[MUSIC PLAYING] FRANCIS LOW: Good morning. Unfortunately, I'm
not Viki Weisskopf. Viki was unable to come. He's recovering from
a medical problem. Let me assure you, he's fine. I talked to him this morning. He's getting better
and he'll be back soon. But he simply was
unable to make it today. I'm Francis Low, and I was
asked to share instead of him. So let me welcome
you to the morning session of the Worlds of Philip
Morrison, in which we honor and entertain, and
are entertained by, our friend and colleague,
Philip Morrison. Viki, 10 years
ago, wrote a piece for Technology Review,
which I think one should call an appreciation. And he was planning to read it. And it seemed to me the
best thing for me to do was to read it to you. So here is Weisskopf on
Morrison, Technology Review, 1976. I will change the last word. Phil Morrison is
more than a person. He represents an
attitude, a way of life, a symbol for what I'd like to
call joy of insight or lust for knowledge. Nobody else has better
demonstrated, or rather embodied, what it
means to the human soul to perceive or recognize
a new scientific discovery or a new theoretical insight. I use the word soul advisedly,
because Phil's character contains so much of it. Scientific knowledge
and understanding is not a purely cerebral affair. It is soaked with
emotion, excitement, and nervous tension,
as everybody knows who has heard Phil talk. The life of a
scientist would not be worthwhile were it not for
those few moments, maybe two or three per year, when
he feels an exhilarating joy deep in his gut of
having understood something, of having seen new connections,
that bring things together. Now I know what it means. These moments of joy
occur from time to time, no matter whether it is
one's own or someone else's discovery. In my life, more often
than not, such a moment happened during a talk or
a conversation with Phil. I remember an unforgettable talk
at a Harvard evening seminar more than 30 years
ago, when he told us about Watson and
Crick's double helix just a few weeks after
they discovered it. It was the physicist Morrison
who immediately recognized the immense significance
of the discovery, and he gave us a broad
picture, in his inimitable way, of how this development
will revolutionize biology. We went away from
it with pride to be alive at a time of
such revelation. Phil's strength is the
broad brush painting of the scientific landscape. You get the great connections,
the deep relations, and the far perspective. Surely here and there
some detail gets lost. Some conclusions
are not quite tight. But these are a
small price to pay for great panorama and the grand
vista which we get in exchange. Many people have asked how
Phil can manage all this. When does he read all
the books and journals? When does he acquire
his phenomenal knowledge of what happens in all
branches of natural science? On top of all this, he has been
book editor of the Scientific American for the
last 15 years, where he reviews four to
six books every month, and must have read
10 times as many. He possesses the phenomenal gift
of a quick and thorough grasp. Have you ever seen
him read a book by turning a page every
one or two seconds? He knows the content. And what's more, he knows the
significance and relevance of it. This fact has been
experimentally tested. I envy this in him more
than anything else. Every student at MIT
knows Phil's classic art of lecturing-- or
should I say romantic-- I should. You can count on getting a
new and unconventional view of the subject. Surely we must listen carefully
because the ideas come fast with Phil. There are moments when his
throat muscles have a hard time to follow the speed
of his thoughts. But these are the moments when
the lecture hall is filled to the brim with the
intensity of his thoughts and the tension
of his enthusiasm. If you needed proof
that true science is not a dry and impersonal subject,
go and listen to Phil. He has worked in many
fields of physics, and he is the best
counter-example to the narrow
specialists of today. No wonder his latest
field of endeavor is that part of science with
the widest and grandest scope-- astronomy. But there is more to
his human approach to life than his broad
understanding of science. Science is the relation
of man to nature, but Phil's interests go
far beyond pure science. The predicament of man, the
social and political problems, education, and health
care have always been among his most
important concerns. Everything human fascinates
him, be it great, ordinary, or ominous. Whenever help is needed,
whenever there is a cause to do some good, go to Phil. He will be ready and full
of youthful enthusiasm. Is he really 70 now? Our speaker this morning
scarcely needs an introduction. Nevertheless, it's my
job to introduce them, so I will say a few
words about each of them. Our first is
Professor Carl Sagan, who is the David Duncan
Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and
director of the laboratory for planetary studies
at Cornell University. He has played a leading
role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager expeditions to
the planet, for which he received the NASA Medal
for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. His scientific research has
enhanced and [INAUDIBLE] our understanding of the
greenhouse effect on Venus, dust storms on Mars, the
organic haze on Titan, the origin of life, and the
search for life elsewhere. Both of our speakers
this morning also have had several careers. And the second career of
Professor Sagan is author. He is the author,
co-author, or editor of more than 20 books, including
Broca's Brain, Comet, Contact, and The Dragons of
Eden, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His Emmy and Peabody award
winning television series Cosmos because the most widely
watched series in the history of American public television. There are very few scientists
who have been able to do this, to reach the public with
serious discussion of science and what is going
on in our field, or who had even tried to do it. And I think that Professor
Sagan deserves great credit for having brought some
understanding of science to the general public. In recent years, Dr.
