1 Roger Bingham – 05:54 – Roger Bingham is Co-founder and Director of The Science Network. He is also a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series The Human Quest.

2 Anthony Grayling – 15:17 – Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He has written and edited many books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are a biography of William Hazlitt and a collection of essays. For several years he wrote the “Last Word” column for the Guardian and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Review and the Financial Times.

3 Sonja Lyubomirsky – 16:25 – Sonja Lyubomirsky is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Her honors include a Faculty of the Year Award, Faculty Mentor of the Year Award, a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize, and a million-dollar grant from NIMH to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness. Her book, The How of Happiness, was released in January 2008 by Penguin Press and translated into 15 languages.

4 Owen Flanagan – 13:36 – Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He also holds appointments in Psychology and Neurobiology and is a Faculty Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience. In 1998, he was recipient of the Romanell National Phi Beta Kappa award, given annually to one American philosopher for distinguished contributions to philosophy and the public understanding of philosophy. He has written several books; the most recent is The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World.

5 Güven Güzeldere – 11:50 – Güven Güzeldere is Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and of Neurobiology at Duke University. He has published articles on philosophy of mind, history and philosophy of psychology, and artificial intelligence. He is a founder of Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, a founding associate editor of Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness, and a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.

6 George Koob – 10:07 – George F. Koob is a Professor and Chair of the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders at The Scripps Research Institute and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, and Adjunct Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego. Dr. Koob’s research interests are directed at the neurobiology of drug addiction, with a focus on the theoretical constructs of reward and stress.

7 Panel Human Flourishing Eudaimonics – 22:23 – With Sonja Lyubomirsky, Owen Flanagan, Güven Güzeldere, Anthony Grayling, and George Koob
Moderated by Roger Bingham

8 Roger Bingham – 01:07 – Roger Bingham is Co-founder and Director of The Science Network. He is also a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series The Human Quest.

9 Naomi Oreskes – 15:47 – Naomi Oreskes is Provost of Sixth College, Professor of History and Science Studies and Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at UC San Diego and one of the nation’s leading experts on the history of the earth and environmental science. Her work came to public attention in 2004 with the publication of “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” in Science and was featured in Vice President Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. Her forthcoming book is FIGHTING FACTS: How a Handful of Scientists Have Muddied the Waters on Environmental Issues From Tobacco to Global Warming.

10 Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum – 23:43 – Sheril Kirshenbaum is co-author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future with Chris Mooney describing the growing disconnect between science and society. She has worked in the Senate on energy, climate, and ocean policy and helped found ScienceDebate2008. A former pop radio disc jockey and musician, Sheril is now a science writer and Seed blogger based at Duke University.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress, senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine and author of two books – the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He also writes “The Intersection” blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

11 Tony Haymet – 20:29 – Tony Haymet is the tenth director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Haymet also serves as UC San Diego’s Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences and Dean of the Graduate School of Marine Sciences, and is a Professor of Oceanography at Scripps and Chemistry at UC San Diego. Tony is a founder and currently Vice-Chair of CleanTech San Diego, a business development organization dedicated to the practical response to climate change issues.

12 Panel This is Your Brain on Politics – 27:11 – With Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Tony Haymet
Moderated by Roger Bingham

13 Roger Bingham – 03:19 – Roger Bingham is Co-founder and Director of The Science Network. He is also a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series The Human Quest.

14 Peter Turchin – 15:47 – Peter Turchin is Professor of Ecology and Mathematics at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of more than 100 articles including ten in Nature and Science. He has written five books, the latest of which is War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations, Pi Press. Much of his work concerns a new field known as cliodynamics, which attempts to discover general principles that explain the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.

15 Sally Satel – 20:42 – Sally Satel is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in The New York Times, New Republic, Commentary, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and Wall Street Journal. Dr. Satel is the author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine; Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion; and coauthor of One Nation Under Therapy.

16 V.S. Ramachandran – 24:31 – V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at UC San Diego. A former BBC Reith Lecturer, he co-authored Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, with Sandra Blakeslee, and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness and a forthcoming book on human uniqueness.

17 Panel Human Flourishing Continued – 17:58 – With Peter Turchin, Sally Satel, and V.S. Ramachandran
Moderated by Roger Bingham

18 Roger Bingham – 02:40 – Roger Bingham is Co-founder and Director of The Science Network. He is also a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series The Human Quest.

19 Jonathan Haidt – 24:31 – Jonathan Haidt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He studies the emotional and intuitive foundations of morality. His current work is based on the idea that morality is a team sport and that political liberals don’t understand the game the other side is playing. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and is currently writing The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

20 Sam Harris – 21:04 – Sam Harris is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Letter to a Christian Nation. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience. He is also a Co-Founder and Chairman of The Reason Project.

