| Article: 43132
From: [email protected] (Paul Middler)
Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors,alt.paranet.ufo
Subject: Transcript of Carl Sagan Interview
Date: 22 Sep 1994 09:43:13 -0600
Organization: DeepCove BBS
= Here is a transcript from an hour-long interview of Dr. Carl Sagan =
= which took place at 08/26/94, 7 pm PDT, on a Vancouver, Canada =
= AM-radio station called CKNW. =
[Intro] And now, broadcasting from Vancouver, and throughout western
Canada, "The World Tonight" with Philip Till and John McComb.
[Till] For anyone remotely interested in space and space travel, Dr.
Carl Sagan needs no introduction, but I'll do it anyway. Dr. Sagan
has been associated with the NASA space agency since the 50s. He's
the man who was with the astronauts before their flights to the moon.
He was involved with the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo
expeditions to the planets. Dr. Sagan is a Pulitzer Prize winner
and his book "Cosmos" became the best selling science book ever
published. He is a scientist trained in astronomy and biology, and
what he hasn't studied about the planets probably is not worth
studying. His next book is called "Pale Blue Dot - a Vision of the
Human Future in Space". And Dr. Carl Sagan is on the line live from
California. A very good evening to you.
[Sagan] And to you.
[Till] Dr. Sagan, I could have gone on and on but we'd need to be
here 'til midnight if we ran your list of credentials.
[Sagan] Well, most generous of you to list any of them. Thank you.
[Till] Does humanity have a future in space?
[Sagan] If we have a future at all, I would say we have a future in
space. It's possible we might destroy ourselves tomorrow, but failing
that, the reasons for going into space will become more and more
obvious, the ability to do so, the technology will become more
efficient and less expensive, and eventually it will happen. And it's
just a question of when and who.
[Till] But what is your vision of the human future in space.
[Sagan] Well, there are many, many aspects to it. One is the fact
that we humans are an exploratory species. I mean that not just in
the sense of the settling of the Canadian arctic or something like
that, but the fact that for a million years our ancestors were
hunters and gatherers with no fixed abode. We were wanderers, nomads
in the savannas and the steppes, and I believe that is deeply built
into us. We are designed that way by natural selection, by the
evolutionary process. And the fact that we spent the last 10,000
years in villages and cities has not wholely wiped out that
predilection, that propensity. And just at the moment, that the
earth's surface is entirely explored, the same science that permitted
that exploration allows us to consider going to other worlds. It's a,
I'm saying that there's a kind of emotional root to the longing that
some people have for exploration of other worlds, but there're many
other practical purposes: one is if you understand other worlds, you
understand your own better, another is, in the long term, that the
more worlds humans are on, the better we've hedged our bets, the
safer the species is from a catastrophy of planetary proportions, and
we can identify a particular kind of catastrophy that we had better
start paying attention to and that is the impact of asteroids or
comets from space on the earth as Jupiter was hit by comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9, in mid-July, and in the long run there is no
immediate threat but over the course of centuries, thousands of
years, there is one, and to midigate or prevent that threat we
clearly have to be able to move small worlds around. You can't do
that if you are not in space. There are other reasons as well, but
that's a kind of flavor of the arguments that at least I find
appealing.
[McComb] Dr. Sagan, let's stay with the asteroid issue for just a
second. It's an issue that's gained an awful lot of attention
given the recent developments in our solar system, how do you
see that developing, do we have the technology now that can help
us move those small bodies around?
[Sagan] Well the first, the first point is to know if any of them
are dangerous. And so far, none of them are as far as we know. But we
have inventoried only a small fraction of the near-earth objects,
NEOs, that exist. There are something like 2,000 NEOs more than about
a kilometer across and that's the size that would pose a danger
to the global civilization if they impacted the earth. The chance of
the earth being hit by one of those objects, statistically - we
wouldn't know which one right now - in the next century is something
approaching one chance in a 1,000. Now one chance in a 1,000, that is
not a risk most people would take in boarding a commercial airline,
[Interviewers chuckle] where the chances of dying on a give flight is
a little less than one in a million. And it seems prudent to be able
to take some precautions against such a threat if it emerges, so the
first step is to inventory the dangerous ones and one thing that
happened in the wake of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts with Jupiter is
that congress has now prepared a bill to mandate that in ten years,
which is a pretty quick pace, all of these 2,000 big-ish asteroids
and comets be inventoried, found, and their orbital elements
determined. We have much more time to deal with the question of how
to deflect, because as I say the chance of it happening in the near
future are comparatively small. Now this is a double-edged sword
because if you have the ability to deflect a threatening asteroid so
it doesn't hit the earth, you also have the ability to redirect an
innocent unthreatening asteroid so it does hit the earth and there
are many more unthreatening asteroids that can be made to hit the
earth than dangerous ones that are going to hit the earth that you
want to deflect. So as often happens, especially in our century
with high technology, we have to be very careful and be sure we know
what we are doing and I believe we should go very slowly on
developing the means to deflect asteroids and very quick in
inventorying the asteroidal and cometary population.
