Unintentional ASMR Carl Sagan 2 Deep Relaxing Voice Interview Phone Calls Greenhouse Arms Race

Dr Carl Sagan are we as a people people of the United States helping or hurting our environment well there's no question we're hurting um we as a sort of natural consequence of industrialization the exponential increase in our numbers we are dismoiling the environment um and uh so it's not a yes no question the question is how much should we alter the environment and there are aesthetic factors involved but the key question is survival surely we should not alter the environment to the extent that that we ourselves are in trouble as a result and you might

go further than that and say other animals and plants you know should be preserved and so on a good example is greenhouse warming in which we are pouring huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere we're the worst CO2 polluter on the planet uh by a long shot and that is increasing the global temperature and causing on the time scale of The Next Century a set of very serious consequences now all the major Western European industrial Nations Japan and many other countries have set themselves a a set of limits by such and such a date

we're going to cut our CO2 emissions by such and such an amount the United States refuses to do so so not only are we the worst culprit we're the one least interested in changing our profligated ways we have heard over the past few years though Congress and the administration saying that something would be done about it last year Congress passed and the administration signed a Clean Air Act will that make a difference is it a step in the right direction is it enough sure it's a step in the right direction no it's not enough and

on the issue that I just raised greenhouse warming it does essentially nothing it doesn't address the issue so you know President Bush had a lot of rhetoric about being the environmental president just as he did about being the education president but beyond words there's not much sign of any serious intent to fix these serious problems the argument is at the White House that you can only go so far because if you go beyond that point you're going to hurt the country economically you're going to hurt you're going to lose jobs what do you think of

that argument well it's always used there's an argument to make no changes whatever any change will lose jobs so for example the a12 the Navy fighter that was just canceled because it was absurdly over it's cost estimates there will be thousands of Aerospace workers who lose their jobs is that a good reason to pour additional billions of dollars into this Rat Hole no it's not and if we were really concerned about losing jobs we would have a federal job retraining program we would have much better education at all levels in science and technology so people

could move from one job to another but we're not interested in that the losing job argument is just trotted out for political convenience so that we don't have to make a change no question there are massive changes needed other countries seem perfectly able to make those changes but we are not some of those other countries appear to be though in deep trouble now with the opening of Eastern Europe we find that these former communist countries have tremendous environmental problems no question those weren't the countries I had in mind right but I mean when you compare

when you look at the total mix the world how much does that hurt us as a planet well the kind of problems we're talking about in Eastern Europe are desperately bad but they're local the spoiling ravaging of the environment I mean desolate stretches of Eastern of Eastern Europe where nothing grows in nothing probably will grow for a long time into the future but that's not the planet that's just Eastern Europe bad enough of course but what I'm saying is there are certain categories of problems of which greenhouse warming is one ozonosphere the depletion of the

protective ozone layer is another nuclear winter is a third in which the consequences are worldwide long-term and extremely serious and then there are more local problems as well and we have to do we have to solve all of those problems but in at least in terms of the global issues like greenhouse warming and nuclear winter the United States is not doing a good job on the ozone layer we have done not just a creditable job but a even heroic job a which we should be very proud of but but on these other issues we're doing

not well at all where do we stand I want to ask you specifically about the Greenhouse Effect and nuclear winter Where Do We Stand now on the Greenhouse Effect and what it would apparently eventually do raise the ocean levels well it it's something like this you burn fossil fuels coal oil natural gas the world economy runs on that right now and as a consequent you put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere the carbon in the coal combines with the oxygen of the air and makes carbon dioxide CO2 releasing energy that's why we do it our technology

has now gotten to to such a an awesome level that we are able to put so much of this stuff CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that we're changing the composition of the air and changing its radiative properties we're now keeping heat in the temperatures are rising nobody knows precisely when it will be that things get a certain level of bad but what I believe is very clear is that we continue doing things this way and things are going to get very bad very bad means temperatures rise increasing drought in Continental Interiors as

you say sea level rising flooding of coastal areas and islands and no cut off all this continuing indefinitely into one way or another we stop that serious how bad could it get because I think all of us have seen it one time or another maps and where the current geography and then if the ocean were to rise three four whatever feet it's a dramatically different Outlook yeah so uh the further into the future you want to project the the worst that that becomes um the kind of things that uh are serious prospects for maybe the

