Cosmos: Possible Worlds

| PROLOGUE |

I was a child in a time of hope. I wanted to be a scientist from my earliest school days. The crystallizing moment came when I first caught on that the stars are mighty suns, when it first dawned on me how staggeringly far away they must be to appear as mere points of light in the sky. I’m not sure I even knew the meaning of the word “science” then, but I wanted somehow to immerse myself in all that grandeur. I was gripped by the splendor of the Universe, transfixed by the prospect of understanding how things really work, of helping to uncover deep mysteries, of exploring new worlds—maybe even literally. It has been my good fortune to have had that dream in part fulfilled. For me, the romance of science remains as appealing and new as it was on that day, more than half a century ago, when I was shown the wonders of the 1939 World’s Fair. —CARL SAGAN, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

A contemporary poster highlights the Trylon and Perisphere, iconic symbols of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

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n a rainy night in Queens, the future became a place, one you could visit. A downpour at sunset in Flushing Meadows couldn’t discourage the 200,000 people who

had gathered there for the opening ceremony of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, whose theme was the “World of Tomorrow.” Before it closed in the fall of 1940, 45 million visitors would travel to this art deco land of promises. One of them was a five-year-old boy whose parents were so poor that they had brought their own brown-bag lunch. The 20 cents for a dish of chocolate ice cream topped with fluffy whipped cream was out of their reach, as were the blue and orange Bakelite flashlights and key rings that the boy craved. The apple from home would have to do for dessert. Despite his tantrums, the child came away empty- handed—but with the coordinates for his life trajectory set. At the playground in the Hall of Electrical Living, he was allowed to operate an infrared musical light beam, which enchanted him. He had fallen in love with the place called the future, and grasped that the only way to get there was science. Dreams are maps. The aspirations of this possible world were as egalitarian as they were scientific. In fact, one of its model communities was Futurama, the 1939 World’s Fair’s city of 1960, presaged tiered modern highways and garden-topped skyscrapers.

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known as “Democracity.” There were no slums—but there was a television set, a word processor, and a robot. It was there, for the first time, people saw these things that would change their lives. But on this last night of April, they had come to hear the greatest scientific genius since Isaac Newton saya few words. Albert Einstein was the opening act for a dramatic production number that would choreograph forces of nature as if they were the synchronized swimmers in the water ballet at the fair’s Aquacade. Einstein was to give brief opening remarks and flip the switch that would illuminate the fair. The spectacle promised to be the largest flash of man-made light in technical history, visible for a radius of 40 miles. A wow— but not as mind-blowing as the source of this sudden, unprecedented brilliance. Across the East River in Manhattan, Professor W. H. Barton, Jr., of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History was calibrating instruments that would grab mysterious thunderbolts from unknown parts of the universe and turn them into light, seizing power from the cosmos just as Prometheus stole fire from the gods. A few decades earlier, a scientist named Victor Hess had discovered that the universe was reaching out totouch our world many times a day. Streaks of radiation in the form of charged particles were striking Earth. A single proton could contain the energy of a baseball pitchedat 60 milesanhour. Theycametobecalledcosmicrays. Three oversize Geiger counters were installed at the Hayden Planetarium to capture 10 cosmic rays for the momentous opening of the World’s Fair. Once ensnared by the Geiger counters, their energy was to be magnified through vacuum tubes and then transmitted across a network of wires to Queens, where Einstein and the crowd were waiting. The cosmic rays would supply the energy that would turn night into day, flooding with blinding light a new world made possible by science. But first, it fell to Einstein to explain cosmic rays to the public. He was instructed to keep it to 700 words at most. Initially he — 18 —

Prologue refused. Impossible, he thought. Cosmic rays were a mystery to Einstein and his contemporaries, and to the scientific community when I began writing this book. But such is the relentless probing of science that, as I was completing the final draft of this book, cosmic rays were revealed to be from distant galaxies, generated by some of the most violent processes in the universe. Einstein thought that 700 words couldn’t possibly be enough to explain the complexity of this mysterious phenomenon. But above all, he was a true believer in the scientist’s duty to communicate with the public. And so he agreed to give the talk. Imagine that last night of April 1939, an evening more freighted with cinematic foreshadowing than many a movie. The world was mere months away from the German invasion of Poland, the start of the Second World War, the most catastrophic global bloodletting in human history. A five-year-old Carl Sagan couldn’t have a fancy dessert and the World’s Fair souvenirs he coveted because his parents and the rest of humanity still hadn’t crawled out of the impoverishment of the worst economic depression that ever was. In Germany, where hyperinflation in the 1930s meant a wheelbarrow wasrequired to carry enough paper money to purchase a loaf of bread, the desperate population turned to a demagogue. And yet, on a planet that was about to murder 60 million of its own, and to impose unimaginable suffering on tens of millions more, a world with some of the dimmest prospects in human history, people came together in massive numbers to celebrate, even worship . . . the future. As the sun was setting, Einstein stepped up to the microphone. He had just turned 60 the month before and had already enjoyed decades of the rarest form of iconic celebrity, a renown based on his discoveries of new physical realities on the grandest possible scale. For 2,400 years, since the time of the Greek genius Democritus, scientists had theorized about the existence of invisible units of matter called “atoms,” but no one had been able to demonstrate that they were real. When Einstein was 25, he provided the first definitive evidence for atoms, and their collectives, molecules. He — 19 —

