Ann Druyan on Voyager, Carl Sagan, and Love Without Illusion

Lex Fridman asks Ann Druyan what role science plays in society. She answers with Einstein's remark at the 1939 New York World's Fair: if science is ever to fulfill its mission the way art has, it must penetrate its inner meaning and the consciousness of everyone. In a civilization that depends on high technology and still aspires to be democratic, she says, the public has to understand science's values, methods, and rules. Not everyone needs to become a scientist. Everyone does need to know how science actually works.

Fridman pushes past methods and gadgets to the beauty and mystery of science. That, Druyan says, is how she came in. The revelations of science — the tiny portion of reality countless generations of searchers have managed to pin down — strike her as more spiritually uplifting than religion or poetry ever did. The little bit we know about reality is, for her, the greatest joy, because it is a way of being awake in the cosmos rather than decorating it with wishes.

Love based on illusion about the other person, Druyan says, is not love. Love is seeing the other unflinchingly and accepting with all your heart. Knowing the universe as it is, or the little bit we can currently understand, is for her the purest version of that stance. If a philosophy or a religion is rootless in nature, she does not see how it can be true. Science, in that sense, is the aperture onto the romance of being alive.

Fridman asks why knowing so little is beautiful rather than terrifying. She cites Socrates: knowing that you know little is actually knowing something. The voice whispering *he might be right* is healthy, because we are imperfect. Love, as she feels it, always wants to go deeper and closer and never gets enough. Science says the same thing. It is never content with its picture of nature; it keeps finding a smaller cosmos underneath.

Loving a person deeply, she adds, means not idealizing them and not projecting a private script onto them. The only reliable aperture onto nature is science, because it has an error-correcting mechanism most of what humans do lacks. She compares that mechanism to the Bill of Rights. Science's genius is the rule that we will give you the highest rewards we have for proving us wrong. That is why, in the four hundred years since Galileo first looked through a telescope, we went from a dim glimpse of another world to sending our senses there.

Fridman admits a discomfort with modern skepticism. The scientific method keeps us humble, he says, but the skeptic community can feel like a wet blanket, shutting down ideas that sit just outside what science can currently reach. He wants to know how that rigor sits beside the dreaming that Druyan and Carl Sagan inspired. She answers from twenty years of days and nights with Sagan — her tutorial in science, since she was not trained as a scientist.

The reason Sagan remains beloved, she says, is that his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder, and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism. He would not fool himself into believing something because it made him feel good. On the other hand, he recognized that nature is good enough — way better than our fantasies. If you love life, keep your eyes open, read everything, and spend years on what is known so far, you get an almost infinite capacity to be alive and, at the same time, a fierce rigor about what you are willing to believe.

She thinks Western culture still sells a false split: the scientist as an alienated figure, great at work and a lousy husband, missing the spiritual understanding his wife supposedly has. In the biopic, he comes around at the end. Druyan calls that a lie. The more we understand our surroundings, the more alive we are. Science does not pull people out of life; it roots them more deeply in it. The older tragedy, she adds, is a civilization that gave the world science and still tells the story of a disappointed father who jails us in a maximum-security prison called paradise and treats the tree of knowledge as the original sin — when pattern recognition is our greatest gift.

Asked about Voyager 1 and 2 and the Interstellar Message Project, Druyan says she will never get over it and will never really wrap her head around the reality. The two spacecraft were humanity's first reconnaissance of what was then called the outer solar system — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — using gravitational assists that would eventually fling them out of the solar system and around the Milky Way for one to five billion years. They gave us our first close-ups of those worlds, discovered new moons, and found volcanoes on Io. This is early-to-mid-1970s technology, and it is still active.

A year before the interview, engineers needed to change the spacecraft's attitude and fired thrusters unused since 1987. They worked instantly — as if you had left a car in the garage in 1987, put the key in, and it turned over the first time. Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. Because the two craft went in different directions, they also mapped the shape of the solar system as it moves through the galaxy, reaching the heliopause where the solar wind dies and the interstellar medium begins. Druyan calls it the greatest scientific and engineering achievement of the twentieth century.

The spacecraft do this, she says, on less energy than a toaster — something like eleven watts. They were supposed to function for a dozen years. Forty-two years after launch, Earth is still talking to them. The alignment of the worlds that made the tour possible comes only every 175 years or so. Sagan was one of the people who imagined what the mission could squeeze from that gift of gravity: not just a flyby, but every drop of consciousness the hardware could carry.

Eight or nine months before launch, NASA asked Frank Drake and Carl Sagan to do more than the Pioneer plaque — the famous line drawing of a man and a woman that Druyan calls a license plate for Earth. Voyager would circumnavigate the galaxy for one to five billion years, perhaps twenty trips around, and there was a small chance a spacefaring civilization might flag one of them down. The result was a golden disk with scientific hieroglyphics for our address and basic concepts any spacefaring culture should share, and beneath it the Golden Record.

The record, she says, holds on the order of 118 images of life on Earth and 27 pieces of music from around the world. Many people describe it as the invention of world music: the concept did not really exist before, and the team was determined not to take music only from the dominant technical cultures. There is also a sound essay that uses the microphone as a camera, telling Earth's story from geological sounds into biology and then technology — thunder, wind, heartbeat, trains, rockets.

At the end of that essay are Druyan's own brainwaves. As creative director of the project, she asked Sagan whether an hour of meditation, with every signal from her brain and body recorded and converted to sound, might be reconstituted by putative extraterrestrials a billion years from now. He smiled. A billion years, he said, is a long time to figure it out. She did it blindfolded, unable to hear, with a mental itinerary of where she wanted to go. She was truly humbled by the idea that those thoughts could conceivably touch the distant future.

The year was 1977. There were some 60,000 nuclear weapons on the planet, and the United States and the Soviet Union were in a to-the-death competition. In the meditation she tried to tell the history of Earth as she understood it: the early planet, the origin of life, evolution, human history, and the predicament of the moment, including that one in five people was starving or without potable water. She also carried something private. Within days, she and Sagan had finally expressed feelings they had kept unspoken for years, because both were involved with other people and raising the subject had been outside his morality and hers.

The eureka sat inside a practical problem: finding one piece of Chinese music worthy of one of the oldest musical traditions on Earth, when the Voyager team was completely ignorant of that tradition. Ethnomusicologists kept telling her it was hopeless to choose a single work. A professor at Columbia University said he had it, told her the story of the piece, and made it an even stronger candidate. She called Sagan in Tucson, where he was addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and left a hotel message.

An hour later he called back. He had seen the message from Ann Druyan and asked himself why she had not left it ten years earlier. Her heart, she says, was beating out of her chest. It felt like a scientific breakthrough — a truth newly revealed. Awkward, she blurted something untrue, then said "for keeps." He thought for about a second: You mean get married? She said yes. He said yes. She hung up and jumped around her apartment like a lunatic because it was so obvious. Then the phone rang again. She thought he was taking it back. He only wanted to make sure it had really happened. They were getting married. The date was June 1, 1977. The records had not yet been affixed to the spacecraft.

Among the 118 pictures was a naked couple, followed by a schematic overlay showing the fetus inside the woman and further images of human reproduction. A congressman, she recalls, said on the floor that NASA was sending smut to the stars. The agency panicked and told the team it could not send the picture. What hit Druyan was how much we hate ourselves — that we could not bear to be seen as we are. Fridman suggests the congressman also represents society, and that his opposition might have belonged on the record too.

That fight, she says, was one of the most vigorous debates among the five or six collaborators: do we only put our best foot forward, or do we show Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Congo — what we have done? She does not think cruelty is essential to happiness or beauty. She does think a spacefaring civilization, looking at this derelict spacecraft, would know they were dealing with people in their technological adolescence. A lie only has a shelf life. A forged painting can fool people at first; ten or twenty years later the present's lens starts to show. Even without the atrocities, she believes, they would fill in the blanks.

If Earth sent a follow-up now, she says, we could send everything on the World Wide Web, or Wikipedia, and refuse to be a gatekeeper. The computer that recorded her brainwaves filled a gigantic room and had less power than a phone. Fridman notes that abundance makes human curation more valuable, not less — and that the record was exactly that: boiling a mass of possibilities down to the better angels of our nature. Fundamentally, she thinks, we are the same species, but she would send YouTube. Any musician of the last hundred years she reveres, she can find. She also loves the democracy of it: each of us becomes a curator. We have discovered, largely through the internet, that we are an intercommunicating organism, and that can only be good.

The dream of *Cosmos*, Druyan says, is Einstein's quote again: the awesome power of science in absolutely everyone's hands, not the preserve of a priesthood. Carl Sagan, Druyan, and the astronomer Steven Soter imagined the original 1970s series as an interweaving of scientific ideas, cinematic visual effects, and the stories of searchers. Season two, *Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey*, rolled out in 181 countries in two weeks — the largest rollout in television history, she says, astonishing for a science program. The people who need it most are not already scientists: people who do not yet know they have an interest, or who feel intimidated by jargon and an exclusive history.

A year before the conversation, her son Sam had a cerebral hemorrhage. The doctor who saved his life, realizing who they were, said that was why he was there. If you come of age in a poor country like Colombia and Carl Sagan calls you to science as a child, medicine may be the only avenue open — but that is why he was in that room. She hears some version of that story every week. If science belongs only to people whose interests are the balance sheet or dominance over other nations, she warns, it will probably end up a gun aimed at our heads. Distributed widely, it has a chance of being used with wisdom.

The later seasons almost did not happen on her terms. Networks wanted *Cosmos* without giving her creative control or enough money to make it feel cinematic. She kept saying no until Seth MacFarlane took her to Fox; he offered to pay for half the pilot, and Peter Rice told him to put his money away. For ten years, she says, MacFarlane stood up whenever they needed him. Brannon Braga came in at the right moment; Jeff Okun brought film-grade visual effects. When the vision of a season had to be decided, though, it still came down to Druyan sitting at home in Ithaca, looking out at trees and waterfalls, imagining how to awaken people without yelling that we are all going to die.