[McComb] Dr. Sagan, let's move back to the issue of exploration. We
have been to moon, there is talk and, I suppose, fairly advanced
planning for Mars, but what after that or is that too far into the
future to consider?
[Sagan] Well, the surface area of Mars equals the land area of the
earth, so Mars itself will occupy us for quite a while and it's a
world of wonders. I can touch on a few, a few aspects of it. One of
the most exciting aspects of it is that there are ancient river
valleys, hundreds of them, all over Mars. Mars is today a cold,
bone-dry, desert, ice-age world. And yet here are all these ancient
river valleys, ancient lakes - some of very large dimensions - and
some planetary scientists think they see evidence for ancient
shorelines of oceans. And what's more, we can date the epoch of Mars
when the water was running and that's about four billion years ago,
plus or minus a few hundred million. Now four billion years ago is
the time on earth when the origin of life happened, we are quite
certain of that, again plus or minus a couple hundred million years.
So is it likely that you have two adjacent planets with very similar
environmental conditions, then, and life arises on one but not the
other? Or is it more likely that life arose on ancient Mars, that
it's chemical and morphological fossils are waiting for us to
discover there, and that as the climate changed into the present,
deep ice age, the organisms retreated to, you know, refugia - to
the, to the last remaining clement enviroment, until they too were
extinguished or maybe there could be life, could there?, in oases
which remain to be discovered on Mars. This is an extremely
interesting question. Notice it has two facets, one is the search for
life, and the other is the issue of climate change - something of
very major practical concern for us who are busy pushing and pulling
on the climate system when we hardly know what we're doing.
[Till] Dr. Sagan, we'll want to talk to you about life out there
and also your new work, "Pale Blue Dot". We must do some business.
Our guest is Dr. Carl Sagan and we will be back in a couple of
minutes.
...
[Till] Our guest on the line, live from California, Dr. Carl Sagan
world-reknown astronomer. His latest work is called "Pale Blue Dot"
and we certainly want to talk to him about that. But before we went
into the break, we were talking about life out there. Dr. Sagan, your
position on life in outer space?
[Sagan] I'm in favor of it.
[laughter]
[Till] Of the human kind or other kind?
[Sagan] I'd settle for anything. The simple fact is that we don't
know. The only life we know about is the life from Earth. On the
other hand, we are at the very earliest stages of looking and we'd be
foolish to confuse absence of evidence with evidence of absence. We
are, we have landed spacecraft especially the Viking I and Viking II
spacecraft from the United States on Mars. We have used large radio
telescopes to see if anyone is sending us a message from a planet of
a distant star and we certainly have not obtained anything that is
absolutely compelling in the way of evidence. On the other hand,
there are some tantalizing hints and we've just begun the search, our
technology is improving, and I just think that the right attitude is
to withhold consent until the evidence is absolutely compelling. Keep
an open mind and keep seeking.
[Till] Is there anything you've seen over the years, Dr. Sagan, from
reports of UFOs to people talking about abductions, is there anything
that's left you just about convinced?
[Sagan] No, nothing, nothing there seems to be even in the ballpark
of reasonable evidence. All those cases are anecdotal. They're mere
stories reported by one or two people. We know that such accounts are
riddled with misapprehension of natural objects, with hopes, and with
psychological apparitions. Where the stakes are high, you would not
want to believe unless the evidence was absolutely firm, and there's
nothing approaching absolutely firm. Here, I mean, there are people
who say they woke up in bed to find themselves surrounded by half a
dozen short, grey, large-eyed, sexually-obsessed beings who pick them
up, ooze them through the walls of their bedroom, carry them to a
waiting spacecraft and there, subject them to unconventional medical
and especially sexual examination, and then later they wake up in bed.
