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In his last interview, Carl Sagan warned that America will be taken over by a 'charlatan' political leader

Sagan never would have believed in a fortune tellers but dang this is prescient.

via PBS

Astronomer Carl Sagan was the original host of "Cosmos" back in 1980 and it became most watched show in public television history. Few science communicators have been able to match his talent for stoking wonder about the universe.

Shortly before his death in 1996, he appeared on "Charlie Rose" and made a dire warning about how the average Americans' lack of skeptical, scientific thinking could lead to disastrous consequences.

Today, we can see the problems that are happening due to America's anti-science streak whether it's anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theories or climate change deniers.

Sagan was right, America will suffer due to a lack a lack of scientific skepticism.


Carl Sagan and Government_ Charlie Rose.wmvwww.youtube.com


"We've arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces," he told Rose. "I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?"

He then warned that our lack of critical thinking leaves us vulnerable to those who wish to exploit our ignorance.

"Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking," he says. "If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us something is true to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along."

Sagan believes that a democracy cannot function without an educated populace.

"It's a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on. It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in the Constitution and the Bill or Rights, the people had to be educated and they have to practice their skepticism and their education," he says. "Otherwise, we don't run the government, the government runs us."


This article originally appeared five years ago.

via YouTube

Over the past few years, there has been a growing number of people who believe the Earth is flat. A recent YouGov survey of more than 8,000 Americans found that as many as one in six are "not entirely certain the world is round."

Maybe there wouldn't be so much scientific illiteracy in this world if we still had Carl Sagan around.

Sagan hosted the original version of TV's "Cosmos" in 1980. It would be revived in 2014 with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at the helm.


In the first episode of "Cosmos," Sagan easily proved the Earth was a sphere using a piece of cardboard, some sticks, and the work of an ancient Libyan-Greek scholar, Eratosthenes.

Carl Sagan explains how Eratostenes knows the earth is curvewww.youtube.com

"How could it be, that at the same moment, a stick in Syene would cast no shadow and a stick in Alexandria, 800 km to the north, would cast a very definite shadow? Sagan asked.

"The only answer was that the surface of the Earth is curved," he added. "Not only that but the greater the curvature, the bigger the difference in the length of the shadows."

Considering the distance between the two cities and the lengths of the shadows they produced, Eratosthenes was able to determine that the Earth had a seven-degree curve. He used that calculation to speculate the Earth was 25,000 miles in circumference.

These days we know that the earth is 24,860 in circumference, so Eratosthenes was 140 miles off, not bad for over 2,000 years ago.


This article originally appeared on 7.22.20

Internet

Carl Sagan's future 'celebration of ignorance' prediction from 1995 was spookily spot on

"I have a foreboding of America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…"

Images courtesy of NASA and Amazon

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Cosmologist and science educator Carl Sagan made a name for himself in popular culture as the host of the TV show "Cosmos" and the author of more than a dozen books bridging the gap between the scientific complexities of the world and the people who live in it. Intelligent and eloquent, he had a way of making science palatable for the average person, always advocating healthy scepticism and the scientific method to seek answers to questions about our world.

But Sagan also possessed a keen understanding of the broad array of human experience, which was part of what made him such a beloved communicator. He wrote about peace and justice and kindness in addition to science. He did not shun spirituality, as some sceptics do, but said he found science to be "a profound source of spirituality." He acknowledged that there's so much we don't know but was adamant about defending what we do.

Now, a quote from Sagan's 1995 book, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," has people talking about his uncanny ability to peek into the future. His predictions didn't come through supernatural means, of course, but rather through his powers of observation and his understanding of human nature. Still pretty spooky, though.


He wrote:

I have a foreboding of America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

His words seem downright prophetic in an era where the least qualified people rise to the highest levels of power more and more often, people glom onto outlier voices that contradict broad scientific consensus on everything from climate change to public health, and social media sound bites fuel more and more extreme views devoid of nuance and complexity.

And the most frustrating part is that the people who get wrapped up in quacky conspiracy theories or take on radical stances based on illogical rhetoric don't see their own ignorance. They're told they're the ones thinking critically, they're the ones who are knowledgeable simply because they're questioning authority (as opposed to the "ability to…knowledgeably question those in authority" Sagan refers to, which is not the same thing).

“When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition," Sagan wrote. We watched this play out in the U.S. during the pandemic. We see it daily in our politics at either end of the spectrum. We witness it in social discourse, especially online. One thing Sagan didn't foresee was how ignorance, pseudoscience and superstition would be rewarded in today's world by algorithms that determine what we see in our social media feeds, creating a vicious cycle that can feel impossible to reverse sometimes.

However, Sagan also offered a hopeful reminder that people who fall prey to peddlers who push "alternative facts" for their own gain are simply human, with the same desire to understand our world that we all share. He warned against being critical without also being kind, to remember that being human doesn't come with an instruction manual or an innate understanding of how everything works.

“In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be," he wrote. "Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.”

Discerning truth from falsehood, fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience isn't always simple, and neither is the challenge of educating a populace to hone that ability. Taking a cue from Sagan, we can approach education with rigorous scientific standards but also with curiosity and wonder as well as kindness and humility. If he was right about the direction the U.S. was heading 30 years ago, perhaps he was right about the need for understanding what led to that direction and the tools needed to right the ship.

You can find much more in Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" here.

Science

Watch Carl Sagan eloquently explain why books are the 'greatest of human inventions'

"A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Carl Sagan explains why books are magic.

Carl Sagan was one of the greatest scientific communicators of his generation because he had a knack for putting things into perspective. Whether explaining the vastness of the universe through the “pale blue dot” or how we are all made of star-stuff, Sagan was able to stoke feelings of wonder in everyday phenomena that we sometimes take for granted.

On episode 11 of his groundbreaking PBS show “Cosmos” in 1980, Sagan perused a library and explained why books and the libraries they call home are pure magic.

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years,” Sagan explained.


“Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you,” Sagan continued. “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Sagan goes on to ponder how human development would be stunted if humans only shared information by word of mouth. Great stories told by people in the past would slowly change over time until they eventually lost all meaning.

“A library connects us with the insights and knowledge of the greatest minds and the best teachers drawn from the whole planet and from all our history,” Sagan continues. “To instruct us without tiring and to inspire us to make our own contributions to the collective knowledge of the human species.”

"Libraries in ancient Egypt bore these words on their walls: 'Nourishment for the soul' and that's still a pretty fair assessment of what libraries provide," Sagan concluded the segment.