroying organic molecules and that is one of the lines of evidence.

There are several who say that Mars is just sizzling with oxidants, now what causes that and we think we know the answer, the answer is that Mars has an ozone hole all over the planet, so ultraviolet light from the Sun hits the surface without obstacles and is producing oxidants in the atmosphere like hydrogen peroxide our

vision

of our own future or put another way, another warning about the silly things not to do with the origin that you can learn by going to other worlds and, by the way , just while we are at that 900 degrees Fahrenheit surface temperature of Venus is hot enough to melt tin or lead, is produced by a massive greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and, therefore, in case anyIf you hear a radio commentator saying that the greenhouse effect is a hoax, point them at Venus.

Be very clear on this, I'm not suggesting that there was ever some kind of Venus Z... that insisted on driving fuel in efficient cars and that's what happened. The large amount of CO2 on Venus comes from a quite different cause, but the fact. That a large amount of CO2 can devastate a planetary environment is the lesson to be learned from Venus. Project our scenario into the future. I don't know how far we have to go before we have a populated settlement and not just domes, because they wouldn't do it. I don't think they will become cities, but how far will we go in the future before we have found and migrated to planets that are low enough like Earth that we can actually populate and colonize them?

Furthermore, there are no such planets. Earth, we do not yet know them in the solar system. I think we can say with confidence that there are none, we won't go there, no planets that we haven't found there so far away that they have to be so cold that they don't serve our purpose well, but there is one perspective I want to emphasize: we are not talking about the next few years, we are talking about plausible projections for the next decades and centuries on that time scale, it seems to be a perspective to convert terraforming as the phrase that says that some people use some planetary environments to be able to live there without survival methods heroic that you could even have them say that Mars itself using Mars is a possible how do you terraform a planet?

Get it right, different planets have different problems, it's Lou like Goldilocks, you know, some are too hot and some are golden and one is perfect and that of course is the Earth and there is no accident, it is perfect because we have evolved here. we are perfectly acclimatized for it if we evolve life tends to develop in places that support life, that's one way of saying it or whatever planet you're adapted to, you think it's the only one that's definitely great for life, but in any case For Venus, for example, the problem would be to get rid of that great greenhouse effect that is very difficult to achieve on Mars, the problem is that the planet is too cold and there is no ozone layer that protects against ultraviolet light and The answer to both is to create a larger atmosphere and if so, with the right components you will have a greenhouse effect and if they are the right components you will block ultraviolet light.

How do you make that atmosphere bigger? we go back to nuclear weapons again no, we are not nuclear weapons they turn out to be extremely weak limited usefulness limited usefulness what you want is an amplifier and what you need to do is be able to transport enormous quantities of the gases you need to Mars from somewhere else or extract them from the ground, but it would be much better if you had a machine that could keep pumping things out. it came out of Mars into the atmosphere and that made copies of itself so you wouldn't have to keep delivering and repairing the machines, it would just work itself, well there is such a machine and it's called a microorganism and it's part of the challenge to terraform Mars. is to engineer microbes that can generate the kind of atmosphere in the right quantities that we would need to make Mars a hospital, and with our new science of genetic engineering it is quite conceivable that we could do this at least within another century or two by effectively lifting vehicles and fusion energy and genetic engineering seems possible.

I don't say it's all guaranteed, but it seems possible, but now that we can terraform, the really exciting prospect is very distant space exploration, still within our galaxy, obviously, but it's a very, very big galaxy. Well, with 400 billion suns and finding Earth-like planets that would support human life at a distance much greater than Mars is from Earth, how long will it take? This is simply a matter of projection and speculation, but how long would it take assuming there are some planets of this type out there and you and I assume that I think let's talk about that first.

The first thing to keep in mind is that if we're talking about really long time scales, mm-hmm, then nowhere in the inner solar system is safe. because the Sun is going to become a red giant and all kinds of other possibilities erratic pulsation changes in brightness what is the outer limit by the way for the permanence of the Sun when it burns five billion years but in practice it is more like 2 billion years before the Earth's oceans boil now, that of course is the distant future, we have a lot of pressing problems for five billion years on this Earth, so well, it's not us, no, but the Earth is Midrand, the Earth has about four alive. billion years, so that is correct, but in that sense we are middle-aged, we only have two-sevenths of its time left, yes, indeed, someone in that is true, and there are other catastrophes that can happen to two planets , so again.

In terms of taking out an insurance policy, it would be good for humans if we really are the voters of our species' continued existence in other places. I have to stop you on a crucial point, it is the point you raise in the book. In two billion years our species will no longer exist, the characteristic time for mammalian species to evolve into another, since in a few million years it will not be much different if we are right and yet We can take preliminary measures for that is the first, the first point, the second point is, is there somewhere to go?