end of The Next Century are for example the flooding of uh Bangladesh tens of millions of people live in Bangladesh you have tens of millions of environmental refugees where are they supposed to go you have islands in the Pacific in the Indian Ocean which just are going to disappear it's a serious problem the other topic I'd like to cover is nuclear winter which you have a new book out and where do we stand there well this book called a path where no man thought nuclear winter in the end of the arms race uh has just

come out I wrote it with Richard Turco and it is in the bookstores now in the bookstores all over the country uh uh he's a atmospheric scientist at UCLA and we've been involved since 1982 in this accidental discovery that large climatic changes are likely to follow from even a small nuclear war of such a thing as possible and the basic idea is that uh clouds of dark city Smoke Rise over the burning cities and the burning of petroleum facilities merge spread first in the longitude and in Latitude cover almost all of the northern hemisphere slip

over to some extent into the southern hemisphere sunlight can't get through the surface of the Earth becomes darker and the temperatures drop because after all the sunlight which is warming the surface and uh the temperatures seem for a wide range of scenarios to drop so much that there's massive failure of Agriculture crops die and an estimate made a few years ago massive study by 300 scientists worldwide under the auspices of the international Council of scientific unions uh predicts that billions of people would die of starvation that means that nuclear winter is by far the greatest

threat to our Global civilization and to our species if there weren't such a an obscene number of nuclear weapons in the world it wouldn't be so serious but because you only need a few hundred nuclear warheads to burn a few hundred cities to make something like nuclear winter go and the United States and the Soviet Union have 55 000 nuclear weapons the disparity is so great as to suggest a very dangerous situation and one of the conclusions of this book is an attempt to show how massive reductions in the nuclear arsenals could increase the security

of the Nations involved retain the posture of strategic deterrence will have enough weapons to prevent the other side from using their weapons and make the likelihood of nuclear winter if not vanish become very small right now there are two factors I think that as far as nuclear weapons can cause a great deal of possible change in the future one of course is the conflict in the Persian Gulf where we could be facing war and we don't know how limited that war might be if it does indeed happen the other is the changes in the Soviet

Union where that again is not clear you could have individual states with their own nuclear weapons in theory and the armies say controlling it instead of the central government how much does though how much does that worry you if it does it does both of those are very serious issues nuclear winter or no nuclear winter um and and I'll come specifically to that in just a moment but let me just make a more general statement if we were to be complacent about this issue we were to say well the Cold War is Over so what

are we worrying about then in effect we were saying that we are confident that we're confident in the sanity and sobriety of all leaders military and civilian of all nuclear armed nations from now to the end of time and nobody can be sure of that this is the century of Hitler and Stalin uh even the United States has had leaders in living memory who have shown serious instabilities as you say the situations in the Middle East and the Soviet Union are cause for concern now of course Iraq does not have any nuclear weapons and the

big debate is whether within the next few years they might have one nuclear weapon too heavy to carry anywhere uh that's that's the issue there but you could see a United scenario which the United States attacks Iraq or Kuwait and Iraq considers that an attack on Iraq as Mr Aziz has recently said Iraq would then attack Israel and now Israel we know has somewhere between 1 and 200 nuclear weapons and then you could see a very serious set of circumstances following Our Guest is Dr Carl Sagan of Cornell University and you mentioned to me earlier

before the show starts that your famous cosmo series is coming back yes nice of you to mention it uh yeah a the videotape sets of it are in are in the stores but later this year on the Turner Broadcasting System a revised and updated version will be will be shown okay now what's the one thing and I should add you still live in ethical correct yeah Upstate New York University okay that's right what's the one single thing worries you the most about this whole situation I would have to say the recalcitrance of the United States

um it's painful to say but uh you look at a set of issues about uh about nuclear arms reductions so a comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which is being discussed at the United Nations today dozens of countries all over the world are urging it to be done Soviet Union says therefore it who's against it the United States despite the fact that we have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons you look at issues of de-merving nuclear weapons that is uh right now we have many weapons the MX for example many missiles which have pin Warheads on a

single missile at a time of crisis there's a temptation to preempt if those guys can destroy 10 of my cities with one of their Rockets let me destroy their rocket before it is launched it's unstable on both sides the Soviets also are merged up the Gazoo um look at issues of massive Cuts in the nuclear arsenals not not just the start 30 percent but 99 that's where we ought to be looking who's the recalcitation partner which nation is the ones that's not interested in at all it's the United States I'm very concerned that the United

States is stuck in some kind of cold war freezer and and hasn't come to grips with the kind of world we're now in okay let's go to the phones Detroit Michigan you're on the air hello Mr Sagan Dr Sagan how are you doing uh you know my question has to deal with the Science Education the Public Public uh uh school students here in Detroit right you know I happen to uh go into my child science room and uh I found that there were no test tubes there were no Erlenmeyer flash beakers all gone uh um

they were using uh outdated out uh molded equipment in the science room and yet we are demanding our children to be literate in both science and math and you see the terrible inadequacies in these classrooms uh not only here in Detroit but all over the country and yet uh we hear of a commitment from the Department of Education and from our government uh that there we have an education president but yet uh it has not trickled down as I say to our our basic uh into our elementary schools I agree and yet we're here you

know we we talk about particularly with minorities uh uh students being deficient in science and math and and getting them into the health care professions and you know how can you do this when you how can we encourage more minorities into the healthcare professions when in fact you look at their at the basic training in elementary school is so pitiful well I I I'm very sympathetic to uh to what you just said and let me can I spend a couple of minutes and sort of expanding this um the consequences of being rotten in Science Education

are very serious uh first of all there's the question of dwindling economic competitiveness Industries in which the United States used to be world leader are trickling away to other countries new Industries cutting-edge Technologies are being developed in other countries much more than in the United States and this has powerful and Progressive Economic Consequences I mean progressively negative economic consequences for the United States and beyond that people who understand science are able to influence the future in a way that people who don't understand science can't do you can elect representatives and influence legislation in a way

that you can do if you don't understand what the issues are and so many of the issues facing us for the future are connected with science and technology so where are the failings you you give standardized tests to American kids and kids from lots of other nations not just Japan and Korea but Singapore and Canada and England and and you find the United States let's say junior high school kids are in the bottom 10 of the world you find that uh that applicants for entry-level jobs that uh leading American electronics company 80 percent of them

can't pass a fifth grade mathematics test so this is extremely serious for reasons uh of of our national well-being now the failings are on many levels the fact that so many high school teachers of chemistry and physics are the coach the basketball coach the football coach is a clear indication of that we're not doing something um schoolman issues are routinely not passed so the schools don't have money to buy the laboratory equipment that you you see missing the teachers are not as good as they ought to be or take another issue almost every newspaper in

America has a daily astrology column astrology of course is a hoax it's fake it's Monk how many of them have even a weekly science column take television is there any program on television in which the hero is someone dedicated to finding out how the universe works where are the role models in science when's the last time we heard an intelligent comment about science not medicine not technology science from the president of the United States when's the last time we heard science discussed on an evening news program science not technology not medicine this problem runs all

the way through the society and is uh very worrisome of course it can be fixed but it's going to take money and a change in attitudes to do it let's go to Los Angeles for our next call go right ahead hello uh I'm a first time caller and thank you so much for C-SPAN Dr Sagan it seems to me that all things are connected according to John Muir there and I believe him and that population increase is our very worst underlying problem I wonder how you think it could be controlled and what would be the

result what would be the other side of the coin of curtailing such a basic Drive thank you a very good question and and if I may say very nicely but um you can't force people not to have children I mean uh it's in human at the most fundamental level and uh also I think it's very hard to do uh except if you're willing to accept totalitarian system but there is a little known but extremely important fact and that is that when the per capita income when the the amount of money people make goes gets above

a certain very pitifully low level they voluntarily reduce the population growth so let me now come back to that to that issue in a little more detail as the world population continues to increase exponentially or nearly exponentially all the sorts of environmental problems we were talking about before get worse because the more people there are the more fossil fuels get burned the more greenhouse gases and all the rest of it the more people there are the more competition for resources there is the more human Misery the more likelihood of War it's a very serious issue

