Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Finding Wonder and Meaning in a Book by Carl Sagan’s Daughter

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

Bill Nye says of Sasha Sagan’s new book, “Sagan finds the meaning of life everywhere—with her family, around the world, and especially among the stars of the cosmos. Read her work; you’ll have a deeper appreciation for your every step, every bite, and every breath.” Mat Kaplan talks with Sasha about For Small Creatures Such as We, and later joins Bruce Betts to offer the book in the new What’s Up space trivia contest. Learn more about this week’s guest and topics at: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1030-2019-sasha-sagan.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Carl Sagan's daughter arrives with her great new book, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Sasha Sagan grew up around the Planetary Society, and with parents who loved science and shared that love, now it's her turn, and she has created something unique. We'll meet her in moments, and you'll get your chance to win for small creatures such as we, that's the book, when Bruce Betts drops by for this week's What's Up. We'll begin with a few items from the current edition of The Downlink. It's Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis' roundup of planetary science and exploration news. Here's a milestone toward the next great space observatory.

The James Webb Space Telescope deployed its five-layer heat shield under its giant mirrors for the very first time. You can see a shot of the successful test at planetary.org slash downlink. The privately funded Breakthrough Listen project that we've talked about on Planetary Radio is going to point antennas at the exoplanets discovered by TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, because if you don't listen, you won't hear. And China's U-22 rover has woken up for its 11th two-week lunar day of exploration across the far side of the moon. There's much more to catch up on, all with links to learn more at planetary.org slash downlink. You could easily be forgiven if you envy Sasha Sagan's childhood.

She grew up with the love, guidance, and encouragement of Carl Sagan and his collaborator, partner, and wife, Ann Druyan. They instilled in her the sense of wonder and curiosity that they shared with all of humanity and that Ann continues to share through the TV series Cosmos and other efforts. After working as a writer and TV producer, Sasha has authored a book that surveys humanity's celebrations and rituals, finding science, wonder, and deep meaning. She visited the Society's new headquarters in Pasadena a few days ago and sat down with me in our studio. Sasha Sagan, thank you so much.

It's always an honor to bring people here to the Planetary Society and sit across the table and talk with them. But after all, it's because of your lineage that we have this place to talk about across the table. I'm so happy to be here. This feels very, very special. And everybody else, as you've seen, is also thrilled to have you here today. We already did the little tour. I hope you enjoyed walking around. I loved it. I loved it. You have this book, which I just finished reading for the second time. Oh, thank you. Wow. Thank you. I'm going to start by reading the blurb from our boss here, the CEO, which happens to be on the back of the book. Bill Nye says, what is the meaning of life?

Sagan, that's Sasha Sagan, finds its meaning everywhere, with her family, around the world, and especially among the stars of the cosmos. Read her work. You'll have a deeper appreciation for your every step, every bite, and every breath. He is a way with words. He certainly does, and I was so delighted and felt really a lot of gratitude when I got that blurb. That was wonderful. But then you have a way with words. Thank you. As was also recognized, another blurb inside the book from the great Richard Dawkins, another blurb inside the book from the great Richard Dawkins. She's Carl Sagan's daughter, and it shows.

But you are also Ann Druyan's daughter, and it shows. Thank you. Thank you so much for saying that. I really, I do feel like a product of both of my parents, and I feel extremely lucky to be the daughter of those two particular people. Your mom has been a semi-regular guest on this program. Yes. Well, as you well know, they don't come any more eloquent. I mean, I love the, and I've told this story before,

the time that Neil Tyson told me that when your mother, Adrienne, speaks, he just feels like he wants to sit down on the floor and cross his legs and listen. Yes, I really, I mean, you can imagine getting so much access to her and the way she tells stories, which is really a theme in my book, is her particular way with words, her particular storytelling, and how enchanting it is, and what a big part of my growing up it was to hear not just the stories, historical stories, you know, scientific stories. Obviously, she and my dad together, such fantastic science communicators, but the specifics of our family, our great-grandparents,

into the wider, larger context of the world and history and science. This is the most wonderful agglomeration of personal experiences, your own life, remembrances, stories you've been told by others like your parents, remembrances, stories you've been told by others like your parents, but also bringing in these cultural practices and rituals and celebrations from around the world and from throughout time. They're really well woven together. Thank you so much. Thank you. It was, you know, the more that I was sort of researching celebrations and rituals, because a lot of the book comes from the idea of if you believe that the scientific method is the pathway to understanding, and if you believe that belief or you think that belief requires evidence, how do you celebrate? How do you mark time? You know, you still have weddings.

