Good evening everyone! Welcome,
thank you all for coming! I hope you enjoyed the Cosmos Swirl ice cream
courtesy of the Carl Sagan Institute! My name is Gillis. I'm the president
of the Cornell Astronomical Society, and I organized this event alongside
my fellow officers Ben Jacobson-Bell, Haonan Gong, Abby Bowl, Ben Shapiro, and
Cornell Cinema director Molly Ryan. So big thank you to all of them, and thank
you to all of you for coming tonight! In theory this is the first full
house since
before the pandemic, so I think you should give yourself
a round of applause for that. I came to Cornell as a first year during the
pandemic when events like this would have been completely impossible. I just had to sit in my
dorm room, and the majority of my conversations I had were asking for a second helping of green
beans at the dining hall, so we've come a long way since then—I'm very grateful. Back then I just had
to dream of the days when all of us first years could finally start co
ntributing to science
and to communication like some of my heroes, but I never dreamed that I'd be up here in
front of all of you introducing Ann Druyan, who alongside her husband Carl Sagan has been
one of my greatest inspirations as a science communicator. And I've met so many people at
Cornell who have been inspired like I was, and who are passionate about Professor Sagan's
Legacy, and who take his and Miss Druyan's words to heart. So I hope that this event will let
us all share these p
assions and maybe spark some new passions in some of you who haven't
seen their work before. So without further ado, I would like to introduce tonight's special guest!
Ann Druyan is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning writer producer and director in the communication
of science. She was elected and served for 10 years as the Secretary of the Federation of
American Scientists and began her writing career with the publication of her first novel, "A Famous
Broken Heart." She was the creative dire
ctor of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project and
the program director of the first solar sail mission to deep space, which launched on a Russian
ICBM in 2005. With her late husband Carl Sagan she wrote the show you're about to see, the 1980s Emmy
Award and Peabody Award winning TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Decades later it's still the
most watched science series in global television history. Professor Sagan and Ms. Druyan co-wrote
six New York Times Best Sellers including Com
et, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon Haunted
World, and Varieties of the Scientific Experience. They also co-created and co-produced the Warner
Bros feature film Contact, starring Jodi Foster and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Following the
success of the original Cosmos television series, Ms. Druyan created Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
for the Fox and National Geographic television networks. Ms. Druyan was the lead executive
producer and was a director and co-writer on the series, wh
ich won the Peabody Producers
Guild and Emmy Awards in 2014. The show also received 13 Emmy Award nominations and
was seen in 181 countries and by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. But she
didn't stop there—she was also the creator, executive producer, writer, and director
for another season, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, on National Geographic in 2020. And she wrote a
companion book with the same name, published by National Geographic as well. She's currently
producing two feature film
s and writing her memoir. And on top of all those accomplishments,
asteroid number 4970 is named Druyan in her honor. It circles in perpetual wedding ring orbit
around the sun with asteroid 2709, or Sagan. So Ms. Druyan will be answering any questions
you have about those accomplishments (or about the show) after the show, but for now, I hope you
all enjoy episode six of Cosmos, Traveler's Tales. Gillis: So thank you all again for coming
and thank you for joining us for this Q&A afterwards!
