{"id":565,"date":"2006-05-25T18:49:01","date_gmt":"2006-05-25T18:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=565"},"modified":"2006-05-25T18:49:01","modified_gmt":"2006-05-25T18:49:01","slug":"carl_sagans_bad_dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/05\/25\/carl_sagans_bad_dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"Carl Sagan’s Bad Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was about ten years old when I first saw the PBS series Cosmos<\/i><\/a>, hosted by the late astronomer Carl Sagan<\/a>. I was a pretty bright kid, if I do say so myself, and I think I probably knew more about science and history at that age than a lot of grown-ups do now. Still, I was only a kid, which meant that a lot of the series’ content went over my head until I saw it again years later. Even so, I remember being utterly captivated by the big ideas behind Cosmos<\/i>: that history, both of our puny little species and of the entire universe, is like an epic journey; that life, even intelligent life, may be ubiquitous in the universe but is nevertheless incredibly fragile and therefore precious; that knowledge and the quest to understand is at the core of our species; and that human beings are simultaneously — and paradoxically — insignificant in our scale to creation, but infinite in our spirits, destined for great things if we can only avoid destroying ourselves. I was equally fascinated by the show’s host, Dr. Sagan, who seemed to my ten-year-old self like such a gentle, kind-hearted man, but also, in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, a very sad man. I imagined that his sometimes grim demeanor must’ve come from his knowing everything there was to know, and that he suffered because of that awful, burdensome knowledge. (Yes, I really was a brooding Romantic even at the age of ten.)<\/p>\n

Carl Sagan had a son, Nick Sagan<\/a>, who grew up to become a science-fiction novelist. On his blog the other day<\/a>, I found the following video clip from Cosmos<\/i>, in which his father sums up so much of what that series was about. Curiously — or perhaps frighteningly — his words from almost 30 years ago still seem relevant today:<\/p>\n

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I was about ten years old when I first saw the PBS series Cosmos, hosted by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. I was a pretty bright kid, if I do say so myself, and I think I probably knew more about science and history at that age than a lot of grown-ups do now. Still, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-glass-teat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}