Sasha Sagan: For Small Creatures Such As We (Part 2 of 2)

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Everyone wants to know how unique the human species are. How is it possible that in a galaxy of 400 billion stars that we're the only inhabited planet? Is that possible? He was so eager to understand. He wanted to find out what's really going on. But the discomfort we sit with, even with the very small questions, reveals how we feel about the unanswered great mysteries in our lives. It's so hard to not know.

[00:00:33]Even the future tortures us with our inability to predict it. And we have struggled for eons with this problem.

[00:00:44]It's a source of so much stress, but science is the only only tool that has given us any real shot.

[00:00:52]I think about a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. An eclipse was terrifying all over the world. The sun goes away all of a sudden. What could be more petrifying?

[00:01:04]And now we know when they're coming, and we know it's safe. It won't hurt us.

[00:01:10]Little by little, we're getting some of the tools that we've always longed for through science.

[00:01:19]Not that long ago for our species, so much in life, even the most mundane ordinary things, would have seemed like a magic trick. And I think that's true for so much of science and so much of the reality of our universe. And the more we understand ourselves and our planet, the more magnificent it is.

[00:01:39]My dad felt an enormous joyful wonder about the universe from his earliest childhood. If he had been born a few hundred years earlier, it would have been a lot harder for him to get the answers that he so deeply craved about our place in the universe.

[00:01:56]A quote that you often hear of his is, "I don't want to believe, I want to know."

[00:02:02]And I think that really sums up a lot of his philosophy.

[00:02:07]He really instilled in me this idea that reality, nature, is more astonishing and more breathtaking than the stories that we create for ourselves.