uh has heard so many of the things we've been talking about on on this program all having to do with the growth in our technology now if you ask people in the developing world that's where the problem is that's where the greatest growth rate is why do you have so many kids don't you know you can you can't support them the answer you get back is extremely Talent it's something like this the kids require very little Financial investment you don't have to sound School nobody goes out to the store to buy clothes for them and

they're useful they can gather wood they can gather water they can help on the scrabbley farm or whatever whatever it is and most important if you have lots of kids then maybe one of them will survive into adulthood and take care of you in your old age because there's no social security it's a way having lots of kids is a way to ensure the parents old age now all over the world East and West Buddhist and Catholic former communist and capitalist countries all over when the income rises above a certain minimum level the population growth

rate takes a steep dive um and that's because now there is enough to take care of your old age the only exceptions are countries in which the status of women is so low that they are effectively slaves and have nothing to say about how many children they should have so what can we do we can help raise the standard of living of the billion poorest people on the planet not my handouts not by giving them fish say but by giving them Fish Hooks by helping to achieve self-economic self-sufficiency and that is very much in our

interest as well as being the kind of activity that every one of the great religions urges on us your doctor say again that I feel lucky to be on living on the same Planet as you and um the questions I have are when did you first become so interested in astronomy and also um would you have any advice maybe you've just been talking about this about high school children and grade school children and especially high school children would you have any advice for kids who just aren't so crazy about even staying in school and one

other thing I was wondering you know about Noah and Noah's Art did he do everything himself or did he have his wife there thank you so much bye-bye thank you now those are three very different questions I'm not sure I'm going to remember them all um let me start with Noah the story of Noah's Ark is of course a story the uh the books of the various uh great religions Buddhist Hindu Islamic Jewish Christian and many others are filled with stories that doesn't mean we are to interpret them literally and they're all sorts of problems

with the Noah's Ark Story one of which is kangaroos how did the kangaroos get to Australia if you literally believe the story of Noah's Ark so I'm sure you meant that in a in a light tone in my response is is likewise how to keep kids in school well kids I believe are fundamentally very smart and if they see school being taught by people who themselves are not interested in it people who cannot do very well at teaching if what they're being taught has no practical application then why should they do it so for example

there's an awful lot of kids graduating high school who go into entry-level jobs in the service economy waiting on tables slinging hash and so on now do they get more money if they were good in uh second year algebra the answer is no and they understand that if there were more jobs that required this kind of education there would be more kids who would go into that kind of education with with some enthusiasm if there were connection between how well you did in school and how fast your salary increased later as there is in many

countries uh kids would be much more interested Macon Georgia you're next yes um I look forward to seeing your articles in Parade Magazine on Sundays when you have them I think they're wonderful and a few months back you had a very courageous and I thought saying article about um about the practice of abortion and I would hope that I would like to have you expound on your views a little bit and secondly although I have an engineering degree I have no teaching credentials I have no Masters but I'd like to know what I could do

to help educate children I have a fairly good General Science Background and I'd like to think there's something I could do to uh to spread the knowledge a little bit well I I think that's uh that's an awfully good point I think there are lots of people in this country uh retired people looking for something useful to do uh people much younger who are willing to spend some of their time to try to help educate kids and unfortunately many school boards and state Departments of Education require something to my mind seems very strange you don't

have to know your subject you just have to have taken courses in how to teach and that seems to me backwards if you know your subject well and you're enthusiastic about it then you know how to teach now of course there are problems about classroom discipline and all that which and various School Board bureaucracy things which which you have to learn but I think there ought to be a way in some school districts permitted for people who are experts in their subject but haven't gotten a bachelor's degree in education to do some teaching certainly some

enrichment is possible and I would just urge you to talk to your local school board and see what you can do on the abortion issue it's it's a complex and of course highly divisive issue the the article that my wife andrean and I wrote in parade attempted to steer a middle chorus between those who say that abortion is murder at any age of the embryo a fetus and those who say that any restriction on when you can have an abortion is a deprivation of the fundamental rights of the mother and we were trying to argue