You still have funerals. Kids still come of age. You still want to do something when it's cold and the nights are long. How do we sort of navigate this and still have the things that have brought us together and uplifted us and helped us process change throughout time, even though historically the infrastructure for a lot of that has been religion? And what I found that was so thrilling to me was that so many of the holidays and traditions and rituals around the world and throughout time, when you peel back all the specifics, the things that we're really celebrating are scientific phenomena. Birth, coming of age,

death, these are biological processes, changing of the seasons. As you said in the book, biology and astronomy, which was the first big revelation of the book because it had always been there in front of me, but I never thought about it. Thank you. Well, it's just, it's amazing because we sort of know like, okay, all these holidays in around the spring equinox, and they have these themes that go together that are renewal, rebirth. But to just think that that is spring itself. The idea, you know, if we have so many stories and so many beautiful theological, mythological tales, the crux of them all is, man, that was close, but we're going to be okay. You know, like that could have gone really badly, but we made it. Whether we're talking about

Passover or Easter or Persephone in ancient Greece, there's so many Norvus, there's so many holidays in so many different cultures where that is really the crux of it around springtime. And I think the same time around the winter solstice, the idea that it is dark and it's cold and we need something to brighten things up. There's just a through line here because I think before, for most of history, human history, I write in the book, there was a long time where science and our idea of our God or our gods were not yet at war, and the more deeply we could understand nature, the closer we were to understanding the powers that be,

whatever they were for each particular culture. Hopefully we're coming to a time of at least a ceasefire, if not actual peace between those two. Well, I think more and more you hear, you know, there'll be like a Pew research poll comes out every once in a while that says, you know, more and more people identify as spiritual but not religious. I don't believe you can replace something with nothing. And I think that even if you're totally secular, well, you still got to throw a party every once in a while. You clearly, you celebrate celebration.

Yeah. You clearly find comfort in ritual. I do. Because, you know, my mother always says, there's no refuge from change in the cosmos, you know? And it's like like that's the thing about life on this planet is there's constant change cyclical change and permanent change entrances and exits people are born people die and we're just constantly trying to catch up to

process this to wrap our minds around what what this means what we do with this. And I think rituals are a way of sort of getting a hang of all this change and letting ourselves pause for a moment and think about what this means. I want to ask you about how you structured the book, but be right up front. Why this title? Oh, yes. So for small creatures such as we, it comes from a line in the novel Contact, which is the only work of fiction that my dad ever published. And like everything that my parents did, it was a collaboration. And it's actually my mom who came up with the words. The rest of the line is, for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. And I think that that's so much of what my parents taught me is this idea of if we're just this little out of the way planet and this great wide, vast grandeur, what do we have that can sort of help us not be in just a full blown

existential crisis all day long? And it's one another. And it's that feeling of falling in love, the love you feel for your kids, the love you feel for your friends, the feeling of being part of a community and being part of a species where even though we have these differences that seem important, they're not. And we're really all in it together on this little out-of-the-way rock. And we're really all in it together on this little out-of-the-way rock. Hear, hear. How did you come to structure it the way you did? As I said, it is this amalgamation of both the very personal and what really spans all of humankind.

So the chapters, there's a daily ritual and a weekly ritual. There are chapters like that. There's each of the four seasons. And then there's chapters that ritual and a weekly ritual. There are chapters like that. There's each of the four seasons. And then there's thing, you know, chapters that are about birth and coming of age and death. I just tried to take a little window into some of the things that are just innate to life on earth and some of the things that are innate to our species. And the way that we mark time seemed like such a such a clear theme in so many of the holidays and rituals around the world. It's this way of processing time.

It's so hard to feel it. Every second it's going by, it's like lying on the ground, I like to say, and trying to feel the earth rotate. It's just impossible, but it's happening all the time. I think we've created a lot of beautiful celebrations and rituals to try to feel time passing. Another thought that I had as I read the book is that there must be, I mean, we now know, if you'll pardon the expression, there are billions and billions of planets across the universe, even in our own galaxy, right? Among those billions and billions, there probably are a billion or more that don't tilt.

