Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)

Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) con­tin­ued doing what he did all along — pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence and “enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­vey­ing the won­ders of the uni­verse to mil­lions of peo­ple on tele­vi­sion and in books.” When­ev­er Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son dur­ing the 70s and 80s, his goal was to con­nect with every­day Amer­i­cans — peo­ple who did­n’t sub­scribe to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can — and increase the pub­lic’s under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of sci­ence.

At the end of his life, Sagan still cared deeply about where sci­ence stood in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. But while los­ing a bat­tle with myelodys­pla­sia, Sagan also sensed that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing was los­ing ground in Amer­i­ca, and even more omi­nous­ly with­in the cham­bers of the Newt Gin­grich-led Con­gress.

Dur­ing his final inter­view, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warn­ing, telling Char­lie Rose:

We’ve arranged a soci­ety on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in which nobody under­stands any­thing about sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, and this com­bustible mix­ture of igno­rance and pow­er soon­er or lat­er is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is run­ning the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in a democ­ra­cy if the peo­ple don’t know any­thing about it.

And he also went on to add:

And the sec­ond rea­son that I’m wor­ried about this is that sci­ence is more than a body of knowl­edge. It’s a way of think­ing. A way of skep­ti­cal­ly inter­ro­gat­ing the uni­verse with a fine under­stand­ing of human fal­li­bil­i­ty. If we are not able to ask skep­ti­cal ques­tions, to inter­ro­gate those who tell us that some­thing is true, to be skep­ti­cal of those in author­i­ty, then we’re up for grabs for the next char­la­tan polit­i­cal or reli­gious who comes ambling along.

Near­ly 30 years lat­er, we have reached that point. Under the sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion, DOGE has rushed to dis­man­tle the sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­ture of our gov­ern­ment, hap­haz­ard­ly cut­ting the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, and NASA. Next, they’re going after our lead­ing research uni­ver­si­ties, inten­tion­al­ly weak­en­ing the research engine that has fueled the growth of Amer­i­can corporations—and the over­all Amer­i­can economy—since World War II. And they’re replac­ing sci­en­tif­ic lead­ers with char­la­tans like RFK Jr. who dab­ble in the very pseu­do­science that Sagan warned us about. Need­less to say, our com­peti­tors aren’t mak­ing the same mis­takes. Few seri­ous gov­ern­ments are stu­pid enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Steps a Pres­i­dent Would Take to Destroy His Nation, Accord­ing to Elon Musk’s AI Chat­bot, Grok

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Richard Feyn­man Cre­ates a Sim­ple Method for Telling Sci­ence From Pseu­do­science (1966)

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing