Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)

in Religion, Science | August 13th, 2021

Some pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als asso­ci­at­ed with sci­ence court dis­agree­ment with reli­gious believ­ers; oth­ers cul­ti­vate suites of rhetor­i­cal tech­niques express­ly in order to avoid it. While Carl Sagan did­n’t shrink from, say, debat­ing a cre­ation­ist on talk radio, he always engaged with char­ac­ter­is­tic aplomb. But deal­ing with bel­liger­ent callers-in is eas­i­er, in a way, than respond­ing to an earnest, straight­for­ward­ly expressed curios­i­ty about one’s own reli­gious beliefs. In the Q&A clip above, tak­en from his 1994 “lost lec­ture,” Sagan receives just such a ques­tion: “What is your per­son­al reli­gion? Is there any type of God to you? Like, is there a pur­pose, giv­en that we’re just sit­ting on this speck in the mid­dle of this sea of stars?”

“Now, I don’t want to duck any ques­tions,” Sagan replies, “and I’m not going to duck this one.” Nev­er­the­less, he requests a tri­fling clar­i­fi­ca­tion: “What do you mean when you use the word God?”  Pressed by none oth­er than Carl Sagan to define God, few of us would pre­sum­ably hold up well.

Here the ques­tion­er changes his angle, draw­ing on Sagan’s own def­i­n­i­tion in Pale Blue Dot of the “Great Demo­tions,” those “down-lift­ing expe­ri­ences, demon­stra­tions of our appar­ent insignif­i­cance, wounds that sci­ence has, in its search for Galileo’s facts, deliv­ered to human pride.” And so, “giv­en all these demo­tions,” the man asks, “why don’t we just blow our­selves up?”

“If we do blow our­selves up,” Sagan asks, “does that dis­prove the exis­tence of God?” This is an intrigu­ing rever­sal, but Sagan does­n’t sim­ply reply to ques­tions with ques­tions. Sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge increas­ing­ly leaves us “on our own,” he says, which is a state “much more respon­si­ble than hop­ing some­one will save us from our­selves.” What if we’re wrong, and a deity does indeed step in to save us? “Okay, that’s all right, I’m for that; we, you know, hedged our bets. It Pas­cal’s bar­gain run back­wards.” The prob­lem lies with God itself, “a word so ambigu­ous, that means so many dif­fer­ent things,” and one used “to seem to agree with some­one else with whom you do not agree.” Despite its impor­tance, not least for “social lubri­ca­tion,” no term can be use­ful to truth that encom­pass­es so many dif­fer­ent per­son­al con­cep­tions — bil­lions and bil­lions of them, one might say.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

Hear Carl Sagan Art­ful­ly Refute a Cre­ation­ist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Dar­win­ian Con­cept of Evo­lu­tion is Pro­found­ly Ver­i­fied”

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Ted Turn­er Asks Carl Sagan “Are You a Social­ist?;” Sagan Responds Thought­ful­ly (1989)

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Carl Sagan Tells John­ny Car­son What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chau­vin­ism in It” (1978)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch an Exquisite 19th Century Coffee Maker in Action

in Food & Drink, Physics, Science | August 13th, 2021

Pourover…

Cold brew…

Sin­gle ori­gin…

Cof­fee snob­bery may seem like a recent phe­nom­e­non, but the quest for the per­fect­ly brewed cup has been going on for a very long time.

Behold the Con­ti­nen­tal Bal­anc­ing Siphon, above — a com­plete­ly auto­mat­ic, 19th-cen­tu­ry table top vac­u­um brew­er.

There’s an unmis­tak­able ele­ment of cof­fee mak­ing as the­ater here… but also, a fas­ci­nat­ing demon­stra­tion of phys­i­cal prin­ci­ples in action.

Vin­tage vac­u­um pot col­lec­tor Bri­an Har­ris breaks down how the bal­anc­ing siphon works:

Two ves­sels are arranged side-by-side, with a siphon tube con­nect­ing the two.