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even measured their sizes. He challenged the dominant wave theory of light and proposed that light traveled as packets of particles called photons. He provided the foundation for quantum mechanics. He expanded classical physics by discovering the energy inherent in particles at rest. And he realized that gravity bends light. The formula he devised to express this idea is the equation that we both already know because it is the most famous scientific/mathematical statement of all. He took Newton’s law of universal gravitation to a new level when he understood it as a property of spacetime. This was the gateway to modern astrophysics and to exploring the darkest places of the universe, where light is imprisoned by gravity. Einstein began to speak. Those who stood there in the rain that night to hear him were only a fraction of those in the United States and around the planet who listened to the event on radio. He told the crowd about Victor Hess, the Austrian physicist who had discovered cosmic rays by making a series of perilous high-altitude hot-air balloon trips between 1911 and 1913. Einstein used up some of his meager 700-word allotment to remind the world of Hess’s status as an immigrant, “who incidentally, like so many others has recently had to seek refuge in this hospitable country.” He went on to explain what scientists knew about the cosmic rays, and concluded by speculating that they could provide the key to the “innermost structure of matter.” An announcer’s voice boomed across the Queens night: “We will now call on these interplanetary messengers to reveal the World of Tomorrow; the first ray that we will catch is still five million miles away, traveling toward us at the rate of 186,000 miles per second.” A roll call began as each cosmic ray arrived and registered on one of the Geiger counters. But when they got to the 10th and Einstein flicked the switch, it was simply too much for the wiring system; some of the lights blew. Still, it was magnificent. The way to the future was open. The next day, the New York Times reported that due to the heaviness of Einstein’s accent and the dueling acoustics of the — 20 —

The most respected mind on the planet opens the 1939 New York World’s Fair with a challenge to science.

amplifiers, those attending heard not much more than the words that began his speech: “If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people.” This always has been and always will be, the dream of Cosmos. When I stumbled upon Einstein’s rarely quoted words of that night during some random late-night wandering on YouTube, I found the credo for 40 years of my life’s work. Einstein was urging us to tear down the walls around science that have excluded and intimidated so many of us—to translate scientific insights from the technical jargon of its priesthood into the spoken language shared by usall, so thatwemay taketheseinsights to heartandbechanged by a personal encounter with the wonders they reveal. Carl Sagan and I fell in love in 1977 during our collaboration on NASA’sVoyagerinterstellarmessage.Carlwasbythattimeacelebrated astrophysicist, communicator, and a principal investigator on the — 21 —

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NASA’s 1977 Voyagers 1 and 2 carry a complex interstellar message deep into the Milky Way galaxy and five billion years into the future. The etchings on the cover are scientific hieroglyphs indicating our cosmic address and instructions for playing the record.

Voyagers’ planned mission of exploration. We had already collaboratedonatelevisionproject.Itwasneverproduced,butthatexperience of thinking together moved Carl to ask me to be the creative director of the message that would become known as the golden record. It was Carl’s vision that once Voyager 1 completed its epochal reconnaissance of what was then thought of as the outer solar system, and sent back its final image of Neptune, it should turn its camera homeward to document our world. For years, he mounted a one-man campaign within NASA and was met with strenuous objections. What possible scientific value could such a picture have? But Carl was convinced of the potentially transformative impact of that image. He would not take no for an answer. By the time Voyager 1 was high above the plane of our solar system, NASA gave in. The family album photos of the worlds of our solar system were taken, including one of an Earth so small, you had to strain to find it. The “pale blue dot” image and Carl’s prose meditation on it have been beloved the world over ever since. It exemplifies just the kind of breakthrough that I think of as a fulfillment of Einstein’s hope for

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Prologue science. We have gotten clever enough to dispatch a spacecraft four billion miles away and command it tosend us back an image of Earth. Seeing our world as a single pixel in the immense darkness is in itself astatement about our true circumstances in the cosmos, and one that everysinglehumancangraspinstantly.Noadvanceddegreerequired. In that photo, the inner meaning of four centuries of astronomical research is suddenly available to all of us at a glance. It is scientific data and art equally, because it has the power to reach into our souls and alter our consciousness. It is like a great book or movie, or any major work of art. It can pierce our denial and allow us to feel something of reality—even a reality that some of us have long resisted. A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, thepolluter—to anyonewho does notputaboveall otherthings the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness. There is no running away from the inner meaning of this scientific achievement. We didn’t know that particular Einstein quote when Carl and I began writing the original Cosmos in 1980 with astronomer Steven Soter. We just felt a kind of evangelical urgency to share the awesome powerof science, to convey thespiritualupliftof theuniverse it reveals, and to amplify the alarms that Carl, Steve, and other scientists were sounding about our impact on the planet. Cosmos gave voice to those forebodings, but it was also suffused with hope, with a sense of human self-esteem derived, in part, from our successes in finding our way in the universe, and from the courage of those scientists who dared to uncover and express forbidden truths. The original award-winning Cosmos television series and book of 1980 was embraced by hundreds of millions of people around our world. According to the Library of Congress, it is one of only “88 books that shaped America,” included in the same category as Common Sense, The Federalist, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, Invisible Man, and Silent Spring. — 23 —