Yes. And what do those poor people do without seasons? Well, yes, there are some places here where it seems like we don't have any seasons. But no, I mean, it's so true because it's so much about a book about being an earthling. It's just amazing, right? It's some collision at some point in our early history as a planet knocked us a little off. We got this 23-ish degree tilt. And because of that, the length of days change.

And we have seasons. They're the source of so much beauty. Facts kind of sometimes get maligned as cold and hard. And, you know, sometimes we learn these things in the abstract. We think, OK, the axial tilt, I just have to remember this for a test or whatever when you're growing up. But I think that if we can teach kids that this is the source of so much beauty and sort of get a thrill out of it, it might be, I don't know, it might encourage a little more scientific thinking. So that's kind of the astronomical side. But as we said, and you say in the book,

the biology is in here as well. And so we kind of get to meet your family and your daughter. Yes. My daughter is two now, but I wrote most of this book. I mean, I started writing it really when I was pregnant, and I wrote most of it in the first year of her life. So she is definitely a big character. And as anyone does when they become a parent, you just suddenly become very aware of your place in as a link in a long chain. And I really felt that when you see your grandparents little expressions in your child or all these things that sort of seem, for lack of a more secular word, magical, but there's a scientific explanation. And in the book, I write about how my parents described to me the idea that there's a secret code in your blood that connects

you to your ancestors as this magnificent, wondrous thing that was sort of more astonishing and thrilling than the stuff of fairy tales, but so much in that genre, it seemed, you know? And I hope to pass on some of that to her, that idea that the things that are explained by science can give us spine-tingling joy, just the way sometimes our fairy tales do. I don't want to give the idea that it's in any way a major part of the book, but you mentioned in passing this seeming correlation between babies and our images of, you know. Yes.

So my parents had written a little bit about something that sort of overlaps with this, but, you know, when you're pregnant, I had so many girlfriends who would say, especially when the baby starts moving around, would say, oh, it's like an alien inside me. But, of course, we don't of the movies and television that we've created for ourselves and sci-fi of creatures almost always a little smaller than us, no hair, big eyes, doesn't speak. We don't know what it wants, but it wants something. And it doesn't know the social mores. And as soon as it arrives, everything is totally different. We don't know if it's going to be really great or really bad, but it just seems so clear that the narrative that we've created about aliens is maybe some of us, some of the ways we need to process how we feel about the arrival of a new baby, because it seems

like there's such an overlap there. And right, we could have imagined aliens any which way, but this is what we came up with. I wonder why. Learning that somebody, a couple, are going to have a baby is such an instant moment of celebration for strangers. Absolutely. As is, you mentioned, being a newlywed and people finding that out, and they're immediately happy for you. Yes. They share in it. Yes, it's so true. I think it's because there's this deep biological sense, especially, I mean,

marriage, right? Traditionally, it's like, okay, well, then they're on the pathway. Obviously, now people get married for all sorts of reasons. It doesn't mean they're going to have kids. But I mean, people are so nice to you when you're pregnant, and it's total strangers. And it just seemed so clear that it was because, oh, this, of course, the species wants to continue. And so it's the sense of, oh, good, there's going to be more of us. And, you know, I mean, there's plenty of us, but that joy that you feel when you just randomly meet a pregnant person or you find out someone you know is having a baby. I mean, it's biological. It's a survival mechanism for the species. If we were really blasé about babies, maybe there wouldn't be

7 billion of us. Exactly. Like the shakers. Exactly. Like the shakers. Right, right, right. And there's, I mean, on that theme, I don't want to not be too PG, but there's also a chapter called sex in this book. And I think that is also something that is a biological event that is cause for celebration, too. And certainly around the world, there's different ways of thinking about it and different mores. But it's something that also is biological and really important to us and something that all over the world cultures have treated differently. But there's ritual and tradition around that too. You have chapters that cover all of these things that we've talked about so far. I'm going to come back to seasons in a moment.

But you made me think for the second time recently, some of the audience has heard this before, the celebration of a birth, of that greatest of beginnings, at least if you're the parent, made me think of the old series Roots, way before your time. But I'm sure it's at the beginning of the first episode of Roots. Baby is born in a village in Africa. The father takes him outside, holds him up to this gorgeous sky with the Milky Way stretching across it and says, behold, the only thing greater than yourself, which seems to fit in to what you were taught by

your parents and what you express here. Yeah. Well, just this, of course, the rituals and celebrations around the birth of a baby are so varied and so beautiful. But when I was born, my father said to me, welcome to the planet Earth. And we made that only two generations long, but we made that a tradition when my daughter was born.

