Carl Sagan on The Tonight Show

right on the anniversary I want to yeah I want to cut this one out real quickly so all the people who missed it will get a chance to miss it again you take a shot I know you did every joke you do the jokes no matter you just keep plunging straight a1 one of my favorite people is here and I know you are a fan of this gentleman and highly respectful he's he's been one of our best guests we've ever had on the show as a world famed astronomer and professor of planetary studies at Cornell his latest book is called a cosmos which also happens to be the name of the show which the abuse September 28th this Sunday on PBS and it's devoted to the study of the cosmos which I don't know was we'll find out the between the cosmos and the universe and so forth would you welcome please dr. Carl Sagan first of all congratulations because I know how long you have discussed this project here many times on the show and to see it come to fruition must be quite a thrill for you it's a pleasure to have done cosmos with a group of extremely talented people and to see it fulfill all my expectations and more I'm really pleased I'm looking forward to seeing it it's gotten some tremendous tremendous publicity the cover of TV Guide this week I noticed when the herald examiner the other day complete review of it which is rather unusual for the show that goes and there's something I was talking about this happen and it kind of bugs me and maybe it does you two television network keeps saying they want to put on quality show shows for the family upgraded now sure like this comes along which really is or a family can sit down with their youngsters and explore the universe and all about life and it ends up on PBS which is only unfortunate to the extent that is not going to get the huge audience that commercial television has did did you talk to any of the networks at all about something like this well we we didn't try to sell it to the network KCT Los Angeles the pediatrician here came to us with the proposal and as soon as it was cleared we would have content control right we said yes and part of the reason that PBS is not a supremely effective competitor where the network's that there aren't PBS stations in a lot of places yeah and they're also UHF instead of VHF so they're just not you know people can't have access to it but we're hopefully some people I would like to think that along the way that the the network the major network will pick up on it and show these episodes well I hope so too and if you happen to see Fred Silverman yeah let me let me check with her actually not actually moved right down here to keep people tight control on things when people talk about the universe and the cosmos what's the difference cosmology and astronomy are related but certainly related but cosmos is a Greek word which means not just the universe but the aspect of it which permits it to be understood the ordered and regular aspect of it you could imagine a universe which was fabulous with chaotic than which there were no regularities no rules no laws of nature but fortunately we don't live in such a universe we live in the universe which can be understood and which the laws of nature here are the same as billions of light-years away which means that we have to do is study the science here and you can know about a whole lot of other places so far that that does hold up doesn't it that the mathematical and physical laws that are observable here seem to be universal as far as gonna be turning now yeah it's it's a remarkable fact that you think there's any possibility now that of course work but right back to the chicken on the egg thing again possibility that there might be something well how can it be something beyond something you know it's the old finite depends with the definition of the universe is everything that is then there isn't anything outside the universe but it is possible to have closed off regions of space which is separated from others and in that sense there might be other universes and there might even be ways of going to them although this is a highly speculative point in cosmos we have some fun with us I slide down into a black hole to find out what happens you see me disappearing on the black hole interesting term isn't it for something that you can't see so how do you describe what the black sense if one cannot be seen I guess you that's there because of the emissions of the well it's two ways one is its its enormous growth your black hole is a place where the gravity is so intense that even light can't get out it's completely dark but if it's revolving around some other object it is shining right then by the gravitational tugs that the black bowl makes on this other star you can detect its presence another thing that happens is that black holes tend to have disks of matter surrounding them in which the friction generates x-rays and one of the black holes something called Cygnus x1 both does this gravitational pull and as a source of x-rays and very likely is an example of the legendary black hole yeah then there was a theory that once you enter a black hole you could go into another universe or you're going to another timeframe I suppose that's science fiction so far well there are some people who seriously think that if you were to slip down into a black hole and could survive the trip which is highly unlikely that you would emerge somewhere else in space and some win else in time yeah those are concepts that are hard for the mind to really sort out and they might even be false but they're fun - yeah we have a couple of little pieces of film from is just from there one of the upcoming episodes yeah take well let me do the commercial first then we'll come back and tell us what we're gonna see and watch together stay where you are Pillsbury bakes better tasting brownies than my Duncan Hines and it's flavor packet than my Betty Crocker with this can of flavoring sure let's see Pillsbury deluxe fudge brownies no packets or cans Pillsbury blends three rich Coco's right into the mix they're better tasting fudge brownies Pillsbury tastes richer than mine no chocolaty and moister than mine tastes deluxe fudge brownies you'll agree the best word for brownies is Pillsbury my Tech's got more yep my man got more yeah my George got more uh-huh more close shades four blade super to ultrix gives more close shaves than tracked to watch one push pushes out soap and stubble your twin blade start clean sharp four more close shaves effects slides on track two razors clicks on a track get all tracks four more close shaves a more close shaves than track two okay Carl why don't you explain what they're over what they could look for in this first clip here well cosmos is certainly about things in astronomy but it's about a whole lot of other things to a lot of other sciences but also myth and politics and religion and history also biology and the two clips we're going to see have to do one with what it is really like were you to dive into a living so I prick my finger and make some blood then the camera swims in fantastic voyage yeah except we go deeper than they did into the cell towards the heart device the DNA molecule the other one shows in 40 seconds a compression of the four billion year history of life on Earth evolved from the first cell to human beings I don't know what order you have it in by but what do we have first but we'll talk over it here you can watch the Mount of here watch it here then we can use a mom to write a paragraph but so here is the blood gushing from my finger this is a episode two of cosmos this is electron microscope oh this is so far optical microscopy you can see this with with an ordinary microscope if you were down at that level and every one of those the red blood cell carrying oxygen as the line of my co-writer Annie Jian says to the remotest freckle in the blood and most of them are red blood cells but we are going to dive into a leukocyte this one sorry a lymphocyte and we're gonna dive in to the inside of the soldiers quite like many other cells in the body and all this information is as precise as we can manage it you can see a bunch of five green blobs that we're approaching those are kind of factories on which enzymes are manufactured by instructions sent from inside the nucleus of the cell in a single cell this is a whole cosmos inside a cell this big blue lump to the right that we're approaching is the outside this is a cell in there is the Holy of Holies the place where every activity in the cell and all of life is directed from the nucleus contains the master molecule of life DNA which we see here it's been described as an explosion in a Spaghetti Factory every one of those long strands is a molecule of DNA containing all the erector double e like it's almost surrealistic a shell is almost like the universal light right yeah it's exactly the right word a microcosm a small universe yeah and there are trillions of such cells within us in fact there are there are as many cells and human body as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy and every one of those cells comes of course from one cell fertilized day and every one of them contains the identical genetic information of how to make the next generation yeah you mentioned Milky Way galaxy our galaxy which we can't see because we're start because we're stuck in the middle of it like that like in the forest but there is I was reading an article and an astronomy magazine where they kind of depicted what it would look like if he could ever observe within the outside we do that in cosmos yeah I approached the you know key way from the outside and our galaxy is just one of billions of billions of galaxies that's right so there are something like a one followed by 22 zeroes number of stars in the cosmos yeah an extremely big place yeah and the average distance between the stars you look at night they look so close together the average distance is maybe four or five light-years apart that's right thing right you're being about ten trillion kilometres so actually space is actually mostly empty it's the universe is made mostly of nothing yeah I know you hold to the fact or are you one of the people I think that would like to believe that they're intelligent beings on other planets we've discussed this before but it it's always intriguing because of what it would do psychologically probably to human beings here I think it would be a character building experience for us I mean think of the arrogance of assuming that that out of a hundred billion stars in this Milky Way galaxy are four hundred billion stars that ours is the only one which has an inhabited planet it's such a self-centered tremendous chauvinistic attitude it isn't exactly yeah but then there are other people who think we may well be unique and and can put up fairly valid arguments showing what has to happen here is very unlikely that it would happen some other places they put forth those arguments anyway yeah those arguments are put forth precisely what happened here is impossible to happen somewhere else but life is covers many different yeah we look at us you know I think we've talked about some before somebody said if you were gonna create a perfect human or when I say human the perfect living thing you wouldn't have two years over here you would have something coming out of the top of your head that would hear sound all around right to be completely efficient well there's no question that we are the way we are because of a long evolutionary heritage and you know our ancestors walked on four legs well in fact we'll see that in the in the next clip and a lot of fun now can we run it quickly run it run it right now BOTS do it's 40 seconds okay let's give the evolution of life or billion years compressed into 40 so here we go these are molecules before the origin of the first cell they're dividing yeah first communal organism composed of many cells here's our ancestor who was stucked on the ocean bottom then you volved gill slits the ability to swim something now recognizably a fish and amphibians which colonized the land hundreds of millions of years ago a branch led to the dinosaurs but that's not our branch our branch small furry scurrying creatures who took to the cheese and then came down invented language and technology and became us you won't find them in a ceiling you won't find them in assertive you won't find them in a Stearns and Foster but you will find them in a Beautyrest by Simmons hundreds of these exclusive Beautyrest coils they're wrapped individually so they're free to move separately to give every part of your body the kind of very comfortable support you will find anywhere look who's turning diet 7up I guess you have to give up a lot so couldn't see a costume that Linda I don't have to give up anything gone remember I'm the star besides any diet drinking help me fit into my costume then why the diet 7up sweetie because it's crisp it's light it doesn't have that funny diet taste why are you drinking it on well I like the taste - that's impossible why is that because you don't have him taste Donny dear no you're a beauty ooh baby diet 7up the only thing you give up is calories okay we've got three three big shows coming up you'll be frisked on Sunday at ten o'clock out here there are some people from another planet right there yours just ten o'clock out here Sunday Sunday TV show is Tuesday at ten o'clock and will be on Monday at nine o'clock for the anniversary

Channel: Kream Machine

Views: 47,539

Rating: 4.9351101 out of 5

Keywords: carl sagan, cosmos, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (TV Program), space, science, popular science, universe

Id: HEjrNs9zN8E

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2015