I'd like to start with a question of
my own, before we get started with the audience questions. So we chose episode 6 since it's
about Voyager, and if you might not know, tomorrow is the anniversary of the Pale Blue Dot
image, every February 14th on Valentine's Day. So we chose it for that reason, since
it's about Voyager, and also because, in my opinion, it does a great job of comparing
the past human history to the future of human history and putting all of that into perspective,
and te
lling some great stories. So my question is, I'm wondering about the writing process for
finding these stories from the past for the original Cosmos and maybe for some of the
newer seasons—how that research process goes—and if you might have any more stories
you're hoping to tell in future versions. Ann: Thank you Gillis, and thank you so much
for the beautiful introduction and for making this whole wonderful evening possible, and
to your colleagues. I'm really glad to be here—it was great
to see episode 6 again. I
think that the real genesis of episode 6 was, I had this very naive impression as a child: I
imagined someone like me in, let's say Genoa, as Columbus was setting sail, and watching those
three ships—of course the people of that time didn't have the kind of ability to inform each
other of what was going on that we have now. And so of course it was a silly idea, that the people
of Genoa were aware of what was about to happen, and how the two halves of this planet we
re
beginning to be an intercommunicating whole. And so I was talking to Carl, and we were thinking
about how exciting Voyager was. Carl had been dreaming about Voyager since the early 1970s. And
we had this feeling that the world's attention was elsewhere. And that when you're going through
history, when you're living history, how many of us are really aware of the larger pattern of
the sweep of civilization? And so what we wanted to do was to imbue the story of what the Voyagers
were doin
g, with that kind of—with its historical lineage, so that sense of exploration. And of
course, to me, the Voyagers are so magnificent for so many different reasons. It's not just
engineering genius of the early 1970s—you know, a transistor world—computing power that was a tiny
fraction of what each of us have in our pockets right now, and yet, this flawless over-performance
of these two spacecraft that still are sending information to us. This was produced in 1979,
1980, and here we are, yo
u know, 44 years later, and they still have things to teach us. That's
so amazing. That was something that we wanted to share, Carl's passion for exploration, and for
the fact that we were living just in that moment, when, as we said in the show, as when those points
of light became real places. How to capture that excitement, and what great good fortune we had
that we could be at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the imaging team area and actually
see those pictures come in. And I say, that see
ing Carl up there... I really am lost in
admiration for him. For the authenticity and of his passion for science and for discovery,
and his passion to share it with everyone, so that science isn't some kind of priesthood, so
not only the lucky few can partake of the gifts, the revelations, about nature that science
gives us. That was very moving to me. Also how far we've come in the last 44 years—how much
better we see than even the Voyagers see. Remember that the Voyagers were launched exa
ctly 20 years
after Sputnik. Two interstellar spacecraft that performed their assignment, over-performed,
out-performed—they were only supposed to last for 10 or 12 years, and yet not only did they give
us our first close-up looks at the worlds of the outer Solar System, they taught us the shape
of the Solar System as it moves through the galaxy. And so we wanted to celebrate that. Carl
and I, and Steve Soter, were painfully aware of the tragedy of our exploration of the rest of the
planet
, and the crimes that were committed as a result of that knowledge. And we wanted to show a
part of that but we wanted to convey something of what happens when there's an awakening to a larger
world than you ever dreamed, and you take your first baby steps into the cosmos and begin to look
around. So that was the inspiration for it. Steven Soter and Carl were—and Steve is still—so learned,
so passionate about science, and curious about the scientific nature of things, but also so learned
ab
out the history of our planet and its cultural achievements. And so working with the two of
them was kind of a great dream that went on for 3 years as we produced this show. And I can't
say how lucky I feel that I was part of it. Gillis: Thank you so much. And
I was struck too by how far come when he was standing in the room
with all the whirring computers, very loud, and the audio quality—I applaud them
for still getting good quality in that room, because, yeahhh... but we've come so
far
now, with computers and the imaging. Gillis: All right, so this point I think
we're ready to start taking questions from the audience! So if you raise your hand
I'll do my best to call on people. All right, I saw your hand first. So we do have
our mic runners... yeah, there you go. Dylan: Yes, thank you. I just want to
reiterate the sentiment that I'm sure that you've already received from Gillis,
and from the other people you've met here, of how much of an honor it is to have you with
us.
You know, I grew up with not the Cosmos with Carl Sagan but with Neil DeGrasse Tyson,
and that, you know, as Gillis was mentioning, that you worked on that with National
Geographic. And I would always I look forward to that each week when it aired. And
I know as I'm sure you understand, you know, Carl Sagan, he was very well in tune with not
just issues of, you know, science, and facts, but he wanted to help us understand what it
meant for us like in the human experience. And there were ma
ny ways in which he was prescient
as a result of that, about the way in which uh our society has developed in the last 30 years.