Sagan and his colleagues have been engaged in research
on the long-term consequences of nuclear war, and covering the
phenomenon of nuclear winter, which you all know about. For this work, he was given the
annual award for Public Service at the Federation of
American Scientists, and of Physicians for
Social Responsibility, as well as the Leo
Szilard award for Physics in the Public Interest of the
American Physical Society. It's a pleasure to welcome
Professor Sagan here to MIT to Phil's celebration. His talk today is titled
"Joining the Universe." CARL SAGAN: Thank you. [SIDE CONVERSATION] Thank you, Dr. Low. I'm delighted to be
here, to be with Ed. My voice is the voice-- I think it's fair to say-- the world's scientific community
in celebrating Philip Morrison. I want to discuss a fairly broad
number of topics, all of which, one way or another, are
connected with Philip Morrison's manifold interests. And I'd like to begin
with a perspective, which I think Phil is one of
the inheritors today of this long tradition. And the tradition could shortly
be called the Copernican Perspective, but it's
much broader than that. In human affairs,
there is a kind of aristocratic
habit of thought that crops up in most
recent human societies, the idea that because of
some accident of birth, some people have an otherwise
unmerited sense of position in the social universe. From Plantagenet
princelings to the children of robber barons and
central committee members, this self-serving
attitude seems as natural as breathing
for those who are born into privilege or power. And it's connected with
sexism, racism, nationalism, and other deadly
chauvinisms that continue to plague the human species. Uncommon strength
of character is needed to resist the
blandishments of those who are surest of some supposed
superiority over our fellows. Since scientists are people,
it should not surprise us. Comparable doctrines
have entered, from time to time, the
scientific world view. Until the 16th century, for
example, almost all scientists considered it absolutely
evident from observation, that the Earth was at the
center of the universe, and that the sun and
the moon and the planets revolved around us. And while there
were good reasons on the basis of confirmation
between theory and experiment for such a view, nevertheless,
some of its popularity, I think, must be due to a
kind of emotional resonance. The universe was
structured around us, created for our benefit. We were at the center. Everything else goes around us. It's difficult to contemplate
such a model without feeling a small stirring of pride-- the
entire universe created for us. We must really be something. And this doctrine, supported
by common-sense observations, consistent with church
dogma, taught in schools-- it survived in Europe for
at least two centuries after the time of Copernicus
before it was supplanted by the more uncomfortable
idea that the Earth went around the sun,
wasn't at the center, and it was just one
of many planets. And the appeal of this
geocentric doctrine, I think, can still be felt, and the
continuing worldwide popularity of the entirely spurious
doctrine of astrology. Well, every other such proposal
to remove the human species from the cosmic
center stage has been resisted, sometimes
violently, for reasons that are emotionally rather similar. So, consider this
list of propositions-- that the stars are other
suns, that the stars are made of the same kind of
stuff that we have down here, that the Earth is much older
than the human species, that the sun is in some
obscure, exterior spiral arm of a vast Milky Way galaxy,
that the spiral nebulae are other galaxies, that
the position, velocity, or acceleration of
the Earth in space does not give us some
privileged reference frame, that human beings, like all
the other plants and animals on Earth, have evolved from
other and more ancient species. Well, every one of
these propositions has elicited a reasonably
fierce scientific debate. In every case, I think
the furor of the debate has something more to it
than just scientific debate. It has to do with
our fear of losing our imagined importance in
the cosmos, the cosmic center stage. But still, despite the
powerful social forces arrayed against them, every
one of these hypotheses has been convincingly verified. The sequence of
deprovincializations that they represent
constitute some of the key scientific advances
since the Renaissance. These debates have
been decisively settled in favor of a
proposition that can be summed up in a
single sentence-- we are nothing special. This set of blows to the
anthropocentric world view has been more than a
little disappointing to human chauvinists. And it's hard to be
human without feeling some sense of chauvinism. But it seems to me that the
gains of our new perspective far outweigh the loses. We find ourselves, maybe
trembling just a little, on the threshold of a
vast and awesome universe, rich in mystery and
promise, that utterly dwarfs in time and space
and in potential the tidy, anthropocentric
world of our ancestors. We have sent dozens
of robot emissaries to the nearby planets and
four spacecraft to the stars. We have launched
telescopes into Earth orbit that peer billions of light
years into the depths of space. And now, we are on the verge
of initiating an observational test of the most recent
self-congratulatory chauvinism-- the contention that in
all this great universe, of 100 billion galaxies and
a billion trillion stars, there is no species so wise, so
intelligent, so advanced as we. This topic is called
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
or SETI for short. And it began in a famous 1959
paper in the journal Nature, written by Philip Morrison
and Giuseppe Cocconi. These days, the revolutionary
nature of this paper is sometimes forgotten. The prevailing attitudes in 1959
were that the search for life elsewhere was somewhere between
science fiction and hokum. It had suffered serious
losses in credibility, going back to
Percival Lowell, who taught at this institution, who
believed that Mars was covered by a network of canals
built by intelligent beings, all of which turned out
to be entirely spurious. What Morrison and Cocconi
did was to ask the question, what is the most effective means
of interstellar communication by another advanced
civilization to us? They concluded that the
radio spectrum was by far the most convenient, the most
noise-free, the quickest, compared to alternative
non-electromagnetic means. And more than
that, they proposed that in the vast microwave
spectrum, the vast radio spectrum, there were a few
specific frequencies which might be the
preferential frequencies for such communication,
because of laws of physics shared between the
transmitting and the receiving civilizations. And they explicitly pointed
to the 1420 megahertz line of neutral
monatomic hydrogen. And this is now one of the
so-called magic frequencies-- that is, frequencies
which are imagined to be shared by a common
knowledge of the laws of nature and the nature of
the galaxy between a hypothetical transmitting
civilization and our own. From that time to
this, Phil Morrison has played a central role in
development and monotonically increasing respectability
of the subject. Right now, there is a search
program going on at Harvard, Massachusetts, led by
Paul Horowitz of Harvard, in which 8.4 million separate
channels, each much narrower than a hertz, are being
examined simultaneously as the telescope scans
the skies, as visible from Harvard in Massachusetts. And a still much more
sophisticated program is being worked on by the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In both of these efforts,
Phil has played a central role sharing the NASA committees, and
providing inspiration, insight, and motivation. We, of course, don't know how
these searches will turn up. There are many aspects
of it that are strange, and many of the
descriptions of the subject have metaphors and
insight which go straight back to Phil Morrison. Many of those who
speak them may not even know where they came from. For example, the now
very common comment that we hear, that
I myself have used, that we must expect
monologue, not dialogue, because of the great
distances, but that is not as big a deficit
as you might imagine, that Socrates speaks to us even
if we do not speak to Socrates. We treasure certain kinds
of one-way communication. That insight and metaphor
goes straight back to Phil. How this search will wind
up, no one, of course, knows. It may turn out that there will
be a comprehensive, very narrow band search of both the
northern and southern skies for a period of decades. If on the other hand,
we would receive a signal of intelligent origin,
even before it was decrypted, we would have learned
something of the very greatest importance-- that there are other
beings out there, that they are almost certainly
more advanced than we-- because the statistical chance
of them being within this very brief few decade long period
after the invention of radio astronomy has very
low probability, and therefore that they have
avoided self-destruction. The fact that that is possible
is knowledge well worth having. And of course, a successful
detection and decryption would, in ways that we can imagine
but cannot accurately foresee, change the history
of the human species. If that were ever to
happen, there is no question that we would all owe the
greatest debt of gratitude Phil Morrison. I don't want you to
think that this openness to speculative
ideas is untempered. In Phil Morrison's
personality, there is also a very appropriate dose
of scientific skepticism, which you can see in many
different areas. His famous remark, I
will believe a black hole when I see one, is an example. And it is exactly the
tension between this openness and this skepticism
which I think is one of Phil's great
virtues, one well worth emulating if we can. So let's think of Phil as
pioneering this subject of the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence at the same time, in
the '60s, that there was a kind of worldwide epidemic
of people who believed we were, at that same moment, being
visited by what were called unidentified flying objects. This had captivated
many, and not just the purchases
of weekly newspapers sold in supermarkets. I can remember James McDonald,
a respected atmospheric physicist, a member of the
National Academy of Sciences, who believed that there were
some anecdotal cases which were so compelling
as to make us really reconsider the possibility
that we were being visited. And I arranged for McDonald to
present to Phil his best cases. And somehow, while being
extremely kind and generous, the balloon was punctured
in a period of about 15, 20 minutes of extremely
friendly conversation. And Phil there did, I think for
many of us, a great service. At the same time, Phil
was replete with anecdotes of an enlightening
nature, one of which I will retell, but
from memory, and so if I get some details wrong,
please forgive me, Phil. The story goes like this-- a New Mexico highway patrolman
is driving along a road that he had many times
before driven along. And suddenly before
his eyes, he sees a great metallic saucer-shaped
object land in somebody's farm. And it's right
there on the ground. He sees it. He happens to know some
scientists at Los Alamos. He calls them up, explains
what happened right there at the highway, and they
say, keep your eye on it and we'll be there
as soon as we can. So let's imagine the
sun rising in the sky, the highway patrolman sitting
there in his patrol car, and the saucer-shaped object
sitting there in the field. The scientists arrive. They and the highway patrolman
then approach this object. The farmer is there
on the farm, and he seems totally oblivious
of this strange object. Could it be that it was
invisible to the farmer but visible to the scientists
and the highway patrolman? They approached
the farmer and say, could you tell us a little
about that UFO that just landed? The farmer turns around, looks
straight at it, and says, what UFO? Well, they talk a little
bit, and it turns out that what had been
thought was a UFO was just a kind of lenticular metallic
storage structure that had been there for years. And there was only one problem
in the highway patrolman's argument. He mistook his glimpse to
mean the thing had landed and he had never seen it before. Phil's lesson was that in a
scheme of inferential argument, you need only break one link
in the scheme for the argument to collapse. I also remember-- it was a
time when something called the Bermuda Triangle
was imagined to be eating ships and airplanes. And Phil raised the question of,
why aren't trains being eaten? Ships in the ocean, airplanes
flying over the ocean, there is a first
order hypothesis about what happens to make
them disappear-- they sink. Trains, on the other hand,
do not have that option, and therefore here we
have the possibility of normalizing the hypothesis. And then, as soon as
that point sank in, Phil then would come up with
a story about a train that did disappear. Well, maybe it wasn't
exactly a train. The story, as I remember
it, goes like this-- a large rotor for
some rotary machinery was being shipped by
train on a railroad flat car in a vertical position
with guy wires supporting it. It left the manufacturing plant. The train arrived at whatever
the transhipment depot where it was supposed to be taken off. And the flat car was
there, but no rotor. It was much too large
to have been hijacked. And they went over
every mile of the track. It had mysteriously disappeared. And this problem was
unsolved for a long period of time, decades,
until in draining a swamp a few miles
from the railroad track they found the rotor. It had obviously
broken its guy wires. And I don't know how
tall the thing was, 10 meters or
something, had rolled a few miles down to the swamp. Can you imagine what it must
have been like if anyone had simply been wandering by? One of Phil's most
remarkable characteristics is his ability as a teacher. I come from Cornell University. It has been a long time since
Phil was on the faculty there, but his influence
is still palpable. People who attend his
lectures never forget them. He has had a powerful
influence on a course curricula for children. In films and television
programs, I'm sure many of you have seen the
remarkable film that he and Phylis Morrison
and the Eames' did called Powers of Ten. Philip Daly, who is responsible
for the remarkable set of science films in the BBC
over the last few decades, stopped by just before
I came up to ask me to mention that Phil has been
a major source of inspiration for the BBC in even attempting
to do science films. And I can certainly say
that for the project I've been involved with in
television science education, Phil has also been a leading
source of inspiration. His articles in Scientific
American, book reviews were mentioned by Francis Low. I think it's fair to say
that many people learn more from the reviews than from
actually reading the books. There is a kind of condensation
down to the essence of the thing, which is hard to
extract one's self in reading the book. And I think these
reviews are also marked by a generosity of
spirit, in which insights are attributed to the authors
which they often never had. It's just Phil who had them. Phil, in teaching
science to the public, constantly stresses
not only what we know, but how it is we
came to know it. He constantly stresses respect
for the work of the hands as well as the mind, following
that ancient tradition of the Ionian scientists,
who in certain sense can be said to have founded
the scientific tradition of the west. Phil exemplifies
the responsibility that I personally believe
scientists have to communicate science to the public. There are many reasons
why it's important. One is just that
we love our subject and are enthusiastic about it. It's very natural to
try to communicate what you love to others. It's one of those
non-zero-sum games, like love itself, in which
every time you give, you gain. In addition, there
are clear sort of naked scientific
self-interest reasons. If we wish the public
coffers to support science, we have a clear
responsibility to explain what the virtues of science are. And I think we are a
scientific species. It's one of the very few
things we do uniquely that other animals do not do. I think every person on the
planet is, on some level, a scientist. But unfortunately,
school curricula and the social
conventions work not to encourage, but to discourage
this sort of interest. And as scientists, I think
we have a responsibility to counter that. And then there is the clear
social responsibility, that we live in a time,
civilization, culture, deeply involved with, dependent
upon, science and technology. And the clearest prescription
for disaster is for the public not to know about
science and technology. How can the public
manage their own future if they don't know some
of the essential tools for doing that management? So I don't know what
mix of these reasons has involved Philip Morrison
in science education for the broad public,
but there are many of us grateful that he has done so. On the issue of the mix of
openness and skepticism, I want also to mention Phil's
courageous and very long standing opposition
to the continuation of the mad nuclear arms race. Phil was involved in
the Manhattan Project. He armed the Nagasaki bomb. He was as deeply
involved as anyone in the development
of nuclear weapons to bring an end to
World War II and to beat the Nazis to this weapon
of great destructive power. On the other hand, soon
after the end of the war, it became clear to many
scientists, including Phil, that there were grave dangers
of continuing in this direction. And he has spoken out often
and courageously on this issue. I can remember being at
a dinner at the Pentagon in a previous administration in
which a secretary of defense, much more moderate than
the one now in office, was vehemently decrying a study
that Phil and a group of people with him called the Boston
Study Group had put together on why it was in the
national interest to make massive cuts in the
Department of Defense budget, the contention being
that it would strengthen the national security
of the United States if you did it in
a prescribed way. As you might imagine, that
did not fall on receptive ears at the Department of Defense. It was ahead of its time. I think that time is coming. There are many issues
related to the cessation, or at least the slowing down
of the nuclear arms race. I just want to mention
one, and that's the issue of continued
testing of nuclear weapons. In the 1963 Limited
Test Ban Treaty, there is in the
preamble a moving phrase about how the United
States and the Soviet Union pledge their efforts
to ending the arms race and moving towards a ban on the
testing of all nuclear weapons. That was 1963. In the 23 years
since then, there has not been much progress. In 1963, there was a remarkable
moment in recent history. The United States and the Soviet
Union with the Cuban Missile Crisis had managed to scare
each other almost to death. And for a very good
reason, Bobby Kennedy wrote that he thought
that there was a 50/50 chance of a central nuclear
exchange between the United States and the Soviet
Union over that incident. For a moment, the leaders
of the two countries had focused their attention
on the nuclear arms race. And in a speech at
American University, the American President,
John F. Kennedy, announced a unilateral
US moratorium on the further testing
of nuclear weapons. The next day, the full
text of that speech was published,
remarkably enough, in Izvestia and in Pravda. Within the week, the Soviet
Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, announced a unilateral
Soviet moratorium on further above-ground testing
of nuclear weapons, which was merely
coincidentally happening in the same week as the
American moratorium. But what we had
was a de facto ban on further above-ground
nuclear testing by the two principal
