Carl Sagan Warned Us About This!

Carl Sagan's last interview with Charlie Rose (Full Interview) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8HEwO-2L4w

SAGAN: It's not that pseudoscience and superstition and new-age so-called "beliefs" and fundamentalist zealotry are something new. They've been with us for as long as we've been human. But we live in an age based on science and technology, with formidable technological powers.

ROSE: Science and technology are propelling us forward at accelerating rates.

SAGAN: That's right. And if we don't understand it, by "we" I mean the general public, if it's something that, oh, I'm not good at that, I don't know anything about it, then who is making all the decisions about science and technology that are going to determine what kind of future our children live in?

ROSE: But what's the danger of all this?

SAGAN: There's two kinds of dangers. One is what I just talked about. That we've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces! I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?

And the second reason that I'm worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.