Well, that's an interesting story. But we have a well-known
phenomenon which all humans have experienced, in which we are in bed
and something funny seems to happen to us - it's called dreaming. And
we would want absolutely to be sure that this is not something like
dreaming or hypnagogic sleep or hallucinations which are also very
common and nothing to be ashamed of, before we could give the
slightest amount of credence to this. What is striking to me is the
absence of physical evidence - no page from the captain's log book,
no photograph of the interior of the spacecraft that could not have
been faked, no flake of alien paint, no small artifact which is
examined and people say "oh my goodness these isotopes are completely
unfamiliar on Earth." Nothing, anything like that, nothing
approaching it. And until there is, I think we must treat these cases
with most extreme skepticism.
[McComb] We don't want to belabor this particular issue but the
believers would suggest that all of those things exist - the crashed
spacecraft and the bodies of aliens, etc, etc, but that it's all a
massive government coverup.
[Sagan] Yes, yes, they can say that, but that may or may not be true.
But until they can produce the physical evidence we don't know. It's
a mere contention.
[Till] What is your new work about, "The Pale Blue Dot - a Vision of
the Human Future in Space"?
[Sagan] It's a book that will be out in the United States and Canada
in October, so we are talking about a couple of months before
publication, and it's about a number of things. One thing it's about
is the human propensity in all cultures to develop the conceit that
we're at the center of the universe or that we are the reason that
the universe was made. And this is a kind of childish fantasy which
many of the world religions have embraced. And it has held back the
progress of science, it has held back our knowledge of ourselves, and
it has also undermined religion because when religions invest
themselves in statements that are clearly erroneous and refuse to
give in to the facts, they then undermine the authority of their
statements, for example, in moral and ethical areas. And I think it's
very interesting to track the kind of resistance there has been at
every step in the progress of science by many people to acknowledge
that we are not at the center of the universe, that we are in the
galactic boondocks, that we are obscure and small. There is a fear of
tinyness that I believe is a kind of characterlogical deficit. And
one of the advantages of our time is that our true circumstances, our
true coordinates in the universe are becoming clear. That's one theme
of the book. Another theme is to trace the recent history of
planetary exploration so we can place our planet in the context of
the hundred other worlds that we know something about in our solar
system and beyond, because we have now evidence for at least three
planets going around another star, and the expectation that planets
are a cosmic commonplace. And in the last part of the book is an
effort to trace, and this is of course quite speculative, what our
future involvement will be in space, motivated by the kinds of things
I said at the very beginning of this program. Not because I believe I
can predict the future but to present a positive vision of such a
future to...as a basis for further discussion. So that's the, I guess,
the three components of "Pale Blue Dot".
[Till] Are we stuck, at the moment, when it comes to space travel, I
mean the shuttle goes up on missions but we don't seem to go very
far. We're not... seem to be going to the spectacular lengths of the
Moon Shot or is that simply layman's nonsense that I've just...
[Sagan] No, no that's layman's truth and Space Agency nonsense. That
is...you send four to seven people up 200 miles in the air, above the
air. Note 200 miles. That's nothing...200 miles is not the distance
between Montreal and Quebec, I believe. And that's considered to be a
remarkable accomplishment. And there they orbit the Earth for a week
running over the same orbit that has been done dozens of times
before, and they grow tomatoes or watch newts reproduce or something
like that, and then they come back down again. And that's passed onto
us as if..as exploration. That's not exploration, that's riding a
bus. And you are absolutely right, that from 1969 to 1972 there was a
historic, truly exploratory venture, the Apollo program, in which
humans went to another world, did true exploration of a place that no
human had ever been to before. It reminds me of a toddler who takes a
few courageous steps away from his mother, and then, frightened, runs
back and hides behind her skirts. We had the courage and the
resources for a few years and since then, as far as the human space
program, the so-called manned space program goes, we've lost our
initiative. But at the same time the most extraordinary, true
exploration has been happening throughout the rest of the solar
system with robotic spacecraft, mainly from the United States and
Soviet Union with a few further missions from Japan and the European
Space Agency. And that is the most extraordinary, exploratory story
of the last few decades.