The outer solar system is absolutely loaded with small worlds. The Kuyper comet belt has trillions, not millions, not billions, trillions of worlds, where is it built? It's a long distance away, maybe it's starting. 10,000 astronomical units of distance 10,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a large distance compared to other planets around other stars, which is clearly a very long-term approach. There is some? Can you get there? Those are the obvious ones to play correctly. New. Question from England, can you get there from here? oh you can't get there from here, can you get there from here with the kind of technology we could have in 10,000 years for an hour? 1,000 I mean, we already have four ships on their way to the stars. yes, pioneers 10 and 11, travelers 1 and 2, they travel quite slowly now, they are not designed for interstellar spacecraft, it's just an accident of trajectories, some of them have plates, other material designed by Carl Sagan, which is actually correct , and Voyagers have gold. phonograph records with information for anyone who can find them in the distant future, including the fourth movement of Beethoven's ninth movement, if I remember correctly, that is correct and many other classical and folk things from the east and west, but our technology is improving very quickly and If you do a small extrapolation of the speed of transportation from the stagecoach until now, you will know that this is the speed in this year, you will see that the curve is exponentially increasing sharply and without making any commitment on what the technology will be to make .

We are going faster and faster, the most modest extrapolation of these curves suggests that in a few centuries perhaps less, but at least in a few centuries we will travel close to the speed of light and, if that is the case, then much of the galaxy is accessible and We live in a fantastic time in which for the first time we are in the process of discovering other planets and the breeding grounds of other planets around other stars. We have a genuine extraterrestrial solar system with Earth-like planets and it is a very surprising discovery quite unexpected three planets at least orbiting a pulsar called B 1257 plus 12 where is Sidda?

Is she in our arm of the Milky Way? It's about 1,500 light years away, yes, so it's not a close neighbor, but it's just for scale, the distance from where we are to the center of the galaxy is about 25,000 light years and our astronomical skills have reached the point in which we can determine that they have three Earth-like planets, possibly Earth-like, it is completely around that side yes, it is a completely unexpected discovery I thought you can't see planets that far away, let's see them, you can't see them, but What happened is that this is a pulsar, the star is surely a pulsar, the rapidly rotating neutron has a kind of lighthouse. a radio beacon that sweeps the earth very quickly and if there were planets orbiting this, there would be slight timing residues in the short period with which the Pulsar was set, they would interfere with the beacon transmission.

No, no, it's not that it affects. the rotation speed of the beginning is a little off, I say and and because we know the rotation speed to twelve significant figures or something like that, then, if there are planets, there is an absolutely predictable variation in what are called time residues and it is they could detect planets and them. They have been found and confirmed and you say 15 million light years from 115 oh Sorry 1,500 light years over 50 million 1,500 light years away I guess I made that distortion because it still seems like a pretty big distance even if we can travel at a close speed to the light, what does that mean?

Well, that's not 80 1,500 years, that's not a goal for us, this is simply a stimulus, yes, planets are a dime a dozen, it could be much closer. for itself if I guarantee it, I guarantee it, I guarantee it, and the other thing we are discovering is that circling at least many, probably most and possibly all of the very young nearby stars like the Sun, is fantastic in all those cases, a fantastic flat disk of gas and dust exactly. What scientists here have predicted is necessary to explain the origin of our planets. Planets are forming in the arcs of our planets and so is the origin of the organic molecules that will ultimately generate life in such systems.

Plus, organic matter is absolutely everywhere. Halley's Comet which we now know is made up of 25% organic matter hmm, Saturn's moon called Titan is covered by an orange cloud and organic matter, including amino acids and nucleotide bases, is raining down from the sky of Titan like manna from heaven . Of course, I always do it with your arrival and I knew that the only problem I would have is that I would mess up with the commercials because the conversation becomes too fascinating to meet the commercial schedule, so we have to stop and just A moment, but I want raise a question that I hope we'll address immediately after those commercials.

I think about the discovery of the so-called new world and the colonization of the new world, which was done at a very high cost to the residents of the new world and produced a tremendous cultural conflict that actually led to millions and millions of deaths. You have long been interested in extraterrestrial life and have been heavily involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI and I know that you If we are personally convinced that there is likely to be a large amount of life elsewhere, inevitably if we are going to establish planets in solar systems other than our own, there seems to be a high probability that we will be doing what the like The Spanish and the Dutch and the others did it when they arrived in the Western Hemisphere, we are going to impose ourselves on others, we cannot say people, but we can say on other beings, and there could be hell to pay as a result, one has to ask about the migrants or the consequences of this type of migratory migration that could generate conflicts between species.

I have a lot to say about that and after the break and we'll do it right after the break when we get back to Carl Sagan, whose new book that we're drawing from tonight is called Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space and it's published by Random House beautifully illustrated as one would expect, superbly written, very exciting on every page and we return to this exciting conversation after these words from Radio 720 WGN Chicago you are listening to extension 720 once again your host and moderator Milton Rosenberg and we return to Carl Sagan his new book pale blue dot before he hits you with a question about alien war, you know, we haven't said anything.

I said it didn't lead to anything personal, you know, we've known each other for a long time, we just realized before that it goes back to your I wasn't your first book, but it was the first one in which you and I interacted and that goes . We go back to 1973. I started doing the program in 1972. We missed each other at the University of Chicago. When did you obtain your doctorate at the University? 1960. I got there in '65 as a staff member, so we missed each other. that round but of course we have been together many times, even sometimes not on the radio.

In fact, it was a great pleasure to meet you at the annual meeting of the committee for the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal just this time. Summer in Seattle you have so many honors I haven't even gone through all these things what do you really do with most of the guests you have been honored by so many organizationsimportant to be famous as an asteroid to you which says something very significant about you continues, aren't you a professor of astrophysics or are you the chair of astronomy and astrophysics at Cornell and director of what is the official name of the planetary studies laboratory and, of course you are also founder of the Planetary Society which is the largest space interest group in the world and of course you are the author of a book that was the leading scientific book in English in the history of book publishing in the global cosmos and, of course, the accompanying television series, you and your wife. and Riaan have been doing a series that is not yet complete since there is no third volume scheduled.

Oh yes, the shadows have forgotten the ancestors, was the first, but we digressed on several other things. you're including writing and co-producing a film version to rent for Warner Brothers your contact novel, right, yeah, that's what you just told me before Jodie Foster will play the young girl. Yes, can you imagine? Yes, that will be fascinating. I thought the novel was superbly done, but hey, come on, let's go back to the universe when it's okay, so our adventures beyond the pale blue dot are okay, then we run into aliens who won't be happy to find us, so let's jump in, let's go step by step first.

As far as we have been able to find so far, this solar system is lifeless mm-hmm if it wasn't, if there was even microbial life somewhere, then that would change my point of view, but in a lifeless solar system all the motivations that applied to Christopher Columbus and his colleagues does not apply there is no gold there is no spices there are no slaves - to capture and bring back there are no pagans to convert and that is why all those mainly atrocious reasons that led to so much pain and suffering do not appliqué just like Woody Guthrie sang this earth is your earth this earth is my earth we can say this solar system is your earth this solar system is my earth well, I mean, the whole idea of ​​owning a planet seems ridiculous to me, but but it depends on whatever you want to say with my, but at least it's where I can live, we can, where it's where we live, that's right, but beyond the solar system, okay, so first of all let's remember that beyond the solar system is quite far into our technological future, but you're estimating between four and six hundred years, aren't you?

Yes, but of course, in that time we will have done a very thorough SETI search to see if there is anyone out there and in SETI the most likely circumstance, by far, is that we receive a message from someone much more advanced than us, much less because anyone else silly that we don't even have a radio since we just invented the radio so the scenario is much more about worrying about what they will do to us than what we will do to them and as for receiving a radio message it is perfectly safe . The transmitting civilization has no way of knowing that we received the message.

We don't have to return the signal. We do it when nothing requires us to respond. The problem is that radar and television already have our presence. Sure, there is a spherical wave expanding at the speed of light from the Earth, indicating the presence of a rudimentary technical civilization. Contains the late 1940s television shows Milton Berle Howdy Doody, the military, the McCarthy hearings and other signs of high intelligence. How far have they gone at this point, about 45 light years? Yes, so if there are any extraterrestrial civilizations within 45 light years, then they have just discovered our presence. What a thought, they are watching McCarthy's army hearings.

Yes, and as I say sometimes when they ask me if they are intelligent beings out there, how come they are not here now? You know it's a sign of their intelligence that they don't come here. I'm just saying that as a joke, yeah, so the idea that a slow, cautious movement of humans beyond the solar system is going to cause us pain is belied by the fact that our radio transmission is expanding at the rate of light, far ahead of any flotilla of spaceships from Earth, and that is what will dominate. our relationships with other beings now a moment ago I made an attribution but maybe I should ask you if I did it correctly or incorrectly that you are personally convinced that you do not have strong evidence, you have some things and you review them in the book that suggest that there is a good amount of life out there, what you do is that essentially your conviction about them my conviction is a very strong term your hunch, although not as strong as the belief, the hunch is much closer, yes, when I look in the galaxy with so many stars when I consider the results I just mentioned about planets now appearing to be a cosmic commonplace when I take into account that the stuff of life is everywhere, even in the cold, dark, diffuse near-vacuum between the stars. when I consider that there are many places that are much older than the earth and therefore have much more time for evolution to occur when I reflect that evolution the process of evolution stated by Charles Darwin has a completely general applicability nothing special about what you add to that When you look at the findings, however ambiguous they may be from Seti exploration of the matrix, I'll come back to that in a second, but when I put all that together, it seems ridiculous to imagine that by great chance we occupy the only inhabited planet. but that does not mean that it is not a proof that, at best, is an argument for applause and who knows, there may be a terrible improbability in the origin of life, since it could be that civilizations, as soon as reach their technical capacity, they will quickly destroy themselves, like who knows.

