Carl Sagan Predicted The Mess 2021 Would Be 25 years Ago

last thing before we go tonight is a new appreciation of carl sagan that so many people find way overdue armed with four degrees from the university of chicago try that in your spare time sagan was an astronomer scientist astrophysicist a genuine public intellectual he taught at harvard and cornell and was ahead of his time almost by definition jason johnson called our attention to this clip on social media today here is carl sagan on johnny carson calling out a new movie called star wars for its faulty assumptions and lack of diversity star wars starts out saying

it's on some other galaxy right and then you see there's people and uh scene starting in scene one there's a there's a problem because human beings are the result of a unique evolutionary sequence based upon so many individually unlikely random events on the earth in fact i think most evolutionary biologists would agree that if you started the earth out again and just let those random factors operate you might wind up with beings that are as smart as us as ethical and artistic and all the rest but they would not be human beings that's for the

earth so another planet different environment yeah very likely human being are you saying on another galaxy it's not possible that there could be extremely unlikely that there would be creatures as similar to us as uh as the dominant ones in star wars and a whole bunch of other things they're all white the skin of all the humans and in star wars oddly enough is sort of like like this right and uh not even the other colors represented on the earth are present much less greens and blues and purples and oranges they did have the scene

in star wars with a lot of strange characters yeah but none of them seem to be in charge of the galaxy everybody in charge of the galaxy seemed to look like us and i i thought there was a large amount of human chauvinism and also i felt very bad that at the end the wookiee didn't get a medal also you know all the people got medals and the wookiee who had been in there fighting all the time he didn't get any medal and i thought that was an example of anti-wookie discrimination [Music] how about that

carl sagan advocate for wookies everywhere as the noted astrophysicist ron popeil would say but wait there's more carl sagan could not have predicted 2021 but he did see it coming he wrote the following back in 1995 and we quote i have a foreboding of an america in my children's or grandchildren's time when the united states is a service and information economy when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues

when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes are critical faculties in decline unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true we slide almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness the dumbing down of america is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media the 30 second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less lowest common denominator programming credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition but especially a kind of celebration

of ignorance roll that around for a while those were among his final published words he died 10 months later here we are 25 years later realizing just what he was trying to tell us back then [Music] you