[McComb] And we will continue this story in just a few moments. Our
guest on the line from California is Dr. Carl Sagan. His new book
"Pale Blue Dot" is due out in the fall. We'll continue our discussion
after this break.
...
[Till] Philip Till and John McComb with you on the "World Tonight".
Our guest, and we are honored to have him, is Dr. Carl Sagan, the
world reknown astronomer. His new book coming out in the fall is
"Pale Blue Dot" and if you'd like to get involved with our
discussion and conversation about space and space travel, you are
more than welcome to do so, give us a call. In the lower mainland of
British Columbia at 280-0491, 280-0491 and if you are with us in
Winnipeg tonight, in Calgary and Edmonton, wherever else you may be,
toll-free 1-800-667-0946. Dr. Sagan, if what we are doing now with
the shuttle is basically driving the bus, what should we be doing,
however keeping in mind that they are not giving the kinds of funds
anymore that those space travellers really want?
[Sagan] Well I think the question you have to ask before you
can answer that is what are our goals in space? And the shuttle
and Apollo are so-called manned missions - I hate the phrase, because
there are after all women astronauts - human missions into space.
Why do we want humans up there? And the idea that they're good for
science is, in almost every case, wrong. Humans are in the way in
science and they increase the cost enormously. Robots are extremely
efficient. There is no task I know of that's scientific in earth
orbit that requires a human. There are claims that you need humans to
do manufacturing in space. No strong case has been made that
profitable industries can develop from manufacturing things in the
vacuum of space for example. And if you could, the method of doing it
would almost certainly be robotic. So if that's true, if weather
observations, if monitoring the environmental health of the earth, if
telescopes looking out to probe the origins of the universe, if
missions to the planets, if communication satellites, if military
reconnaissence satellites all can do their stuff without humans, what
do we need humans for at all in space. That is the key question to my
mind, before we can answer your question.
[McComb] Canada is involved with the United States and some other
nations in building the space station, the space station "Freedom"
which will orbit the earth, Dr. Sagan, your thoughts on that. Is that
type of project necessary?
[Sagan] Again, it depends on our goals. If we have no reason for
humans to enter the space environment, no reason for humans to go to
other worlds, then there's no reason for the space shuttle. For just
the reason I just said. However, I think that there are reasons for
humans to be up there. Not to do science, not to do any of the tasks
I just said, but for historic, social, political reasons and for
reasons of the long term safety of the human species, some of which
I eluded to at the beginning. An argument that American and Russian
high officials, not just space officials, but I mean of the highest
levels, find attractive these days is that these two former Cold War
adversaries combining in a technological strength of both nations
on behalf of the planet, the human species, in a long term, forward
looking, high technology endeavor. That's worth something. The United
States who also find another argument that it's desire for the Soviet
rocket building program to be involved in peaceful space activities
rather than tempting them to go for currency by selling the
technology to nations that are considered unreliable, that want them
for weapons purposes.
[Till] Dr. Sagan, many people wanting to speak with you this evening
and we'll take our first call from White Rock. Hello there.
[White Rock] How are you doing tonight gentlemen?
[Till] Very good.
[White Rock] Very honored to speak with you Dr. Sagan.
[Sagan] Oh thank you so much.
[White Rock] I'll make my points then I'll hang up and listen to your
responses. Basically what I wanted to know first of all was the
Galileo probe that will be dropping a part of itself into the
atmosphere of Jupiter. Will this probe be able to detect any changes
in the atmosphere caused by the collision of the comet. And second
of all, as an amateur historian, I am fascinated by the Tunguska
explosion in 1908 where an unidentified object came through earth's
atmosphere and slammed into the earth with such force that the
seismic stations around the world picked it up and it threw people
who were living in the area to the ground, it knocked horses down, it
caused a huge fireball that was described by the Tunguskas as exactly
the same as survivors of Hiroshima had described the atomic blast.
And I was wondering if there was any more data concerning this and
has there been any more studies done about this blast and its
effects, 'cause I read the book, "The Fire Came By", and it's just a
fascinating read.
[Till] Thank you for your call sir. I want to get many more callers
in so I'll get Dr. Sagan to respond to that.