Cof­fee is placed in one side (usu­al­ly glass), and water in the oth­er (usu­al­ly ceram­ic). 

A spir­it lamp heats the water, forc­ing it through the tube and into the oth­er ves­sel, where it mix­es with the cof­fee. 

As the water is trans­ferred from one ves­sel to the oth­er, a bal­anc­ing sys­tem based on a coun­ter­weight or spring mech­a­nism is acti­vat­ed by the change in weight. This in turn trig­gers the extin­guish­ing of the lamp. A par­tial vac­u­um is formed, which siphons the brewed cof­fee through a fil­ter and back into the first ves­sel, from which is dis­pensed by means of a spig­ot.

(Still curi­ous? We direct you to Har­ris’ web­site for a length­i­er, more egghead­ed expla­na­tion, com­plete with equa­tions, graphs, and cal­cu­la­tions for sat­u­rat­ed vapor pres­sure and the approx­i­mate tem­per­a­ture at which down­ward flow begins.)

The bal­anc­ing siphon was to 1850’s Paris and Vien­na what Blue Bottle’s three-foot tall Japan­ese slow-drip iced cof­fee-mak­ing devices are to ear­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry Brook­lyn and Oak­land.

Does the fla­vor of cof­fee brewed in a bal­ance siphon mer­it the time and, if pur­chased in a cafe, expense?

Yes, accord­ing to Maria Tin­de­mans, the CEO of Roy­al Paris, whose 24-carat gold and Bacar­rat glass bal­anc­ing siphon retails for between $17,500 and $24,000:

The cof­fee from a syphon can best be described as “crys­tal clear,” with great puri­ty of fla­vor and aro­ma and no bit­ter­ness added by the brew­ing process.

More afford­able bal­anc­ing siphons can be found online, though be fore­warned, all siphons are a bitch to clean, accord­ing to Red­dit.

If you do invest, be sure to up the cof­fee snob­bery by telling your cap­tive audi­ence that you’ve named your new device “Gabet,” in hon­or of Parisian Louis Gabet, whose 1844 patent for a coun­ter­weight mech­a­nism kicked off the bal­anc­ing siphon craze.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Make the World’s Small­est Cup of Cof­fee, from Just One Cof­fee Bean

The Life Cycle of a Cup of Cof­fee: The Jour­ney from Cof­fee Bean, to Cof­fee Cup

Wake Up & Smell the Cof­fee: The New All-in-One Cof­fee-Mak­er/Alarm Clock is Final­ly Here!

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Jocelyn Bell Burnell Changed Astronomy Forever; Her Ph.D. Advisor Won the Nobel Prize for It

in Astronomy, Gender, History, Science | August 5th, 2021

A few years back, we high­light­ed a series of arti­cles called The Matil­da Effect — named for the fem­i­nist Matil­da Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay “Woman as an Inven­tor” inspired his­to­ri­ans like Cor­nell University’s Mar­garet Rossiter to recov­er the lost his­to­ries of women in sci­ence. Those his­to­ries are impor­tant not only for our under­stand­ing of women’s con­tri­bu­tions to sci­en­tif­ic advance­ment, but also because they tell us some­thing impor­tant about our­selves, who­ev­er we are, as film­mak­er Ben Proud­foot sug­gests in his “Almost Famous” series of short New York Times doc­u­men­taries.

Proud­foot casts a wide net in the telling, gath­er­ing sto­ries of an unknown woman N.B.A. draftee, a would-be first Black astro­naut who nev­er got to fly, a man who could have been the “next Colonel Sanders,” and a for­mer mem­ber of the Black Eyed Peas who quit before the band hit it big. Not all sto­ries of loss in “Almost Famous” are equal­ly trag­ic. Joce­lyn Bell Burnell’s sto­ry, which she her­self tells above, con­tains more than enough strug­gle, tri­umph, and crush­ing dis­ap­point­ment for a com­pelling tale.

