ADVANCES
24 Scientific American, March 2020
GETTY IMAGESSCIENCE COMMUNICATION
Reimagining
the Future
Cosmos co-creator Ann Druyan
talks about communicating
her dream for humanity
The universe in which the classic PBS
series Cosmos debuted 40 years ago no
longer really exists. In 1980 the Internet
was in its infancy, scientists were just start-
ing to sound the alarm about global warm-
ing, and present-day scientific realities
such as exoplanets, dark energy and the
Higgs boson remained entirely theoretical.
Co-created by its host, the late astronomer
Carl Sagan, with his wife Ann Druyan and
their collaborator Steven Soter, the series’
clear-eyed view of the past, present and
future of life in the universe has been
clouded over by the passage of time.
Today, however, Sagan’s brainchild is
in the midst of a modern reimagining that
began in 2014 with Druyan as an executive
producer, writer and di rect or and with
as trophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as host.
This revival begins its third season, Possible
Worlds, in March; an accompanying book by
Druyan comes out in February. Scientific
AmericAn spoke with her about Cosmos,
science communication and her vision of
a world made better and more beautiful
through rational inquiry. —Lee Billings
What can we expect from this latest
installment of Cosmos?
This new season contains a hopeful vision
of the future and is a meditation on a re -
markable quote from Einstein, from when
he opened the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
I will paraphrase, but he was saying [that]
science will not fulfill its mission the way art
has until its inner meaning penetrates into
the consciousness of the people. When
I saw that quote, I recognized this was the
original mission of Cosmos: to bring that
inner meaning to everyone.
This season is in the shadow of climate
change. I feel like I’m a member of a civiliza-
tion that cannot awaken to the challenges
that threaten to destroy it. One of the ways
to awaken [people] is to give a dream of
what the future could be if we use our sci-
ence and technology with wisdom and fore-
sight and begin to think in the timescales of
science. Not the next balance sheet, the next
quarter, the next election, but 1,000 years
from now. What will it be like?What does it mean to use
science that way?
For me, science is one of those rare occa-
sions for human self-esteem, precisely
because [science] is a kind of mechanism
that says, “We’re human, and we’re going
to deceive ourselves and each other. So
let’s create a system where no matter how
much we may want to believe something,
if it’s not true, we’ll come to know that
over time .”... What happiness, what self-
respect can we have unless we face reality
and embrace it?What “possible worlds” will
Cosmos explore?
We go to lost worlds from our own history.
Like the great city of Mohenjo Daro (in
what is now Pakistan), which thousands of
years ago had indoor plumbing and a glori-
ous civilization—we bring that back to life.
We go to the possible worlds on exoplan-
ets, of course, but also to the planets of our
own solar system.
We also explore inner worlds. For
instance, we’re fascinated by the concept
of the “connectome” of the human brain—
the idea that just as we’ve mapped the
human genome, we could map all the
thoughts, associations, memories andideas of a single human. Imagine putting
that on an interstellar probe!
And we go to worlds right beneath our
feet, looking more deeply at the ways oth-
er life-forms on this planet communicate.
Like the democratic society of the bees,
in which consensus arrives through wag-
gle dancing. Here we are, thinking about
messages from other extraterrestrial civili-
zations, when we are living in the midst
of another society that communicates in
symbolic language.What is your dream for the future?
I have a theory that dreams are maps.
And [today] we don’t have a dream of a
great future. I wanted to create a believ-
able dream of the future [with] episode 13
of Cosmos, in which we go to the 1939
World’s Fair, with its art deco sepia gor-
geousness, and then to the 1964 World’s
Fair with its Kodachrome futuristic opti-
mism, and then to the 2039 World’s Fair.
And what I’m most proud of is a new
colossus in New York Harbor that consists
of the carbon dioxide redeemed from the
atmosphere that has been turned into cal-
cium carbonate—limestone. Like a Statue
of Liberty except it’s the Tree of Life, with
all the different species of biology.
That’s my dream: that human ambition
will be directed to making this planet, and
the astonishing diversity of life that it sup-
ports, our priority. That’s the possible world
that ultimately all of Cosmos is driving to.New York’s 1964 World’s Fair showed
an optimistic view of progress.© 2020 Scientific American