[Sagan] Let me answer the questions in reverse order. The Tunguska
explosion in 1908 which you very nicely summarized just now,
is almost certainly the impact of a small asteroid or more likely
small comet with the earth's atmosphere. An object that broke up
and exploded in the atmosphere before it reached the surface of the
earth. Now that object seems to have been only a few tens of meters
in diameter and the objects that I talked about earlier, that
arguably might threaten the global civilization are about a kilometer
across. That is about the size of the larger fragments from comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 that impacted Jupiter last July. So if you just
take your description and imagine that that is something which is
much, much smaller than the objects that hit Jupiter, you can get
some vague sense of how dangerous big impacts might be. I might also
mention that 65 million years ago a ten kilometer diameter object hit
the earth and seems to have been the immediate cause of the
extinction of the dinosaurs and of 75 percent of the other species of
life on earth. This is dangerous stuff. On your other question, the
Galileo spacecraft does have an entry probe which will enter the
atmosphere of Jupiter, if all goes well, in December of 1995. And we
have no idea what it will find, as to whether it will be able to find
traces of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact, much of that may have
disappeared by then.
[Till] Thank you for your call and many calls on the line wanting to
speak with Dr. Sagan so there's not much point in me giving you the
phone number out again but I will ask you to be patient on the lines
while we take a break for once we will take it more or less on time.
Dr. Carl Sagan is our guest and more of your calls, please be
patient, we'll be back in a couple of minutes.
...
[McComb] Philip Till and John McComb with you on "The World Tonight".
Thank you for joining us this evening. On the line from California is
Dr. Carl Sagan and let's take another call from Vancouver. Good
evening.
[S.W.] Good evening. Hi there, my name is Steve Whitehouse <sp>, I'm
the president of the Vancouver Center of the Royal Astronomical
Society of Canada and I'd like to talk to Dr. Sagan with regards to
his views on the role of amateur astronomers around the world.
[Till] Good point, a lot of you out there too, Dr. Sagan.
[Sagan] Thank you. I think, well first of all, amateur astronomy is
fun. As we saw most recently, again in the impact of those
20-some-odd fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 that impacted
Jupiter. There, with a relatively small telescope, you could stand
out in your backyard and see these enormous, earth-sized blemishes
appear in the upper atmosphere and clouds of Jupiter and that is a
truely remarkable experience for an amateur astronomer. I feel that
it is a superb educational tool for children, a way to get them
excited about science and technology and the universe around them. I
just wish there were many more amateur astronomers and I think the
Royal Astronomical Society of Canada has, over the years - I
followed its progress a little bit - done an excellent job.
[Till] Next call from Vancouver for Dr. Sagan. Good evening.
[Vancouver] Good evening Dr. Sagan. I previously had the opportunity
to talk to you, like so many people you had a definite influence on
my interest in astronomy with your wonderful "Cosmos" series, which
is available still in a lot of video stores and I recommend people to
watch it, it still, it hasn't aged that's for sure, it's still very
up to date and just an incredible show. I wanted to ask you though,
in general, and the last caller talked a bit about amateur
astronomers and so on, I'm thinking of all the events in the last
little while, particularly of the comet crash and the perseid meteor
shower, etc. we can get 250,000 people to go out to a firework
display, but an event such as the Perseids or the comet crash only a
few thousand people will go out, and I am looking at a generation
growing up in the urban centers that now will probably never even see
a dark sky. Why aren't more people interested in astronomy and
looking at the dark sky and the beauty of Saturn and Jupiter, etc.
[Till] Any answer for that?
[Sagan] {laughs} One part of the answer is, you yourself said if you
grow up in an urban environment with lots of light pollution at night
with clouds and smog, you look up and you see nothing. And after a
while you become accustomed to the proposition that there's nothing
to see. Such people are sometimes astonished, dazzled when they find
themselves on the countryside on a clear night. But you also might
have asked, never mind looking up at the night sky, why aren't more
people interested in Euclidean geometry or simple algebra or
chemistry or history. I know the educational deficits that we worry
about in the United States are not nearly as bad in Canada and
particularly not as bad in British Columbia. British Columbia has a
superb educational system judging from international competitions in
science, in 11th grade and 8th grade and 6th grade, I think they
were. But in the United States and in many other countries there has
been declining abilities which, of course, are correlated with
declining interest in the most basic and important and exciting and
interesting subjects and clearly it bodes ill for the future.
[McComb] Well, Dr. Sagan, I can tell you I'm one of those people who
became interested in astronomy based on getting out into the
Arizona desert, I grew up in Tuscon, and we use to camp at the foot
of Kitt Peak, which I'm sure you are familiar with, and the first
night of camping there in the desert and looking up at what was
literally a carpet of sky, stars across the sky, was a tremendous
sight and was breath-taking indeed.
[Sagan] You know, the most stars that you can see with the naked eye
on the most absolutely clear night is about 3,000. The number of
stars in the Milky Way galaxy is about 400 billion.
[Till] {Chuckles} But what can we do with that information, Dr.
Sagan, knowing that they are out there. This is a bit of frustration,
I think, that we know it's there but what can we do about it, what
should we do about it?
[Sagan] What's the it?
[Till] The stars out there, the planets out there, everything that's
out there. Billions of Billions of this that and the other and we
talk about it but we never seem to get very far.
[Sagan] Well, stars are far away. {laughs} I mean we haven't gotten
to them because we're at a very backward and primitive and early
stage in our technology. For example, the fastest spaccraft the human
species have ever launched are the Voyager I and II spacecraft. They
are travelling so fast that it will take them 30,000 years to go the
distance of the nearest star, and they are not headed towards the
nearest star so even in 30,000 years they won't get there. But as
time goes on we will have better propulsion systems, we will be able
to get to the stars in shorter periods of time. But long before that,
in the next few decades, in fact, we should be able to start a
comprehensive inventory of the planets around the nearest stars. And
nobody knows what we are going to find. Will we find other earths? It
is possible by remote studies to even discover the existance of
life...it is...there are dazzling prospects in store.
[Till] That's if we do not implode and kill ourselves on this planet.
[Sagan] Yes, everything depends upon that.
[Till] Next call for Dr. Sagan from Tsawwassen. Hello there.
[Tsawwassen] Hi, oh Dr. Sagan, it is such an honor to speak to you.
I wanted to be you since I was 11. [laughter] He almost asked my
question, I was going to say, I read your book "Contact" that novel
you wrote and it was really good. And I am wondering, do you see us
maybe going that way in terms of exploration as opposed to say the
Star Trek future - we get in a spaceship and we go light years around
checking out new planets? Exactly what do you think we'll be leaning
to in terms of current economic policy and the way we seem to be
waffling about in terms of going out? Space exploration isn't that
important. Do you think we might have to go underground with this or
what?
[laughter]
[Sagan] Underground is a bad place to be from.
[Till] She wants to be you though Dr. Sagan.
[Sagan] Well it's, you know, please, please be me. Contact, which
BTW is being made into a motion picture, is about using radio
telescopes to look for a message and then getting one that is
fantastically rich and in fact it's the instructions for building a
machine. Now nobody knows what the contents of amessage from another
civilization in space would be like, but that's one of many
interesting possibilites. It's certainly much cheaper for us to try
to listen for radio messages with radio telescopes and try to detect
planets around other stars than to go to other stars. Going to other
stars is not an activity for us in the next decades or probably even
centuries. It's for the millenia.
[McComb] We should keep our eyes out for the message in the bottle.
[Sagan] Ah, yes. {Chuckle}
[McComb] Dr. Carl Sagan is our guest on the line from California. We
will continue our discussion and take more of your calls when we come
back. Stay with us on "The World Tonight".
...
[Till] Final segment of calls to Dr. Carl Sagan. His new book "Pale
Blue Dot - a Vision of the Human Future in Space" is coming up in
October. Vancouver, you are on the air with Dr. Carl Sagan.
[Vancouver] Hello Mr. Sagan. A long time fan from the early days of
Johnny Carson, but everyone has a lot of respect for you. I have two
questions that I have maybe I can get an answer to. The first
question is do you think there is a correlation between earthquakes
on the planet earth and other activities in the cosmos, and the
second part and the other question, which is quite a bit different,
the comet Bourlia <sp>, we were wondering if we could see it in
binoculars in mid-September. And I'll hang up and listen to the
answer.
[Till] Thank you for your call.
[Sagan] Briefly, I don't know the answer to your second question and
comets, however, their brightness is often unpredictable and I know
of no correlation between earthquakes and anything beyond the earth.
[Till] New Westminster, you're on the air with Dr. Sagan.