And I think this idea of teaching children from very early on, minutes in, that they are part of not just this planet, but a grand universe that we are only just beginning to understand. And a lot of what I write about, too, is the idea that it's okay to say we don't know everything yet and that there are still really big unanswered questions. And I think getting a sense of that early on, too, is really powerful. I'll be back with Sasha Sagan after this break. Hi, I'm Jason Davis, Editorial Director for the Planetary Society.

Did you know there are more than 20 planetary science missions exploring our solar system? That means a lot of news happens in any given week. Here's how to keep up with it all. The Downlink is our new roundup of planetary exploration headlines. It connects you to the details when you want to dive deeper. From Mercury to interstellar space, we'll catch you up on what you might have missed. That's the downlink every Friday at planetary.org. That concept of what we don't know and an unfortunate quote from a former secretary of defense.

Yeah, right. The unknown unknowns. Right, right, right. I wasn't surprised to read at all that your parents, when asked about, you know, do they believe that aliens exist or is there life after death, they responded by saying we don't know. But what was interesting is that you report how they responded. They gave that response with such joy.

Yes. When I write about this too, when I was little, if I could ask a question to which they didn't know the answer and we had to look it up or investigate it, that was like I had done something marvelous and I was like really celebrated for that. Sometimes we would go to the Britannica and we would find out the answer. And sometimes there were questions to which we don't know the answer, or, you know, we don't know the

answer yet, or some things like life after death, to which each of us will in time get the answer. But the idea that it was okay to say, well, we just don't know. And that's great. You know, that's fine. It's better than coming up with an answer because we're so uncomfortable or as my parents would say unable to tolerate ambiguity you know I think they really instilled in me this idea that anyone who ever came up to my dad and said like do you believe in aliens and he would say well I just don't know so we don't have any evidence and they would say yeah but like what do you really think? And like, what does your gut say? And he would say, you know, something to the effect of, well, like I try to use my brain and not my gut to determine these sort of things.

And it's just a very, I don't know, I think it's so hard. Sometimes we really struggle in everyday life, not even with like big philosophical questions, but just the feeling of not knowing is so hard. But I think it's something really useful and something that if we can try to get more comfortable with, we'll be better off. And it drives so much of science. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And to find an answer that's real rather than a placeholder so that we're more comfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I want to get into the seasonal stuff here because you've got chapters about all the seasons.

And the one about summer, I mean, this is a space show. Yes. So some people are saying, okay, let's talk about space. Yes, yes. This is sort of moving in that direction. Summer seemed especially relevant for this conversation. We owe our lives to the sun, clearly. Yes.

More broadly, though, you review how light in general has always been regarded as sacred. Yes, it's so true. I mean, so many celebrations and rituals and holidays have to do with a flame, with a candle, or some, this little, I like to think of it as this little miniature of our sun. And, you know, there's so many, there's so much sun worship throughout history, so many sun gods, especially in places close to the equator where the sun is part, you know, this double-edged sword part of everyday life. And it just makes, it makes perfect sense, right? If we're going to worship anything, certainly the star that we orbit that gives us so much and to whom, as you said, we owe our lives, it seems so natural.

But what I found so fascinating was the idea that an eternal flame at the gravesite of someone we admire or a birthday candle or in Judaism, there's something called a yardside candle, which you light on the anniversary of someone's death. And just, of course, so many holidays revolve around making light in the wintertime. And it just seemed so, you know, when you take a step back, if you were to look at us from the vantage point of another species somewhere, you might think, oh, of course, this is how they celebrate. This is what they worship. They have this yellow star that's really meaningful to them.

And in fact, this all comes up, this discussion of the sun, in your chapter about anniversaries and birthdays, this idea that every time the earth comes back around to roughly the same spot is a time to break out a birthday cake. Right. It's so funny because, again, it's so much a part of our lives that when it's the anniversary of something, an event, a birth, marriage, anything, a coronation, that's when you celebrate it. But it could be any time. But it's so astronomical that we do it when we're in the same position around the sun that we were when the thing happened. But of course, the whole solar system is moving and

the whole galaxy is moving. So we're not really in the exact same place. But that's kind of like a perfect metaphor for what it feels like on your birthday, right? It's kind of the same. You have cake with your friends or whatever. But everything's different because the year has gone by. Yeah. You ever hear, this is sort of a semi-non-sequitur? I'm open to all non-sequiturs. Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer, once, back in the 1940s, wrote this wonderful science fiction short story called Nightfall. And it was set on a planet where science was budding and they had great observatories, but they had never seen the night sky because the observatories were for studying their stars

because they had, I think, three or four stars. And because of this, there was always a star that was up in the sky over wherever you were on the planet. They didn't know what stars were. They had never seen the night. Except that once every millennium or so, they all dip below the horizon and civilization goes utterly mad. Wow. Oh, my God, I have chills.

