YouSaid · the spoken record

Ann Druyan

lines on the record: 71
first: 2020-03-05
most recent: 2020-03-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Books I've read, the music I've heard. So I feel like, you know, if it'd be much better if instead of working on the immortality of the lucky few, of the most privileged people in the society, I would really like to see a concerted effort for us to get us our act together. You know, that to me is topic A, more pressing, you know, this possible world. That is the challenge. And we're at a kind of a moment where if we can make that choice. So immortality doesn't really interest me. I really love nature and I have to say that I Because I'm a product of nature, I recognize that it's great gifts and it's great cruelty.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. It's just that the universe is so full of so many wonderful things to discover that it feels like it would be fun. But no, I don't want to live forever. I have had a magical life. My craziest dreams have come true. And I feel, you know, forgive me, but this crazy quirk of fate that put my most joyful, deepest feelings, feelings that decades later, 42 years later, I know how real, how true those feelings were. Everything that happened after that was an affirmation of how true those feelings were. And so I don't feel that way. I feel like I have gotten so much more than my share. Not just. My extraordinary life with Carl, my family, my parents, my children, my friends, the places that I've been able to explore.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Carl, definitely. I would have You know, in a nanosecond, I would take that deal. But not for me. I mean, if Car were alive, yes, I would want to live forever because I know it would be fun.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, all the time. I just turned 70. So, yeah, I think about it a lot. I mean, it's, you know, how can you not think about it?”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm going to make you watch this series. My book And, you know, but I'm just saying, like, this person would be forgotten. But you know, the way that we do Cosmos is that like I ask a question to myself, really want to get to the bottom to the answer and keep going deeper, deeper until we find what the story is, a story that I know because I'm not a scientist, if it moves me, if it moves me, then I want to tell and other people be moved.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, chemistry, yes. Geochemistry, geophysics, absolutely. You know, it makes perfect sense to me. And it doesn't make it any less wondrous. It doesn't rob it at all of... Wonder of it. And so, yeah, I think that's amazing. I think, you know, we tell the story of someone you have never heard of, I guarantee. And I think you're very knowledgeable on the subject, who was more responsible for our ability to venture out to other worlds than anyone else and who was completely forgotten. And so those are the kinds of stories I like best for Cosmos because did you?”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the origin of consciousness is to me also not so amazing. If you think of it as, you know, going back to these one-celled organisms of a billion years ago, who had to know, well, if I go higher up, I'll get too much sun. And if I go lower down, I'll be protected from UV rays, things like that. They had to know that, or you I eat, me, I don't. I mean, even that. I can see if you know that, then knowing what we know now is just not so hard to fathom. It seems like, you know, there's, I've never believed there was a duality between our minds and our bodies. And I think that...”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was a we are a byproduct of geophysics. And I think it's not, my suspicion, of course, which is take it with a grain of salt. But my suspicion is that it happens more often and more places than we like to think. Because, you know, after all the history of our thinking about ourselves has been a constant series of emotions in which we've had to realize, you know, no. So to me,”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, they all inspire me. Everyone knows inspire me. But now I have to say. That to me, at the origin of, as I've gotten older, to me, the origin of life has become Less interesting Because I feel, well, not because it's more, I think I understand I have a better grasp of how it might have happened.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Milky Way galaxy, and you do it. I mean, you know, the climate scientists, some of the people that we, whose stories we tell in Cosmos, their predictions. And they were working with very Early computer modeling capabilities, they have proven to be so robust nuclear winter. All of these things, this is a prophetic power, and yet how crazy that, you know, it's like the Romans with their lead cooking pots and their lead pipes or the Aztecs ripping out their own people's hearts. This is us. We know better and yet we are acting as if it's business as usual.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And warning about inadvertent climate modification in 1980, you know, and of course Carl did his PhD thesis on the greenhouse effect on Venus. And he was. Painfully cognizant of what a runaway greenhouse effect would do to our planet. And not only that, but the climatic history of the planet, which we go into in great detail in the series. So, yeah, I mean, how are we going to get a grip on this if not through some kind of understanding of science? Can I just say one more thing about science is that its powers of prophecy are astonishing. You launch a spacecraft in 1977 and you know where each and every planet in the solar system is going to be in every moon. And you rendezvous with that flawlessly and you exceed the design specifications of the greatest dreams of the engineers. And then you go on to explore”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has a form of human social organization that thinks in terms of a hundred years, let alone a thousand years, which are the time scales that science speaks in. And that's part of the problem is that we have to get a grip on reality and where we're headed. And I'm not fatalistic at all. But I do feel like, you know, and in setting out to do this series each season, we were talking about climate change in the original cosmos in episode four.