Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #78

The following is a conversation with Anne Julian, writer, producer, director and one of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time. She co wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981 and her love for whom with the help of NASA was recorded as brainwaves on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer, and launched into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still active, reaching out farther into deep space than any human made object ever has. This was a profound and beautiful decision Anne made as a creative director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project. In 2014 she went on to create the second season of Cosmos called A Spacetime Odyssey, and in 2020 the new third season called Cosmos Possible Worlds, which is being released this upcoming Monday, March 9th. It is hosted once again by the fun and the brilliant Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Annie Julian and Cosmos have inspired millions of scientists and curious minds across several generations by revealing the magic, the power, the beauty of science. I am one such curious mind and if you listen to this podcast you may know that Elon Musk is as well. He graciously agreed to read Carl Sagan's words about the pale blue dot in my second conversation with him. If you listened to there was an interesting and inspiring twist at the end. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple, podcast support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman spelled F R I D M A N. As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code Lex Podcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally, peer to peer and security in all digital transactions is very important. Let me mention the PCI data security standard that Cash App is compliant with. I'm a big fan of standards for safety and security. PCI DSS is a good example of that where a bunch of competitors got together and agreed that there needs to be a global standard around the security of transactions. Now we just need to do the same for autonomous vehicles and artificial Intelligence systems in general. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store, Google Play and use the code lexpodcast, you get $10. And cash app will also donate $10 to first, one of my favorite organizations that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Anne Druyan.

What is the role of science in our society?

Well, I think of what Einstein said when he opened the 1939 New York World's Fair. He said, if science is ever to fulfill its mission the way art has done, it must penetrate its inner meaning, must penetrate the consciousness of everyone. And so for me, especially in a civilization dependent on high technology and science, one that aspires to be democratic, it's critical that the public, as informed decision makers, understand the values and the methods and the rules of science.

So you think about what you just mentioned, the values and the methods and the rules and maybe the technology that science produces. But what about sort of the beauty, the mystery of science?

Well, you've touched on what I think is, for me, that's how my way into science is that for me, it's much more spiritually uplifting. The revelations of science, the collective revelations of, you know, really countless generations of searchers and the little tiny bit we know about reality is the greatest joy for me because I think that it relates to the idea of love. Like, what is love that is based on illusion, about the other? That's not love. Love is seeing unflinching the other and accepting with all your heart. And to me, knowing the universe as it is, or the little bit that we're able to understand at this point is, is the purest kind of love. And therefore, you know, how can our philosophy, our religion, if it's rootless in nature, how can it really be true? I just don't understand. So I think you need science to get a sense of, of the real romance of life and the great experience of being awake in the cosmos.

So that the fact that we know so little, the, the humbling nature of that. So. And you kind of connect love to that. But isn't it also, isn't it scary? Isn't it? Why is it so inspiring, do you think? Why is it so beautiful that we know so little?

Well, first of all, as Socrates thought, you know, knowing that you know little is knowing really knowing something, knowing more than others. And it's the, it's that voice whispering in our, our heads, you know, you might be wrong. Which I think is not only it's really healthy because we're so imperfect. We're human, of course, but also, you know, love to me is the feeling that you always want to go deeper, get closer. You can't get enough of it. You can't get close enough, deep enough. So, and that's what science is always saying. Science is never simply content with its understanding of any aspect of nature. It's always saying, it's always finding that even smaller cosmos beneath. So I think the two are very much parallel.

So you said that love is not an illusion.

No, it's not.

Well, if it is, what is love?

What is love? Is, is knowing. For me, love is, is knowing something deeply and still being completely gratified by it, you know, and wanting to know more. So what is love? What is loving someone, a person, let's say deeply, is not idealizing them, not putting some kind of subjective projection on them, but knowing them as they are. And so for me, the only aperture to that knowing about nature, the universe, is science because it has that error correcting mechanism that most of the stuff that we do doesn't have. You know, you could say the Bill of Rights is kind of an error correcting mechanism, which I, it's one of the things I really appreciate about the society in which I live. To the extent that it's upheld and we keep faith with it. And the same with science, it's like we will give you the highest rewards we have for proving us wrong about something. That's genius. That's why in only 400 years since Galileo's first look through a telescope, we could get from this really dim, this vague apprehension of another world to sending our eyes and our senses there, or even to going beyond. So it is, it is, it delivers the goods like nothing else. You know, it really delivers the goods because it's always, it's always self aware of its fallibility.

So on that topic, I'd like to ask your opinion. And a feeling I have that I'm not sure what to do with, which is the, the skeptical aspect of science. So the modern skeptics community, and just in general, certain scientists, many scientists, maybe most scientists that apply the scientific method are kind of rigorous in that application. And they, it feels like, sometimes miss out some of the ideas outside the reach of just slightly outside the reach of science. And they don't dare to sort of dream or think of revolutionary ideas that others will call crazy in this particular moment. So how do you think about the skeptical aspect of science that is really good at sort of keeping us in check, keeping Us, humble, but at the same time, sort of the kind of dreams that you and Carl Sagan have inspired in the world, it kind of shuts it down sometimes a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's up to the individual. But for me, you know, I was so ridiculously fortunate in that I. My tutorial in science, because I'm not a scientist and I wasn't trained in science, was 20 years of days and nights with Carl Sagan and the wonder. I think the reason Carl remains so beloved. Well, I think there are many reasons, but at the root of it is the fact that his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder, and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism. So he couldn't fool himself into believing something he wanted to believe because it made him feel good at the other. But on the other hand, he recognized that what science, what nature is, is really, it's good enough. You know, it's way better than our fantasies. And so if you. If you're that kind of person who loves happiness, loves life, and your eyes are wide open and you read everything you can get your hands on and you spend years studying what is known so far about the universe, then you have that capacity, that really infinite capacity to be alive and also at the same time to be very rigorous about what you're willing to believe. For Carl, I don't think he ever felt that his skepticism cost him anything because again, it comes back to love. He wanted to know what nature really was like, not to inflict his preconceived notions on what he wanted it to be. So you can't go wrong, because it doesn't, you know, I mean, you know, I think the pale blue dot is a perfect example of this, of his massive achievement, is to say, okay, or the Voyager record is another example, is here we have this mission, our first reconnaissance of the outer solar system. Well, how can we make it a mission in which we absolutely squeeze every drop of consciousness and understanding from it? We don't have to be scientists and then be human beings. I think that's the tragedy of Western civilization, is that it's, you know, it's one of its greatest gifts has been science, and yet at the same time, it believing that we are the children of a disappointed father, a tyrant who puts us in a maximum security prison and calls it paradise, who looks at us, who watches us every moment and hates us for being our human selves, you know, and then most of all, what is our great sin? It's partaking of the tree of knowledge, which is our greatest gift as humans, this pattern recognition, this ability to see things and then synthesize them and jump to conclusions about them and test those conclusions. So I think the reason that in literature, in movies, the scientist is a figure of alienation. A figure or you see these biopics about scientists and yeah, he might have been great, but, you know, he was missing a chip. You know, he was a lousy husband. He lacked, you know, the kind of spiritual understanding that maybe, you know, his wife had. And it's always in the end they come around. But to me that's, that's a false dichotomy that we are, you know, to the extent that we are aware of our surroundings and understand them, which is what science makes it possible for us to do, we're even more alive.

So you, you mentioned a million awesome things there. Let's even just. Can you tell me about the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and, and the interstellar Message project and that whole, just fascinating world leading up to one of my favorite subjects.

I love talking about it. I'll never get over it. I'll never be able to really wrap my head around the reality of it, the truth of it.

What is it? First of all, what's the Voyager spacecraft?

Okay, so Voyagers one and two were our first reconnaissance mission of what was then considered the outer solar system. And it was a gift of gravity. The idea that swinging around these worlds gives you a gravitational assist which ultimately will send you out of the solar system to wander the Milky way Galaxy for 1 to 5 billion years. So Voyager gave us our first close up look of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. It discovered new moons, it discovered volcanoes on IO. Its achievements are astonishing. And remember, this is technology from the early to mid-1970s.

And it's still active.

And it's still active. We talked to Voyager a few days ago. We talked to it in fact, a year ago I think it was. We needed to slightly change the attitude of the spacecraft. And so we fired up its thrusters for the first time since 1987.

Did they work?

Instantly. It was as if you had left your car in the garage in 1987 and you put the key in the ignition, because you used keys then in the ignition and it turned over the first time you stepped on the gas. And so that's the genius of the engineering of Voyager. And Carl was one of the key participants in imagining what its mission would be because it was a gift, actually, of the fact that every 175 years, plus or minus, there is an alignment of the worlds. And so you could send two spacecraft to these other worlds and photograph them and use your mass spectrometer and all the other devices on Voyager to. To really, to explore these worlds.

And it's the farthest spacecraft.