When I began trying to build my own worldview back in 2006, Carl Sagan’s books were instrumental in giving me a scientific orientation — and a scientific education. By the time he first appeared on the blog (November 2007), I was a rapacious enough fan that I’d read the overwhelming majority of his pop-sci books. For those who missed his time in the sun( he died rather young, weakened by a rare blood disease), Sagan was an astronomer and prominent science advocate who featured in the PBS show Cosmos, still an extraordinary watch today. When I spotted this book I had to give it a try: Conversations is a collection of interview transcripts with Sagan ranging from the seventies to May 1996, months before he died: they range, too, in tone and depth, as sometimes Sagan can go into more technical details (when being interviewed by science magazines) but on other occasion it’s similarly casual, as with his interviews on the Charlie Rose show.

Several things popped out at me while reading this: first, Sagan’s scientific versatility, as he had training in biology and chemistry and in fact did his astronomical work in that vein — trying to identify chemical compounds from the Voyager data. Two, although I’ve often heard that Sagan was poo-pooed by the scientific establishment for being a popularizer, these interviews also demonstrate that Sagan’s tendency to speculate and think out loud in public — on air, in columns, etc — grated them. They wanted him to do his imagination work in the presence of his peers, not the public — despite the fact that his charisma and imagination excited the public, too, and made him into a rare celebrity-scientist. Sagan used his high profile to advocate for better science education — no more football coaches teaching chemistry, please, and focus on the lab instead of textbooks — as well as speak on public policy issues that needed to be informed by science, like global warming and ozone damage. Sagan was particularly frustrated by the fact that, after the Cold War was over, the American government continued to sink so much of its GDP into the military instead of focusing on problems or investing in the future. Those familiar with Sagan won’t find any surprises here, especially not if they’ve read books like Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World: the latter third of the book is dominated by interviews that were inspired by book launches there.

Although most of this was familiar content to me, it was nice to revisit Sagan after so long.

[T]he enormous amount of radio energy that we’re pouring out today
is due to three sources. One is the high frequency end of the AM broadcast
band, another is just ordinary domestic television, the third is the radar
defense networks in the United States and the Soviet Union. Those are the
only signs of intelligent life detectable on Earth from .a distance. It’s pretty
sobering. It’s often asked, if there is extraterrestrial intelligence how come
they don’t come here? Now we know. Just listen to what we’re sending out.

At the tin1e of the launching of Viking 1, Sagan wore two NASA badges, one
identifying him as a scientist and the other as a correspondent for Icarus, a
scientific journal he edits. It was as though he was having a hard time deciding whether he was a scientist or a writer.

“The Soviet Union has collapsed. The Cold War is over. Presumably we’re not obliged to invade lots of other nations.We can protect ourselves for a fraction of that $300 billion, and the money saved could do an enormous amount to solve many of
our other problems.” (If only, Carl, if only….)

PT: Science saved your life.
CS: This is not the first time I almost died. This is my third time having to deal with intimations of mortality. And every time it’s a character-building experience. You get a much clearer perspective on what’s important and what isn’t, the preciousness and beauty of life, and the importance of family and of trying to safeguard a future worthy of our children. I would recommend almost dying to everybody. I think it’s really a good experience.
PT: Probably once is enough for most people.

PT: Coming as you do from a hard-science background, how do you think
psychology is doing as a field? A lot of the issues in your book are big areas
in psychology.
CS: I’m not a psychologist. I don’t have a comprehensive surveillance of the
whole field, so all I can do is give you an offhand impression. The thing I’ve been most appalled by is the sense of so many psychotherapists . . . that their job is to confirm their patients’ delusions rather than help them find out what really has happened. It took a long time to convince myself that’s what’s happening, but it certainly is happening.

We have a society based on science and technology, and at the same time we’ve arranged things so that almost nobody understands science and technology. That’s a prescription for disaster as clear as anything.