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good because they come from a world which was in many ways in terms of climate fairly familiar and benign. And they know that we're headed in another direction. And it's not just that. It's what we do to the oceans, the rivers, the air. You know, I mean, you ask me like, what is the message of cosmos? It's that we have to think in longer terms. You know, I think of the Soviet Union and United States and the Cold War, and they're ready to kill each other over these two different views of the distribution of resources. But neither of them”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's not so true anymore. I don't think our problem is a population that's skeptical about climate change because I think that the extreme weather fire events that we are experiencing with such frequency has really gotten to people. I think that there are people in leadership positions who choose to ignore it and to pretend it's not there. But ultimately, I think they will be rejected. The question is, will it be fast enough? But, you know, this, I don't, I think actually that most people have really finally taken the reality of global climate change to heart and they look at their children and grandchildren and they don't feel”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, how much cruelty and brutality? Is happening at this very moment. And I would put climate change higher up on that list because I believe that there are unforeseen discoveries that we are making right now. For instance, all that methane that's coming out of the ocean floor that was sequestered because of the permafrost, which is now melting. I think there are other effects besides our greed and short-term thinking, that we are triggering now with all the greenhouse gases we're putting into the atmosphere. And that worries me day and night. I think about it every single day. Every moment, really, because I really think that's how we have to be, we have to. Begin to really focus on how grave the challenge is to our civilization and to the other species that are”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of the above. You'd have to be silly, you know, like not to think and not to look at, for instance, our Rapidly burgeoning capability in artificial intelligence and to see how sick so much of the planet is, not to be concerned.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly. And that's one of my theories about our current situation. Is that this is our adolescence? And I was a total mess as an adolescent. I was reckless, irresponsible, totally. I didn't, I was inconsiderate. I the reality of other people's feelings and the future didn't exist for me. So why should a technological adolescent civilization be any different? But you know The vast majority of people I know made it through that period and went on to More wise, and that's what my hope is for our civilization.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we had a moment of wow, we can do this. And then we realized, and somehow we had a failure of nerve and we went scurrying back to our mother and did things that really weren't going to get us out there, like the space shuttle, things like that, because it was a kind of failure of nerve. So Cosmos is about overcoming. Those fears.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if you give them a vision of the future that's not pie in the sky but something ways in which science can be redemptive can actually remediate our future we have those capabilities right now as well as the capabilities to do things in the cosmos that we could be doing right now, but we're not doing them not because we don't know how to be the engineering or the material sciences or the physics. We know all we need to know, but we're a little bit paralyzed in some sense. And, you know, we're like, I always think we're like the toddler, you know, like we left our mother's legs, you know, and scurried out to the moon.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just placed trees everywhere, waterfalls I'm sitting there thinking, well, you can't, how do you? Do you awaken people? I mean, you can't yell at them and say, We're all gonna die, you know, it's not going, it doesn't help. Don't help but”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possible worlds. Well, I stole it from an author and a scientist from the 1940s, but it for me encapsulates not just, you know, the exoplanets that we've begun to discover, not just the worlds that we might visit, but also the world that this could be, a hopeful vision of the future. You ask me, what is common to all three seasons of Cosmos or what is that voice? It's a voice of hope. It's a voice that says there is a future which we bring to life. And I think fairly dazzling fashion. We can still have, you know, and in sitting down to imagine what this season would be, the new season would be, sitting where I live in Ithaca, beautiful.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michael Faraday created the wealth of the twentieth century with his various inventions, and yet he never took out a single patent at a time when people were patenting everything because that was not what he was about. And to me, that's a kind of almost a saintliness that says that, you know, here's a man who finds in his life this tremendous gratification from searching. And it's just so impressive to me. And there are so many other people in Cosmos, especially the new season of Cosmos, which is called Possible Worlds.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you so much. Me, these are rare occasions for human self esteem. Scientists that we To life in cosmos. People, in my view, who have everything we need. See us through this current crisis. It's there very often they come, they're poor, they're female, they're outsiders who are not expected. To have gifts that are so prodigious, but they persevere. And so you have someone like Michael Faraday, who comes from a family, dysfunctional family of like 14 people. And, you know, it never goes to university never learns the math. But, you know, is the, you know, there's Einstein years later looking up at the picture of Faraday to inspire him. So it's, you know, if we had With that kind of humility and unselfishness who didn't want to patent everything as, you know,”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, when it came down, I have to say that when it came down to the vision of what the series would be, that was me sitting in my home, looking out the window and really imagining like what I wanted to do”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that was a critical thing. But also to have, for instance, our astonishing VFX supervisor who comes from the movies, who heads the global association of VFX people, Jeff Oaken. And then, and I can rattle off ten more names, I'd be happy to do that. And it was that collaboration.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in every time since in the 10 years since, at every turn, when we needed Seth to intervene on our behalf, he stood up and he did it. And so that was in a way, that is the, you know, the watershed for me of everything that followed since. And then I was so lucky because I know Steve and I, Steve Soder and I written the original cosmos with Carl and were collaborated on the treatment for a season two. And then Brandon Braga came into our project at the perfect moment and has proven to be just the really, I have been so lucky my whole life. I've collaborated, I've been lucky with my collaborators have been extraordinary.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I kept saying no. And he took me to Fox and to Peter Rice and said, you know, I'll pay for half the pilot if I have to, you know, and Peter Rice was like, put your money away. And.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm saying And my partners, I'm sure, you know, I know they would look at me like I was nuts. And they probably must have entertained the idea that maybe I didn't really want to do it, you know, because I was afraid or something.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, the critical thing really was the fact that Seth McFarlane became our champion because I had been with three colleagues. I had been schlepping around from network to network with a treatment for Cosmos. And every network said they wanted to do it. but they wouldn't give me creative control and they wouldn't give me enough money to make it cinematic and to make it feel like you're really going on an adventure. And so”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it was not just a way to understand a new scientific idea, but it was also Way to understand what if it matters what's true how the world can change for us and how we can be protected. And if it doesn't matter what's true. And we're in grave danger because we have the capability to not only destroy ourselves and our civilization, but to take so many species with us.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because for us and for me, and carrying on this series in the second and third seasons, the primary interest was that we wouldn't tell a story unless it was kind of a three-ferroom.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that's the greatest gratification, because that's the dream of science. And that's the whole idea is that if it belongs to all of us and not just a tiny few, then we have some chance of determining how it's used. And if it's only in the hands of people whose only interests are the balance sheet or hegemony over other nations or things like that, then it'll probably end up being a gun aimed at our heads. But if it's distributed in the widest possible way. A capability that we now have because of our technology, then the chance is that it will be used with wisdom. That's the dream of it. So that's why we did the first cosmos. We wanted to take not just, as I say, the scientific information, but also tell the stories of these searchers.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so crazy that, for instance, my son had a cerebral hemorrhage a year ago. And the doctor who saved his life in very Dangerous situation. When he realized that Sam and I were who we were. He said, That's why I'm here. You know, he said, if you come of age in a poor country like Colombia and Carl Sagan calls you to science when you're a child, then you go to medicine because that's the only avenue open to you. But that's why I'm here. And I have heard that story. And I hear that story. I think every”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea that once there was such a thing as a television network, which of course is now evolved into many other things, the idea that you could in the most democratic way make accessible to absolutely everyone and most especially people who don't even realize that they have an interest in a subject or who feel so intimidated by the jargon of science and its kind of exclusive history. The idea that we could do this and in season two of Cosmos spacetime odyssey. We were in one hundred eighty one countries in this space of two weeks. It was the largest rollout in television history, which is really amazing. There is no science-based program.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These scientific concepts and revelations and using cinematic VFX to take the viewer on this transporting, uplifting journey, but also the stories of the searchers. Because the more I have learned about the The process of science through my life with Carl and Since the more I am Really persuaded that it's that adherence to the facts And to that adherence to that little approximation, that little bit of reality that we've been able to get our hands around. Is something that we desperately need, and it doesn't matter if you are a scientist. In fact, the people, it matters even more if you're not. And since, you know, the level of science teaching has been fairly or unfairly maligned.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, the dream of Cosmos is really. Like Einstein's quote, you know, it's the idea of the awesome power of science. To be in absolutely everyone's hands. You know, it belongs to all of us. It's not the preserve of a priesthood. It's just as the community of science is becoming more diverse and being less exclusive than it was guilty of in the not so recent past. The discoveries of science, our understanding of the cosmos that we live in has really grown by leaps and bounds and probably we've learned more in the last hundred years about it. You know, the tempo of discovery has picked up so rapidly. And so Idea of Cosmos from the 1970s when Carl and I and Stephen Soder, another astronomer, first imagined was that interweaving not only of”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I still feel so lucky that there's any great musical artist of the last hundred years who I revere. I can just find them and watch them and listen to them. And that's fantastic. I also love how democratic it is that we each become curators, that we each decide those things. Now, I mean, I agree with the choices that everyone makes, but of course not, because that's not the point. The point is that we are, you know, we have discovered largely through the internet that we are an intercommunicating organism. And that can only be good.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think fundamentally we're the same, but we have a kind of advanced. To an astonishing degree in our capacity for data retrieval and for transmission. And so, you know, I would send YouTube. I would send, you know, really, like think of all.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, now we could send the worldwide. We could send everything that's on the wide web. We could send, I mean, you know, that was a time when we were talking about photograph records and transistor radios. So we try to be to take advantage of the existing technology to the fullest extent. The computer that was hooked up to me from my brain waves and my heart sands while I was meditating was the size of a gigantic room. And I'm sure it's not that I didn't have the power of a phone. The phone has now. So, you know, now we could just, I think we could let it all hang out. We could just like send that. Wonder, like, I would send you know Wikipedia or something and not be a gatekeeper, but show”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Purely to me chance. It's totally random. It's just, I mean, but and the fact is, is that some people are, and it's happening every day right now. Some people are the random casualties of chance. That and I don't just mean the people who are being destroyed in childhood in wartime. Or the people who starve to death because of famine, but also the people who... You're not living to the fullest, all of these things. I think there's a, my parents met on the subway in rush hour. And so I'm only here with you because of the most random. Possible situation. And so I've had this sense of this even before I knew Carl. I always felt this way, that I only existed because of the generosity.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, they begin to realize the lens, our lens of our present is coloring everything that we see. Know, I think it didn't matter that we didn't show our atrocities.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly not essential for happiness or beauty, that's for sure. I mean, it's part of who we are if we're going to be real about it, which is, you know, I think we tell on ourselves even if we don't want to be real, you know, I think that if you're a space-faring civilization and you've gotten it together sufficiently, you can move from world to world, then I think they probably took one look at this derelict spacecraft and they knew that these were people in their technological adolescence. And they were just setting forth, and they must have had these issues, you know, because it's. And so it really is the great thing about lying that a lie only has a shelf life, like a great, like a work of art Forgery? People can be fooled immediately, but 10 or 15 years, 20 years later, they start to look at it and”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, that's one of the most vigorous debates during the making of the record. You know, the five or six people that we collaborated with was do we show, do we only put our best foot forward Or do we show? Hiroshima Auschwitz, the Congo, what we have done.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should say that among the 118 pictures. Was an image. A man and a woman. Completely naked And there was, I believe, a congressman on the floor had said, NASA to send smut to the stars, you know. And so NASA really, they got very upset. And they said, you can't send a picture. And we had done it so that it was so brilliant. It was like Lovely couple, completely naked, and then the next image was a kind of overlay schematic to show the fetus inside this woman that was developing. And then that went off into additional imagery of human reproduction. And it really hit me how much we hate ourselves, that we couldn't bear to be seen as we are.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beautiful moments. And these amazing moments. And I just said for keeps. And he thought for a very brief, like a second and said, you mean get married? And I said, yeah. And he said, yeah. Put down the phone Literally was jumping around my apartment like a lunatic. Because it was so obvious, you know, it was something like, of course. And then the phone rang again and I thought, damn, no, he's going to say, I don't know what I was saying. I am married. I am a kid. I'm not going to do this, you know. But he was like, I just want to make sure. That really happened, and I said, Yeah. He said, We're getting married. And I said, Yeah, we're getting married. Now, this was June 1st, 1977. The records had not been affixed to the spacecraft yet. And there had been a lot of controversy about what we were doing.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, I was awkward and didn't really know what to say. And so I blurted something out like, oh, I've been meaning to talk to you about that, Coral, which wasn't really true. I never would have talked to him about it. We had been alone countless times.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of all the people I talk to, everyone had said that's hopeless. You can't do that, that there can't be one piece of Chinese music. But he was completely, no problem. I've got it. And so he told me the story of the piece, which only made it an even greater candidate for the record. And I listened to it called Carl Sagan, who was in Tucson, Arizona addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I left him a message, a hotel message center. And he called me back an hour later. I heard this beautiful voice. Back to my hotel room and I find this message that Annie called. And I ask myself, why didn't you lead me this message 10 years ago? My heart. Beating out of my chest. I Was for me a kind of eureka moment, okay, a scientific. Breakthrough A truth, a great truth. It suddenly been revealed”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because we're both involved with other people, and it was a completely outside his morality and mine to even broach the subject. But it was only days after that had happened. And for me, it was a Eureka moment. It was in the context of finding that piece of Chinese music that was worthy to represent one of the oldest musical traditions on Earth when those of us who worked on the Voyager record were completely ignorant about Chinese music. And so that had been a constant challenge for me talking to professors of Chinese music as no musicologists everywhere and all through the project desperately trying to find this one piece. Found the piece On the upper west side, found the piece, a professor at Columbia University gave it to me.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also was very newly within days of the moment when Carl and I fell in love with each other. Maybe we fell in love with each other long before because we'd known each other for years. But it was the first time that we had expressed our feelings for each other.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's 1977. There are some 60,000 nuclear weapons on the planet. The Soviet Union and the United States are engaged in a, you know, to the death competition. And so I began by trying to tell the history of the planet. In my limited ability, what I understood about the story of the early existence of the planet, about the origin of life, about the evolution of life, about the history of humans, about our current at the time predicament, about the fact that one in five of us was starving or unable to get potable water And so I sort of gave a kind of Know as general a picture as I possibly could of our predicament.”
2020-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source