You may not be able to be absolutely sure, but if you ask me to guess, if I were a betting man, I would bet on a galaxy full of life. What about the results of setting the project I've been most involved in recently? It's called the extraterrestrial trial of the mega meta channel M ETA. This is a project that has been funded by contributions from private members of a private membership organization, the Planetary Society, primarily contributions of five out of ten dollars, although there was a significant initial infusion of funds from Steven Spielberg and the The Guru The technological behind the meta is Paul Horowitz, professor of physics at Harvard and recently Paul and I published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal about our findings and this is briefly what it is about: we establish a set of gates that a signal must pass through to For it to be a genuine extraterrestrial intelligent signal, it has to be very narrow band because natural sources of radiation tend to be very broadband, since the frequency has to be very narrow, of course, it must not rotate with the Earth.

Sources of interference will rotate with you. It has to be much stronger than the occasional glitches in electronics and such, and when we run it through all those filters and discard all the events that don't match these criteria in five years of searching, we get a handful that really looked like they fit the bill. These criteria and the five strongest of them all are found in the plane of the Milky Way, which is where the stars are. Because of some mistake, some Air Force AWACS plane or something, some new Earth satellite we wouldn't do it. It gets those signals when we look at the plane of the Milky Way so you know your heart beats when you look at that, but it's very, very big, but none of these signals are repeated.

You look back at the same place in the sky for an hour. later, one day, later, a week, a month, a year, seven years later and without repetition, and if results that are not reproducible in science are almost useless, then, as I think about it a little, certainly not I can affirm that we have found extraterrestrials. intelligence but these are tempting results other searchers of extraterrestrial appearances have also found similar non-reproducible but very suggestive what is a friendly hypothesis about its reproducibility nun here is one that has to do with interstellar twinkling this is like the twinkling of stars you know what You look at a star and the sudden increase in brightness turns bright and fades again.

I'm just talking about looking with your eyeball at a star. Well, that also happens in the radio domain, there are interstellar clouds of electrons and they pass through. the line of sight and can act as a lens that momentarily focuses the radio waves so that there is an increase in brightness, so imagine that there is a constant signal that is simply underdetectable and now this cloud of electrons passes temporarily focuses the source of distant signal. detectability and then fades away, that would explain it and the numbers even work, but then there is the question of how come all the sources we find are just in that small range below detectability that can be temporarily elevated to detectability, a characteristic of the imagination. and obviously this is pure imagination, it's more than a guess, it's close to fantasy, but it's an informed fantasy, if you fast forward a really considerable number of years, what should ten thousand say twenty thousand or should I say half a million?

Give me the biggest gap. of years between now and then you feel comfortable talking and tell me what you imagine the extension of the human race or the extension of these successive races that evolved from the human race could be correct, so of course we recognize that the more far in the future we try to predict the silliest chance, yes it is our prediction only because humans are fallible and we look at all the incompetent attempts to predict the future even a little bit in the future, for example, Kremlinology failed because complete in predicting the fall of the Soviet Union. wonderful example, yes, and you can recognize that you have to be very careful, yes, leaving aside caution.

I would say that if we don't destroy ourselves first, which is a real possibility, but by no means inevitable, then we will be out there first. We'll have temporary visits and then longer sealed habitats and then terraforming progressive worlds that will go deeper and deeper into the outer solar system and then once we're in the Oort comet cloud, we'll jump from comet to comet, as if your World War. Two analogies, but in the least hostile mood and when we get to the outer word cloud we are halfway to the nearest star and the nearest star probably also has word clouds so it wouldn't be much more difficult in instead of jumping into one.

From our comments about jumping to one of yours, the two clouds probably interpenetrate at their peripheries and then there's the obvious of reversing the process and jumping too close to a planet on a planet of that other star and on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, that's about what you know or how long we've had civilization, so it's by no means the lifespan of our species. I can imagine emphasizing how speculative this conclusion is, well, no one has any idea, I'm just coming to it to argue. with me that I can take a listening hit or refute, eh, yeah, that's the only comforting thought about it.

I will be around many stars and this spiral arm of the Milky Way may have humans expanding in considerable numbers, but I certainly imagine the majority. Of us who are back here on Earth or in the inner solar system, I imagine that we will have to be very cautious and respectful and taking into account that if there are advanced civilizations we have very high motivations to be careful, remember the Klingon scenario in Star Trek . I'm about to ask about Star Trek where everyone we meet is exactly at our technological level, yes which of course is incorrect, the most likely case is that they are so far behind us that they posed no threat or so far behind us. in front of.

It tells us that we pose no threat, but at least in the current version or in the version we completed with Jean-luc Picard as commander of the Starship Enterprise in that Star Trek series, they found cultures, some of which are very advanced compared to to ours and represent a great life. threats against humans and other friendly life forms at the end of the Starship Enterprise, yes, but of course they are exams. I've never been very clear on what sector or what rank within the total universe the Starship Enterprise is. I think there is certainly restricted to this galaxy, but I don't know what part of the galaxy.

My son Nicholas has written two episodes of Star Trek. She, I should ask her, I know I never thought, to ask how far they have come. Yes, good. You would know as well as I do where we will be in 10,000 years. Be sure to ask them. We must pause. Of course, we are late for commercials and it is also time to open the phone lines. I know a lot of people want to have the opportunity. to speak with Carl Sagan and that opportunity is now available to you the lines are open the number of course five nine one seventy two hundred the area code is three one two then five nine one seventy two hundred if you arecalling long distance receive your calls right now five nine one seventy two hundred and we will return after these words from Radio seven twenty WGN Chicago you are listening to extension seven twenty once again your host and moderator milton rosenberg and our guest tonight is, for Of course, Carl Sagan and the A new book that is a wonderful adventure into the future and in which you painlessly learn a lot of relevant science is called Pale Blue Dot, which is the way the Earth looks from very, very away in a photograph that Carl did not take himself. not from which the explorer voice of him was Voyager 1 from a point of view far beyond the planet Neptune, but in a way he took over those photographic facilities and organized everything so that the photograph was taken and we found him in the book that is so. a wonderful image.

I could go on and on with that, but I digress because we want to get right to Carl Sagan's phone calls, number five nine one seven two zero zero right now, of course, all lines are taken. but some will open as we process some of the calls directly to the first caller. Good evening, it's on air. Hello dr. Sagan, I look forward to your new book, thank you, are you familiar with a recent book called The Millennial Project by Marshall Savage? Hmm, I don't think so. Okay, they actually quote you extensively in the last part of the book.

It is nothing more than an 8-point program to inhabit the galaxy. The point of view that the author takes is that life most likely does not exist anywhere else in the universe. He says that our planet is not only the only source of life in this galaxy, but it is also probably the only source of life in any galaxy you can imagine how you would know well, I think it's a very good question. He goes on about four pages of statistical methodology by saying that the odds against life are overwhelmingly unlikely, and he quotes it quite extensively and is taking the opposite view, but I don't know if he could comment.

No. I cannot, from what he has said, understand what the argument is, and in any case, if not, he heard Milton in my earlier discussion. I have an idea why I think life is probably abundant, but I think it's fair to say that no one really knows what the balance of opinion is, in fact, among the relevant scientists on this topic. I think one way to put it is that the chances of life and intelligence elsewhere are high enough to justify serious efforts to find it, but that doesn't mean anyone is sure it's out there, just that it's a very important question. about our place in the universe and who we are and about biology and almost every topic I know.

I mean, especially if we could receive messages from advanced civilizations that it is important to try or do it in the most cautious way, we don't know enough to exclude the possibility and therefore we should see one of the most exciting lectures I have ever heard in my life. Life was within the first week after I arrived at Yale University as a new assistant professor with the Hutton PhD and Harlow Shapley was giving a lecture at the University and it was just on this topic, yes, he was a very good early popularizer , that's all. here's the next person he calls, good night, he's on the air, good night, yes sir, um dr.

Sagan, it's a great honor. I'd like to ask you if you could summarize your opinion of Richard Hoagland and his particular beliefs, which you're quite familiar with, I'm sure, and whether you think you have something to stand on or whether it's completely left field, okay, first let me tell the audience what these arguments are and then say what I think. About that, the argument is that there is in a place on Mars called Cydonia a giant stone face a few kilometers wide at the base, maybe a kilometer wide. tall, looking at the sky, it's not a very friendly face, maybe it has a helmet, and the idea is that this is a monumental sculpture that dates back to a time when humans certainly had no technology and therefore , our whole sense of human evolution is wrong and then there are other very enthusiastic and heart-pounding conclusions about religion about craters in the sun. system is being created by a past nuclear war, etc., what is the real reality here?

I think a good way to look at this is to notice that there is an eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon, now how can we understand this? Is aliens meddling with the genetics of eggplants a plot by the Republican Party to etch President Nixon's face into our memories, or is it that if you have a million different eggplants, all of which are roughly the shape of a human head? once in a while, to be one familiar to us, who are very good at recognizing things that look like human faces, even fake Lee ones.

