Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 4: Carl Sagan's Five Principles

Starting point is 00:00:14 This is Brian Keating of the scientist, a special podcast, a breakaway podcast, under the Into the Impossible brand network. It's a pleasure to be discussing one of the greatest science communicators of all time. There really isn't anybody who compares to Carl and people have tried. I try. And it's not an easy thing to do. So we're going to be governing over his life, his work, his snubs, some of his greatest failures, some of his greatest triumphs. And of course, how he was perceived and how we perceive scientists today, thanks in large part due to him. He started a new brand of a science influencer and science podcasters.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Oh, a great deal of gratitude and a debt of gratitude to him. So today's episode of the scientist focuses on a boy who got his start in life in the cosmos. 1934, November 9th, in Brooklyn, New York, a five-year-old boy stood transfixed at the World's Fair, staring up at a massive projection of the future. The universe just got a little bit bigger, and that boy would spend the next 62 years of his life, making the universe feel both incomprehensibly vast, but also intimately personal to millions of people. Today, we're diving deep into the life and legacy of Carl Sagan, and I'm not just interested in telling you that he wrote Cosmos or influenced Neil deGrasse Tyson or worked on Voyager.

Starting point is 00:01:40 We know that. We're here to extract the principles that made him one of history's most effective scientific minds. And you may wonder, how did a working class kid from Brooklyn become the voice of science for an entire generation? What specific mental models did he use? And most importantly, what can we steal from his playboy? We'll cover in particular a book by Poundstone about him called Carl Sagan.

Starting point is 00:02:03 There's a slightly more critical biography of him. I don't think it was really enjoyed by the Sagan family, which I've had an honor, pleasure to talk to, two of whom I've had the honor and pleasure of talking to, his widow, Andruan, and his daughter, Sasha, both three, four, five years ago maybe when I was just starting the podcast. So it's interesting to come upon this episode, or maybe not interesting, but this primary source for this episode will at least be taken from a positive biography of him, which is Poundstone's book, as I said, A Life in the Cosmos, Carl Sagan, supplemented by some of Carl's own writing.

Starting point is 00:02:39 And so I aim to bring you a mix of first and secondhand sources because I think that's the best way to learn the history of these great individual scientists. It's not going to be a comfortable story about a scientific wonderkind who happened to do science on the side. It's about someone who was willing and often was, in fact, not just in principle,

Starting point is 00:02:59 hated by his peers, for achieving something bigger than what he might have been able to expect as that young kid back in the 1930s. Let me start with a number, 600 degrees Fahrenheit. It's 1960, and now a 26-year-old Sagan is a PhD student. He's standing in front of some of the most accomplished astronomers of their generation, and he's telling them something they weren't ready to hear, that the surface of Venus was hot enough to melt lead. The room erupted.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Senior scientists were initially cackling in laughter. Because the accepted wisdom said that Venus was maybe 50 degrees, maybe. Here was this kid, not a professor yet, telling them that they were off by a mere factor of 11x. But here's what separates Sagan from every other grad student with a wild theory. He didn't just guess. He built a model based on radio emissions that everyone else had dismissed as an equipment malfunction. The noise.

Starting point is 00:03:58 By the way, the word noise comes from the Latin for nausea, which we experimental physicists often would agree with. While they were protecting the reputations of the senior scientists, he was following the data wherever it led him. And it teaches us what I call Sagan's first principle. We know about Feynman's principle, the first principle is you should not fool yourself. The second principle is that you are the easiest person to fool, and the third principle is don't fool, Richard Feynman. But Sagan's principle, I would call that calculated audacity. He wasn't brave because he didn't understand the risk. He was brave because he'd done the math and reduced the risk.

Starting point is 00:04:34 Think about that for a second. When's the last time you made a prediction that could end your career before it started? And more importantly, when's the last time you were so certain of your data, you'd take that risk? Two years later, NASA's Marin, or two, confirmed Venus's surface temperature. A whopping 864 degrees Fahrenheit. Sagan was right. He was off by a mere 300 degrees, but what's that between friends? It was even hotter than predicted.

Starting point is 00:04:59 But here's the thing. Being right almost destroyed him. See, there's something nobody talks about in science. When you're being spectacularly correct, it can mean that everyone else is equally wrong. It doesn't make you popular. It makes you dangerous. It makes you a threat. And the same scientist who laughed at his Venus prediction now saw him as an instrument of their own undoing.

Starting point is 00:05:23 A true threat. This kid who was making them all look like fools, that's where Sagan's story. gets interesting. Because most people in face with professional jealousy do one of two things. They either retreat, become less visible, less bold, or they attack back, becoming bitter, playing politics, railing against gatekeepers in the very system itself. But Sagan did neither. He did something I've only seen a handful of exceptional people do. He expanded. While his peers were writing papers for other scientists, again started writing for the public, for you, for me. He took that gamble and it would not only define the wrong.

Starting point is 00:05:57 rest of his career became a great influence on generations of scientists, including me, and possibly including you. He bet that making science accessible to millions was more important than impressing dozens. His Harvard colleagues were appalled. One professor called him a carnival bark. Another said he'd never be taken seriously as a scientist. And in fact, in 1968, when Harvard denied him tenure, the message was clear. Choose. You can be a serious scientist, or you can be a science communicator. You can be a party line toller, or you can be Carl Sagan, but you cannot be both. This is the moment that breaks most people. You've worked your entire life to join the club, and the club rejects you. This is all he had ever dreamed about. He was on his own, cast away,

Starting point is 00:06:39 like a star ejected from the gravitational force field of its host galaxy. But the way Sagan responded reveals his second principle, turned stigma into strength. Cornell University offered him a position. But Sagan didn't negotiate, like someone who'd just been rejected by Harvard, he negotiated like somebody who knew exactly what he was worth. And this is a lesson that all too many scientists don't pay heed to today, especially, I'm afraid to say, women and minorities, who oftentimes just accept the first offer that they're given.

Starting point is 00:07:10 But he knew his worth. He told Cornell, I need resources for what I love. I need resources for public communication, for dissemination. After all, as I always say, although I never heard Carl Sagan, but I do believe he would agree. that scientists have a moral obligation to share what they learn with the public who pays their salary. Even at Cornell, a private Ivy League school, there's still a tremendous amount of support from NASA, the National Science Foundation, other sources, a funding that comes exclusively

Starting point is 00:07:37 thanks to the largesse of you, the taxpayer. Carl Sagan said, I need the freedom to write books, to appear in television, to engage with the media. His last book, Billions and Billions, makes fun of his own reputation as really portrayed in TV form by none of the other. out of the late great Johnny Carson, who actually coined the term billions and billions with a mop wig on his head, imitating Carl Sagan, they had great banter together. Sagan appeared on Johnny Carson, which was bigger than all the biggest talk shows. It was like the Joe Rogan experience times two or three because everybody watched Johnny Carson.

Starting point is 00:08:14 He was like the last thing you saw at night every night before you went to bed. Whereas, you know, a good deal of people watch Rogan, but not as many as watched Carson in his heyday. and that's when Carl Sagan would shine. See, Sagan saw what others didn't. He understood that science locked in ivory towers was a death sentence. He knew that wonder, real wonder, is contagious, but only if you're willing to share it. And this is where we need to stop and make something crystal clear. Sagan wasn't dumbing down signs.

Starting point is 00:08:40 I don't like to dumb down science. He was doing something much more difficult. It's easy to dumb down science. It's hard to make absolute scientific rigor while making it irresistible and accessible. It's easy to hide behind jargon. But explaining the greenhouse effect on Venus so clearly that a politician or a talk showhouse can't pretend that they don't understand it, that's damn hard. That brings us to 1983. Height of the Cold War.

Starting point is 00:09:06 Sagan and four of his colleagues publish a paper that should have stayed in academic journals. It was about nuclear war, or more precisely the aftermath of nuclear war. And if you've ever heard of nuclear winter, the idea that a nuclear war of atomic thermonuclear devices would trigger, a global ice age. He believed the science was solid. Others weren't so sure. The implications politically, and even in the media, were terrifying. And most scientists would have just published in some obscure journal, gotten 10 citations, and moved on, happy to have made their minuscule incremental contribution to the field that they're a member of. Let's let the policymakers figure it out, but that's not his job. But Sagan understood everything was his job. It was something

Starting point is 00:09:48 that his colleagues didn't or wouldn't admit when you discover something that could, quite frankly, end civilization. Staying quiet isn't noble. It's negligent. So Sagan did what no serious scientists was supposed to do. He went on TV. He testified before Congress. He flew to Moscow.

Starting point is 00:10:05 Moscow at the height of the Cold War was a dangerous place, especially for a learned scientist like Sagan. He met with Soviet scientists, colleagues, competitors. His American colleagues were furious. He was out there. politicizing and popularizing science, grandstanding. A Nobel laureate even called him a propagandist. But here's what I want you to understand. Sagan wasn't playing politics. He was living by his third principle. Responsibility scales with capability. Here's the only one who could explain something crucial. Explaining it isn't optional. It's a mandatory obligation. The nuclear winter work changed global

Starting point is 00:10:41 nuclear policy. At that time, both Reagan and Gorbachev cited it as an influence in arms reduction techniques. How many academic papers can say they influenced public policy between world superpowers that were engaged in a cold war? But again, for his sins, he was nominated for membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, the highest honor in American science, really in the world as an organization. The Nobel Prize is more prestigious, but it's not an organization. It's a collection of winners. He was rejected, nominated and rejected, rejected again and again and again. The message was clear. You can change the world or you can change the club that you're in, but you can't have it both ways. And this is what I meant to say when I said it's not a comfortable story, because the

Starting point is 00:11:27 truth is, Sagan could have had an easier life. He could have stayed in his lane, published in journals, been celebrated by peers. Instead, he chose impact over approval. He chose to be useful over being purely admired, but he had a huge ego. Let's be honest. He had a very big ego. And this brings us to 1980, PBS approaches Sagan with an insane proposition. They want him to host a 13-part television series about the universe. Now, we'll cover some of Sagan's flaws, foibles, and shortcomings in just a bit, but it's impossible not to talk about the 1980 world-shifting PBS documentary series called Cosmos. PBS approached Sagan with a proposition. They want him to host a 13-year-old part series about the universe. The budget, astronomical, the risk catastrophic, if it failed.

Starting point is 00:12:20 Whatever scientific credibility he had left would be on the line. Sagan's agent begged him not to do it. His colleagues warned him he'd become just another TV personality. Think YouTube influencers, popularizers. Maybe me included, who knows? Even his friends thought he was making a huge mistake. Cosmos was going to break records throughout the world. It would go on to be the most watched science program in television history. It's 600 million people across 60 countries, but the numbers don't tell the real story. The real story is in his letters. Thousands of them poured him from kids who decided to become scientist, from adults who went

Starting point is 00:12:58 back to school, from people who said for the first time in their lives, they understood their place in the universe. And this is Sagan's fourth principle, democratic genius. The idea that the deepest truths aren't just for specialists, that wonder isn't something you grow out of, you cultivate curiosity throughout your life. But what kept me when researching this is that while he was filming Cosmos, he was changing how society he saw itself. He was also going through his second divorce.

Starting point is 00:13:24 His wife said he literally couldn't stop working. We'd call a workaholic these days. At dinner, his mind would be on Mars. At his daughter's recital, he'd be calculating orbital mechanics. And this is the part where I'm supposed to warn you about work-life balance, but I'm not going to insult your intelligence. The truth is, the people who change the world, and that we cover on the show aren't really balanced.

Starting point is 00:13:45 Just as with my intellectual podcaster and least hero, David Senrod, the people that he covers, they're not balanced. Frequently, the founders on the founders' podcast have horrible family lives, multiple divorces, children's spurn that don't show up to even bury their parents. Usually a father. And so too what the scientists will cover. They're obsessed. They need to be obsessed.

Starting point is 00:14:06 They have to be obsessed. Is it worth it? Sagan's obsession was specific. He called it the cosmic perspective. the idea that once you truly understand our place in the universe, on the pale blue dots suspended in a sunbeam, as he called it, everything changes. War seems absurd. Hatred seems pointless. The only thing that matters is protecting this tiny world and expanding our understanding.

Starting point is 00:14:29 This wasn't philosophy for Sagan. It was strategy. Everything he did, from the Venus prediction to nuclear winter to cosmos the series, it all served this single vision. Make sure humanity sees its own reflection looking back on itself from space. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it. Astronauts call it the overview effect, the indelible, unrelenting change in themselves. That occurs once they see the planet Earth from space and how minuscule it is and how all the politicians ruin the planet. But not many of us can go to space, at least not yet.

Starting point is 00:15:04 Not yet. Maybe Musk vision will keep us alive and take us to the stars so we can. be like Katie Perry, perhaps all of us. Now, we turn somber. For real, it's 1995 in January. The winter is approaching Sagan's 60 years old. He's been fighting bone marrow disease for two long years. He knows he's dying. What does he do? He writes faster. Reminds me of Alexander Hamilton. Why do you write like you're running out of time, the song goes? His last book, The Demon Haunted world isn't about space. It's about thinking. It's about Sagan. trying to download everything he knows about not knowing and not being fooled.

Starting point is 00:15:45 To teach truths in a world full of lives, to his young children on that he won't get to see grow into old age. He writes about what he calls the baloney detection kit, a set of tools for critical thinking. But really, it's more than that. It's Sagan's fifth and final principles. Skeptical optimism. Pessimistic optimism. Question everything, but believe in the potential of human beings and humanity itself.

Starting point is 00:16:09 Doubt claims, but don't doubt our ability to find the answers. Be critical of ideas, but generous with people. And I think it's quite lovely to think about Carl. He never recanted his atheism as some claim that he did. That's not true. We'll talk about his foibles and failings in just a second. But I want to wrap up this segment of the five principles, at least. With that cold winter day at the end of 1996, December 20th,

Starting point is 00:16:35 Carl Sagan leaves this earth. He was working on a new book. He had speeches scheduled. He had ideas, so many ideas left to share. But here's what I can't stop thinking about. In his last interview, knowing he was dying, Sagan didn't talk about his accomplishments. He talked about what was left to do.

Starting point is 00:16:53 He talked about the generation of scientists who would come after him. He's talking about you. So here's my question. What would you change if you knew you had only 62 years, not 80, 120 as we sometimes wish our fellows? what comfortable lies would you stop telling yourself? What bold scientific opinion or prediction would you make? What truth would you insist upon sharing,

Starting point is 00:17:16 even if it made you unpopular, even if it got you kicked out of the clubs that you once wanted in so desperately? Sagan bet on that simple idea that wonder and skepticism could coexist, that you could be rigorous and poetic, that science belonged to everyone. That the cosmic perspective wasn't just for astronomers. It was for anyone,

Starting point is 00:17:36 brave enough to look up. And he paid for that bet. Boy, he did. He was mocked by peers, rejected by institutions, criticized by people who should have been his champions. But he also had 600 million ravenous people, more than any other scientist ever seen before or since. Even the Great Meal of the Grass Tice will never reach that many people.

Starting point is 00:17:58 Because the media landscape is so much more fragmented. You spend all your time watching the scientist and listening to the scientist's podcast. It doesn't leave you, Tom. to go off and watch other scientists in the same depth that those 600 million people around the planet watched him. And the world was much smaller back then in 1980, probably about 5 billion people. This was a much larger fraction of the population of Earth

Starting point is 00:18:21 that got to see it. And there are millions of people who also engaged and read his books, eye among them. And somewhere, right now, a kid is looking up at the stars for the first time those billions and billions of stars and feeling that they're part of something,

Starting point is 00:18:35 vast, beautiful, and worth protecting. Now, now, I said he's not perfect. Nobody's perfect. Although I tell people that are looking for their husbands, I say, do not look for the perfect man because my wife got the last one. But I do want to touch upon some of the imperfections.

Starting point is 00:18:51 Of course, of course. Can't overlook the challenges to this perfect vision of Sagan that everyone loves to have. I believe that during the Biden administration on NASA, the administrator didn't swear herself in on the Bible, she swore herself in on a copy of one of Carl Sagan's books. I found that embarrassing as a scientist and as a somewhat agnostic individual myself, but I have to point out that Sagan himself was quite naive when it came to theology.

Starting point is 00:19:21 As most atheists that I've encountered are, foremost among them Sam Harris, completely ignorant about religion, at least the Judeo-Christian version, except where he attempts to mock it. Now, Dawkins is as well, and I've interviewed both of them, as well as Dan at the late Great Nandena. So I have my bona fides, my chops, and debating these people, and I don't take it from a perspective of pure theism. I always call myself a devout practicing agnostic. But in the demon-haunted world and in contact, he reduced complex theological traditions

Starting point is 00:19:53 and the meaning of life into primitive superstitions or evil dogmatism that the belief in the supernatural was uniquely capable of having. And that's the false dichotomy. There are many scientists who have religious traditions. can balance the lack of evidence in their choice of religion with their demand for evidence, as Sagan did in rational, scientific endeavors. And that neglects, obviously, mystical traditions

Starting point is 00:20:18 from Judaism to Christianity, from Maimonides to Thomas Aquinas to Herschel. And these need to realize that it's a little bit more sophisticated than Sagan gave. Of course, the evil character, the most evil character in contact. Spoiler alert. If you haven't seen it, you know, pause. now, but pause the podcast now, but the evil one is a religious fundamentalist who thinks it's

Starting point is 00:20:40 going to be bad to go to space and visit this vegan stellar system that Ellie Arroy, based on our good friend and past guest J.L. Tartar loosely, at least, is based upon. So Sagan's view of God, like many of the atheists, is intentionally simplistic, straw manned for rhetorical clarity. And so not all religious belief has to be reduced to God of the Gaps. And I think this reductive definitional, you know, kind of trait that he had misses the richness of non-fundamentalist, at least, theology. He also was incredibly sentimental when it came to the point and teleology of the universe without a God.

Starting point is 00:21:18 He said, if we're alone in the universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space. Now, this is just sappiness dressed up as logic. The cosmos owes us no company, no purpose, no symmetry, especially without a divine being. So his lines, while poetic, they import a kind of smuggled teleological bias into a universe that, as Kimu put it, is unreasonably silent. It's an emotional appeal. It's not a scientific inference. Vastness isn't waste. It's data.

Starting point is 00:21:46 And a good scientist like him should have known. Next. The four principles, five principles, I have to have five counterpoints. Otherwise, people accuse me of not being balanced. His optimism, again, bordered on naivete. His science and civilization thoughts. were inspiring, but they could feel blind to history's darker patterns, from eugenicist to climate science, it's not immune. Science itself is not immune to misuse. The greatest country