So if there's one—well you don't have to limit it to just one—but if there's one piece of wisdom
that either you or he have offered that you think would be maybe the most suited for our society or
our planet in its current state, what might it be? Ann: Thank you for this wonderful question
and the very kind things you said. Well, tomorrow is the anniversary of the
Pale Blue
Dot, and as Candy Hanson who was a member of the Voyager imaging team wrote in a recent paper,
Carl started pleading with NASA in 1981 to wait until Voyager had taken its last picture of the
outer solar system, and as he said in the update, to turn the cameras homeward to look at the
planets of the Sun, but particularly to see the Earth as we had never seen it before. I'm old
enough to remember the impact of the Apollo images of that frame-filling Earth; that was a real scene
ch
ange for our civilization. It was tremendously influential to see the Earth from space. And that
was a giant step in my view. But Carl was pleading with NASA to take the next giant step, by turning
Voyager 1's camera back to the Earth, to help us grasp our true circumstances in the universe.
Not the frame-filling Earth of Apollo, but the one pixel Earth of reality. And to see that,
to me... you know, Carl is the one person I can think of really, in history, who would not only
be the guy who
kept schlepping to Washington DC, to NASA headquarters, and nagging them, and then
to Jet Propulsion Laboratory and nagging them saying take the picture—and they always said
the same thing: what scientific value can this picture have? And Carl, the giant that
he was, understood that what was needed, what was called for, was not another scientific
picture, but a spiritual picture. A picture that tells us that the need for us to treat each other
with greater kindness, to treat the resources
of the planet and the other living beings on the
planet with greater wisdom and tenderness, was the inevitable byproduct of accepting that
the Earth—as our ancestors, some of our ancestors believe—is not the center of the universe. It's
not the center of the Solar System. It's not we, as human beings—we're not the crown of creation.
We are part of the fabric of life. And you know, to accept our true smallness in the scheme of
things, it's a sign of mental health! It's a sign, and—nothing of
we know of, besides science,
has been able to wean us from our fantasies of centrality. These are the fantasies of infancy,
to be the center of the universe. And Carl, through his efforts to get permission for
Voyager 1 to take that picture of the Earth, and to be the poet who could write
the Pale Blue Dot meditation—I mean, only one person I can think of could do
all those things, contribute to science, contribute to being a member of the imaging
team, and design of the mission—all those
things, and then to say it so plainly, so clearly, that
it pierces our denial, our set delusion, and makes us realize. What I love about the Pale Blue Dot
picture is that you don't need even an education to appreciate what it is saying to us. And I
just... you know, seeing Carl up on the screen, thinking about who he was, as a husband, as a
father, as a son, all of those things—really just fills me with such wonder. The honor of
knowing him, of thinking with him for 20 years, is mind-boggl
ing to me. You know, I think of the
Voyager record cover every night. And I'm still unable to wrap my head around the idea that when I
was 27 years old, I got to be part of this mythic Noah's Arc of human culture, that will outlast the
Earth, will outlast everything that we know, two spacecraft circumnavigating the Milky Way galaxy
for 1 to 5 billion years. And I really do... I just feel very, very lucky to have witnessed
this experience and been a part of some of it. Dylan: Thank you very
much.
Gillis: In the back, there! Audience member: I was wondering what
was Carl Sagan's most philosophical moment? Through any sort of history,
like whether it be on camera or off, what was his most philosophical moment? Also,
bonus question, what was his favorite song? Ann: I'm sorry, could you
say that last part again? Audience member: Bonus question,
what is his favorite song? Ann: Ohhh! Well actually, it's easier to answer
the latter question than the former! He loved Mr. Tambourine M
an by Bob Dylan. (Audience laughs).
He really did! And he used to really mist up—that line, "to dance beneath the diamond sky with one
hand waving free"—he would always—it just really moved him. He also really liked to dance with me
and Sasha, and our daughter, to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. (Audience laughs again). He really, he
just, we all loved the spirit of that song. He loved Bob Marley, he loved Dire Straits... he was
a trained pianist, although he didn't really like to play, and he w
as delighted when his mother
could no longer force him to do so. He knew classical music, he had a great deep knowledge of
classical music, but most of the time we listened to Bob Marley and Bob Dylan and some of the
other greats—Sam Cook—and you know, that's what he liked. He liked—he really liked all kinds
of music. What was his greatest philosophical moment? I couldn't speak for Carl, to dare to say
that, but I think the greatest, as I said in the previous question—I think his greatest s
piritual
gift was that vision, of the tiny Pale Blue Dot. Gillis, nodding: ...That
one. That person over there. ...It's hard to run a Q&A. Audience member: So I was just wondering,
as a science communicator and someone who's looking to engage with
and connect with the public, what are some things that you try to really
incorporate into your writing or your work, as themes that you find to be either particularly
engaging or most important to include? Ann: Well, you know, I was not a science
student,
and I felt pretty much excluded from science, until I began to read—because of my interest in
history and politics—about the materialists. The ancient Socratic, pre-Socratic, philosophers
of ancient Greece. And I was fascinated with them because of the idea of demystification,
was really what appealed to me about science. The idea of trying to just rid yourself
of all the things you want to believe, or all the lies you want to tell the world, or
you want to tell yourself, and jus
t rigorously winnowing winnowing and never being contented
with, you know, an absolute truth. Knowing full well that that is beyond our grasp. And just
those little tiny pieces of reality, so precious, that science can give us. And so, for me, it was
very easy to begin to write this stuff, because I knew if I didn't understand it, nobody else would!
And so what Carl would do, which was so brilliant, was he would retrace his original thought steps
in beginning—getting towards—understanding.
And I think that's why he was a genius communicator.
Because he never—like so many people—he never spoke to impress people with what he knew. He
only wanted to communicate, to connect. And for me I think this engine of demystification
that science is, is when people know about it, and when it's stripped away all of the jargon,
and all of the stuff that keeps people away, out of a scientific perspective... We are a story
driven species, that's for sure. And sometimes I wonder, by the way, if
the direction of science
a is not the yearning for a narrative. And maybe we want too badly to have that narrative, that
story that begins and has a middle and an end, and so that affects our focus of what we look for
and how we think. For me, I'm always looking for the story in all three seasons of Cosmos. You
know, we would only tell a story—it had to be a three-for—it had to, first of all, make a deep
understanding of science completely accessible. It had to have this drama of a story,
you
know—someone like the story of Michael Faraday, one of my great heroes—the kid who comes from the
completely impoverished, dysfunctional family, and the most rigid class structure on
Earth, with nothing but his desire to know, his curiosity and his courage, the courage
of the questions he asked. And so once I can really feel something about a particular
scientist or a particular scientific idea and find that way to make it a story that
anyone can understand, I know that we've got somet
hing. It has to be good science, it has to
be dramatic, it has to have a kind of punchline, a kind of revelation. It's very simple really—I
just know that if if I'm bored, you know, then I'm not there, I'm not finding the story
and the way, the doorway, into understanding. Gillis: And I think what you said about
Carl Sagan being able to tell the whole process is part of what made him such a
great communicator, because—he was smart, but he also was able to communicate how he got to
a certai
n place, and I think that's very important in being able to communicate science to people
and to share wonder with people like he did. I've seen your hand up for a while! Roland: Hello? Oh, okay—hi! So I'm Roland, I am
an inspiring astronomer and storyteller here at the Carl Sagan Institute, and I too was inspired
by Neil DeGrasse Tyson's version of Cosmos, and that's what inspired me to become an astronomer,
was the storytelling and the representation of having someone who looks like my dad
telling these
stories. And now being at Cornell University, being where this mythic figure Carl Sagan used
to teach, and being under the direction and leadership—and honestly like, amazing, mentorship
of Professor Lisa Kaltenegger—if we could have a round of applause! Thank you! All that to
say is that your legacy has echoed, rippled, snowballed through so many generations in so many
different ways, and in order to commemorate that last semester, I wanted to create an art exhibit
for one
of my classes as a final project. And I wanted to do it off of the Voyager mission and
displaying those pictures that were chosen, why they were chosen, and their connection to
humanity. So I was a little bit disappointed to submit an incomplete gallery, because only,
I believe, 45 images were released—the others were hidden behind a pay wall. And so it was a bit
disheartening, and luckily my professor was very understanding, but it was a bit strange to think
about: wow, we have this testam
ent to humanity, a plaque, understanding everything that we are
and have been, just free floating and inviting anyone to come across it to interact with it,
to learn, to find out who we are—and yet here on Earth like we can't access all of those images,
we can't even know how we're being represented. So my question to you is, in terms of—because I
know when it comes to the Pale Blue Dot image, the way it's communicated—when it comes to the
Voyager Record, all of the turmoil you guys went th
rough in terms of trying to get permission
from different record labels to get their songs included within the record... what kind of... I
guess there's always been a kind of audaciousness and audacity and rebellion in trying to tell the
story of other worlds while being constrained to worldly concerns and limitations. So I was
wondering how you break that mold and how you get those stories not only written, but
also fight for those to be told and heard. Ann: Well, Roland, thank you so much
, but I want
to be sure I understand your question. But I want to thank you first of all for mentioning Lisa
Kaltenegger, who is so wonderful and such a great friend, and really there would not be a
Carl Sagan Institute—of course—without Lisa, without her vision and her leadership. And I can't
tell you how thrilled I am with, years later after our first conversation, the shape of the Carl
Sagan Institute and what it means. I will speak for Carl and say I know that he would be—first,
well,
he would have loved Lisa—and second of all, he would be so thrilled with the way that she
has molded and shaped this institute in his name, really. Couldn't have hoped for a better
outcome. But Roland, I'm not sure I really understand your question. You were talking—you
said that you couldn't see the Voyager pictures? Roland: So that was a bit more of like, an
example of like, the broader question in terms of having... so that was like an example of one
the instances in terms of trying to c
ommunicate this global Pale Blue Dot image, and trying to
communicate this aspect of the cosmos and of this giant vast universe, but also being limited
to Earthly regulations. Whether it's governmental, copyright laws—so how do you, whether
it was like, Cosmos Studios and the production of Cosmic Africa—how do you get
those stories specifically, not only made, but how do you fight for them to be published,
to be promoted, to be told and heard as well? Ann: It can take—it takes years and yea
rs and
years, and you just have to be unwilling to accept no for an answer. You know, in making the
Voyager Record, the Earthly problems were not that much. Because, well—I had the problem
in that when I would be calling people up, or I would go to see them and tell them
that we were making an interstellar message, and I wanted, you know, their whale songs
or whatever—people would be skeptical. And I completely understand the skepticism, this
is 1977—and it just seemed like, you know, this
woman is crazy! Which is what I got a lot of.
But the saddest thing, I think, was the picture we were not allowed to send. And that was a picture,
fully frontal naked picture, of a man and a woman, standing, looking fearlessly into the camera.
The woman was visibly pregnant, and they were both completely naked. And we were told by—well
first of all, on the floor of the US Congress, a guy stood up and said "NASA wants to send smut
to the stars!" (Audience laughs). And that caused a huge ker
fuffle at NASA, you can imagine,
as dependent as NASA is on the kindness of Congress. And so that was—I remember saying... you
know, Carl and I were very sad about that picture, because it was one of the most beautiful ones of
all that we sent. And it made us realize how much we hate ourselves. How much we hate ourselves: we
can't stay stand naked before the cosmos, because of this profound sense of shame and self-hatred.
Which is a failure, in my view, of our received spiritual vision of m
any generations. And that
really was kind of heartbreaking, the idea that extraterrestrials, the putative extraterrestrials
of a million years from now or more, would somehow be discomforted. (Audience laughs again).
By the way we really look when take off our clothes! You know, it was just unbelievable! So
that was kind of a downer, but mostly, actually, people were thrilled—the living, the few living
artists, musicians, who communicated with me after the record was launched. One of them w
as
the great Chuck Berry, who told us that he had been in prison when he heard that his music would
be on Voyager and live forever. We invited him to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the night that
we were bidding farewell to the Voyagers. It was the very last encounter we would have, you know,
from starting in 1979 and going to 1989—10 years, 10 years punctuated by these planetary encounters,
in which all of the media of the world, but also the world planetary scientific community, and
ev
eryone would gather at JPL for sometimes a week, sometimes many months. And it was really just
such an exhilarating and fascinating time. Also the Bulgarian shepherdess—I don't know if you're
familiar with the music of the Voyager Record, but there's a woman named Valya Balkanska who is
singing the musical tradition of Bulgaria, which was formed by shepherds and shepherdesses standing
on mountaintops and calling to the shepherd or shepherdess on the next mountaintop. And so Valya
Balkanska
had a set of pipes like Aretha Franklin. I mean, she was a fearless singer, singing with
all of her soul, holding nothing back. And we were really touched by that, because what were
we doing? We were calling to perhaps the punitive shepherdesses and shepherds of some other world.