I think it's clearly the latter, the so-called face in Cydonia, which is not such a perfect face, especially if you look. In the almost limitless half there is a rough block table situated among hundreds of other block tables, each of which has a different look sculpted by ancient flows of mud and windblown sand, etc. If you ask me to guess, I guess this is just the exact same kind of thing as eggplant, but I'm not opposed to looking closer, I'd like to do that, so next time we have a high-resolution camera in a Mars orbiter on the list of the hundred or so things we should do of course, let's look at this and see if there is anything interesting in high resolution what comes to mind is the dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius, thank you that cloud has a very similar shape to a camel, I'm a lord, it's backed like a camel, yeah, and there's something about a handsaw that appears on that or maybe another part of the player, yeah, you know, five nine one seven two zero zero is the number one line that's available right now and we'll be back right after. we pause for these words from Radio 7:20 WGN Chicago you are listening to extension 720 once again your host and moderator milton rosenberg and directly again to Carl Sagan all I want to make clear once again for those who tuned in late is that his new book has just been published as title pale blue dot a vision of the human future in space magnificently written as one would expect, of course, and certainly magnificently illustrated.

I didn't know there were so many painters doing so much. extraterrestrial representation, yes, there is a whole genre of astronomical art and some of the best exponents of it were kind enough to contribute an exquisitely detailed painting. Great stuff that reminds me of something about the job of what was his name, extra value, bonus, I'll tell you who that guy is. of the patron saint of us as inkelaar should be this book pale blue dot is published by Random House our number five nine one seventy two hundred and you are on the air good evening yes, hello dr.

Sagan hi, I'm also looking forward to reading your book to receive as a Christmas gift thank you good luck thank you ah actually I was wondering what your opinion is regarding the moon Europa in terms of hosting life, your rope is very interesting, It is one of the four large or Galilean satellites of Jupiter and there are theoretical reasons to believe that it may have an underground ocean of liquid water, which is why I heard that no, we are not sure about that and, in fact, exactly one year from now, when If the Galileo spacecraft is inserted into orbit around Jupiter, we'll start to get a much better idea of ​​whether that's the case or not, but if there is an underground ocean, that doesn't mean, of course, that it's necessarily full of swimming creatures, but it is a very interesting question. if it's hot enough for liquid water and there's a lot of liquid water there and there's some source of energy, who knows, it's one of the many exciting prospects we face in the near term in the exploration of the solar system, sir, we thank you for the call .

Oh, thank you, I'm glad I heard from you. There are now some lines available. Finally, you have been trying to contact us quickly. Make another attempt and someone will contact five nine one seven two zero zero five nine one. seventy two hundred and you are already on the air good night good night dr. Sagan, it's really an honor to speak with you, thank you and I was wondering that the public and government desire for manned space exploration has really diminished in recent years and I was wondering what the prospect is of getting the public and getting the government try hard to get the man out again and get to the places you've been arguing all night.

Thank you. I'm so glad you asked that question, it's something I wanted to talk about. so let me say a few words about that first. I personally have problems with this word manned because after all there are female astronauts and manned and women are uncomfortable for a while. I was thinking about using the raw word CRE with Edie, but it lends itself. to misunderstandings in speech, you know this was a manned mission, so I would, in a way I would have started talking about human missions instead of robotic missions, but from time to time, the unconscious sexism of my youth. when the phrase man runs away came up, so having said that, now let me try to answer your question: the Apollo program was a glorious program and it has deep historical significance and you know that in a thousand years no one will know what gat means. who was the speaker of the House at the end of the 20th century you will remember, of course, Apollo and also the robotic missions that it spawned, but Apollo was not about science, it was not about exploration, it was about the nuclear arms race.

Defeat the Russians. Nuclear intimidation. The nations and the United States won that race to the moon and when we wanted it, the political purpose was fulfilled and then we stopped at the clearest indication of that is that the last human to step on the moon was the first scientist to step on the moon. as soon as the scientist was there we were clearly wasting our money, what are we doing with a scientist? Defund and the lesson of this is that human spaceflight, because it is expensive and also because it risks lives, requires some general political or historical justification that you want. people in both political parties and in both houses of Congress and across the board in a country where there are other very pressing human needs that need money, you want to have such a space program, you better have a good reason why.

Now, what has happened? Since Apollo, the human space program has focused on shuttle missions. A typical shuttle mission is five, six or seven people climbing into a can 200 miles up in the sky and launching a communications satellite that could very well have been launched by a much cheaper, unmanned booster and then the plants of tomato didn't grow or the newts are reproducing very well thank you and then NASA calls that exploration that's not exploration, that's bus driving and 200 miles, I mean, it's over 200 miles from here. I don't know Detroit and I guess you drove back and forth to Detroit dozens of times and called it exploring, people would look at you funny, but it's 200 miles up, yeah, up, sideways, that's all, it's only 200 miles, It's not like not exploring, it doesn't work. to a new place, a new world, whereas if NASA had been able to explore near-Earth asteroids or go to the far side of the Moon or go to Mars then I think public support would have remained at a very high level, It's not NASA's fault. because many limiting conditions are imposed on it, including all kinds of favoritism policies in Congress and a kind of lack of courage in the administration, does it seem conceivable to you, Carla, that we could do something to plug the hole in the ozone layer at through space activity and would that be a sting that could take us back there again?

