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