There were one or two other living musicians who were tremendously gratified by this closest
thing to immortality that we know how to get. Gillis: One final question. Iona: Hello, I'm Iona. You already
touched on t
his a little bit, but being one of the people who worked on
the Golden Record, how did it feel to be an arbiter of what cultural artifacts and
information got to go on this mission, and if you were to make another Golden Record,
say, today, is there anything that you think is important to go on there, except—besides
the image that you described before? Ann: Well—how did it feel? You know, first
of all, we were a committee of five people: the great Frank Drake, Linda Salzman Sagan,
Timothy
Ferris, Carl, and Jon Lomberg, and myself. And we consulted composers,
musicians—we went far and wide talking to, in the cases for instance of cultures and
civilizations that we knew nothing about—none of us knew anything about Chinese
music. What hubris, what arrogance, for us to pronounce what that one piece of Chinese
music should be. You know, it was ridiculous. And we talked to lots of experts on Chinese music,
including a great Chinese composer named Chou Wen-Chung who was a professor
at Columbia
University. And I remember being embarrassed, to say, you know—the Chinese musical tradition
is 2500 years continuous, 2500 years old—and you, pick one piece of music from the great music of
2500 years. And to my astonishment, he looked at me and he said "Oh, I know exactly which one!"
Didn't even think about it! And he said "I think it has to be this one performance by the greatest
virtuoso on the Qin," this stringed instrument. And this is one of the oldest pieces of music,
you know, this continuous tradition, this music is 2500 years old. It's from the beginning. And
it's about our relationship to the universe. My brain was exploding, everything he said! And
there's one performance and one performance only, and it is by the greatest virtuoso on the Qin. And
he was 95 years old when he made this recording, and that was only weeks before he was dragged
out of his house and murdered in the cultural revolution. I was—really?! This is like, wow!
And so that's the
piece that we put on Voyager. And so, you know, I didn't feel like an arbiter,
because I was painfully aware of my own ignorance. But I do know that the first thing I thought of
when Carl invited me to work on this project, the very first thing I thought—I went back to 8
years before. I had a friend who'd played for me one of Beethoven's late quartets the Cavatina
movement from Opus 130, and when I heard that, I thought to myself: "Beethoven, how can I ever
repay you?" And the very first th
ing I thought of when Carl invited me to be on this committee was,
"Now I can pay back Beethoven!" (Audience laughs). And what's so amazing is that Beethoven wrote on
the manuscript: "What will they think of me on the star of Urania?" Will they—what will they think
of my music on the star of Urania? I think he was thinking of the recently discovered Uranus,
and he was a little confused about, you know, whether it was a star or not! But still, he had
that knowledge in his own wondering, thin
king, "Would my music... would my music matter anywhere
but on Earth?" And so that was a tremendously gratifying experience. And the other one was Blind
Willie Johnson, doing Dark Was the Night. And that was especially thrilling, because this was a
man whose genius was so unrecognized, when he lived in a world that was so blind and poisoned
as to not recognize this man's great talent. He died of exposure because he had no roof over his
head. And... now his music is almost a light day from u
s—it's about 20 light hours from us, right
now, and is going to live much longer than the cherished things of the people who were too blind
themselves to see who he was and his great gift. Gillis: All right... so thank you once again! Gillis: It's been—it's been
wonderful to have you here, and we have one more thing for you
before you go. We have a gift for you. Ann: Oh! This was a gift. Oh,
how lovely! I love flowers! Gillis: We have flowers and
a card for you! Thank you! Ann: Wowww, look
at this! Oh, this
is beautiful! What a great picture. I love it! Thank you, thank you
so much. This is a great gift. Gillis: I hope you all have a
wonderful night and a happy Pale Blue Dot Day tomorrow! Thank you all for coming!
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