CS: I look for enthusiasm and wonder, but there's such a thing as
too much. I look for someone who knows what he or she is talking about,
because there's a tendency to repeat anything you've read without
skeptical scrutiny of it. But in meeting people, it's rare that what I'm
impressed by is their intelligence. There's much more likelihood that
what I'm impressed by is their compassion, their optimism, their sense of
humor-things of that sort I find much more compelling. There are very few
people who don't have an impressive degree of intelligence, especially
children. Society does very dangerous things in squashing that
intelligence. It's a tragedy. You can see a kind of Darwinian competition
of nations, and the ones that squash the intelligence of the citizenry in
the long run are not going to do very well. The ones that learn to
encourage curiosity and wonder and hard work are the ones tt}at are going
to make it.
PT: Are there insights to be gained from nonrational thought,
religious thought?
CS: Certainly the insight that we're capable of nonrational thought
is to be gained from nonrational thought. That is something very
important. Every society--there are no exceptions--has some kind of
religion. That tells us something important about human nature. It
doesn't say that what the religion says is true. It says that there is a
common need, that must be genetically based, that religions make an
effort, successful or not, to deal with.
PT: A drive to find meaning or purpose?
CS: It's partly that, and also the need to have a code of ethics,
because otherwise society is impossible. A sense of community, communion
with nature, communion with your fellow human beings. A sense of ritual,
music, art, poetry. Religion appeals on many different levels and serves
many different needs. It would have to, to be so widespread.
PT: You have a young son. What are your biggest fears for the world
he's inheriting?
CS: There are so many. I'm certainly worried about local and global
environment. About overpopulation and violence. I'm worried about
stupidity. I'm worried about consumerism, the focus on buying things that
by any survival standard you don't need, but which American advertising
culture promotes like mad.
PT: What gets you most excited for him?
CS: The inexhaustible benefits that emerge from science. I don't
just mean agriculture and medicine, which have a large variety of
practical benefits. The thing I like most about science is its room for
managing the future. It's a tool for baloney detection. It's absolutely
essential, not just for the technological products of science, but as a
way of thinking. If that were more widely understood, we'd be a lot more
secure in the future than we are now.
PT: Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932. Have you thought
of writing a book about the future, say, a century later?
CS: Prophesy is a lost art.
PT: He didn't write a prophesy, he just took information--
CS: Well, more than that. He was trying to give us a glimpse of a
future society we should avoid. It was a cautionary tale. That was one,
but there are so many. There are already possible dire futures; you could
spend the rest of your life writing cautionary tales. Anyway, I have no
plans to do so.
PT: You did write a novel a few years ago. What inspired you to
write it?
CS: It's called Contact. It's being made into a motion picture
starring Jodie Foster. It's the story of the receipt of a first bona fide
radio message from another civilization in space, and of the response
here on Earth, which is very complex and diverse. I wrote it because it
was an opportunity to get across scientific ideas to an audience
different from that of Scientific American.
Also, it seemed fun to try to write fiction. And many people have
asked me what I think the consequences of receiving such a message would
be. I never could give in a few sentences what seemed to me an adequate
answer.
PT: Are you hopeful that there is intelligent life
elsewhere?
CS: My mind is certainly moot. Monitoring extraterrestrial radio
waves is a chance, at relatively small cost, to try to answer one of the
deepest questions ever posed. It's the importance of the quest, and the
fact that we don't know enough to say in advance that it's fruitless,
that motivates me. But I don't pretend to know that there are beings out
there.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): A Slayer of Demons
Turning from outer space to inner sapce, Carl Sagan wants to know
one thing: Why is it that we prefer what feels good to what's true? He
stands tall for our natural sense of wonder-- balanced by
baloney-detection skills. Sagan sees our national inability to translate
science coming back to haunt us in, say the O.J. verdict.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Carl Sagan
Tags:
best friends,
Carl Sagan,
demon haunted world,
dominance hierarchies,
evolution of humans,
genetic predispositions,
human emotions,
human intelligence,
imperfections,
inner space,
intelligent life,
life on earth,
litany,
mistakes,
new departure,
outer space,
present times,
prudence,
public,
repressed memory,
Science,
space,
tendencies,
ufos
