I am speaking to you from my home in ithaca new york and im the author of cosmos possible worlds and im deeply, truly honored to be participating in this event for the library of congress. The very first of cosmo cosmos 0 years ago, carl sagan and stephen and i celebrated the Great Library of alexandria and the library of congress means so very much to me because of the democratic idea of the worlds knowledge to all of us so it is my great honor to be here. Im here to talk about household world just the book ive written and also a Television Series that i had the pleasure of producing, writing and directing with my collaborator. So, why a third cosmos after 30 years . The first cosmos was an effort to give the broadest possible public a global public. Itits coordinates in space and time. It was his dream, one that i completely share that how we find our way in the cosmos, the great story of the 40,000 generations of human beings who in one way or another added to the current understanding of nature that we could tell these wonderful Inspiring Stories to a global audience. That is the great strength of science. It is power because it seeks constantly to use the methodology of science. There is a pool of those things that are not true and why science will never be completed is not for one generation to see the picture of spacetime but instead science is a generation binding enterprise going back to our earliest ancestors and more recently to the ancient greeks and inventors of libraries and even a sense for the future. Its about finding our place and in 2014 cosmos spacetime odyssey took some of the parallels, the planetary power and the imagination powered by twin engines of skepticism and imagination. That is the key one at the expense of the other whether skepticism or faithfulness to reality and to what the data tells us. But at the same time based on what we know could be possible. So the third possible realist, evidencebased sense of how we can be hopeful about the future. We all know the long shadow the polls on our future those of us looking at children and grandchildren feel a certain pain of remorse and concern. But believe it or not we are handing them a planet process much as it has been for our ancestors we know how serious the challenges that we face are but instead to find hope that is rational and truthful so to go from stories of the scientist who faced formidable and dangerous enemies for information to be shared with the public of those 2000 people may be that you would me in the pages of the book and through the show that against all odd odds, stood up in defense of reality and in defense of the evidence and the methodology of science nature will not be deceived and we can tell ourselves as many lies as we want to but in the end its worse than that. That will doom us. The sacred science teachings in fact may be and it is the most powerful advantage that we have. After all as organisms we are the fastest or the biggest we dont have those advantages but we has the fantastic ability of pattern recognition, cleverness and that place where the wind and the sun and swear spacecraft has done we can rendezvous with a distant planet or its moon. Fifteen years from now with absolute flawless precision we will have this capability but yet here we are sleepwalking as if in a stupor and unable to awaken with the future by making those changes and the way that we treat each other. So this is been a moment for me because i have seen a sea change in the united states. Not as a result of a single charismatic leader but a sea change in the hearts of all of us. That is what is so inspiring because that is what has to happen. So i feel a great sense of hope. And that hope is that i hope completely permeates every page, every word, in both the series and the book. We imagine the future of our descendents experience in place places. So to imagine a future with 100 degrees fahrenheit and the climate is so rampant and completely out of control. And i also feel and then to communicate with each other with this point in Human History and then to reach boot people all over the world so that original series that voyage has been seen by nearly 1 billion people and shown and 180 countries around the world. And at the heart of cosmos is to make the case for science of course it has that is true. That can only be dealt with when it is scientific knowledge and a scientific approach looking at the true circumstances weather Climate Change and then be cut to a halt and before the pandemic began we dont think any of us thought anything would make a stop in our tracks those that have been quarantining alone from the first of march until a month ago and with that tremendous experience to equal eight sadness in great pain and yet i was able to observe spraying and beautiful its a car where i live as never before to appreciate each new leaf on the tree. And the way natures genius any fantasy so that we have what it takes the book is important because it tells the stories in such a greater gap they and as possible then a show that is on for an hour but what you see in the stories is not only the xo planets and the other worlds that may aid in our future as well as the work for the plan and the lost civilization, and waiting to be discovered and the possible world that this can become if we are unified and if we are clear eyed and to keep our eye on the most precious of all with the beautiful planet so completely graced in the inexplicable every note and cranny that is so precious that in a way that sustains us and our fellow earthlings about money if we cannot value above a certain inconvenience of the