Carl Sagan

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a download from the Desert Island Disc's archive. This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it is the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection.

Speaker 10:14

The recording didn't contain the guests' eight music choices, so we've rebuilt the original show by using discs from the B B C Gramophone library. For Wright's reasons we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:25

Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Discs website.

Speaker 10:30

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 10:34

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:52

Our Castaway this week describes himself as a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules. Using only this modest equipment he's become a foremost astronomer, a very successful author and a celebrated popularizer of science. It's Carl Sagan.

Presenter1:08

Now, Carl, does music mean a lot to you?

Carl Sagan1:11

Yes, I uh I'm deeply attracted to music and uh get a kind of uh

Carl Sagan1:17

Dependency withdrawal symptom when I'm away from it too long.

Presenter1:20

Have you any skill yourself as a musician?

Carl Sagan1:22

I would say not, although I did play piano for ten years until I uh was able to escape from home and uh be on my own.

Presenter1:29

Do you sing? No.

Carl Sagan1:31

Except in the shower.

Presenter1:31

We're all naturally.

Presenter1:33

Just eight disks to choose for the island. Did you find it a hard task?

Presenter1:38

Yeah.

Carl Sagan1:38

Yes, it's always uh

Carl Sagan1:40

Difficult to select from an enormous range, only a few items. And uh I I'm not sure that uh I wouldn't get terribly bored with any selection of eight, but uh it it was interesting to try to choose. What do we start with?

Carl Sagan1:53

I'm interested in uh in starting with a uh

Carl Sagan1:57

Peace by Evangelus Papathanasiu, which uh by accident we've also used in the Cosmos television series, and it's called Heaven and Hell.

Presenter2:33

Heaven and Hell by Vengelis with the composer at the synthesizer.

Presenter2:37

Whereabouts in the United States do you come from?

Carl Sagan2:39

Well, I was uh born in Brooklyn, New York. Uh I teach at Cornell University, which is uh also New York State, but uh I've been in uh California for the last uh well, almost three years. I'll be going back to Cornell shortly.

Presenter2:54

Were you one of several children?

Carl Sagan2:55

Yes, I I have a sister, uh seven years younger. Do you remember when you first began to be interested in astronomy? I do very uh very vividly. Uh I was a small child, I don't know, five or or so, and uh

Carl Sagan3:11

Even with an early bedtime, in winter you could occasionally see the stars. Cities were not as polluted then as now.

Carl Sagan3:18

And uh they seemed to me interesting, strange, remote, different from uh the neighborhood that I knew reasonably well. And I asked people, uh older children, adults, what the stars were, and they said uh they're lights in the sky, kid. Well, I could tell they were lights in the sky, but it seemed to me there had to be some some deeper explanation. Uh it seemed to me unlikely that they were just little lights, lamps hanging from from the sky. Uh who put them there? What for?

Carl Sagan3:54

And so when I got my first library card I uh

Carl Sagan3:57

fairly breathlessly uh asked the librarian for a book on stars and she gave me one uh which was uh about people named Clark Gable and Gene Harlow. I explained that wasn't what I wanted and uh after some confusion I got the book that I did want and uh

Speaker 24:07

Yeah.

Speaker 14:07

But

Carl Sagan4:14

Um

Carl Sagan4:15

turn the pages of this, you know, easy children's book and uh

Speaker 14:17

You know

Carl Sagan4:20

finally came to what uh what I had been looking for, an astonishing statement, that the stars were just like the sun, except immensely far away that the sun was a star, but just very close. And uh I couldn't tell how close

Carl Sagan4:36

the sun was or how far you'd have to move it to make it as dim as a star, but I could tell that was a very big distance and suddenly the scale of the universe opened up for me, a a very powerful emotional experience which uh I'm uh still engaged in.

Presenter4:53

You were only sixteen when you entered the University of Chicago. I presume you'd taken a scholarship. Why Chicago? Was it the University of your choice?

Carl Sagan5:01

Oh yes, very much. I I had applied to a number of institutions and been accepted, but Chicago sent a brochure called If You Want an Education, and the brochure went something like this. It said

Carl Sagan5:15

If uh you want a school in which uh sports are a uh a major consideration and there's a picture of uh football players battering each other, don't come to the University of Chicago. Turn the page. If you want a uh school in which uh religious activities are a major part of what we do, there are people in pews, don't come to the University of Chicago. If you want a school in which fraternity and sorority life is uh a major thing, don't come to the University of Chicago. You got about halfway through the book and it said on a one whole page, it said, but if you want an education, come to the University of Chicago. And it was the only university that um advertised itself as providing an education and uh that was what I wanted and it certainly

Presenter5:58

Certainly did provide a and well, obviously there were other activities. What were you interested in apart from astronomy and astrophysics?

Presenter6:06

Yeah.

Carl Sagan6:06

Well, uh I was

Carl Sagan6:08

Very active in uh in basketball and table tennis and uh meeting members of the opposite sex and all those things the Chicago said it didn't provide.

Presenter6:15

All those things the Chicago said it didn't provide. You took your PhD, though, and left to go to Berkeley as a research fellow. What was your project?

Carl Sagan6:25

When you get a PhD there's uh always an enormous amount of uh topics that you didn't have time to complete, uh to pursue and so there there were a great many things that I I did at Berkeley, but uh my doctoral thesis was uh mainly on the atmosphere of the planet Venus in an attempt to uh explain the uh apparently high surface temperature of Venus through what's called the greenhouse effect, the trapping of uh infrared radiation by the this massive carbon dioxide in water atmosphere. And uh I was fortunate enough to uh have been successful in the sense that subsequent space vehicle explorations of uh Venus have uh made a reasonably plausible case that it's a greenhouse effect that keeps the surface hot and that the surface is in fact hot. Well, very different place

Presenter7:00

To uh have

Presenter7:06

Yes, I've uh

Speaker 17:09

Good.

Presenter7:12

It's a very different place from

Carl Sagan7:14

The earth.

Presenter7:15

Then you followed with a spell at at Stanford University School of Medicine studying the origins of life.

Carl Sagan7:20

Yes.

Presenter7:21

You were really taking a a thorough background in your in your subject.

Carl Sagan7:21

You were really

Carl Sagan7:25

Well, I was always interested in that question and had uh

Carl Sagan7:29

Even as an undergraduate spent uh summers working in uh in biology and and genetics to try to provide some background in

Presenter7:36

in that field. Then Harvard, the Smithsonian Observatory. And finally you settled down at Cornell in nineteen sixty eight. What was your assignment there?

Carl Sagan7:47

I'm a professor of astronomy and space sciences and I also direct um the laboratory for laboratory, I guess you say, for planetary studies. And uh we're engaged in uh

Speaker 17:55

Planet for planetary

Carl Sagan7:59

fairly wide range of uh investigations of uh the nature of uh the surfaces and atmospheres of uh the other planets and uh and their moons, largely using uh unmanned space vehicles which uh are uh trickling out through the solar system in all directions at the present time.

Presenter8:18

Was it the first laboratory of its kind?

Carl Sagan8:20

No, I would not say so, but certainly one of the first.

Presenter8:24

Don't have yourself.

Carl Sagan8:25

But

Presenter8:25

Yeah.

Carl Sagan8:25

And regular.

Presenter8:25

But what

Carl Sagan8:25

What's that?

Presenter8:25

Could be.

Carl Sagan8:26

Well, it's the fairly well-known uh cannon by Acclabau.

Presenter9:24

Canon indeed by Pacquelle.

Presenter9:27

Neville Mariner and The Academy is and Martin in the Field.

Presenter9:31

I presume the laboratory was tied up with NASA.

Carl Sagan9:34

Yes, all of the unmanned space vehicle well, and and manned uh activities in the United States are uh are done by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And uh they have had uh despite uh extreme budgetary restrictions uh just success after spectacular success in exploring all the planets known to the ancients from Mercury to Saturn.