21 Jonathan Glover – 28:17 – Jonathan Glover is Professor at the Centre of Medical Law & Ethics at King’s College London, as well as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. His books include Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, What Sort of People Should There Be? and Causing Death and Saving Lives, the first philosophical study of the then futuristic issues of genetic engineering and of neuroethics. He is currently interested in a number of issues in global ethics and ethical issues in psychiatry.

22 Marco Iacoboni – 22:06 – Marco Iacoboni is Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. He is also a member of the Brain Research Institute and of the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. Iacoboni studies the neural mechanisms of imitation and social cognition in humans, and he is author of the recent book on mirror neurons entitled Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others.

23 Patricia Churchland – 16:17 – Patricia Smith Churchland, UC President’s Professor of Philosophy, UC San Diego, focuses on neuroethics and attempts to understand choice, responsibility and the basis of moral norms in terms of brain function, evolution and brain-culture interactions. Her books include Brain-Wise, Neurophilosophy: Towrds a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland.

24 Panel This is Your Brain on Morality – 37:06 – With Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Jonathan Glover, Marco Iacoboni, and Patricia Churchland
Moderated by Roger Bingham

25 Roger Bingham – 02:11 – Roger Bingham is Co-founder and Director of The Science Network. He is also a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series The Human Quest.

26 Brian Knutson – 15:16 – Brian Knutson is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University. His laboratory uses multiple methods (e.g., psychometrics, psychophysiology, brain imaging, and pharmacology) to investigate neural mechanisms that support emotional experience, and explores implications for clinical disorders of affect and addiction, as well as for economic decision-making. He has received Young Investigator Awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research.

27 Paul Zak – 22:27 – Paul J. Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Zak also serves as Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and is a Senior Researcher at UCLA. Zak is credited with the first published use of the term “neuroeconomics” and has been a vanguard in this new discipline. He organized and administers the first doctoral program in neuroeconomics in the world.

28 Terry Sejnowski – 17:38 – Terrence Sejnowski is an HHMI investigator, the Francis Crick Professor and Director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology at the Salk Institute. He is author of several books including The Computational Brain and Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are.

29 Philip Zimbardo – 21:15 – Philip Zimbardo is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and is internationally recognized as a leading “voice and face of contemporary psychology” through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment. He is the author of over 300 professional publications and 50 books including the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, and The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

30 Panel This is Your Brain on Money – 23:07 – With Brian Knutson, Paul Zak, Terry Sejnowski, and Philip Zimbardo
Moderated by Roger Bingham

31 Walter Sinnott-Armstrong – 18:42 – Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and the Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College, as well as the Co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project. His research interests include ethics, philosophy of law, epistemology, and informal logic. Currently he is working on moral psychology and brain science, and the uses and implications of neuroscience for legal systems. He has recently edited three volumes on the evolution, cognitive science and neuroscience of morality.

32 Amanda Pustilnik – 17:04 – Amanda Pustilnik conducts research and teaches in the area of law and neuroscience at Harvard Law School. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, practiced litigation at Sullivan & Cromwell and Covington & Burling, and has served as a visiting scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in History of Science. She is also counsel to the Board of Network 20/20, a foreign policy not-for-profit organization.

33 Nita Farahany – 14:38 – Nita Farahany researches and writes about the intersection of criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. She does so with an interdisciplinary background in Genetics from Dartmouth College, a master’s degree concentrating in biology, from Harvard University, and a J.D., M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy of biology and philosophy of law from Duke University. She is the editor of forthcoming volume Genes and Justice: The Impact of Behavioral Genetics and Neuroscience on Criminal Law.

34 Adam Kolber – 14:19 – Adam Kolber is a law professor at the University of San Diego who recently completed a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. He writes about legal and ethical implications of emerging neurotechnologies. Most recently, he has written about methods of measuring pain and punishment. He runs the “Neuroethics & Law Blog” and is an associate editor of the journal Neuroethics.

35 Erin O’Hara – 16:13 – Erin O’Hara is Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Director of the Law and Human Behavior Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. One of Erin’s primary research interests involves conciliation: the effort to integrate theoretical and empirical insights from multiple academic fields, including economics, positive political theory, cognitive psychology, behavioral biology, and neuroscience, to more effectively formulate legal policies that regulate human behavior.

36 Panel This is Your Brain on Law – 45:24 – With Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Erin O’Hara, Amanda Pustilnik, Adam Kolber, and Nita Farahany
Moderated by Roger Bingham

37 Lawrence Krauss – 23:47 – Lawrence M. Krauss is Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Physics Department, Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative and Inaugural Director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. He is an internationally known theoretical physicist with wide research interests, including the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, where his studies include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics.

38 Beatrice Golomb – 19:04 – Beatrice Golomb is Associate Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego, best known for her work on Gulf War Illness (she has testified before Congress, her RAND reports have changed US policy, and she served as Scientific Director and Chief Scientist for the Department of Veterans Affairs Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses). She also heads the UC San Diego Statin Study group. Her work has engendered broad media interest, from The New York Times to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

39 Sir Harold Kroto – 21:08 – Sir Harold Kroto is Francis Eppes Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State University. In 1996, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of C60 Buckminsterfullerene. In 1995, he inaugurated the Vega Science Trust, and in 2007, he started the Global Education Outreach in Science, Engineering and Technology (GEOSET) at FSU. He has received many scientific awards including the Royal Society’s prestigious Michael Faraday Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.

40 Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum – 21:43 – Sheril Kirshenbaum is co-author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future with Chris Mooney describing the growing disconnect between science and society. She has worked in the Senate on energy, climate, and ocean policy and helped found ScienceDebate2008. A former pop radio disc jockey and musician, Sheril is now a science writer and Seed blogger based at Duke University.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress, senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine and author of two books – The New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He also writes “The Intersection” blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

41 Leon Lederman – 26:12 – Leon Lederman is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois and Professor of Science at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998. He has also served as President and Chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a member of the National Academy of Science, and has received numerous awards including the Nobel Prize in Physics (1988).

42 Michael Shermer – 20:56 – Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. His most recent book on evolutionary economics is The Mind of the Market. He is also the author of Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design and How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God.

43 Panel This is Your Brain on Politics continued – 34:09 – With Lawrence Krauss, Leon Lederman, Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Michael Shermer, Beatrice Golomb, and Harold Kroto
Moderated by Roger Bingham

44 Peter Atkins – 24:02 – Peter Atkins was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford from 1965 until his retirement in 2007. He is the author of over 60 books including Four Laws That Drive the Universe; Galileo’s Fingers: The Ten Great Ideas of Science; and the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry. He is involved in a variety of international activities including chairing the Committee on Chemistry Education of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and organizing the Malta series of conferences.

1 The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
After an introduction by Ann Druyan, including the benefits of the end of the Cold War, Carl Sagan opens the program with a description of the cosmos and a “Spaceship of the Imagination” (shaped like a dandelion seed). The ship journeys through the universes’ hundred billion galaxies, the Local Group, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, our Solar System, and finally the planet Earth. Eratosthenes’ attempt to calculate the circumference of Earth leads to a description of the ancient Library of Alexandria. Finally, the “Ages of Science” are described, before pulling back to the full span of the Cosmic Calendar.

2 One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue
Sagan discusses the story of the Heike crab and artificial selection of crabs resembling samurai warriors, as an opening into a larger discussion of evolution through natural selection (and the pitfalls of the theory of intelligent design). Among the topics are the development of life on the Cosmic Calendar and the Cambrian explosion; the function of DNA in growth; genetic replication, repairs, and mutation; the common biochemistry of terrestrial organisms; the creation of the molecules of life in the Miller-Urey experiment; and speculation on alien life (such as life in Jupiter’s clouds). In the Cosmos Update ten years later, Sagan remarks on RNA also controlling chemical reactions and reproducing itself and the different roles of comets (potentially carrying organic molecules or causing the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event).

3 The Harmony of the Worlds
Beginning with the separation of the fuzzy thinking and pious fraud of astrology from the careful observations of astronomy, Sagan follows the development of astronomical observation. Beginning with constellations and ceremonial calendars (such as those of the Anasazi), the story moves to the debate between Earth and Sun-centered models: Ptolemy and the geocentric worldview, Copernicus’ theory, the data-gathering of Tycho Brahe, and the achievements of Johannes Kepler (Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and the first science-fiction novel).

4 Heaven and Hell
Sagan discusses comets and asteroids as planetary impactors, giving recent examples of the Tunguska event and a lunar impact described by Canterbury monks in 1178. It moves to a description of the environment of Venus, from the previous fantastic theories of people such as Immanuel Velikovsky to the information gained by the Venera landers and its implications for Earth’s greenhouse effect. The Cosmos Update highlights the connection to global warming.