Prologue And so it was with a fair degree of fear that I set out with Steve, a dozen years after Carl’s death, to undertake another 13 hours of the series, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey. My waking nightmare throughout the six years it took to write and produce was that my personal limitations would reflect poorly on Carl, whom I love and admire infinitely. This, my third series of voyages on the Ship of the Imagination, marks my 40th year of writing Cosmos. The Ship and the Cosmic Calendarare not theonlyartifactsfrompreviousflights. Sometropes, anecdotes, and teaching tools, in my view, have unrivaled explanatory power, and so I bring them along on this journey, too. Inevitably, there will be some repetitions and overlap from concepts Carl and I expressed previously, but they are now more urgent than before. I am blessed once again to have brilliant collaborators, and I am still worried about not measuring up. Despite this, the times impel me forward. We all feel the chill our present casts on our future. Some part of us knows that we must awaken to action or doom our children to dangers and hardships we ourselves have never had to face. How do we rouse ourselves and keep from sleepwalking into a climate or a nuclear catastrophe that may not be reversed before it has destroyed our civilization and countless other species? How do we learn to value those things we cannot live without—air, water, the sustaining fabric of life on Earth, the future—more than we prize money and short-term convenience? Nothing less than a global spiritual awakening can transform us into who we must become. Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence, to that soaring experience of the oneness of being fully alive. The scientific approach to nature and my understanding of love are the same: Love asks us to get beyond the infantile projections of our personal Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan in 1980, during the production of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage in Los Angeles

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hopes and fears, to embrace theother’s reality. This kind of unflinching love never stops daring to go deeper, to reach higher. This is precisely the way that science loves nature. This lack of a final destination, an absolute truth, is what makes science such a worthy methodology for sacred searching. It is a never ending lesson in humility. The vastness of the universe—and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable—is out of reach to the arrogant. This cosmos only fully admits those who listen carefully for the inner voice reminding us to remember we might be wrong. What’s real must matter more to us than what we wish to believe. But how do we tell the difference? I know a way to part the curtains of darkness that prevent us from having a complete experience of nature. Here it is, the basic rules of the road for science: Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything, including authority. Do these things and the cosmos is yours. If the series of pilgrimages toward understanding our actual circumstances in the universe, the origin of life, and the laws of nature are not spiritual quests, then I don’t know what could be. I am not a scientist, just a hunter-gatherer of stories. The ones I treasure most are those about the searchers who have helped us find our way in the great dark ocean, and the islands of light they left to us. Here are stories of searchers who dared to venture into the bottomless ocean of the cosmos. Let’s travel together to the worlds they discovered—the lost worlds, the worlds that still flourish, and the worlds yet to come. In the pages that follow, I want to tell you the story about the unknown genius who sent a letter 50 years into the future that guided the successful Apollo mission to the moon. And another about the scientist who made contact with an ancient life-form which, like us, uses symbolic language to communicate. These beings who reflexively make mathematical calculations informed — 26 —

Prologue by physics and astronomy live a commitment to a consensual democracy that puts ours to shame. I want to take you to the worlds that science has made it possible for us to imagine, bring back to life, and even visit: one where it rains diamonds, and the ancient city at the bottom of the sea where life on Earth may have begun. I want you to witness what is perhaps the most intimate stellar relationship in the cosmos, two stars locked in perpetual embrace, joined bya bridge of fire eight million miles long. Let’s eavesdrop together on the hidden worldwide terrestrial network that is an ancient collaboration among the kingdoms of life. I want to tell you about the little-known scientist who provided the key to a long-lost world. This same man also exposed a logical hole in reality more than 200 years ago, one that still remains unexplained, despite Einstein’s best efforts. Most heart-wrenching to me is the passion of the man who chose a slow horrible death at the hands of one of the most terrifying murderers in history. He might have saved himself by telling a scientific lie. But he just couldn’t. His disciples willingly followed him into martyrdom to protect what must have been nothing more than an abstraction to them—the generations to come. Us. Which brings us to the possible world that excites me the most—the future we can still have on this one. The misuse of science endangers our civilization, but science also has redemptive powers. It can cleanse a planetary atmosphere overburdened with carbon dioxide. It can set life free to neutralize the toxins that we have scattered so carelessly. In a society that aspires to become a democracy, a conscious and motivated public can will this possible world into existence. These are stories that make me more optimistic about our future. Through them I have come to feel more intensely the romance of science and thewonder of being alive right now, at these particular coordinates in spacetime, less alone, more at home, here in the cosmos. —ANN DRUYAN — 27 —