climate in the air and the water and what we need to survive and those other things that are recent construct. If we can keep our eye on the most precious of all price prices, then the wonders that await us in this cosmos are beyond the wildest imagination. Science has done some things to us the people are hampered by and i respect that we started out in 16 oh nine back to galileo. We cherish the idea we were the only children of a creator that the universe revolved around us. And one by one that once the world had accepted to the extent that we have the work of the earlier scientist copernicus who said the sun was at the center of the solar system, once we said we are not at the center of the solar system, but the center of the galaxy, then the universe. No no no. Will we were created separately from the rest of all the other beings of the plan that we are gods only children. Well that we are deeply related to each other and all those that we share this planet with. That we have more in common to that degree then a sunflower then we are likely to have with the being from any area in the cosmos. I cherish what carl sagan said if a person to guess one disagrees with you let them live you will not find another in a hundred billion galaxies. So this is part of science so when i look at that and i looked at it countless times since carl showed it to me back in the early nineties , when i look at that image to say this is where science and eventuality and even when they meet in one place to understand what that is telling you. As a nationalist the polluter, polluter, the purveyor of the fossil fuels that will destroy our future. How can we look at that . And escape its meaning . So there is the thinwall a very tall wall between science and the rest of us. I was not born inside those walls a science. I was a lousy student. Is not a good math or science student. I i come to my love of science until i was an adult and found those philosophers and began to feel included and then i met carl sagan, in my view one of the greatest teachers of the last 1000 years or more. When i met carl sagan, and had the honor and privilege to spend 20 years working with him writing with him thinking with him building a beautiful family together i felt this overwhelming desire to share the spiritual uplift and joy and pleasure a little bit and is used to say why do you spend all your time in the laboratory . Go do telephone on Television Shows and kindergarten and so many other things that he did to talk about science. He would say when you are in love you want to tell the world. And thats how i feel about my book that is personal in many ways in ways that the Television Show could not see. So really that is what i wanted to do was to share this knowledge which was no longer boring that i felt alienated from the most evangelical desire to tell the stories of thes figures people who chose death rather than telling a lie about science. I think i could do that. But to understand they are the Unsung Heroes who lived so bravely and dramatically and made it possible for us to venture to the star i never met anyone who was able to integrate with that mathematical mathematical chemistry and physics and biology that was comprehensive. We need to integrate with that skepticism with imagination and sense of wonder and joy. The founding civilization is if you partake of the root of the tree of knowledge he will be miserable and doomed that i feel in the story of genesis when you do partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is when we become our human self commits the most natural thing for us this is what we are really good at. So you can do it just with skepticism. And im not the first person to say and people said this way before me but you cant have that in your brain things that are real from what we want to be real we also need imagination and the great beauty of life. I think of the person to integrate those two things perfectly one at the expense of the other think of carl because he embodied that. And probably one of the most fully realized human beings at least that i ever met because he never lost his sense. So one of the reasons he is so beloved to have a sense of 13. 8 billion years old. How long do we live . We are mayflies. One hundred years is the best we can get but yet carl new and it wasnt just lip service. He knew how great life is so he lived it with a sense of great pleasure and appreciation and at the same time what it would be like on the world of another son to travel into the very distant future or into the past. So i feel like something has happened in Space Exploration and i write about this in the book and i told this story in the show before the spaceage all the different scientific disciplines were sideload so not a single journal on planet earth so in the beginning he was constantly criticized for being widely disciplinary but yet i think he understood once you have your instrument or other human beings there is no way to understand of many different scientific disciplines. You cannot go to mars without a geologist and an astronomer, chemist, physicist and a probably astro biologist to hunt for past life if there is any. So with a very scientific journal which made it possible for a collaboration among the scientific disciplines and that is another facet not just the wall between science and the rest of us but of the discipline such good humor and joy and imagination but also how to enthrall people of all ages the joy he of discovery but humanity and your soul and if we dont lose any of that creed by knowing something about nature in fact it makes everything that much richer