TV shows may be space ambassadors
United Pres* International
NEW YORK — “Laverne & Shir
ley,” ‘The Dukes of Hazzard” and
“CHiPs” all are being broadcast
into space and could provide proof
to an alien civilization that intelligent
life exists on earth.
Or perhaps that it doesn’t.
The alarming picture of Laverne
and Shirley as electronic ambassa
dors to alien civilizations came up in
conversation with Dr. Carl Sagan,
astronomer and author, who hosts
and was the major writer for the new
PBS science series “Cosmos."
“Every television program is an
interstellar emissary,” Sagan said.
“Radio signals bounce back off the
ionosphere but television goes right
through into space.
“They go on forever, although
they get weaker as they get further
away. But even we could pick up
our kind of television signal on a
planet around the nearest star —
Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years
away. A more advanced civilization
even at some greater distance
should be able to pick up our signals
quite easily.
"It may be a sign of their intelli
gence that we haven’t heard from
them."
Sagan doesn't downplay TV —
on the contrary, he thinks it stimu
lates what he considers the basic
scientific urge in humans, some
thing he says schools from elemen
tary level through Harvard fail to do.
That’s what he hopes to accom
plish with “Cosmos,” a series of 13
hour-long programs that premiered
on PBS Sept. 28.
“We call it ‘Cosmos’ because it’s
about pretty much everything,”
Sagan said, and, although the prim
ary emphasis is on astronomy and
related fields, most other branches
of science also are explored to
some degree.
‘‘We want to make science
accessible, comprehensible, enjoy
able — for children and adults.
“Little toddlers who can’t even
talk poke about investigating every
thing — that’s the human instinct to
explore, to find out how things work,
and that’s science.
“Every child asks those marve
lous naive questions, deep ques
tions about why the grass is green
or the moon round. Parents and
teachers don’t know the answers.
Instead of admitting that they tell the
kids, ‘Don’t ask dumb questions.’ Or
they put the kids down with answers
like, ‘What color would you expect
grass to be?’ or 'What shape do you
think the moon should be —
square?’
“Children learn that asking ques
tions makes adults mad and if they
don’t want adults mad, they don’t
ask questions.”
The problem is compounded, in
Sagan’s view, by Saturday morning
TV.
"The image of science that is pre
sented on the Saturday morning
television cartoons is extremely
hostile to science. The mad scien
tist is a real standby. He’s the moral
cripple who wants to solve the ener
gy crisis by making everybody one
inch tall. It has to be explained to
him that maybe people wouldn’t en
joy being shrunk to one inch tall
without even being asked.
“A lot of kids watch Saturday
morning television and I doubt if any
except the most disturbed among
them decide to be scientists after
watching such programs.”
Sagan, 45, grew up in Brooklyn,
N.Y., and remembers as a boy
reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, his
imagination soaring as he cavorted
with John Carter on Mars.
Somewhere Burroughs wrote
that on Mars there were two primary
colors unknown on earth.
“I spent the longest time trying to
imagine colors that weren’t red, we
ren’t blue, weren’t yellow, weren’t
green, weren’t anything. It was very
frustrating."
Since those days, Sagan has
gone on to become an educator, a
best-selling author with "Dragons of
Eden,” and one of America’s top
scientists in the field of astronomy
and space science. He played a
major role in the Mariner, Viking and
Voyager missions for NASA.
The idea of “Cosmos” began tak
ing shape when Sagan was working
on Viking.
“It was an absolutely major his
torical event,” he said, the wonder
he still feels shining through. “It was
the first landing of a spacecraft on
another planet, the first successful
landing on Mars. We had
thousands of pictures, many of
them in color.
“The television networks were
barely interested. It was the first
search for life on another planet and
they couldn’t be bothered. They
thought not enough people were in
terested; that the audience was too
stupid to understand.”
Sagan, who ranks television “an
extremely powerful medium,”
wasn’t ready to give up.
He and B. Gentry Lee, Viking’s
Director of Mission Testing and
Data Analysis, formed an indepen
dent production company. Their
efforts produced “Cosmos,” which
in its 13 episodes travels in time and
space.
In time to goes back to ancient
Alexandria and even further back to
the origin of the universe, and for
ward to "the last perfect day” on
earth, some 5 billion years hence,
after which the sun will enter its red
giant stage and burn away the
earth’s atmosphere. In space,
“Cosmos” travels halfway to the
edge of the universe, 8 billion light
years from earth.
Sagan deplores an educational
system that “turns kids off Shakes
peare because they were forced to
read it in the 10th grade and syste
matically makes people dislike the
greatest poet in the language.” He
hopes to reverse the attitude it en
genders toward science, which he
summed up when talking about the
Apollo moon landing program.
“The last astronaut to land on the
moon was the first scientist,” he
said sadly.
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