The scientists *Cosmos* brings to life, Druyan says, have everything we need to see us through the current crisis. They are often poor, female, outsiders not expected to have prodigious gifts — and they persevere. Michael Faraday came from a dysfunctional family of about fourteen, never went to university, never learned the math, and still became the picture Einstein later looked up to. Faraday's inventions underwrote the wealth of the twentieth century, yet he never took out a single patent at a time when people patented everything. That was not what he was about. To her it is almost a saintliness: a life whose gratification came from searching.

Season three is titled *Possible Worlds*, a phrase she stole from a 1940s author and scientist. It names the exoplanets we have begun to find, the worlds we might visit, and a hopeful vision of the future. Asked what voice is common to all three seasons, she says it is a voice of hope: there is a future we can still have, brought to life in fairly dazzling fashion. Yelling that we are all going to die does not help. Giving people a vision of how science can remediate the future does — and those capabilities, she insists, already exist, as do the engineering, materials, and physics to do things in the cosmos we are simply not doing.

She pictures humanity as a toddler who left mother's legs, scurried to the moon, felt for a moment that we could do this, then had a failure of nerve and scurried back — building things like the space shuttle that were not really going to get us out there. As a civilization, she thinks we are ready to be teenagers heading toward college. She was a mess in her own adolescence: reckless, irresponsible, inconsiderate; other people's feelings and the future did not exist. Why should a technologically adolescent civilization be any different? Most people she knows made it through and became wiser. That is her hope for us.

Fridman asks about existential threats: nuclear war, and the worry people like Elon Musk raise about artificial intelligence. Druyan says all of the above. You would have to be silly not to look at our rapidly growing AI capability, at how sick so much of the planet is, and at the cruelty happening at this moment. She would put climate change higher on the list. Unforeseen discoveries are arriving now, she says — methane coming out of the ocean floor that had been sequestered in permafrost that is melting. Besides greed and short-term thinking, we are triggering other effects with the greenhouse gases we put in the air. She thinks about it every moment. It is a mass extinction event, and we see news of it every day.

On the politicization of science, Fridman describes Americans who hear "human-caused global warming" and immediately file it as a liberal talking point. Druyan does not think that is as true anymore. Extreme weather and fire events have gotten to people. The problem, in her view, is leaders who choose to ignore it. Ultimately they will be rejected. The question is whether it will be fast enough. Most people, she thinks, have taken the reality to heart and look at their children without feeling good, because they come from a climate that was fairly familiar and benign.

The message of *Cosmos*, she says, is that we have to think in longer terms. In the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union were ready to kill each other over two views of distributing resources, yet neither form of organization thought in centuries, let alone the millennia that science speaks in. The original *Cosmos* was already talking about climate change in episode four, warning about inadvertent climate modification in 1980. Sagan's Ph.D. thesis was on the greenhouse effect on Venus; he knew painfully well what a runaway greenhouse would do. Climate scientists in the series, working with very early computer models, made predictions — including nuclear winter — that have proven robust. That prophetic power sits beside us cooking in lead pots, she says, like Romans, or ripping out hearts like Aztecs: we know better and still act as if it is business as usual.

Asked what on Earth fascinates her most — the origin of life, evolution, the human mind, technology, spaceflight — Druyan says all of it inspires her, but as she has gotten older the origin of life has become less mysterious, not less wondrous. Her suspicion, offered with a grain of salt, is that we are a byproduct of geophysics, and that life happens more often and in more places than we like to think. The history of thinking about ourselves has been a series of demotions. Consciousness, too, seems less astonishing if you go back to one-celled organisms a billion years ago that already had to know whether to go higher toward the sun or lower for protection. She never believed in a duality between mind and body. Chemistry and geophysics make sense of it without robbing it of wonder.

The stories she likes best for *Cosmos* are the forgotten ones. Season three, she teases, will tell of someone Fridman has never heard of — and she thinks he is knowledgeable on the subject — who was more responsible for our ability to venture to other worlds than anyone else, and who was completely forgotten. The method is the same because she is not a scientist: she asks herself a question, keeps going deeper until she finds the story, and if it moves her, she tells it, on the bet that it will move other people too.

Druyan had just turned seventy and thinks about mortality all the time. Fridman asks whether, if science allowed a much longer life, she would choose immortality for herself or for Sagan. For him, in a nanosecond. For herself, no — unless he were alive, in which case living forever would be fun. She has had a magical life. Her craziest dreams came true. Forty-two years later she knows how real those June 1977 feelings were; everything after was an affirmation. She feels she has gotten more than her share: the life with Carl, family, parents, children, friends, places, books, music.

Immortality of the lucky few, she says, interests her less than a concerted effort to get our act together — topic A, the possible world that is actually the challenge. We are at a moment when we can still make that choice. She loves nature, and because she is a product of it she recognizes its gifts and its reality. Fridman ends not with a summary but with Sagan's words about books: a flat object made from a tree, funny dark squiggles, and then you are inside the mind of someone who may have been dead for thousands of years. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding people who never knew each other. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.