An astronomer, Bell Bur­nell was instru­men­tal in the dis­cov­ery of pul­sars — a dis­cov­ery that changed the field for­ev­er. While her Ph.D. advi­sor Antony Hewish would be award­ed the Nobel Prize for the dis­cov­ery in 1974, Bell Burnell’s involve­ment was vir­tu­al­ly ignored, or treat­ed as a nov­el­ty. “When the press found out I was a woman,” she said in 2015, “we were bom­bard­ed with inquiries. My male super­vi­sor was asked the astro­phys­i­cal ques­tions while I was the human inter­est. Pho­tog­ra­phers asked me to unbut­ton my blouse low­er, whilst jour­nal­ists want­ed to know my vital sta­tis­tics and whether I was taller than Princess Mar­garet.”

In the film, Bur­nell describes a life­long strug­gle against a male-dom­i­nat­ed estab­lish­ment that mar­gin­al­ized her. She also tells a sto­ry of sup­port­ive Quak­er par­ents who nur­tured her will to fol­low her intel­lec­tu­al pas­sions despite the obsta­cles. Grow­ing up in Ire­land, she says, “I knew I want­ed to be an astronomer. But at that stage, there weren’t any women role mod­els that I knew of.” She com­ments, with under­stand­able anger, how many peo­ple con­grat­u­lat­ed her on her mar­riage and said “noth­ing about mak­ing a major astro­phys­i­cal dis­cov­ery.”

Many of us have sto­ries to tell about being denied achieve­ments or oppor­tu­ni­ties through cir­cum­stances not of our own mak­ing. We often hold those sto­ries close, feel­ing a sense of fail­ure and frus­tra­tion, mea­sur­ing our­selves against those who “made it” and believ­ing we have come up short. We are not alone. There are many who made the effort, and a few who got there first but didn’t get the prize for one unjust rea­son or anoth­er. The lack of offi­cial recog­ni­tion doesn’t inval­i­date their sto­ries, or ours. Hear­ing those sto­ries can inspire us to keep doing what we love and to keep push­ing through the oppo­si­tion. See more short “Almost Famous” doc­u­men­taries in The New York Times series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

How the Female Sci­en­tist Who Dis­cov­ered the Green­house Gas Effect Was For­got­ten by His­to­ry

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Watch Beautiful Footage of the Rarely Seen Glass Octopus

in Biology, Science | August 3rd, 2021

First things first: the plur­al of octo­pus is not “octopi,” it’s octo­pus­es.

Now, drop every­thing and watch the video above. It’s an extreme­ly rare sight­ing of a glass octo­pus, “a near­ly trans­par­ent species, whose only vis­i­ble fea­tures are its optic nerve, eye­balls and diges­tive tract” notes the Schmidt Ocean Insti­tute. “Before this expe­di­tion, there has been lim­it­ed live footage of the glass octo­pus, forc­ing sci­en­tists to learn about the ani­mal by study­ing spec­i­mens found in the gut con­tents of preda­tors.”

Lim­it­ed sight­ings did not stop the poet Mar­i­anne Moore from see­ing some­thing like this won­drous crea­ture in her mind’s eye:

it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shift­ing snow-dunes;
dots of cycla­men-red and maroon on its clear­ly defined
pseu­do-podia
made of glass that will bend‑a much need­ed inven­tion-
com­pris­ing twen­ty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hun­dred
feet thick,
of unimag­ined del­i­ca­cy.

Glass octo­pus­es have green dots and do not live under “snow-dunes” but in the warm Pacif­ic waters beneath the Phoenix Islands Pro­tect­ed Area (PIPA) near Samoa, and else­where Schmidt Ocean Insti­tute sci­en­tists cap­tured rare footage and “iden­ti­fied new marine organ­isms,” writes Colos­sal, while record­ing “the sought-after whale shark swim­ming through the Pacif­ic Ocean.”

We must admit, Moore got the sense of awe just right….

Marine sci­en­tists from around the world embarked on the 34-day expe­di­tion on the ship Falkor. Using “high-res­o­lu­tion map­ping tools,” Ocean Con­ser­van­cy writes, they sur­veyed “more than 11,500 square miles of sea floor” and observed “not one but two glass octo­pus­es,” with a remote oper­at­ed vehi­cle (ROV) called SuB­as­t­ian.

See sev­er­al views of the glass octo­pus­es — the stars of the show — and dozens more rare and beau­ti­ful crea­tures (such as peren­ni­al inter­net favorite the Dum­bo octo­pus, below, from a 2020 expe­di­tion) at the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Insta­gram. “We’re at the begin­ning of the UN Decade of Ocean Sci­ence for Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment,” remarked chief sci­en­tist of the Falkor expe­di­tion Dr. Ran­di Rot­jan of Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. “[N]ow is the time to think about con­ser­va­tion broad­ly across all ocean­scapes, and the maps, footage, and data we have col­lect­ed will hope­ful­ly help to inform pol­i­cy and man­age­ment in deci­sion mak­ing around new high seas pro­tect­ed areas.” Learn more at the Schmidt Ocean Insti­tute here.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

When an Octo­pus Caused the Great Stat­en Island Fer­ry Dis­as­ter (Novem­ber 22, 1963)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

757 Episodes of the Classic TV Game Show What’s My Line?: Watch Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong, Salvador Dali & More

in Games, Music, Politics, Science, Television | July 30th, 2021

What would the host and pan­elists of the clas­sic prime­time tele­vi­sion game show What’s My Line? have made of The Masked Singer, a more recent offer­ing in which pan­elists attempt to iden­ti­fy celebri­ty con­tes­tants who are con­cealed by elab­o­rate head-to-toe cos­tumes and elec­tron­i­cal­ly altered voiceovers.

One expects such shenani­gans might have struck them as a bit uncouth.

Host John Charles Daly was will­ing to keep the ball up in the air by answer­ing the panel’s ini­tial ques­tions for a Mys­tery Guest with a wide­ly rec­og­niz­able voice, but it’s hard to imag­ine any­one stuff­ing for­mer First Lady Eleanor Roo­sev­elt into the full body steam­punk bee suit the (SPOILER) Empress of Soul wore on The Masked Singer’s first sea­son.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s Oct 18, 1953 appear­ance is a delight, espe­cial­ly her pan­tomimed dis­gust at the 17:29 mark, above, when blind­fold­ed pan­elist Arlene Fran­cis asks if she’s asso­ci­at­ed with pol­i­tics, and Daly jumps in to reply yes on her behalf.

Lat­er on, you get a sense of what play­ing a jol­ly par­lor game with Mrs. Roo­sevelt would have been like. She’s not above fudg­ing her answers a bit, and very near­ly wrig­gles with antic­i­pa­tion as anoth­er pan­elist, jour­nal­ist Dorothy Kil­gallen, begins to home in on the truth.

While the ros­ter of Mys­tery Guests over the show’s orig­i­nal 17-year broad­cast is impres­sive — Cab Cal­loway, Judy Gar­land, and Edward R. Mur­row to name a few — every episode also boast­ed two or three civil­ians hop­ing to stump the sophis­ti­cat­ed pan­el with their pro­fes­sion.

Mrs. Roo­sevelt was pre­ced­ed by a bath­tub sales­man and a fel­low involved in the man­u­fac­ture of Blood­hound Chew­ing Tobac­co, after which there was just enough time for a woman who wrote tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials.

Non-celebri­ty guests stood to earn up to $50 (over $500 today) by pro­long­ing the rev­e­la­tion of their pro­fes­sions, as com­pared to the Mys­tery Guests who received an appear­ance fee of ten times that, win or lose. (Pre­sum­ably, Mrs. Roo­sevelt was one of those to donate her hon­o­rar­i­um.)

The reg­u­lar pan­elists were paid “scan­dalous amounts of mon­ey” as per pub­lish­er Ben­nett Cerf, whose “rep­u­ta­tion as a nim­ble-wit­ted gen­tle­man-about-town was rein­forced by his tenure on What’s My Line?”, accord­ing to Colum­bia University’s Oral His­to­ry Research Office.

The unscript­ed urbane ban­ter kept view­ers tun­ing in. Broad­way actor Fran­cis recalled: “I got so much plea­sure out of ‘What’s My Line?’ There were no rehearsals. You’d just sit there and be your­self and do the best you could.”

Pan­elist Steve Allen is cred­it­ed with spon­ta­neous­ly alight­ing on a bread­box as a unit of com­par­a­tive mea­sure­ment while ques­tion­ing a man­hole cov­er sales­man in an episode that fea­tured June Hav­oc, leg­end of stage and screen as the Mys­tery Guest (at at 23:57, below).

“Want to show us your bread­box, Steve?” one of the female pan­elists fires back off-cam­era.

The phrase “is it big­ger than a bread­box” went on to become a run­ning joke, fur­ther con­tribut­ing to the illu­sion that view­ers had been invit­ed to a fash­ion­able cock­tail par­ty where glam­orous New York scene­mak­ers dressed up to play 21 Pro­fes­sion­al Ques­tions with ordi­nary mor­tals and a celebri­ty guest.

Jazz great Louis Arm­strong appeared on the show twice, in 1954 and then again in 1964, when he employed a suc­cess­ful tech­nique of light mono­syl­lab­ic respons­es to trick the same pan­elists who had iden­ti­fied him quick­ly on his ini­tial out­ing.

“Are you relat­ed to any­body that has any­thing to do with What’s My Line?” Cerf asks, caus­ing Arm­strong, host Daly, and the stu­dio audi­ence to dis­solve with laugh­ter.

“What hap­pened?” Arlene Fran­cis cries from under her pearl-trimmed mask, not want­i­ng to miss the joke.

Tele­vi­sion — and Amer­i­ca itself — was a long way off from acknowl­edg­ing the exis­tence of inter­ra­cial fam­i­lies.

“It’s not Van Clyburn, is it?” Fran­cis ven­tures a cou­ple of min­utes lat­er.…

Expect the usu­al gen­der-based assump­tions of the peri­od, but also appear­ances by Mary G. Ross, a Chero­kee aero­space engi­neer, and physi­cist Helen P. Mann, a data ana­lyst at Cape Canaver­al.

If you find the con­vivial atmos­phere of this sem­i­nal Good­son-Tod­man game show absorb­ing, there are 757 episodes avail­able for view­ing on What’s My Line?’s YouTube chan­nel.

Allow us to kick things off on a Sur­re­al Note with Mys­tery Guest Sal­vador Dali, after which you can browse chrono­log­i­cal playlists as you see fit:

1950–54

1955–57

1958–60

1961 ‑63

1964–65

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch His Appear­ances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view (1958)

How Amer­i­can Band­stand Changed Amer­i­can Cul­ture: Revis­it Scenes from the Icon­ic Music Show

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophis­ti­ca­tion to Late Night Talk Shows: Watch 270 Clas­sic Inter­views Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Sounds of Space: An Interplanetary Sonic Journey

in Astronomy, Science | July 29th, 2021

There are those of us who, when pre­sent­ed with duel­ing star­ships in a movie or tele­vi­sion show, always make the same objec­tion: there’s no sound in out­er space. In the short film above, this valid if aggra­vat­ing­ly pedan­tic charge is con­firmed by Lori Glaze, Direc­tor of NASA’s Sci­ence Mis­sion Direc­torate’s Plan­e­tary Sci­ence Divi­sion. “Sound requires mol­e­cules,” she says. “You have to be able to move mol­e­cules with the sound waves, and with­out the mol­e­cules, the sound just does­n’t move.” Space has as few as ten atoms per cubic meter; our atmos­phere, by con­trast, has more ten tril­lion tril­lion — that’s “tril­lion tril­lion” with two Ts.

No won­der Earth can be such an infer­nal rack­et. But as every school­child knows, the rest of solar sys­tem as a whole is hard­ly emp­ty. In twen­ty min­utes, the The Sounds of Space takes us on a tour of the plan­ets from Mer­cury out to Plu­to and even Sat­urn’s moon of Titan, not just visu­al­iz­ing their sights but, if you like, aural­iz­ing their sounds.

These include real record­ings, like those of Venu­sian winds cap­tured by the Sovi­et lan­der Ven­era 14 in 1981. Most, how­ev­er, are sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly informed con­struc­tions of more spec­u­la­tive phe­nom­e­non: a “Mer­curyquake,” for instance, or a “Methanofall” on Titan.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between film­mak­er John D. Boswell (also known as Melodysheep) and Twen­ty Thou­sand Hertz, a pod­cast about “the sto­ries behind the world’s most rec­og­niz­able and inter­est­ing sounds,” The Sounds of Space was recent­ly fea­tured at Aeon. That site rec­om­mends view­ing the film “as an explo­ration of the physics of sound, and the sci­ence of how we’ve evolved to receive sound waves right here on Earth.” How­ev­er you frame it, you’ll hear plen­ty of sounds the likes of which you’ve nev­er heard before, as well as the voic­es of Earth­lings high­ly knowl­edgable in these mat­ters: Glaze’s, but also those of NASA Plan­e­tary Astronomer Kei­th Noll and Research Astro­physi­cist Scott Guzewich. And as a bonus, you’ll be pre­pared to cri­tique the son­ic real­ism of the next bat­tle you see staged on the sur­face of Mars.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

Sun Ra Applies to NASA’s Art Pro­gram: When the Inven­tor of Space Jazz Applied to Make Space Art

42 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner, Alien, Star Trek and Doc­tor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

Plants Emit High-Pitched Sounds When They Get Cut, or Stressed by Drought, a New Study Shows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Carl Sagan Tells Johnny Carson What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chauvinism in It” (1978)

in Film, Sci Fi, Science, Television | July 14th, 2021

Is Star Wars sci­ence fic­tion or fan­ta­sy? Dif­fer­ent fans make dif­fer­ent argu­ments, some even opt­ing for a third way, claim­ing that the ever-mul­ti­ply­ing sto­ries of its ever-expand­ing fic­tion­al uni­verse belong to nei­ther genre. Back in 1978, the year after the release of the orig­i­nal Star Wars film (which no one then called “A New Hope,” let alone “Episode Four”), the ques­tion was approached by no less a pop­u­lar sci­en­tif­ic per­son­al­i­ty than Carl Sagan. It hap­pened on nation­al tele­vi­sion, as the astronomer, cos­mol­o­gist, writer, and tele­vi­sion host in his own right sat oppo­site John­ny Car­son. “The eleven-year-old in me loved them,” Sagan says in the clip above of Star Wars, Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind, and oth­er then-recent space-themed block­busters. “But they could’ve made a bet­ter effort to do things right.”

Every­one remem­bers how Star Wars sets its stage: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” But right there, Sagan has a prob­lem. Despite its remote­ness from us, this galaxy hap­pens also to be pop­u­lat­ed by human beings, “the result of a unique evo­lu­tion­ary sequence, based upon so many indi­vid­u­al­ly unlike­ly, ran­dom events on the Earth.”

So Homo sapi­ens could­n’t have evolved on any oth­er plan­et, Car­son asks, let alone one in anoth­er galaxy? “It’s extreme­ly unlike­ly that there would be crea­tures as sim­i­lar to us as the dom­i­nant ones in Star Wars.” He goes on to make a more spe­cif­ic cri­tique, one pub­li­cized again in recent years as ahead of its time: “They’re all white.” That is, in the skins of most of the movie’s char­ac­ters, “not even the oth­er col­ors rep­re­sent­ed on the Earth are present, much less greens and blues and pur­ples and oranges.”