nuclear powers. What then happened is
a remarkable moment in recent history, in which
the two countries vied with each other to be nice. The Soviets removed
their objection to the stationing of
neutral observers in Yemen. The Americans removed
their objections to the credentials of the
proposed Hungarian delegation to the United Nations. There was a mutual
doffing of the hats. Before things got
out of hand, however, an American academic
named Barghoorn was arrested in Moscow
on grounds of espionage. And the climate heated up. And there was a real danger of
the test ban treaty unraveling. But Mr. Kennedy made
private remonstrances with Mr. Khrushchev. And Khrushchev then released
the American academic, saying that while he,
Khrushchev, was not convinced that he was innocent
of espionage charges, because the American president
wished it so strongly, he, Khrushchev, as a gesture
of humanitarian dedication, released him. And then it was time to
convert the de facto treaty to de jure treaty. Averell Harriman
was sent to Moscow as an ambassador,
got off the airplane. A reporter from TASS said to him
something like, Mr. ambassador, considering the grave tensions
between the two countries and the difficulties of
such a treaty, how long do you think it will be before
a successful treaty can be negotiated? Harriman said, if Mr.
Khrushchev wishes such a treaty half as much as
Mr. Kennedy, I'll be back on this
airplane in two weeks. 13 days later, the 1963
Test Ban Treaty was signed. And from that day to this,
no American or Soviet nuclear weapon has been tested
on the ground, in the air, or in space. On August 6 of 1985, on the 40th
anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, the Soviet Union announced
a unilateral moratorium on further underground testing. The American response
has been to explode 20 underground nuclear
weapons and to contemptuously reject the Soviet offer. This is an opportunity
which may not recur. It is very clear that the
longer the Soviets continue their moratorium,
the greater will be the pressure on
the Soviet leadership from the nuclear arms
establishment in the Soviet Union, and it may be that the
two nations will perpetually remain out of phase. What seems to me
is our objective is to arrange things so that
they are in phase long enough in reasonableness to make
a significant decline in this mad race to oblivion. An American private group,
the Natural Resources Defense Council, has established a
seismic monitoring station in the Soviet test area
near Semipalatinsk. Of So now that argument
has been swept away, and we hear other
sorts of arguments. To give an idea
of the desperation of the justification,
here are three ways that have been proposed
by this administration that the Soviets can cheat. One, they can wait for a natural
earthquake in Central Asia and test their weapons then. Even there, by the way,
the seismic signatures of natural earthquakes and
nuclear weapons are different. Two, they could decouple. They could make a vast
underground cavity and muffle the sound of
the nuclear explosion. Yeah, I guess sound
is the right word. But for any weapon
of significant yield, you have to excavate such
an enormous volume of earth that it should be readily
detectable by satellite reconnaissance. And then the pride of
place in these arguments is the third argument due
to Edward Teller, which is that the Soviets will cheat
by exploding nuclear weapons on the far side of the sun. Stopping testing
is a long-lever arm to ceasing the nuclear
arms race and to bring us into a regime in
which we can set about the urgent task of
making major, verifiable, and bilateral cuts in this
absurd joint arsenal of almost 60,000 weapons of
mass destruction. And if we succeed in doing that,
some measure of inspiration will have come again
from Philip Morrison. I want to mention just one
more topic before I sum up, and that has to do
with exploration. Phil is an explorer, an
explorer in many senses, but also an explorer in the
traditional sense of going out to new lands. He has traveled widely. But the kind of exploration
I'm talking about is real, old time
exploration with explorers. Phil is on the advisory board
of the Planetary Society, a 100,000 member worldwide
organization that is devoted to exploration
of the solar system, as well as the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence. And I'd just like to give you
a vision of something that is possible. It is a joint US-Soviet, manned
and womanned mission to Mars. There's not any appropriate
word to say manned and womanned. Manned certainly seems
wrong, because there are woman astronauts. It leaves out half the species. And some of the alternatives,
like crewed missions, lends itself to
misunderstanding. Mars is a world of wonders. The scientific justification
for going there is very clear. For one thing, a billion years
ago there was liquid water all over the planet. Rivers were gushing. There were lakes. There's even a contention
that there were oceans on Mars a billion years ago. Something very important
