Mr. Science Puts Us All on Notice

What is a star?

If you can’t answer that one, try, why is the sky blue?

If nothing comes to mind, then you’re like 95% of Americans, Carl Sagan says. You have no replies to the simplest science questions your children ask. And you won’t try to help them find any.

Such lack of interest on the part of so many, the eminent scientist says, could signal the beginning of the end for our country. Or perhaps even our planet.

But not to worry. Sagan may be one of the world’s most optimistic individuals, a man who has spent his life exploring mysteries of the universe, who knows that even “the slightest alteration of course” may avert a catastrophe.

The course change he proposes in his new book, “The Demon-Haunted World” (Random House), could be fun for those who don’t know that, in Sagan’s words, “The stars are suns, very far away.”

Knowing the right answers is not essential to science, Sagan explains. The crucial element is respect for the questions.

Sagan’s book, his 22nd, is a rumination on America’s false perception that science is a subject too difficult for ordinary people to understand.

And it is an indictment of the pseudo-science we have embraced instead.

From crop circles and alien abductions to astrologers, channelers and psychics, the astronomer / biologist / physicist says we support whole industries based on crackpot notions that pretend to be science.

Have you seen the giant eggplant that looks exactly like Richard Nixon?

Sagan has, and points out that thousands of people would probably be willing to believe that some Force From Beyond was trying to tell us something by creating the ski-nosed purple veggie.

“We believe just about anything that caters to our longing for superhuman powers,” he says.

The astronomy professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author says the consequence of not learning the scientific method--which includes healthy skepticism that leads to tough, pertinent questions and a demand for evidence before we commit to belief--leads us “into serious danger” as a nation and makes us gullible for “the next political or religious charlatans who saunter along.”

Things have obviously slid downhill since 1980, when Sagan told the New York Times, “The public is a lot brighter and more interested in science than they’re given credit for.”

What has happened in the interim?

“We have become a nation of scientific illiterates,” Sagan, 61, complains in a phone conversation from Seattle, where he is being treated for what he calls “a setback” in his fight against myelodysplasia, a rare bone marrow disease that left him with a “grave deficiency of red cells, white cells and platelets--all of which one needs to stay alive.”

Luckily, his only sibling, a sister, was a perfect match and Sagan had a bone marrow transplant about a year ago.

He is too weak to travel on the usual book promotion tour. He sounds almost too weak to talk. But the world-famous Sagan style--a blend of erudition, irony and wonder--is still evident over the phone.

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His book, an overview of pseudo-science versus real science through the ages, argues that real science is far more fascinating, scary and hopeful than anything the most farfetched con artist or fiction writer might conjure.

Sagan says, for example, that the odds seem to be “roughly one chance in a thousand” that in the next century Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid. It was just such an accident, millions of years ago, that killed the dinosaurs and 75% of all species on Earth, he reminds his caller.

If just a piece of the asteroid, about one mile across, hits Earth, it “would put in peril the global civilization,” Sagan says.

Should we be concerned?

Of course, he says. There is much we can do to predict the disaster by studying all objects in the vicinity of Earth that can do us damage. And then by taking steps to deflect that object, or to make alternative arrangements for life elsewhere. That work should be going on now.

But, as Sagan acerbically notes, we are living in such an anti-science era “that the Republican government just eliminated its own office of technology assessment, the office that gives bipartisan advice on crucial issues of science that legislators must know about in order to make important decisions. The [government] decided, in essence, that it doesn’t need to know about science and technology in order to make decisions about it.”

The asteroid scenario is the most frightening of dozens of consequences the author predicts might occur if we don’t pursue science as individuals and as nations.

There is global thermonuclear war: “When we understand the consequences of nuclear war, we are much more restrained in our willingness to consider it,” Sagan says. “It is by no means clear that the leaders of nuclear armed states have a keen appreciation of the realities of nuclear war.”

Global warming: The planet is in peril if “we foolishly continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas, and do other things that warm the Earth. We ought to use fossil fuels much more efficiently. Eighty miles to the gallon in cars, for example, rather than 20 mpg. And we should vigorously pursue alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels.”

In general, Sagan says, if our nation does not appreciate the potential of science for good and for evil, we may lose our supremacy “in the usual Darwinian natural selection of nations, to those who do.”

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Sagan has built a worldwide reputation with his wake-up calls.

For 27 years he has been David Duncan professor of astronomy and space sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

As one of the first exo-biologists, he has helped lead the search for extraterrestrial life. He has written more than 600 scholarly articles, lectured around the world, is co-founder and president of the Planetary Society, and Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, among numerous other positions he holds.

He has helped design and carry out the Mariner 2 mission (to Venus), Mariner 9 and Viking (to Mars), Voyager (to the outer solar system), Galileo (to Jupiter) and has designed the messages sent from these craft to outer space.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Dragons of Eden” in 1978, and as a television phenomenon he has attempted to communicate the glory of science and his passion for it. For a while, it seemed he might succeed.

In the 1970s, his appearances on “The Tonight Show” were mini-crash courses on how the universe works. He was so engaging and attractive that autograph hunters and swooning women soon began to besiege him wherever he went. New York magazine called his appearances on Johnny Carson’s show “one of the great reckless solos of late-night television.”

In 1980, his 13-part public television science show, “Cosmos,” explained the workings of the universe, from the intricacies of a living cell to the mysteries of black holes. It was the most successful public television series in history, eventually reaching 400 million people around the world.

Sagan feels fantastically lucky to have done the things he dreamed of as a child. “My dream was to send spacecraft to explore other planets. This was before any spacecraft ever existed, and there was no guarantee there would ever be any.”

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Sagan grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of a homemaker and a garment cutter who had plenty of dreams, none of them scientific. They did not know the answers to his precocious questions, he says. But their gift to him was that they did not obstruct his enthusiasm or his quest for knowledge. They encouraged him to find answers and, whenever they could, helped him do it.

“My life experience has shown that almost every child is a scientist in first grade,” Sagan says. “Kids are tailor-made for science. They ask tough questions, have insatiable curiosity and an intact sense of wonder. But all of that is gone by 12th grade. Something awful has happened. They’ve decided science is not for them.”

What happens, he says, is that parents are embarrassed to say “I don’t know,” so they subtly make fun of questions, change the subject or ignore their child’s curiosity. Pretty soon, “Kids get the message that science questions should not be asked” because they’ll be ridiculed or ignored.

Sagan says parents need only say, “That’s a great question. Let’s find out.” Encourage the child to find the answer in a dictionary, a science book, a trip to the library or bookstore, he says. And encourage the child to keep asking.

Schools often add to the problem, Sagan says, with science teachers who are barely one step ahead of their students and who cover their own ignorance by belittling the kids’ questions.

Children are told to read chapters and memorize answers. They are subtly cued by teachers not to go beyond the printed page in the text, not to think creatively. Whatever spark is there, Sagan says, is quickly extinguished.

Sagan ends the interview with a few questions of his own:

* Astrology is bunk, but The Times has an astrology column every day. Why doesn’t it have a daily science column?

* Why are varsity jackets given to the good baseball, basketball and football players--but not to the good math and science students?

* When was the last time we heard an intelligent remark on science made by a president of the United States?

* When was the last time “60 Minutes” or “Meet the Press” did a program on science? Not technology or medicine, but science?

The problem runs through our entire society, he concludes. “But humans are a very hopeful species. We’ve shown in the past we can foresee the consequences of our actions and change course. I absolutely think we might do that, if we all get together and try.”