Ann Druyan is the writer, producer, director, and one of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time. She co-wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981, and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brain waves on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still active, reaching out farther into deep space than any human-made object ever has. This was a profound and beautiful decision she made as a Creative Director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project. In 2014, she went on to create the second season of Cosmos, called Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and in 2020, the new third season called Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which is being released this upcoming Monday, March 9. It is hosted, once again, by the fun and brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson.

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0:00 - Introduction
3:24 - Role of science in society
7:04 - Love and science
9:07 - Skepticism in science
14:15 - Voyager, Carl Sagan, and the Golden Record
36:41 - Cosmos
53:22 - Existential threats
1:00:36 - Origin of life
1:04:22 - Mortality

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The following is a conversation with Anne Jullian, writer, producer, director, and 1 of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time.

She co-wrote the 1980 science documentary series, Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981, and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brainwaves on a golden record, along with other things our civilization has to offer, and launched into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now 42 years later, still active, reaching out farther into deep space than any human made object ever has.

This was a profound and beautiful decision and made as a creative director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project.

In 2014, she went on to create the second season of Cosmos, called Cosmos, a Spacetime Odyssey.

And in 2020, The new third season called Cosmos Possible Worlds, which is being released this upcoming Monday, March 9th.

It is hosted, once again, by the fun and the brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Carl Sagan, Annie Drouin, and Cosmos have inspired millions of scientists and curious minds across several generations by revealing the magic, the power, the beauty of science.

I am 1 such curious mind, And if you listen to this podcast, you may know that Elon Musk is as well.

He graciously agreed to read Carl Sagan's words about the pale blue dot in my second conversation with him.

If you listened, there was an interesting and inspiring twist at the end.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it 5 stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.

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And now here's my conversation with Anne Julianne.

What is the role of science in our society?

Well, I think of what Einstein said when he opened the

New York World's Fair, he said, if science is ever to fulfill its mission the way art has done, it must penetrate.

Its inner meaning must penetrate the consciousness of everyone.

And so for me, especially in a civilization dependent on high technology and science, 1 that aspires to be democratic, It's critical that the public, as informed decision makers, understand the values and the methods and the rules of science.

So you think about what you just mentioned, the values and the methods and the rules and maybe the technology that science produces, but what about sort of the beauty, the mystery of science?

Well, you've touched on what I think is, for me, that's how my way into science is that, for me, it's much more spiritually uplifting.

The revelations of science, the collective revelations of really countless generations of searchers.

And the little tiny bit we know about reality is the greatest joy for me, because I think that it relates to the idea of love.

Like what is love that is based on illusion about the other?

Love is seeing unflinching the other and accepting with all your heart.

And to me, knowing the universe as it is, or the little bit that we're able to understand at this point, is the purest kind of love.

And therefore, you know, how can our philosophy, our religion, if it's rootless in nature, how can it really be true?

So I think you need science to get a sense of the real romance of life and the great experience of being awake in the cosmos.

So that, the fact that we know so little, the humbling nature of that, so, and you kind of connect love to that, But isn't it also, isn't it scary?

Isn't it, why is it so inspiring, do you think?

Why is it so beautiful that we know so little?

Well, first of all, as Socrates thought, you know, knowing that you know little is knowing, really knowing something, knowing more than others.

it's that voice whispering in our heads, so you know you might be wrong.

Which I think is not only it's really healthy because we're so imperfect, we're human of course, but also love to me is the feeling that you always want to go deeper, get closer.

So, And that's what science is always saying.

Science is never simply content with its understanding of any aspect of nature.

It's always finding that even smaller cosmos beneath.

So you said that love is not an illusion.

What is love is knowing, For me, love is knowing something deeply and still being completely gratified by it, you know?

So What is loving someone, a person, let's say, deeply is not idealizing them, not putting some kind of subjective projection on them, but knowing them as they are.

And so for me, the only aperture to that knowing about nature, the universe, is science because it has that error-correcting mechanism that most of the stuff that we do doesn't have.

