Director of the Sagan Institute Talks Life in the Cosmos 

Many thanks for this interview. Like Carl Sagan interviews, I found it so compelling that I just ordered her book. p.s. I still feel very fortunate to have attended a Carl Sagan lecture at the University of Toronto in 1988. During the Q&A, many adults wanted to speak with Carl but he pre-announced that he wanted to limit his time to students. Over the next 45 minutes the audience watched in amazement as he convinced almost everyone that being a scientist or engineer would be preferable to being an astronaut. An educator to the very end.

Enlightening talk. There's so much discover,

Impressive! Thanks.

Hello Michael! Great interview! Lisa mentioned Baseian statistics and I've been thinking a lot about the ongoing "Eyewitness testimony phenomenon". I started looking around for different kinds of studies about the validity of eyewitness testimony and everything I could find was about the court of law. I think it would be interesting if someone were to gather up all of these various reports of uap's and categorize them all, localize them, and perform a Baseian analysis of this data. Nobody has done this and that seems strange to me because so many people claim to be so interested in this phenomenon. It's the only data that exists regarding the subject and it just gets swept in to a big pile and labeled "evidence". Even upon consideration of this idea some interesting things appear.

His books, lectures and interviews as a voice of science, reason and rationality. Most people leave none of it. Only a very few, handful do. In fact, most people are totally irrational and staunchly superstitious, and try to convince others of their superstitions, fearmongering, tribalism, segregationism, primitivism and archaism. Whereas science and people of science admit that they don’t know everything (none do!) and that they’re trying to figure things out and to understand the world around us better, and that the onliest way to do, understand, learn, know, discover, explore, invent anything at all in the first place is via science and scientific means. Science is honest as it deals with facts. It’s nemesis, religion/faith, lies and pretends to know.

Carls legacy is a great man of science and the voice of reason

Named my son after Carl 😊

We went to that party when he sold his house. He was also our WoW guildmaster for several years long before his travel life.

🤔… She said, “billions and BILLIONS of Galaxies” 🙀😯😱 that in itself is mind blowing! Yet our little blue planet, only appears to be a bubble bopping on the surface of the vast ocean of Space… 😁😄 and you only see half of the planet. How do they even find us! 😏😝😅

It's also interesting that Sagan started three families with three consecutive wives, like a controversial current public figure I could name. Posthumously the pro-natalists could list Sagan as one of their heroes.

It is easy talking to jelly fish, the problem is understanding what they say back.

Come to think of it, let's say we find no evidence of of life outside Earth then we might be able to argue that would be a step closer to assume that we live in matrix.

I’m sooo sick of woke gender issues. Netflix, BBC, MSM, etc. It’s insane! Advance on merit equality, period. DEI is biased, color biased, and not equal or merit based.

I'll just say it.... if Sagan had lived in the 2020s, he'd be sucked into being part of the woke academia set like so many others. Cosmos and Demon Haunted World will forever hold the title of most influential and important books I've ever read as a kid in the 90s. They were a watershed and kindled my nascent skeptical worldview in a way nothing else could have. But Sagan himself had some really eye-rollingly lefty indulgences. His pomposity on nuclear issues in particular verged on the quasi-religious and he loved correcting people who said things like "man" to represent everyone, to rather say "people" or "humans".

Sagan's belief in extraterrestrials was, and remains, a woo-woo, evidence-free faith position which violated his own "skeptical" standards. He latched onto it as a substitute for the god beliefs he thought he had to abandon. Michael Shermer discusses a study about how belief in ET's is a religion surrogate for allegedly rational, secular and scientific people like Sagan in one of his last _Scientific American_ columns. Apparently Sagan and similar people find the ET religion attractive because it gives their lives meaning and purpose, as that study concluded. Just to show the absurdity of this situation, ask: Do these undetected ET"s have to believe in *_OUR_* existence, without any evidence, for *_THEIR_* lives to have meaning & purpose?