[New West] Yes, gentlemen, I always find it very interesting when
hearing a member of the american scientific or academic community
explaining some major events. I was a little concerned about the
dismissal of empirical evidence with this disparaging term of
anecdotal, that was ringing some bells, because medical people
are fond of saying what you see is not really real. Although in
court rooms, of course, may people have been sent to the electric
chair based upon anecdotal evidence of somebody saying, well
somebody shot somebody, I saw that, I saw the blood, you know,
I saw the smoke, whatever. But the other thing is that there seems
to be in the United States a kind of concensus view among academics
and scientists and government people that has nothing to do with
actual reality. But I think that at a certain point, the amount of
empirical evidence, which he calls anecdotal, becomes somewhat
overwhelming, so I understand that now the medical profession,
particularly the psychiatrists in the United States, have got so many
independent and some large number of people who have, you know, under
hypnosis and under other direct means of giving of evidence have
reported these extraordinary events that they now considered a
syndrome that is actually something that can be treated or delt with
in counselling. So like I say, whether it's the Warren Commission or
Linus Pauling's view on vitamin C, it seems like empirical evidence
at some point goes out the window and what we get is kind of like
Norman Chomsky <?> says "certain acceptable views" that seem to be
the concensus or future line that are contemptuous to what ordinary
people are actually experiencing.
[Till] Alright, I'll leave it there in the interests of time. Dr.
Sagan, he doubts you.
[Sagan] That is good, doubting is part of the scientific method.
Skepticism is our bread and butter. Um...a lot of things can be
said about that. Linus Pauling's claims, he just died as a great
hero of many scientists all over the world, claims about the
efficacy of vitamin C is amenable to experiment. You give vitamin
C to one group of people, you withhold vitamin C from another
group of people, you see who has more colds. You can debate on
whether the statistics are significant, but this is a claim that is
amenable to the scientific process. Any reasonable approach, the same
kind of approach that you'd use in buying a used car. There is no
acceptance by the psychiatric community of alien abductions as a
syndrome. There is one psychiatrist who says that. But nothing in the
grand summary of psychiatric syndromes put out by the American
Psychiatric Society says a word about this. And finally I would ask
the questioner, suppose you were dropped down on the earth in the
middle ages, and you found that everybody believed, as they did, in
witches, in two kinds of demons called Incubi and Succubi which came
to people of the opposite sex during sleep and did various sexual
things with them, would you say that the evidence is overwhelming
because a large number of people report this and therefore it must be
true? Or in this case would you be somewhat skeptical about demons
and witches? And if you'd be skeptical in that case, why would you
not in this?
[Till] Well, in the interests of time, I wish I could put that caller
back on, but I can't because I've got one last question that I
absolutely must ask you, and I wanted to ask you how you got involved
in this chosen field of yours, what made you decide to do this?
[Sagan] Well, I've been awfully lucky. I grew up in Brooklyn, New
York where the skies were not so clear, but you could sometimes
see the stars, and nobody could tell me what they were. I mean, they
said they are lights in the sky, kid, but that wasn't an answer,
I mean what were they? Little electric bulbs on long black wires,
you couldn't see the wires, what were they? And, But great befortune
was that my mother got me a library card, sent me off to the library,
told me to get a book, and in this book there was this miraculous
statement that the stars were suns but very far away. The sun was a
star but very close. And suddenly the scale of the universe opened
up before me. I was dazzled and I've remained dazzled ever since.
[Till] Dr. Sagan we greatly enjoyed speaking with you and we thank
you for taking the time to be with us.
[Sagan] It was my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
[Till] Look forward to "Pale Blue Dot" coming up in October. Our
guest Dr. Carl Sagan...Well that's about it for us, but John, I lean
in the direction of the UFOs, I must confess.
[McComb] Do you? I think that's the first time you have actually
made that confession. [laughter] In all the years that we have been
on this program, in various incarnations and all the UFO programs
we've done, I think that's the first time I have actually heard you
say that.
[Till] Well...I think there's something out there, that's what it is.
[laughter]
[McComb] It's time for us to move along. We appreciate the time with
Dr. Carl Sagan tonight. Susan Jenks and Jane Green have produced this
program. Dean Ward has so ably been at the controls. For all of us
here on the program, I'm John McComb, thanks for your time tonight.
[Till] And my name is Philip Till. Good night to you.
[end of program]
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