You could say the Bill of Rights is kind of an error-correcting mechanism, which is 1 of the things I really appreciate about the society in which I live, to the extent that it's upheld and we keep faith with it.

It's like we will give you the highest rewards we have for proving us wrong about something.

That's why in only 400 years since Galileo's first look through a telescope, we could get from this really dim, vague apprehension of another world to sending our eyes and our senses there, or even to going beyond.

So it delivers the goods, like nothing else.

It really, it delivers the goods because it's always self-aware of its fallibility.

So on that topic, I'd like to ask just your opinion and a feeling I have that I'm not sure what to do with, which is the skeptical aspect of science.

So the modern skeptics community, and just in general, certain scientists, many scientists, maybe most scientists that apply this scientific method are kind of rigorous in that application.

And it feels like sometimes miss out some of the ideas outside the reach of, just slightly outside the reach of science, and they don't dare to sort of dream or think of revolutionary ideas that others will call crazy in this particular moment.

So how do you think about the skeptical aspect of science that is really good at sort of keeping us in check, keeping us humble, but at the same time, sort of the kind of dreams that you and Carl Sagan have inspired in the world, it kind of shuts it down sometimes a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's up to the individual, but for me, I was so ridiculously fortunate in that my tutorial in science, because I'm not a scientist and I wasn't trained in science, was 20 years of days and nights with Carl Sagan.

And the wonder, I think the reason Carl remains so beloved, well, I think there are many reasons, but at the root of it is the fact that his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism.

So he couldn't fool himself into believing something he wanted to believe because it made him feel good.

But on the other hand, he recognized that what science, what nature is, it's really good enough.

And so if you're that kind of person who loves happiness, loves life, and your eyes are wide open, and you read everything you can get your hands on, and you spend years studying what is known so far about the universe, then you have that capacity, a really infinite capacity to be alive, but also at the same time, to be very rigorous about what you're willing to believe.

For Carl, I don't think he ever felt that his skepticism cost him anything because again, it comes back to love.

He wanted to know what nature really was like, not to inflict his preconceived notions on what he wanted it to be.

Because it does, you know, I mean, you know, I think the pale blue dot is a perfect example of this massive achievement is to say, okay, or the Voyager record is another example, is here we have this mission, our first reconnaissance of the outer solar system.

Well, how can we make it a mission in which we absolutely squeeze every drop of consciousness and understanding from it.

We don't have to be scientists and then be human beings.

I think that's the tragedy of Western civilization is that It's, you know, 1 of its greatest gifts has been science, and yet at the same time, believing that we are the children of a disappointed father, a tyrant who puts us in a maximum security prison and calls it paradise, who looks at us, who watches us every moment and hates us for being our human selves.

And then most of all, what is our great sin?

It's partaking of the tree of knowledge, which is our greatest gift as humans, this pattern recognition, this ability to see things and then synthesize them and jump to conclusions about them and test those conclusions.

So, I think the reason that in literature, in movies, the scientist is a figure of alienation, a figure, you know, oh, you see these biopics about scientists.

And yeah, he might have been great, but, you know, he was a misthinking ship.

He lacked, you know, the kind of spiritual understanding that maybe his wife had.

And it's always in the end, they come around.

But to me, that's a false dichotomy, that we are, to the extent that we are aware of our surroundings and understand them, which is what science makes it possible for us to do, we're even more alive.

So you mentioned a million awesome things there.

Let's even just, Can you tell me about the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and the interstellar message project and that whole just fascinating world leading up

I'll never be able to really wrap my head around the reality of it, the truth of it.

Okay, so Voyagers 1 and 2 were our first reconnaissance mission of what was then considered the outer solar system.

And it was a gift of gravity, the idea that swinging around these worlds gives you a gravitational assist which ultimately will send you out of the solar system to wander the Milky Way galaxy for 1 to 5000000000 years.

So Voyager gave us our first closeup look of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

It discovered new moons, it discovered volcanoes on Io.

And remember, this is technology from the early to mid 1970s.

We talked to it, in fact, a year ago, I think it was.