5 Blues for a Red Planet
The episode, devoted to the planet Mars, begins with scientific and fictional speculation about the Red Planet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ science fiction books, and Percival Lowell’s false vision of canals on Mars). It then moves to Robert Goddard’s early experiments in rocket-building, inspired by reading science fiction, and the work by Mars probes, including the Viking, searching for life on Mars. The episode ends with the possibility of the terraforming and colonization of Mars and a Cosmos Update on the relevance of Mars’ environment to Earth’s and the possibility of a manned mission to Mars.

6 Travellers’ Tales
The journeys of the Voyager probes is put in the context of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, with a centuries-long tradition of sailing ship explorers, and its contemporary thinks (such as Constantijn Huygens and his son Christian). Their discoveries are compared to the Voyager probes’ discoveries among the Jovian and Saturn systems. In Cosmos Update, image processing reconstructs Voyager’s worlds and Voyager’s last portrait of the Solar System as it leaves is shown.

7 The Backbone of Night
Carl Sagan teaches students in a classroom in his childhood home in Brooklyn, New York, which leads into a history of the different mythologies about stars and the gradual revelation of their true nature. In ancient Greece, some philosophers (Anaximander, Theodorus of Samos, Empedocles) freely pursue scientific knowledge, while others (Plato, Aristotle, Aristarchus, and the Pythagoreans) advocate slavery and epistemic secrecy.

8 Journeys in Space and Time
Ideas about time and space are explored in the changes that constellations undergo over time, the redshift and blue shift measured in interstellar objects, time dilation in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the designs of both Leonardo da Vinci and spacecraft that could travel near light speed, time travel and its hypothetical effects on human history, the origins of the Solar System, the history of life, and the immensity of space. In Cosmos Update, the idea of faster-than-light travel by wormholes (researched by Kip Thorne and shown in Sagan’s novel Contact) is discussed.

9 The Lives of the Stars
The simple act of making an apple pie is extrapolated into the atoms and subatomic particles (electrons, protons, and neutrons) necessary. Many of the ingredients necessary are formed of chemical elements, formed in the life and deaths of stars (such as our own Sun), resulting in massive red giants and supernovae or collapsing into white dwarfs, neutron stars, pulsars, and even black holes. These produce all sorts of phenomena, such as radioactivity, cosmic rays, and even the curving of spacetime by gravity. Cosmos Update mentions the supernova SN 1987A and neutrino astronomy.

10 The Edge of Forever
Beginning with the origins of the universe in the Big Bang, Sagan describes the formation of different types of galaxies and anomalies such as galactic collisions and quasars. The episodes moves further into ideas about the structure of the Universe, such as different dimensions (in the imaginary Flatland and four-dimensional hypercubes), an infinite vs. a finite universe, and the idea of an oscillating Universe (similar to that in Hindu cosmology). The search into other ideas such as dark matter and the multiverse is shown, using tools such as the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Cosmos Update shows new information about the odd, irregular surfaces of galaxies and the Milky Way perhaps being a barred spiral galaxy.

11 The Persistence of Memory
The idea of intelligence is explored in the concepts of computers (using bits as their basic units of information), whales (in their songs and their disruptions by human activities), DNA, the human brain (the evolution of the brain stem, frontal lobes, neurons, cerebral hemispheres, and corpus callosum under the Triune Brain Model), and man-made structures for collective intelligence (cities, libraries, books, computers, and satellites). The episode ends with speculation on alien intelligence and the information conveyed on the Voyager Golden Record.

12 Encyclopaedia Galactica
Questions are raised about the search for intelligent life beyond the Earth, with UFOs and other close encounters refuted in favor of communications through SETI and radio telescope such as the Arecibo Observatory. The probability of technically advanced civilizations existing elsewhere in the Milky Way is interpreted using the Drake equation and a future hypothetical Encyclopedia Galactica is discussed as a repository of information about other worlds in the galaxy. The Cosmos Update notes that there have been fewer sightings of UFOs and more stories of abductions, while mentioning the meta scanning the skies for signals.

13 Who Speaks for Earth?
Sagan reflects on the future of humanity and the question of “who speaks for Earth?” when meeting extraterrestrials. He discusses the very different meetings of the Tlingit people and explorer Jean-François de La Pérouse with the destruction of the Aztecs by Spanish conquistadors, the looming threat of nuclear warfare, and the threats shown by destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the murder of Hypatia. The episode ends with a overview of the beginning of the universe, the evolution of life, and the accomplishments of humanity and makes a plea to for mankind to cherish life and continue its journey in the cosmos. The Cosmos Update notes the preliminary reconnaissance of planets with spacecraft, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid in South Africa, and measures towards the reduction of nuclear weapons.