Carl Sagan’s Last Interview

Not long before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan was inter­viewed by Char­lie Rose and dis­cussed the trou­bled state of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge in Amer­i­ca, and how it threat­ens our democ­ra­cy. Before Richard Dawkins came along, Sagan was already out there, mak­ing the case for sci­en­tif­ic think­ing, argu­ing that it let us make progress and keeps our repub­lic vital. (Whether our repub­lic actu­al­ly remains vital at this point, it’s cer­tain­ly hard to say.) We need more fig­ures like Sagan, and we par­tic­u­lar­ly need the Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem to care more about pub­lic engage­ment — an area where it depress­ing­ly comes up short. But we’ll talk more about that at some oth­er point. Part 1 is above. Click for Part 2 and Part 3.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing and Carl Sagan Remixed


by | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Leave a Reply

Quantcast