Well, first of all, that would be very, very little up there, yeah, because that up there is the stratosphere, you know, 10 kilometers up there or something like that, and also one. is very concerned about whether we know what we are doing are the side effects is the cure worse than the disease the correct cure for ozone depletion is to stop producing the things that make up the ozone layer and because of the Montreal, all the industrial nations have agreed to do that and CFCs will be almost completely phased out in a couple more years, so we have another non-space solution; well, so what is the next step that we can hope to start or move forward?

We are embarking on serious space exploration. The Clinton-Gore administration likes the idea that international cooperation, especially between the United States and Russia, is so good, and it's not a dumb idea. I mean, the Russians have a fantastic space capability that we don't have and vice versa. It's something of a marriage made in heaven, but it's been notoriously difficult to consummate and only in recent years, largely thanks to the push of Vice President Gore and NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, isstarting to happen and that's the way to achieve it. because you do things with the Russians with the Europeans the Japanese you share costs you take advantage of their enormous technical and intellectual capacity and now you can do things that the United States could never do on its own it is important to keep that in mind We are not talking about a large amount of money, NASA's total budget is less than $14 billion compared to the defense budget which, if we include hidden costs, is well over $300 billion.

We thought we were going to have a peace and defense dividend. The budget would be significantly reduced and could be diverted to some operations like these, as well as other social programs and social issues, but apparently defense is not taking as much of a hit as we thought. It's not good, it's always easy to find real and imaginary enemies and anyone who says let's reduce the defense budget oh, is not interested in the security of the United States and we never have a serious debate on these issues, always politicians are desperately afraid of being called unpatriotic when I would recognize if they were - that national security does not mean only weapons, but many other things, education, health and care for the poorest among us, but you are convinced that within a fairly short time we will emerge a again of the Pale Blue Dot, yes, and if the United States doesn't play a major role in other countries, someone else will, but the human species is clearly disappearing because technology is getting cheaper, the reasons for doing so are becoming becoming clearer and it will certainly happen. for a moment about something I wanted to ask for sure and then we go to commercials for one last round and then we're back on the phones in 591 7200 speculation about the direction post-human evolution might take our fascination what did you say before? the average mammal species could last up to millions of years, a few million years and then it will become something else around two million years when we have to leave this planet if we are going to continue whatever the successor is. race may be again this is pure speculation, no one will be around to check or call him, questioned him on this, but where are we going in evolutionary terms?

Is there any way to think about that? I have a lot of biological experience and you know many biologists and exobiologists. What can we think? I don't think it's possible to do that. It is very subtle and complicated. Can we assume that we will become smarter than we are? now there are bigger brains, bigger brains, you would certainly think that, all things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid, at least until the invention of nuclear weapons, when perhaps it is the other way around. You see what I mean by being misleading, Tom.

It is absolutely unpredictable and even in retrospect, when we look at the record of evolution of other species or our own, it is very difficult to see. Oh, this is the path you have to follow and then dig it up and sure enough, there is the fossil very often completely. unexpected directions and strange things that you didn't imagine and huge, you know, sudden rushes in evolutionary direction and in long periods of stasis, the so-called punctuated equilibrium, so we can't even assume that in 50 million years human beings will have the same appearance. as humans do now, I think it is very unlikely that Russel will be quadrupedal, won't they still be?

We have two legs, oh, let me buy your quadrupeds, which are bipedal and locomotion exactly, but who knows, I mean, you know in a much faster way. milt time scale on this is a prosthesis it's a human machine there are marriages and you know, we do it with glasses and hearing aids and heart valves and all kinds of things like that nowadays, but you can imagine all kinds of things, including replaceable modules in the brain and things like that and on the time scale you're talking about, I think they're likely to dominate any of the biological evolution stuff.

It would be nice to stay there for the next billion years, but yeah, the worst part about dying is not dying. find out how accurate without but I know what the next three minutes are going to be like, we'll take care of some messages and then we'll get back to the phones five nine one seven two zero zero from Radio 720 WGN Chicago you're listening to extension 720 once again your host and moderator milton rosenberg and quickly in the little remaining time back to the phones it's on the air hello hello dr.Rosenberg yes ma'am hello my uncle Scott Sagan was once on your show yes yes I actually remember it yes I had a question for dr .