That is a great premise. But it fits right in. You're talking about our attitude about light and about the light of the sun, the originator of all light, almost all of it. And also this idea that right before we had control of fire and at night, you know, the stars, and if you're lucky, a full moon was the only light. But also how much scarier that was and what a visceral relief sunrise must be. And to be able to see what's in the forest, see what animals are around, that must have been so not just, oh, it's nice that it's daytime, but just that relief of safety. Yeah. And we're going to come to the season at which we're talking right now, days away from Halloween.

But before we leave this chapter, you also spent a little bit of time exploring time travel of a sort. Yes. Not the science fiction variety, but it still fascinates you in the way that it manifests itself in our books, in our entertainment. I really, since childhood, have been totally fascinated with time travel and back to the future. But also on trips to Disney World, my favorite thing was the giant golf ball that Walter Cronkite used to narrate about the history of communication. And you would see Rome burning

and animatronic people bringing each other scrolls and things like that. And I was like, this is great. I'll just ride this all day. And my parents were like, oh, no, please not again. But in the summer chapter, I talk a little bit about a very low tech way of time traveling, just in your mind. But I love to go to like the beach or in a forest or somewhere like that. And when you create a little window with your hands where there's nothing modern and there's nothing that couldn't have been there a few centuries ago, I don't know, there's something about that that I find really moving. And just to sort of artificially get an idea of what it might have been like to live in another epoch.

I don't know. Sometimes I find it really moving. You also, as a form of time travel, talked about something which I think has come up on the show before, but you gave it this significance in terms of human meaning. And that is that there's a little bit of time travel in every breath we take. Yes. Yes, because air particles are so small and they are, they're so plentiful that every time you inhale, there's a great quote from Sam Kean's book

called Caesar's Last Breath about how there's more traffic of air particles in our lungs than in like all of the transportation, I'm paraphrasing, but like all the highways and roadways and train travel tracks in the history of the world. And so, you know, if you love someone who's no longer here, you take a deep breath, there's a very good chance that some of the air that they once breathed is in your lungs. And to me, that's so intimate and beautiful. Yeah, doesn't it just make you want to, yeah, take that deep breath and just feel that connection. And it's real.

There's one other little bit of time travel, which was part of your tour today. Because it was that little bit of footage of your father on the Johnny Carson show, on the Old Tonight show. Yes. It's so, I feel so lucky that even though I lost my dad when I was 14 because of the nature of his work, I have so much of him. And also because of the nature of the time that we live in and that he lived in.

Even 30 years ago, not many people had, you know, as many photographs and footage. I have, you know, 13 hours of Cosmos and all these Johnny Carson appearances. And I feel so lucky that I can go back to that and see him and how wonderful it is that through modern technology, now all of us, everyone has these pictures and videos of each other on their phones. And, you know, when somebody's gone, you can see them again, hear their laugh again, all these things that until very recently would have been lost with their death. I forgot to show you my favorite memento in this place when we took you around the Planetary

Society. And it's hanging on the wall out there. I will definitely show it to you on the way out. It's from the original Cosmos series. Because they didn't have CGI, when they wanted, when your father and mother and the others who made the show wanted to fly us through the Valles Marineris, that Grand Canyon of Mars, they had to build it. And so we have it hanging on the wall outside here, this gorgeous model that takes us to the red planet. Oh, that's awesome. Oh, that's so great.

I would love to see that. We have a prop Rosetta Stone at my mother's house from the cosmos. And it's like, you know, the back is styrofoam, but it's the same thing that they used in the original series. That they used in the original series. And it's that sort of thing where it's like, well, we'll just physically make a prop. Because, you know, in the 1980s, the technology wasn't quite there yet. Yeah. It's kind of a shame to think that now, with Neil Tyson's revisiting of Cosmos, they probably don't come out with as many of those. Not as many props, I don't think.

You have to have a hard drive, I guess. Just switching gears a little bit. Something disappointing that happens to me two or three times a year probably, that some very nice person, sometimes someone I know well, sometimes a stranger, will either introduce me or ask if I've been an astrologer for long. Now, I'm a very poor astronomer, and I'm certainly not an astrologer, but I'd rather be a poor astronomer than the best of astrologers. Yes. And you believe with your parents, in spite of this, that we are connected to the cosmos.

Well, this is the thing. Again, talking about people who sort of see themselves, describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. I think sometimes that category, you know, maybe they're very skeptical of religious doctrine that they were brought up with, but they're really interested. I mean, again, it's a generalization, but there is a theme where you sometimes see people who describe themselves that way who are really interested in astrology or crystals or other things that sort of fall into that category.

And of course, because I believe that evidence has to, I'll put it this way, I withhold belief without evidence, so I'm not a big fan of astrology and crystals. Extraordinary claims. Yes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I have yet to see any that support those things. But what I think is really important is I think that that urge and interest in those things comes from this desire to feel connected to the planet, to the universe. And I think a lot of people really want to feel that sense of their place in our world, in our universe, in this great vastness.

And sometimes maybe they get a little sidetracked as to what the best way to do that is or what the way that is most reflective of our understanding of science at this time. But I think that it's some of that desire could be repurposed into a deeper understanding of astronomy. Couldn't agree more. And we still find such connections in the sky. We always have. Yes. I know you do too. Yes. In your chapter about autumn. Yes. You go through all these other cultural visions of these patterns, random patterns of stars that we see in the sky. My favorite among these, the mono people who live here in California, who when they looked up at the Pleiades, that beautiful little cluster of stars, they see a group of women

who prefer... Onions to husbands. Yes, that was a great one. I mean, right, constellations, right, they're such a reflection. I mean, the lines we draw between the stars, they're a reflection of what our hopes and fears are and what we are thinking about and what our culture emphasizes. a species has been about looking for meaning up in the sky. And I think just in the last few hundred years, we're really getting a sense of what's up there and how we fit in. You have wonderful quotes at the top of each chapter.

One that really stuck with me, I don't even know if this is at the top of the chapter actually, but someone that my wife and I think very highly of, the Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh. I'll read the quote. I know you know which one it is. In this plate of food, I see clearly the presence of the entire universe supporting my existence. It signals sublime gratitude. But it was only on my second reading of that that I was struck by this wisdom similarity to something that your father said. And it's kind of a koan in itself when he said what he said about apple pie. Yes.

Yes, to make apple pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe. That quote is in a chapter that's really about gratitude and about our relationship to food and the theme of fasting in so many cultures and the majority of human history when there were lean times and fat times and we had a different relationship with food than we do now. But I think one of the things I admire most, even though I'm secular, one of the things I admire most about religious culture is a sense of gratitude and a sense of working am I lucky that I have food and to the, if it's an animal, you know, the animal who we're eating and the farmers and the migrant workers and everybody who made it possible to get this, you know, meal on our plate, but also to the millions of years of evolution that it took for us to be able to consume food for the bounty that's available on earth. I think it would be really great if we could find sort of a secular way to have some of that gratitude.

And it's amazing how many versions, and this is a Buddhist prayer, I guess, of gratitude, but it could be secular easily. Easily, yeah. And I'll note in passing, there's a chapter about that. I almost said feast and famine, but it's feast and fast. Yes, exactly. Yeah. We're at the Planetary Society.

Yes. I am so proud to work for an organization that your father helped to create. It was a big part of creating this place. And I just wonder, I mean, you had to know this question was coming. Your thoughts in being in this place, which is in large part a part of his legacy. Oh, it's so moving. And I can remember being at the other location when I was a kid. And I can picture his stationery with the Planetary Society logo

at the top. And we spent most of a summer in Pasadena when he was working here and at JPL. And I just have such, such fond memories of him here. And I know that, I mean, the way that that Johnny Carson footage we were talking about where he's introducing this idea of the light sail on The Tonight Show, and decades later to see it come to fruition is so meaningful and moving, really genuinely moving for me. So it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for that. In the end, is there advice you want to pass along? Or if you're not into giving advice, lessons you may have learned from just writing this book and living the life that led up to it?