happened between then and now in terms of
massive climatic change, and it might even be of
practical significance for us living on a
nearby planet not all that different from Mars to
understand what happened. I won't go into the scientific
reasons for going to Mars, but they are manifold. But to send a mission
with human crews requires, it seems to me, more
than scientific justification, because people are much more
expensive, between 10 and 100 times more expensive, than some
comparable robotic mission, which could do
very well in terms of science and exploration. And the only reason to
spend that sort of money-- by the way, it's not a
huge amount of money. It's a tiny fraction
of Star Wars. It's in fact in constant
dollars less than the cost of the Apollo program. It's about the cost of a
major strategic weapons system, which we seem to have
an endless supply of money to support. But imagine such a mission. What could its
political purpose be? It can't be competition
with the Soviets in space. That is an issue, despite
the president's deep problems with the American space program. We have had enough
successes in space that we don't have to do that. But the idea of the United
States and the Soviet Union together, doing an exploration
on behalf of the human species, paving a way into
the 21st century, capturing the imagination of
people all over the planet-- that seems to be
something worthwhile. A mission which
would for some years be before the public
eye, in the construction of the interplanetary transfer
vehicle in Earth's orbit, in the voyage to Mars and the
setting down on the Martian surface, Americans
and Soviets together in the exploration of Mars, some
wheeled vehicle, for example, down an ancient
Martian river valley, and the return to Earth-- at every step citizens of these
two countries working together. I think it could do wonders. And it uses, notice, exactly
the same sorts of rocket and nuclear and computer
technology that is also used to drive the arms race. I think there is a way to
use the same technology that has created some of the
very serious problems that we have here
on Earth, a place contaminated with
60,000 nuclear weapons, to undo it by going elsewhere. Well, I am grateful
for the opportunity to be able to speak
to you in honor of Philip Morrison,
physicist, astronomer, SETI pioneer, peerless teacher,
weaponeer when it counted, peace activist when it counted,
pasta manufacturer, explorer, master of metaphor, inspiration
to generations of scientists and others. I should say that
in much of this, we can see the wisdom and
vitality and tenderness of Phylis Morrison,
who has clearly played an important part in
Phil's manifold activities. Phil has helped students,
colleagues, and many readers join the universe,
but he has also helped a much vaster
audience of people all over the world,
many of whom may never have even heard his name. His kindness, his generosity
of spirit, his insights, his enthusiasm,
his social concern have made him a model
for other scientists in the rare art of being a
fully developed human being. Thank you. FRANCIS LOW: Are there que-- I think we have
time for questions, if people would like to ask any. Yes sir, yes. AUDIENCE: I've heard
a recent speech that you gave to a group of
journalists on public radio. Would you care to comment on
the state of science journalism right now? CARL SAGAN: Yeah,
this was a talk I gave a couple of days ago
at the National Press Club, not on that issue,
but I was asked that. Well, it's mixed. And I guess the easiest is,
virtually every newspaper in America has a daily
astrology column. How many of them have even
a weekly astronomy column? That's certainly
one measure of it. Another measure is when
the Nobel Prizes in science are announced every year, when's
the last time you can recall getting a coherent explanation
on radio or television of what they won
their prizes for? It's almost entirely
oh, yeah, I woke up in the middle of the night. I was surprised. I didn't believe the
reporter from Stockholm. My wife was happy. When do we find
out what these guys did to win their Nobel Prizes? I think that that's
another indication of the state of journalism. Another is, you
look at people who are called science
reporters for the networks, and you find that they
don't report science. It's not scientific ideas,
theories, discoveries. It's almost entirely
medicine and technology. There ought to be
a medical reporter. There ought to be a
technology reporter. But there ought to be
a science reporter. I think the general
level of teaching science in the public schools
is woefully low. I think scientific
attitudes of thought, including skepticism
of received wisdom, is desperately needed in various
social, economical, political, and even religious aspects of
our society, and isn't there. And this may in fact
explain part of the reason that scientific
attitudes of thought are not taught by and
large in the schools. I think this is simply suicidal. I think science ought to be