Sagan I was wondering how worthy you thought the bus fare was to experience. I'm sure you're Sagan too, yes, what's your name? Well Margaret, hello Margaret, how are you? Hey, as far as I know, Scott and I aren't related, we're trying to find out. This I don't think you are, but he was involved and you worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bosses is a very important, very good book on risk assessment. You know about one nuclear weapon, but you are related to the second one. Meet Bruce Sagan, yes that is absolutely true anyway, as far as my best Margaret is concerned, as far as biosphere 2 is concerned, you know this is an attempt at a closed ecological system in a place with a name wonderful Arizona miraculous and it was not closed.

Gases were exchanged and people came in and out and they had a wide variety of problems and because there are so many uncontrolled variables it can't be said to be a top-notch scientific experiment, now it seems like the scientists are more in charge and they may real science is being done, but with respect to what we were talking about earlier about closed ecological systems on other planets with humans living on them, clearly this is a precursor to that kind of thing. Our thanks to the caller five nine one 7200. you are on the air good evening, good evening, yes, sir, thank you for taking my call to take advantage of the last gentleman who called you and his comments about it.

I heard that there was a program that the government was paying for that was started and had been started to monitor extraterrestrial signals that recently apparently ended recently that's right but you know it is oh that's certainly true the project was called hrms high resolution microwave study started on October 12, 1992 and it was canceled exactly one year later. The argument of the main opponent, Senator Brian of Nevada, was that we did not know that there was extraterrestrial intelligence and also this is very expensive. How expensive? It would have cost one attack helicopter a year. Oh my gosh, was there ever a flash?

Was there ever a flicker of a signal? that could have been interpreted as a clever message, no, but they were buggy and they know that the startup time is long, but there is a very good coda to this and that is that they have the same people who raised private money and this project is now called Project Phoenix will be airing at least for a short period of time early next year from Australia sir, we appreciate the call, thank you and let us quickly move on to another one, it's on air, good evening, hello, yes sir.

Oh dr. . Second, I study and teach astronomy at the University of Kentucky and I have been surprised and dismayed to learn where you are going soon. Calling from a truck stop in Indiana was a small thing: you're sure it's portable, it works well, it's cool, and it's, I'm still excited about embarking on a teaching career, but I find that some of the problems seem almost insurmountable, we're talking about go to the stars, but people know very little about science here, it seems well, there is no doubt that So-called scientific illiteracy is widespread and in a recent survey 25 percent of American adults did not know that the Earth revolved around of the Sun and it took a year to do it just to give a little calibration, and this is extremely foolish and dangerous.

He fixed a society that is based on science and technology and at the same time he fixed things that almost no one understands about science and technology and you know, it is clear that this is a recipe for disaster, this mixture of ignorance and power is going to explode in our We face each other sooner or later, especially in a democracy, where the people are supposed to control what the government does and if you look at all things related to science and technology, the government has to decide who is going to take these decisions if we cannot understand it.

What we are talking about, people do not understand science in technology in a compensatory way. Do they understand something else better? I think the general level of education Thomas Jefferson made a very profound comment in which he said that any society that imagines it can be both ignorant and free, imagine what never was and what will never be, and then you agree with me because I have been furious for years because, in general, although the quality and level of education and sophistication are declining precipitously in this society throughout the world. all areas science certainly also general literacy also numeracy also any concern with an investment in some of the important and persistent questions of value that matter to human beings and in part this is due to the free market system and the profit motive because if The idea is If you go to the lowest common denominator, then you don't waste time on the most difficult issue of raising people's gaze.

What I find in the television series Cosmos in many other ways is that people long to know about science and all the other things that we are talking about that they recognize that they have to understand that their own future is a tool for their children and grandchildren and that Society is simply not giving us what people need and what people want, and you know that you have to attack a little provincial and proper feeling. reference note, that's why a show like this works so well and gets a sizable audience to beat their way to your door because you're trying to give an intelligent talk about important things and if you ever talk to first graders , We would have a very hopeful idea of ​​what his interests and abilities might be if it hadn't been beaten out of him in the 12th grade.

Our thanks to the caller, Carl. We have about a minute and a half left to talk about the biggest questions about yourself and stepping on the boundaries of philosophical inquiry and worrying about what your life's work has accomplished in terms of shaping your values ​​and what it has led you to. the additional research represented in the new book in terms of fundamental questions, well, you know, last, last, such a big word. I would say one thing I have learned is how little we know, how the frontiers of knowledge are surrounded by a huge ocean of ignorance and every year we search for a little more land and avoid the ocean of ignorance. of us swampy and that's all that stands between us and drowning and I think it's very for a technical civilization the agricultural economy was not just entertainment but the difference between life and death look at medicine for example, it's knowledge which we have to take much more seriously. knowledge, so we better take care of not only going out into space or venturing into space, but also venturing into intelligences, that is correct and the two go hand in hand, of course they do.

It has been a pleasure to have you here once again like me. I am, of course, aware that it would be Carl Sagan's new book. A pale blue dot. A Vision of the Human Future in Space is published by Random House, so we've done it again. Thanks Milton, it's a pleasure as always.