and believe we made a reasonably good case that you cannot be at either end of that spectrum and be consistent with the science that you have to choose a place somewhere in the middle a difficult but I think essential compromise our next call is from Washington State go right ahead uh hello Dr Sagan hi um I'd like to ask you more on the Test Ban Treaty I've never found a political issue that had more agreement from all ends of the spectrum that I don't know anybody who knows why we should be continually detonating nuclear devices

underneath the planet and such I wonder if you could tell a little more on that and whether I've also been told by some somewhat outlandish sources that there's a possibility that the destruction of the ozone layer can be related to that and one further point I'd like to ask about do you have any reaction to the book by Howard Blum out there in the Extraterrestrial question thank you okay let's see we got test man we have ozone and we have UFOs uh that's a good menu um okay on the idea of a test man 1963

the United States and the Soviet Union signed an agreement barring nuclear testing in the atmosphere in space and in the ocean the only place left to blow them up is in holes dug underground so due to flee the two countries went and have exploded uh roughly a thousand nuclear weapons each underground to develop new nuclear weapons so underground testing of nuclear weapons has become a prime driver of the arms race because if you can't develop new nuclear weapons if you're not permitted to explode them then you might not be confident in what you've devised and

that might just pull the rug out from under the arms race now the United States committed in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to make massive Cuts along with the Soviet Union in its arsenals and that was the quid pro quo so that other countries would not develop nuclear weapons at all the United States and the Soviet Union are in flagrant violation of of that treaty and uh it's very hard for American diplomats to go to other countries and say listen it's bad to develop nuclear weapons because those are the countries say where do you come off

telling us what to do you're in violation of your own treaty so these two issues are are very serious the Soviets have urged us to stop to make a comprehensive Test Ban Treaty this week at the United Nations 70 nations are getting together to urge the United States and the Soviet Union to stop the Soviets say we'd love to stop if the Americans will do so the Americans say no way I think that is not to the credit of the United States on tests depleting the ozone layer no evidence whatever what's depleting the ozone layer

is chlorofluorocarbons the DuPont brand name is freons and we are phasing them out all over the planet and on UFOs I would just say the evidence no one would be happier than me if we were being visited and it would save me so much trouble um but uh extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I would say the evidence that we are now or ever have been visited despite the claims of being abducted and God knows what happens on the spaceship those claims are crummy the evidence just isn't good and my mind is open I'm willing

to to look at new cases but there has been no compelling cases physical evidence photographs a stolen log book of the alien Captain nothing that would convince a skeptic go to Appleton Wisconsin you're on the air yes I have a couple questions concerning the environment although the chances of a space probe like Galileo hitting the Earth and causing plutonium releases very small I think the consequences are very severe and I want to ask the guests how would you uh how does that square with your environmental support uh and and pushing for this type of fuel

in this type of vehicle and the second question is basically um don't we need to consider changing some form of our economic organization if we're going to impact the environment because a lot of things are done for profit I used to consume a lot of soda water and I used to use returnable bottles it was cheaper it tasted better than aluminum cans and I liked it but it wasn't my decision that that the that ended that and and we got aluminum cans as a result and a lot more uh pollution I think with disposable bottles

I like to guess the comment on that thanks okay on on the plutonium issue a spacecraft going to the outer solar system beyond the orbit of Mars can't use big solar panels to uh to convert sunlight into electricity because you're so far from the Sun that there isn't enough sunlight so if you wish to go there and do any kind of exploration you need some self-contained power source and so-called radio isotope thermoelectric generators are the proven technology now they do involve plutonium and if plutonium were ground down to a very fine powder microgram size of

particles and it was breathed in you can produce serious cancers in a lot of people maybe hundreds or thousands with the Galileo um plutonium amount but there is no plausible scenario in which the spacecraft would fail in a way that would pulverize it what would happen is you'd spray lumps and even if you ate the lump it would do you almost no harm at all so income in all these cases you want to compare the cost with the benefit and the potential cost here compared to the potential benefit in my opinion goes on the side

of the benefit in another case it might go on the side of the cost dominating on the question of is the profit motive of the end-all and be-all and nothing May touch it of course not and even in this country with its capitalist free enterprise tradition there are Anti-Trust laws there are laws preventing the exploitation of children there are all sorts of restrictions on the profit motive and where the profit motive gets in the way of the public well-being there will be further restrictions on the profit motive certainly so I don't think that is fundamentally

I mean in principle a an issue but where you draw the line is very much debatable and and I agree with you I think there are there are cases petroleum spills for example Exxon Valdez and so on in which uh the line has been drawn so that the profit motive has too much leeway and we ought to tighten it up down to Port Richey Florida you're on the air good evening Dr Sagan uh I admire you very much of affecting you have all your so whatever you said on tape plus your spaceship world or whatever

uh really everything practically everything my question is you talked about the education for our children now I've heard often enough on TV alternate newspapers that children from foreign countries safe in Japan Taiwan the uh uh from anywhere they they really are eager to learn and my opinion is our children here they they have you know interested in mostly baseball football or whatever out there they are not interested in learning they are what I think is there is no discipline among them now when I went to school I'm 67 years old when I went to school

and I didn't learn I got I had the teacher about me coming behind the ears so I had to learn and that's what it is my second question is about the ozone layer like I said with the ozone what we have in the air is it is it there for steady or will it depletes in due time if nothing is used again anymore and uh well it's just vanish and everything will be as it used to be um okay thanks um on how well uh kids of Asian origin are doing in the American school system

there's no question they're doing phenomenally well and uh I think the reason is reasonably clear these are some of them of course are are graduate students from the People's Republic of China and they'll go back right they'll stay here but a large number of them are first or second veneration Americans and they come from poor families but with a tradition of learning that is of respect for learning and so the parents play a fundamental and vital role in encouraging or in some cases requiring the kids to learn they make them or encourage them to take

extra kinds of school afterwards to spend lots of time on homework I know cases where the the parents stay up late at night to serve the kids tea while the kid is is doing the homework parental support parents willing to sacrifice so the kids will learn is vital and the idea is that uh is that if you're educated if you do well you have a passport out of poverty that's why they're doing well and and I say more power to them and a lot of other people could learn from them um I don't believe however

that you can hit the kid with a baseball bat and uh and make him or her learn that way by the way on on baseball I find it very strange that we've arranged things so that young men who play who play football or basketball or baseball have a codery of of uh attractive young women who jump up and down in skimpy outfits and cheer them for doing well in these Sports whereas uh young men and young women who do well in science or mathematics or geography or history don't have some codery of cheerleaders who who

compliment and praise and support them is it really in our interest to have the the support in the in the direction of sports and not in the rest why aren't there Sports and jackets with the school letter for people who do well in in science and on the ozone question uh the ozone is being depleted by this chemical CFCs once we stop producing the CFC then the ozone layer will heal itself but the trouble is that it takes a hundred years to do it so two three generations from now people will still be living in

a planet which has a depleted ozone layer because we were careless in our time we have time for one more call in this segment let's go out to Tucson Arizona you're in C-SPAN yes good evening Dr Sagan uh I'm trying to promote an idea which I call dmz2000 and I'd like your opinion on what it would take for people to come for countries to come to the rational realization that it's in everybody's interest to say start reducing their arms spending and their militaries by like 10 percent every year or every few years until we get

down to zero and then all the countries will be both economically and militarily more secure and there will be hope for the world that we can start addressing these other problems thanks well I don't think it's practical to get down to zero because after all there's always the prospect of some one nation that doesn't want to play this game and that wants to use Muscle to intimidate others and some degree of of Force May well be necessary but to make major Cuts in arms worldwide I think is a first class idea the human species spends

one trillion dollars a year on arms the Cold War has cost the United States 10 trillion dollars what could you buy for 10 trillion dollars the answer is you could buy everything in the United States I mean everything except the land all the highways skyscrapers homes cars trucks boots babies diapers everything in the United States for 10 trillion dollars and likewise the Soviet so I I say we've done something phenomenally stupid the cold war is dumb and the present precarious state of the American and Soviet economies uh has something to do with that and all

you have to do is look at the thriving economies of places like Japan and Germany that didn't spend money on the Cold War and you can see what the consequences have probably been Dr Sagan's latest book is a path where no man thought nuclear winner and an m to the end to the arms race and I might add that your book Cosmos was the best-selling science book ever published in the English language and we look forward to Cosmos returning later in the year on TV thank you very much thank you very much for being here

appreciate it