Carl Sagan on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (full interview, March 2nd 1978)

guests I always look forward to having here he is a professor of astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell director of the laboratory for planetary studies he's written a best-selling and fascinating book called the dragons have eaten would you welcome please dr. Carl Sagan your name was discussed on this very show last night we had Ray Bradbury with us for the science fiction writer we were talking about being out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and so far well what's new in space Carl see I like to condense the subject down real quickly and don't start off too big hey I know what I think I think it's all comedy yours I don't have some time or Newsweek somebody to ask you about the the pictures that are out now there's Star Wars Close Encounters and so forth and they asked you what you thought then you thought that they should be Nazis and say they were in an entertaining but you thought maybe they should deal a little closer with scientific facts yeah my sense of them is that sort of the eleven-year-old in me love them but they they could have made a better effort to to do things right a lot of a lot of different aspects of things there's a Star Wars starts out saying it's on some other galaxy right and then you see there's people and scene starting in scene one there's a there's a problem because human beings are the result of a unique evolutionary sequence based on so many individually unlikely random events on the earth in fact I think most evolutionary biologists would agree that if you started the earth out again and just let those random factors operate you might wind up with beings they're as smart as us and as ethical and artistic and all the rest but they would not be human beings that's for the earth so in another planet different environment yeah very like the down human being are you saying on another galaxy it's not possible that there could be extremely unlikely that the creatures as similar to us as as the dominant ones in Star Wars ends a whole bunch of other things they're all white the skin of all the humans and in Star Wars oddly enough is sort of like like this right and not even the other colors represented on the earth are president much less greens and blues and purples and oranges they did have a scene of Star Wars with a lot of strange characters yeah but none of them seem to be in charge of the galaxy everybody in charge of the galaxies seem to look like us and I I thought it was a large amount of human chauvinism and also I felt very bad that at the end the wookie didn't get a medal also you know all the people got medals and the wookie you had been in there fighting all the time he didn't get any medal and I thought that was an example of anti Wookiee discrimination here are you dissecting a scientifically Carl taking all the fun out of it for me well that's it I mean you can you can view these pictures entirely uncritically well that's really what it was it was a it was a shoe died wasn't it a Western sir outer space sir good guys versus the bad guys when my sense is it every picture with touches on science could do that and at the same time just a little more effort to get the science right I remember one comment you made it was about a allusion to speed when I really had to do with distance yeah the that's the part I'm your solo that's right talked about a getting to a certain place and only so many parsecs of time yeah or skedaddle even when it's unit of distance it's like saying but from here to San Diego is 30 miles an hour it just doesn't mean anything out for money people were sitting there that figure that out during make sure that what we got to do is hire one impoverished graduate student senator flex right let me tell you I would have owned Ray Bradbury's on here last night and I think I've asked you this question before because if I remember in Star Wars they got up and they got in the spaceship and they were beyond the speed of light right yep now as far as I guess science knows that is supposed to be the finite limit of velocity is the speed of light and nothing can go faster than that and yet in this picture they were going faster than that and I asked ray I said what would happen I think I asked you the same question if they found something that was beyond the speed of light how wouldn't that change all of the whole your legal conception of what's going on a lot of people are sort of annoyed that physicists should lay any constraints on what we are do in the future but I think the way to look at it is something like this is all do Tyne Steinem and that's related his lap all the people who are annoyed and not paying for travel faster than the speed of light um it's simply this if no material object can travel a door beyond the speed of light then there's a great deal of things in the world that are understandable quantitatively in detail the universe makes sense if if we're possible to travel faster than the speed of light then all of that that comprehensibility breaks down and there are a lot of awkward things that can happen such as effects proceeding clauses uh if you see what I mean the light goes on and then you walk to the switch to turn it and there were there a famous poem about that after I'm since there was a young lady him bright named bright to could travel much faster than in light she let it out one way one day in a relative way and returned the preceding night was little Carl Sagan's Chinese now let's hear our next suit very good car you may take your seat we'll be right back after this and talk impatient we're talking just we're talking about star wars during the commercial I said you realize Star Wars made over 200 million dollars and he said you could go to a planet for 200 million dollars right that's true that's what it cost and Sheen Mansmann see it live right unless you go coach that's right and then you get that one little trade dinners and Slough Zee um we start talking we've talked about this before but it's the fascination is still mind boggling you're involved now with looking for extraterrestrial intelligence right to put a committee how do you go about looking for well there there are a number of popular ideas would know it I mean something that they were maybe we couldn't comprehend what they were trying to tell us he's out of possibility sure but it's a little like this if if you're an advanced civilization and you wish to communicate to a backward civilization you talk slow and simple and and obviously we would be the backward civilization because we do not have that capability of will we must emerged our technology just barely has come to the point we were able to send spacecraft to prove in a halting and tentative way than your by planets and in which we're able to construct large radio telescopes to see if anyone is sending us a message and it's this letter end of things that for the first time is now being funded at a quite low level but the first operational program that NASA is funded is to in the present the present budget and the idea is simply to look at a lot of stars or carve up the sky into little pieces and look at my piece and see if there's a message coming to us know even the nearest one would be well nearest ours the one for light-years away so if we got a message today it left that star four years ago but you know we ought to be used to that kind of idea you look at the Sun you're not seeing it now you're seeing it eight minutes ago because it took eight minutes for light to travel at the speed of light from the Sun to the earth of course to know how you would recognize a signal as intelligent so suppose you heard some which said beep-beep-beep beep-beep-beep bbbb beep God went through the first 30 or so prime numbers it's an answering service in other words you go through the numbers yeah and and there's no natural process which you know we would say 1 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 which are the rests on this one the first few prime numbers and so you would say well oh here's somebody who for some reason is into prime numbers prime number is a number that can only be divided by 1 in itself here here's somebody who's into prime numbers they've attracted our attention there must be more to it than just prime numbers and then you would look more closely that's the sort of so you think it's just an arrogant would be in some kind of mathematical well it would it would be so regular to the universal type you know that you could only say the only possibility would be that it was intelligent and then you would look for the more detailed message either at the faster time resolution or at some adjacent frequency or something of that sort the remarkable thing is that for all the history of mankind people have wondered about intelligence elsewhere I think it's in religion and philosophy legends but this is the first time that we have the competence and ability to actually do such a such a search and we're just beginning are we sending out from here some kind of outside of the thing that you the plaque did see you put on the mariner who pioneer pioneer on the Voyager record which manned the record are we sending any type of radio signals not really the there was one sort of ceremonial demonstration at the resurfacing of the Arecibo Observatory in 1974 a signal was sent by Frank Drake who's getting married in two days of three measurements um but to a place that's 24 thousand light-years away it's not a you know so if there was an answer it'll be in 48 thousand years you don't don't hold your breath it was merely being on hold and it was merely to demonstrate that it could be done but in general radio astronomers have not sent out just have listened but there are signals that are sent out including this program I was going to just accept what I was saying is it true that all shows of television radio shows that are sent out travel forever through the void yep they do they do not diminish in they do they diminish but what's called the inverse square law so goes twice as far it's a quarter as an intense about somebody with a receiver the powerful and receiving antennas all the television shows and radio shows have been broadcast well the earth turns so they get jumbled up star beings are still travelling through the cosmos so it's a little bit like this you imagine here's the earth and around it as a kind of miracle wavefront traveling at the speed of light it's now about 30 light years away from the earth because the first large-scale commercial television was 30 years ago and in there is the television programs of the late 40s Howdy Doody Milton Berle the army McCarthy hearings and other signs of high intelligence on the planet Earth somebody could be seeing Burrell right now walking around on the sides of his feet 30 and 30 light and address and judging us and just saying well all guy think that we got troubles down there I just hope they wait till Sesame Street arrives it'll save us that's fascinating oh the idea that goes out there the the actual situation is that even if the programs could not themselves be made up there is no question that a low form of intelligent life on the earth could be deduced in that way if you had to make but I guess it calculated guess or the theorized when do you think it would be if you think of it would happen when would it happen within a period of ten years twenty fifty years see depends on how much of effort we make if we make no effort the possibility of detecting such signals is small for make a big effort then the probability goes up but nobody knows to what now people are gonna ask you you say because it could this could cost money you say okay you hear from somebody ten light-years away but by the time you transmit back and forth what is the value of that I mean that's if you have to sit around and wait for 50 years or a hundred years to get an answer there's what they're saying why what are you talking about a hundred years now who the hell is gonna care we're gonna be gone well there's a lot of answers to that it's a good question but it's one worth pondering for one thing there's a lot of information in human society which goes only one way Socrates talks to us we don't talk to Socrates Liz that's what books are about people who are dead convey their wisdom to us somebody could transmit and the knowledge of another planet and just sends the direct knowledge think of that think of a civilization on a different planet evolved under quite different circumstances than here what is their art like their music their science their technology their politics what have they learned have they been in contact with still other civilizations do they have a repository of such information think of how we'd be able to view ourselves in a new way suddenly to have a new perspective there's another aspect to it too and those we are at a very day Juris moment in human history we have weapons of mass destruction we are in the process of inadvertently altering our climate and exhaustion of fossil fuels and mineral all kinds of problems which come with technology we are not certain that we will be able to survive this period of what I like to call technological adolescence were we to receive a message from somewhere else it would show that it's possible to survive this kind of period and that's a useful bit of information yeah wouldn't this be something in other words somebody has solved a particular problem we are still wrestling with it's good to know that the problem could be solved I think would be very very useful in for some of the medical breakthroughs someway to end wars or something like that maybe medical breakthroughs are tougher because I suspect our physiology would be quite different from that of any other creatures if there are some also it's possible that you'd make such a search and the results would be negative that's perfectly possible you don't want to prejudge the outcome but it seems to me that's an important bit of information also if it turns out that life intelligent life is rare that makes something particularly precious and valuable about life here but isn't it when you talk about 50 light years or 100 years in astronomical terms that is a Manute distance it's true I mean now you can get into thousands of light years and millions of light years sorry light years about six trillion miles the distance to the nearest star as we said is about four light years the distance to the center of the Milky Way galaxy that we're part of is 30,000 light years the distance to the nearest galaxy is about two million light years fascinating book the dragons of Eden and of course you still got the cosmic connection which is what they also learn fascinating books thanks for being here it it's always a great cake lady gynecologist you'll start when on your show tomorrow night tomorrow night Bob were you headed to the gynecology to determine your sexuality okay uh tomorrow shirley maclaine will be here Cheryl Tiegs Ronnie Graham and jazz greats Stan Getz I'm humbled by that applause