Well, I would say this. The thing that really I hope to take away from this is, whatever you believe, whether you're secular or religious or somewhere in between, that the idea that we are here right now, and it is really meaningful and beautiful and worthy of celebration and we are in it together. There are ways to reflect your true philosophy in the way you mark time, in the way you celebrate, in the way you have holidays with your family, in the way you welcome a newborn. There's no need to go through the motions. family and the way you welcome a newborn, there's no need to go through the motions. You can do what actually reflects your deepest philosophy. And I think that in a way, the most traditional thing is the idea that human beings are trying to understand where we are and what it means to be alive on this planet. And we've been doing that long before we were doing anything else.

It's an exciting quest. Yes, it certainly is. It certainly is. You close the book with a kind of a celebration, but a connection to your past. You spend all over the book, you've got mention of your grandparents, even your great grandparents. We even, I told you, I discovered that we both had Grandpa Harry's. Yes. But you had this wonderful experience that your mother invited you to participate in. Yes. In the next season of Cosmos, which my mother writes and produces and directs, there is a scene where my dad is a little boy and he's working on a flyer that he

imagined would be a flyer that would be put up somewhere in the distant future for people who are interested in interstellar travel. And that flyer really existed. It's really in the Library of Congress now. And there was a little background role with no lines. My mother called me and said, do you want to play your grandmother, Rachel, who I talk about in the book, I always felt very connected to. I got her name, Rachel, as my middle name. And that sort of connection of these characteristics that everyone said I had that were hers felt like this magical, for lack of a better word, way that, you know, DNA was exhibiting itself and something worth celebrating. And then this idea that, again, time travel,

you know, I came out to the sound studio and I'm in costume and there's this set that looks like the apartment that my father lived in when he was a little boy in Brooklyn. And it was this, again, artificial, but really moving, powerful feeling of time travel. So I got a little cameo in there in the next season and a really meaningful experience for me. Can't wait to see it. Your mom told me how proud she is of you for creating this book. I absolutely agree with her. It is a wonderful work. I recommend it very highly.

And thank you for coming in to talk to us about it. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. The book is for small creatures such as we, rituals for finding meaning in ourly World. And its author is Sasha Sagan. What's Up with Bruce Batts arrives right after a break. Time for the barely pre-Halloween edition of What's Up. And we are joined by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Batts. Welcome.

Yay! No, I think it should be boo. Boo. It's Halloween time. Speaking of spooky, you're just back from Washington, D.C. Always, always a spooky place to go. Yes, I was attending the International Astronautical Congress, the IAC conference, and giving a talk about preliminary results of LightSail 2. Still up above our heads as we speak, right?

Still up there, still flying, still talking to us, still doing some sailing. We're tweaking it here and there, and it's going. I sure hear from lots of listeners who are thrilled to know that we did this, and it's still going on. The mission continues. I wanted to share that with you as well. What else is up there? Well, on spooky Halloween, if you pick this up in time, we've got a lovely site with the moon in between Jupiter and Saturn, a crescent moon between Jupiter and Saturn.

That will be low in the southwest in the early evening. Jupiter and Saturn will be hanging out there even after that. On the second, the moon will be close to Saturn, looking yellowish. Saturn, not the moon. I mean, probably not. Maybe if it's smoggy where you are. And then in the pre-dawn east, very low down is reddish Mars starting its ascent into the pre-dawn sky. And then, and then Mercury transit, Matt, the last one for until the 2030s on November 11th. A rare transit of Mercury crossing the Sun, going between the Earth and the Sun. To observe this small disk crossing the Sun, you're going to need a telescope with proper safety filters.

Don't fry your eyes out, please. Or tune into telescope webcasts that you can find online. The transit will be visible from South America and Africa and most of North America and Europe. It will rise already with Mercury on its face when we see it here on the west coast of North America. I am definitely going to bring the telescope out. That'll be great. Proper safety filters, everyone. I've got it. That doesn't mean sunglasses. Right, yeah. Yeah, I've got that filter that's good for nothing but looking at the sun with my telescope. Yeah, all right. Well, we move on to this week in space history.