talked about on some level over dinner tables. Why is it all right
for newspapers to have many, many pages of
fine print on the stock market? Really very arcane, lots of
abbreviations, lots of numbers, fractions. Why is it all right to have
box scores of baseball games, you know, with
abbreviations, HB, RBI. No explanation, you're
supposed to understand that. You pick up your daily
paper and you figure, well, just being a person
in this society, I'm expected to know something
about stocks and bonds. I'm expected to know something
about baseball and football. I guess I'm not expected to
know anything about science. There's not any of it in here. I maintain that there's an
enormous amount of science that can be taught in
newspapers and elsewhere that's a whole lot easier than
the stock page and the sports pages. Yes, please? AUDIENCE: What's the present
status of nuclear winter? CARL SAGAN: Present status of? AUDIENCE: Nuclear winter. CARL SAGAN: Present
status of nuclear winter. Well, I'm glad to say
it's not here yet. Nuclear winter is the
contention that if we are so foolish as to permit
a nuclear war to happen, the fine particles of soot
and dust that would be raised would spread over
large land areas, would darken and
cool the earth enough to produce a significant
additional peril for those who survive the
consequences of nuclear war. And while there are
continuing debates on just how much the
temperature decline would be and what the
duration would be, I think it is fair to say that the
consensus of scientific opinion is that it would
be very serious. Or maybe the best I can do
is to quote the Department of Defense, which proposes
that the consequences of nuclear winter
would kill perhaps as many people as the direct
consequences, which have been variously estimated
for a central exchange as between a few hundred
million and two billion people. Other questions? Yes, please? AUDIENCE: You talked
about various doctrines throughout history,
given the idea that there is something [INAUDIBLE]. Suppose [INAUDIBLE]
two people are arguing about [INAUDIBLE]
the probability of that is very small. Suppose that-- CARL SAGAN: I'm sorry, I
missed that last sentence. AUDIENCE: The probability of
two people arguing and being [INAUDIBLE],, like you
just said, is very small. Suppose that right now,
the two superpowers started earnestly trying
to have a unified view on the human creature. And how soon do
you think that we could have a unified
world, a planet which acts as one entity,
looks towards the space. CARL SAGAN: How soon? If a miracle happened and the
United States and the Soviet Union were to agree on what
to do, how soon before we could have a unified world? I have a perfect quote
from Philip Morrison. Prophecy is a lost art. Francis Low says especially
about the future. Nevertheless, I'd like to stress
that the problems that face us were made by people. There is nothing about them
that cannot be unmade by people. We have made
extraordinary changes in what we consider obvious. And of course, when we make
those changes, then we forget. But for example,
there was a time not so long ago when the view
of the divine right of kings was widely held worldwide. Famous scholars wrote famous
textbooks on this subject. There was a vast, vested
political interest to maintain this view,
especially among kings. And yet-- in fact,
there was even a war fought here partly
on that issue. But that view is not to
be found very often today. I mean, except for
some minor places, like Thailand and
the United Kingdom, this is a view that is done. Or consider chattel
slavery, the view that some people
are by right masters and some people are
by right slaves, and that the slave
holders could do what they wanted with
the slaves and break up families, all the rest of that. This doctrine was vigorously
supported by Aristotle. It was considered to
be an obvious truth. Not only that, that it was
God given that that's the way the world was to be arranged. But there there's been a
stirring worldwide revolution. And there are very few
places on the earth in which chattel
slavery is considered acceptable or permissible or
socially respectable today. Well, the vested interests
in the divine right of kings and in slavery seem
to me far greater than the vested interests in
continuing the nuclear arms race, although there certainly
are such vested interests. And everybody on the
planet has something to gain from reversing
the nuclear arms race. And I think this is
something that can be done, but only if we understand
the nature of the issue and if we're willing to take
courageous personal steps to turn the situation around. Okay, I'm told I have time
only for one more question. Please. AUDIENCE: Since you [INAUDIBLE]
education in the media, [INAUDIBLE] show a
program that would wake up the world to all these issues? CARL SAGAN: Thank you. The questioner says, why
don't I make a television program to wake the
world up on these issues? I will take it under advisement. [SIDE CONVERSATION]