Starting point is 00:22:10 in terms of scientific output in the 90s was Germany. The greatest reliance on university education was Germany, and look what that produced. So over-indexing on the potential of life, intelligent life, including ours, and underplaying the ability and propensity to destroy itself was a hallmark of his career until he wrote a pale blue dot, which was really really just a speech and it was then turned into a book, one of his 30 books that he either wrote or co-wrote. So optimism can be earned through history, but you shouldn't assume it's naturally going to occur through evolution. That's my principle number three. So the anti-Sagan principle, it's not really anti. It's this counterpoint to Carl's counterpoint. Science became somewhat

Starting point is 00:22:51 of a religion to him. It was replaced in his ideas of what a religion could be, oversimplified and straw men, with science as a pure source of, of wonder, which is fine, curiosity, which is wonderful, but not ethics and not meaning. Science has nothing to say about it. Science means knowledge in Latin. It doesn't mean wisdom. For wisdom, you need experience. And from experience, you need to have judgment to winnow away the good experience to the bad

Starting point is 00:23:19 experience, to have good judgment, and to know when wisdom is necessary to make decisions, not to worship as he seemed to do the sort of high priests and priestesses. of past history of the history of science. So canonization of skeptical inquiry that he would typically show, you know, it's sometimes beer into a form of almost dogmatic orthodoxy itself. And that, to me, leaves squeezing out the rhetorical room for the metaphysical and bordering on the worship of science itself and what I call scientism. So let's not confuse the two and conflate the two.

Starting point is 00:23:58 They are two separate things. And lastly, he was certainly respected by many of his peers, but not all of them, and many of them who would play a role in the public discourse that did criticize him from the highest levels of scientific acumen, shall we say, Stephen Weinberg among them, Edward Teller and others, did criticize him his science for not being as technically sophisticated or as important to the canon of science. Now, Weinberg, you could kind of say him that he didn't have a particular axe to grind. Maybe he did. Maybe he was jealous of Sagan's fame. But I doubt it. He had a Nobel Prize, and Sagan never did. But his snubbing and rejection from the National Academy of Sciences reflected this tension

Starting point is 00:24:43 that most of his peers did, in fact, not respect him or were to consume by their own hatred and jealousy of him. We'll never know the truth. These things tend to be sealed for decades. For what reason, I don't know, to protect the guilty, maybe. But I want to finish with kind of where we started, which is this notion of Sagan as a kind of preternatural boy genius that never lost the curiosity of that young boy in Brooklyn. And that's his real legacy. There's no way to diminish that light.

Starting point is 00:25:13 Not his discoveries, though they were important and significant. Some of them are incredibly readable and enjoyable to this day. He actually convinced a voyage to Jupiter to turn around and take pictures of the Earth on its way out to Jupiter and slingshotting around the sun and then looked to see if it could detect signs of life as if Earth were an exoplanet. And he comments in the paper about the strange narrow band radio signals, and those are, of course, coming from radio and television stations, but also a green infrared hue, sorry, red infrared hue, which is coming from a photosynthesis that's occurring. on the planet. So he kind of intelligently, uniquely, creatively used a spacecraft to Galileo spacecraft to turn its cameras back on the Earth, to look at us. And that's part of his legacy, too. Not just the books or the TV series or the interviews on Johnny Carson. It was the permission that he gave us. He was sort of accessible. He was the first really accessible scientist

Starting point is 00:26:12 that achieved worldwide mass of fame. And he taught us famously claiming, although I hate this phrase, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence because I don't have a special drawer where I keep my extraordinary evidence. I just pull out the evidence and I use it whenever I have it. You know, here's my piece of alien spacecraft that I found in my kid's underwear drawer. And I'm not going to say that this piece came from aliens, but maybe it did come from aliens. But to refute it, I don't bring out the extraordinary evidence. I bring out evidence. But anyway, that's a minor quip.

Starting point is 00:26:44 You probably don't agree with that sentiment. but demand evidence, never stop wondering, and to be intellectually and emotionally rigorous. And that will help us to expand and explore into the cosmos. We're desperately trying to understand. Those are the principles of Carl Sagan. And this has been the scientists. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 4: Carl Sagan's Five Principles

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