We needed to slightly change the attitude of the spacecraft.

And so we fired up its thrusters for the first time since

It was as if you had left your car in the garage in

And you put the key in the ignition because you use keys then in the ignition, and it turned over the first time you stepped on the gas.

And so that's the genius of the engineering of Voyager.

And Carl was 1 of the key participants in imagining what its mission would be because it was a gift actually of the fact that every 175 years plus or minus, there is an alignment of the worlds.

And so you could send 2 spacecraft to these other worlds and photograph them and use your mass spectrometer and all the other devices on Voyager to really to explore these worlds.

And it's the farthest spacecraft, it's the farthest human creation away from us today.

These 2 spacecraft not only gave us our first close-up look at hundreds of moons and planets, these 4 giant, these planets, but also it told us the shape of the solar system as it moves through the galaxy.

Because there were 2 of them going in different directions, and they arrived at a place called the heliopause, which is where the wind from the sun, the solar wind dies down and the interstellar medium begins.

And both Voyagers were the first spacecraft that we had that could tell us when that happened.

So it's a consummate, I think it's the greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century.

Engineering, I mean really, Voyager is doing this on less energy than you have in your toaster.

So, okay, but because of this gravitational assist, both Voyagers were destined, as I say, to, they were just, first of all, they were supposed to function for a dozen years.

And now it's 42 years since launch, and we're still talking to them.

But prior to launch, almost a year, 8, 9 months prior to launch, it was decided that since Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and Linda Salzman Sagan had created something called the Pioneer 10 plaque for the Pioneer spacecraft that preceded Voyager, which was kind of like a license plate for the planet Earth, man and a woman, hands up, very basic, but very effective.

And it captured the imagination of people all over the world.

And so, NASA turned to Frank and to Carl and said, we'd like you to do a message for Voyager.

Because if it's going to be circumnavigating the Milky Way galaxy for 1 to 5000000000 years, it's like 20 trips around the galaxy and There's a very small chance that a spacefaring civilization would be able to flag 1 of them down and So on board you see this exquisite golden disc with scientific hieroglyphics explaining our address and various basic scientific concepts that we believe that would be common to any space-faring civilization.

And then beneath this exquisite golden disc is the Voyager record, the golden record.

photographs, images of life on earth, as well as

pieces of music from all around the world.

Many people describe it as the invention of world music.

World music was not a concept that existed before the Voyager record.

And we were determined to take our music, not just from the dominant technical cultures, but from all of the rich cultural heritage of the earth.

And there's a sound essay, which is a kind of using a microphone as a camera to tell the story of the earth, beginning with its geological sounds and moving into biology and then into technology.

And Lex, I think what you were getting at is that at the end of this sound essay, I had asked Carl if it were, in the making of the record, it was my honor to be the creative director of the project, if it was possible to, if I had meditated for an hour while I was hooked up so that every single signal that was coming from my brain, my body, was recorded and then converted into sound for the record.

Was it possible that these putative extraterrestrials of the distant future of perhaps a billion years from now would be able to reconstitute this message and to understand it.

And he just, big smile, you know, and just said, well, hey, a billion years is a long time.

And what were you thinking about in the meditation?

Like what, I mean, it's such an interesting idea of recording as you think about things.

So I was blindfolded and couldn't hear anything.

And I had made a mental itinerary of exactly where I wanted to go.

I was truly humbled by the idea that these thoughts could conceivably touch the distant future.

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 to 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 that time predicament, about the fact that 1 in 5 of us was starving or unable to get potable water.

And so I sort of gave a kind of, you know, as general a picture as I possibly could of our predicament.

And 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.

Acknowledged it, the existence of this love.

Yes, because we were 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 it happened.

It was in the context of finding that piece of Chinese music that was worthy to represent 1 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 well as musicologists everywhere, and all through the project, desperately trying to find this 1 piece.

Found the piece, lived on the Upper West Side, found the piece, a professor at Columbia University gave it to me.

And he's, of all the people I talked to, everyone had said, that's hopeless.

