48 ASTRONOMY • APRIL 2020
Druyan: That was another touchstone
for me, for the new season: the idea that
dreams are maps. Here’s a working-class
kid in a little, really tenement apart-
ment in Brooklyn. He took me to see
that apartment, and we actually rang the
buzzer and the woman let us look at the
apartment. It must have been 40 years
ago, but I did see it.
Here’s a kid who is lying on the living
room rug in his parents’ little apartment
in Brooklyn, and he’s mapping out the
unfolding over the next 100 years of our
exploration of the cosmos. The name of
the drawing is “The Evolution of
Interstellar Flight.” It’s so amazing to me.
That’s the amazing thing about Carl.
He knew how lucky he was because he
got to live out his earliest, his wildest
dreams. As he wrote so beautifully.
When he was 5, he was taken to the 1939
New York World’s Fair. That’s where he
realized, as he wrote, that there was such
a thing as the future, and that the only
way to get to it was science.
So, we go with Carl and his parents to
the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Then we
go along with Neil deGrasse Tyson to the
1964 New York World’s Fair. Because his
father was an official, they named one of
the monorail cars at the ’64 World’s Fair
the Tyson Comet.Astronomy: I’ll be darned.Druyan: Yeah. So we go with Neil and
his family to that — you know, first with
Carl is that magnificent art deco, almost
sepia kind of New York World’s Fair,
and then with Neil is the Kodachrome
World’s Fair that I remember so well,
because I lived in Queens and I was a
teenager at that moment. My brother
worked at the fair, so I was there almost
every week. I loved it.
One of the things we do in the newseason is that we go to the 2039 New
York World’s Fair, which is a vision of
the future we can still have if we learn
to use our science and tie technology
with wisdom.
As I write in the companion book to
the new series, this is where the future
became a place that you could visit. It
was a democratic vision of the future,
small D, but also large D, too, I guess.
This is the thing I find so amazing.
It’s 1939. The country is still mired in the
worst global economic depression ever.
It was about five minutes away from themost brutal, destructive world war in
human history, the greatest bloodletting
in human history. Yet, here are these peo-
ple who are so in love with the future.
If they had known what the future was
really gonna bring them, they probably
would have been terrified. Any reasonable
person would be, but they had a passion
for the future, and that passion captivated
Carl and so many others, with the idea of
a world — when you look at Democracity,
which was the name of the actual city at
the New York World’s Fair in 1939, no
slums. No slums. None of the inequality
and tragedy.
What really excited me was — some-
times I like to just go around on YouTube
and just search for things. YouTube is
such a treasure trove of great musical per-
formances and history and many things.
In my searching, I found Einstein’s open-
ing speech. He opened the New York
World ’s Fa i r.Astronomy: I didn’t remember that. Wow.Druyan: It’s a great story, which I tell in
the book. We didn’t get a chance to really
go into it in the show, but in the book, I
had the freedom to write about the fact
that Einstein was given the assignment to
explain cosmic rays at the opening of the
New York World’s Fair.
This is how audacious and imaginative
these people were, the greatest minds on
Earth at that time, before or since for a
couple of centuries. They said, “OK, we’ve
got this World’s Fair. We’re gonna open it.
What are we gonna do? I know what we’re
gonna do. We are going to pluck 10 cosmic
rays from the cosmos, and we are going to
capture them on the roof of the Hayden
Planetarium” — no kidding — “on the
roof of the Hayden Planetarium, and we
are going to transmit that energy from
Manhattan to Queens. And after Einstein
explains what a cosmic ray is, we are
going to use the energy from a cosmic ray
to illuminate, to perform the greatest path
of illumination in human history, as this
sphere bursts into light.”
So they said to Einstein, “You have to
do it in 700 words.” He said, “Impossible.
That’s impossible. I’m not gonna do it. It’s
too complicated and we don’t even really
understand what they are. So no way.”
And they begged him, and he relented.
What I think is so brilliant is what hisIn the Palace of Life, host
Neil deGrasse Tyson
encounters Saccorhytus
coronarius. When it lived
about 540 million years
ago, it was microscopic.
But in this depiction, it
looms large. This
creature is the earliest
common ancestor we’ve
yet found, a physical
connection we share
with almost every animal
on Earth.
You know, it’s my hope that when the pendulum swings so wildly
in one direction towards falsehood and fantasy, that it means that
it’s going to be swinging back equally in the other direction.