Respectfully remember 1957, Sputnik 2 launched Laika the dog into space in the first space example of animal cruelty. But, hey, it wasn't Laika's fault. Laika rocked. 1973, Mariner 10 launched. It would fly past Venus and then give us our first views of Mercury. In 2013, the Mars Orbiter mission launched from India on its way to Mars. Wow. That's a long time ago, and it's still orbiting and still delivering science. Yeah. All right, we move on to space fact! I'm heading down a lion's drag strip. Thanks. Well, I did once a long time

ago. It's been gone for many, many years. You'll travel back in time and go. So here's your random space fact. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, you've probably heard of them. Until just before, relatively close to launch in 1977, they were known either as the Mariner Jupiter Saturn missions, or you could have even called them Mariner 11 and 12, but then the Voyager program was split off and they became Voyager one and

two and went on to fame and fortune fame. They went on to fame. Well, they delivered a fortune in data and images and the data continues. So yeah, you're not far off. And soans! Yeah, I'd read about that, that they almost were part of the Mariner series. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, what was the first star system, besides our own, found to have eight planets? How'd we do, Matt? We got a winner.

I think our first one, I'm not absolutely sure, but I think our first one from South Africa. Sean Young believes that it is the Kepler-90 system was the first to be discovered that had eight planets, which a lot of people believe is how many our own solar system has. More about that in a moment. He's correct? He is correct.

Congratulations, Sean. We have a NIAC pin for you. That's the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program out of NASA that we did a show on two, three weeks ago, two weeks ago to be precise, and a kick asteroid, rubber asteroid from the Planetary Society, along with a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. Way to win. So Kepler-90, the parent star, is a G-type main sequence star,

not that different than the Sun, and located about 2,840 light years from Earth. Eight planets. Go ahead, Matt. Back to you. Andres Ospina, a longtime listener in Colombia, somebody else in the Southern Hemisphere, he mentions, as did several other listeners, that it could have more than eight planets and needs to be observed for longer to see if that's possibly the case. All of these eight apparently very close to that star, Kepler-90. We heard this, by the way, from Devin O'Rourke in Colorado. He said, if you lived on Kepler-90i,

the positive side would be cheaper, quicker space exploration because they're all basically closer to their star than Earth is. The bad side, the negative side, you'd be dead. It's too hot. Yeah. Yeah. It's a hot star. And they're all within Earth's orbit.

They sort of share a similarity that you have the rocky planets on the inside or the small, let me be more specific, the smaller planets on the interior and the larger gas giants on the exterior, but they're all way too close to their star. Smokin'. Smokin'. So you said 2,840 light years away. Brian Mangold wonders if therefore maybe LightSail 3 or 4 will pay them a visit. We'll get back to you on that. Yeah. Finally, from our poet laureate, here's Dave Fairchild.

Google took a neural network, dumped in Kepler stuff, started up the process, and found planets, sure enough. So around a G-type star, they found the tying sphere. Kepler-90s, eight are great, but none have biospheres. Yeah. And it's true. Apparently, there was a Google algorithm, sort of a citizen science thing, that was used to find at least one and maybe more of these planets

circling Kepler-90. You knew about that. Yes. I'm not surprised. Okay, we're ready to go on. Back to Mariner 10, well known for Mercury, also flew by Venus, first to do a gravity assist like that to go one body to another. But here's something you may or may not know until after the trivia question, what comet did Mariner 10 return data about in 1973? What comet did Mariner 10 return data about? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

You have until Wednesday, November 6th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And you probably won't be surprised to hear that whoever makes it through the process this time, through random.org and has the right answer, is going to get a copy of Sasha Sagan's book, For Small Creatures Such As We. This terrific book that we've been talking about earlier on this program, I highly recommend it, as you've heard me say, along with a 200-point itelescope.net account from that great worldwide network of remotely operated telescopes. I bet they'll be looking at the Mercury Transit with some of those, and you might be able to join in. Okay, now we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what costume you'd

like Matt to wear for Halloween. Thank you, and good night. Well, my three-and-a-half-year-old grandson had interesting choices for everyone in his life, what they're supposed to be for Halloween. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to need to have a gopher costume. Oh, you would make such a fine gopher. I think you made an excellent choice. Thank you. I don't know why. You just would.

I'll pass that along. Thank you very much. I'm thanking there the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. It's Bruce Betts, who joins us every week here for What's Up. I love bringing back the spooky Halloween version of our theme song. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and it's made possible by its members, most of whom revere the name Sagan. Join them by visiting planetary.org membership. Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, and this version came from Paul Bergel of Phantom Creep Theater, Coney Island, New York.

Thanks again, Paul. I'm Matt Kaplan at Astra.