That there can't be 1 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.

And I left him a message in the hotel message center.

And he called me back an hour later and heard this beautiful voice say, I get back to my hotel room and I find this message that Annie called.

And I asked myself, why didn't you leave me this message 10 years ago?

It was for me a kind of eureka moment, a scientific breakthrough, a truth, a great truth had suddenly been revealed.

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, Carl, which wasn't really true.

I never would have talked to him about it.

We humans are so awkward in these beautiful moments.

And he thought for a very brief, like a second, and said, you mean get married?

And I literally was jumping around my apartment like a lunatic because it was so obvious.

And I thought, damn, no, he's going to say I don't know what I was saying.

But he was like, I just want to make sure that that really happened.

The records had not been affixed to the spacecraft yet.

And there'd been a lot of controversy about what we were doing.

I should say that there, you know, among the 118 pictures was an image of a man and a woman frontally, 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 this 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, you know, additional imagery of human reproduction.

And it really hit me that how much we hate ourselves, that we couldn't bear to be seen as we are.

In some sense that congressman also represents our society.

Perhaps his opposition should have been included as well.

Yes, well, that was 1 of the most vigorous debates during the making of the record with, you know, the 5, 6 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?

What do you think represents humanity if you think about it?

Are darker moments, are they essential for humanity?

All the wars we've been through, all the tortures and the suffering and the cruelty, is that essential for happiness, for beauty, for creation, generally speaking?

certainly not essential for happiness or beauty, that's for sure.

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.

We, you know, I think that if you're a spacefaring civilization and you've gotten it together sufficiently you can move from world to world.

Then I think they probably took 1 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.

And so it really, that's the great thing about lying is that a lie only has a shelf life.

If a great work of art that's a forgery, people can be fooled immediately, but 10 or 15 years,

You know, they begin to realize the lens, our lens of our present is coloring everything that we see.

So, you know, I think it didn't matter that we didn't show our atrocities.

So let me sort of ask, you've mentioned how unlikely it is that you and Carl, that 2 souls like yours would meet in this vast world.

What are your views on how and why incredibly unlikely things like these nevertheless do happen?

It's a 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.

And I don't just mean the people who are being destroyed in childhood in wartime, I'm also, or the people who starved to death because of famine, but also the people who, you know, who are 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, a sense of this, even before I knew Carl, I always felt this way, that I only existed because of the generosity.

Of the, no, of just all of the things, all of the gains of causality.

Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, the rush hour is a source of stress for a lot of people, but clearly in its moments, it can also be a source of something beautiful.

So everything has a possibility of doing something beautiful.

So let me ask sort of a quick tangent on the Voyager.

This beautiful romantic notion that Voyager 1 is sort of our farthest human reach into space.

If you think of what, I don't know if you've seen, but what Elon Musk did with putting the roadster, letting it fly out into space.

I think that's also kind of interesting, but maybe you can comment on that.

But in general, if now that we are developing, we're venturing out into space again in a more serious way, what kind of stuff that represent since Voyager was launched should we send out as a follow-up?

there things that you think that's developed in the next, in the 40 years after, that we should update the spacefaring aliens?

of course now we could send the worldwide, we could send everything that's on the world wide web.

We could send, I mean, you know, that was a time when we're talking about photograph records and transistor radios.

And, you know, so we tried to be, to take advantage of the existing technology to the fullest extent.

You know, The computer that was hooked up to me from my brainwaves and my heart sounds while I was meditating was the size of a gigantic room.

And I'm sure it didn't have the power of a phone, the phone has now.

So now we could just, I think we could let it all hang out.

We could just like send, you know, every week.

Like, I would send, you know, Wikipedia or something and not be a gatekeeper, but

You were also, it's interesting because 1 of the problems of the internet of having so much information is it's actually the curation, the human curation is still the powerful, beautiful thing.

So what you did with the record is actually, is exactly the right process.

It's kind of boiling down a massive amount of possibilities of what you could send into something that represents, you know, the better angels of our nature or represents our humanity.

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Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #78