WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 49opening remarks were: “If science,” and
I’m paraphrasing because I’m doing this
from memory, “If science is ever to
become fully realized in the same way
that art has, its inner meaning will have
to penetrate into the mind of the public.”
When he said that, I thought, “That’s
the dream of Cosmos.” That’s what Carl
and I have been doing all our lives. This
is the idea of why people should take sci-
ence to heart. If you really take the meth-
odology of science to heart, the rules of
science, then we would not be in the
nightmare predicament that our country
finds itself in at this moment. It wouldn’t
be like that. We would have taught it to
our children, so that they would under-
stand that, above all, it matters what’s true.
You can’t lie your way to Mars. You
can’t lie your way to the outer solar sys-
tem and beyond. Because in all those
iterations and redundancies and every
step of every space program, manned or
otherwise, the point is everybody has to
get it right. You can’t fudge it. You can’t
make it up. You have to tell the truth or
else something terrible is going to hap-
pen and you will never get to where you
want to go.
Astronomy: What is your hope for the
new season of Cosmos in terms of influ-
encing young people in how they think?
We just talked about what a postmodern,
ridiculous world we live in with regard
to the truth now. How can Cosmos help
young people?Druyan: Well, I would love for it to be
an awakening. To thaw that frozen sea
inside of us that makes us act as if it’s all
business as usual and as if we can just
keep carrying on the way we are. That
would be wonderful: a new respect for
scientists and for the value, the message
of science, new standards or old stan-
dards of evidence reintroduced into our
political culture, so that lying becomes
unacceptable, no longer a tenable way to
get power.
These are survival issues. If Cosmos
could awaken those feelings — we feature
several scientists in this season who liter-
ally were willing to die, to be tortured to
death, rather than embrace pseudosci-
ence or lie about science. You know, it’s
my hope that when the pendulum swings
so wildly in one direction towards false-
hood and fantasy, that it means that it’sgoing to be swinging back equally in the
other direction.
I’m 70 years old. I’ve never seen any
kind of time in American history like
this one. I mean, there has been progress
from a very racist, homophobic, anti-
female society. We still have miles to go.
But we made some progress. Yet, we have
devolved in the area of respect for reality.Astronomy: It’s very disheartening to
many of us who are working very hard
to try to continue the respect for truth
and for science that you and Carl worked
on so hard. Frankly, the truth, scientific
truth, it’s more exciting than the fiction.Druyan: Absolutely. We’re not as good
at making up stories as reality and
nature. They make up the best stories.
And ours, you can see through them.
Unless they contain a lot of truth of their
own, they wear thin very quickly.David J. Eicher is Editor of Astronomy
and was encouraged in 1977 by Carl Sagan
to pursue a career in astronomy when he
commenced publishing Deep Sky Monthly
as a teenage astro enthusiast.A crowd gathers to
watch the great story
of the universe, revealed
by the generations of
scientific searchers,
in the night sky above
the 2039 New York
World’s Fair.