Car­son responds, as any­one would, by bring­ing up Star Wars’ can­ti­na scene, with its rogue’s gallery of var­i­ous­ly non-humanoid habitués. “But none of them seemed to be in charge of the galaxy,” Sagan points out. “Every­body in charge of the galaxy seemed to look like us. I thought there was a large amount of human chau­vin­ism in it.” That no medal is bestowed upon Chew­bac­ca, despite his hero­ics, Sagan declares an exam­ple of “anti-Wook­iee dis­crim­i­na­tion” — with tongue in cheek, grant­ed, but point­ing up how much more inter­est­ing sci­ence fic­tion could be if it relied a lit­tle less on human con­ven­tions and drew a lit­tle more from sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies. Not that Star Wars is nec­es­sar­i­ly sci­ence fic­tion. “It was a shootout, was­n’t it?” Car­son asks. “A West­ern in out­er space.” John­ny nev­er did hes­i­tate to call ’em as he saw ’em.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fans Recon­struct Authen­tic Ver­sion of Star Wars, As It Was Shown in The­aters in 1977

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Carl Sagan on the Impor­tance of Choos­ing Wise­ly What You Read (Even If You Read a Book a Week)

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

A Billion Years of Tectonic-Plate Movement in 40 Seconds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

in History, Science | July 12th, 2021

We all remem­ber learn­ing about tec­ton­ic plates in our school sci­ence class­es. Or at least we do if we went to school in the 1960s or lat­er, that being when the the­o­ry of plate tec­ton­ics — which holds, broad­ly speak­ing, that the Earth­’s sur­face com­pris­es slow­ly mov­ing slabs of rock — gained wide accep­tance. But most every­one alive today will have been taught about Pangea. An impli­ca­tion of Alfred Wegen­er’s the­o­ry of “con­ti­nen­tal drift,” first pro­posed in the 1910s, that the sin­gle gigan­tic land­mass once dom­i­nat­ed the plan­et.

Despite its renown, how­ev­er, Pangea makes only a brief appear­ance in the ani­ma­tion of Earth­’s his­to­ry above. Geo­log­i­cal sci­en­tists now cat­e­go­rize it as just one of sev­er­al “super­con­ti­nents” that plate tec­ton­ics has gath­ered togeth­er and bro­ken up over hun­dreds and hun­dreds of mil­len­nia. Oth­ers include Kenor­land, in exis­tence about 2.6 bil­lion years ago, and Rodinia, 900 mil­lion years ago; Pangea, the most recent of the bunch, came apart around 175 mil­lion years ago. You can see the process in action in the video, which com­press­es a bil­lion years of geo­log­i­cal his­to­ry into a mere 40 sec­onds.

At the speed of 25 mil­lion years per sec­ond, and with out­lines drawn in, the move­ment of Earth­’s tec­ton­ic plates becomes clear­ly under­stand­able — more so, per­haps, than you found it back in school. “On a human timescale, things move in cen­time­ters per year, but as we can see from the ani­ma­tion, the con­ti­nents have been every­where in time,” as Michael Tet­ley, co-author of the paper “Extend­ing full-plate tec­ton­ic mod­els into deep time,” put it to Euronews. Antarc­ti­ca, which “we see as a cold, icy inhos­pitable place today, actu­al­ly was once quite a nice hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion at the equa­tor.”

Cli­mate-change trends sug­gest that we could be vaca­tion­ing in Antarc­ti­ca again before long — a trou­bling devel­op­ment in oth­er ways, of course, not least because it under­scores the imper­ma­nence of Earth­’s cur­rent arrange­ment, the one we know so well. “Our plan­et is unique in the way that it hosts life,” says Diet­mar Müller, anoth­er of the paper’s authors. “But this is only pos­si­ble because geo­log­i­cal process­es, like plate tec­ton­ics, pro­vide a plan­e­tary life-sup­port sys­tem.” Earth won’t always look like it does today, in oth­er words, but it’s thanks to the fact that it does­n’t look like it did a bil­lion years ago that we hap­pen to be here, able to study it at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

A Map Shows Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

What Earth Will Look Like 100 Mil­lion Years from Now

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.