Channel: Napkin Botany

Views: 494,592

Rating: 4.8830462 out of 5

Keywords: Carl Sagan, Johnny Carson, Star Wars, SETI

Id: g-Q8aZoWqF0

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/greedshop]

Wow, was he the first person to publicly note that Chewy never got a medal?

[u/dsfdgsggf1]

every time i see a carson clip i understand a little more why he was so revered. Nowadays anyone getting as scientifically detailed as sagan would probably get a half assed "wow that's so interesting (but let's stop because we're losing the audience)" followed by a deprecating joke.

[u/jedichric]

I don't understand why scientists want to knock Star Wars for being not realistic. It's a fantasy, not a prediction. In all fairness, at least Sagan said it was great to his inner 12 year old.

[u/Searyry]

The rest of the clip is super interesting too! Worth the watch!

[u/sfsdfdsfdseewew]

It greatly pains me that in 1978 he was mentioning the danger of climate change. And now 2017 the USA has a president that slammed the breaks on it.

[u/Surfing_Ninjas]

It's almost as if Star Wars is space fantasy with magic and illogical family relationships.

[u/CansinSPAAACE]

Climate change.... weird it must be fake

[u/raresaturn]

Ray Bradbury episode is here: https://youtu.be/k1UaSpNumX8

[u/ajlueb]

I'm most surprised about how large of a time slot he was given.