Presenter9:57

You were

Carl Sagan9:59

You were opposed to the moon landings.

Carl Sagan10:02

Well, I was opposed to uh attributing them to science. I was perfectly happy if they were uh considered uh political or uh economic or historical or

Carl Sagan10:11

beat the Russians or

Carl Sagan10:13

whatever they were, but they were not fundamentally scientific. President Kennedy uh said he was going to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade. He did not say uh he was going to discover the origin of the moon by the end of the decade.

Carl Sagan10:25

And uh the amount of money spent on Apollo uh may well have been an excellent investment, but it was not primarily a scientific activity. So I was opposed to beginning the Apollo program on

Carl Sagan10:37

grounds that uh

Carl Sagan10:39

would be attributed to science, and I was also opposed, somewhat paradoxically, to ending the Apollo program, because after this enormous initial investment had been made, there was a splendid system for exploring the moon.

Carl Sagan10:51

And uh instead uh because it was only to show that we could do it, we stopped as a very uh

Carl Sagan10:58

An ironical and uh clear demonstration of this, the last man to land on the moon was the first scientist to land on the moon.

Presenter11:06

Uh

Carl Sagan11:07

Uh Mm.

Presenter11:07

That's a rather cynical remark, yeah. Now you worked, of course, on on uh a number of the unmanned space probes. The pictures that came back of the surface of Mars were

Presenter11:17

Incredible and very exciting. Yes, I think so too.

Presenter11:21

And machines up there have been digging holes, which seems uncanny.

Carl Sagan11:27

Well, we uh we have done the the first modest engineering works on uh another world. We've uh dug little trenches in the Martian soil to uh examine the composition of the soil and uh see if there's any obvious signs of life. The missions we're talking about are called Viking, and they landed, two of them, uh, in nineteen seventy six, each accompanied by its own orbiting vehicle which was uh overhead in the Martian sky.

Carl Sagan11:55

And these were the first spacecraft to uh

Carl Sagan11:59

Uh land on Mars, the first spacecraft to survive on another planet for uh more than an hour or so.

Carl Sagan12:04

and uh represent in my mind a uh critical moment in human history, a very significant transition from being locked on the earth and being able to go to other planets. And you've now mapped the surface of Venus.

Carl Sagan12:19

The surface of Venus has been uh mapped very crudely by uh ground-based and uh space orbital radar.

Carl Sagan12:29

But much more detailed mapping can be done by a devoted space vehicle in orbit around Venus and uh

Carl Sagan12:37

I very much hope that such a mission will be authorized in the near future. It has not yet been.

Presenter12:43

Now what about Saturn?

Carl Sagan12:44

Well, the uh most recent explorations have been by two spacecrafts called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which uh were launched in uh late summer of 1977. And uh the two spacecraft, one behind the other, flew by Jupiter and its rings, which in fact the spacecraft discovered and its moons.

Carl Sagan13:04

and then were accelerated by Jupiter's gravity to an encounter with Saturn. The Voyager 1 encounter happened last November. The Voyager 2 encounter with Saturn will happen this coming August. Voyager 1 is then accelerated out of the solar system altogether. Voyager 2 will go on to make uh the first look at the planet Uranus before it also is ejected from the solar system in uh nineteen eighty-five. Now what about the space shuttle?

Carl Sagan13:32

Well, it's a transportation system and uh it's a device to uh get whatever you want up there. And so uh

Carl Sagan13:40

It is not primarily a scientific instrument. It has major military purposes, at least some of which I support. I believe that military reconnaissance satellites are stabilizing. That if no nation can make major troop movements without other nations knowing about it, that is good for everybody.

Carl Sagan14:01

Also, uh it'll be involved in

Carl Sagan14:04

Communications satellites, which uh have worked a revolution in technology, you can dial Japan direct.

Carl Sagan14:12

uh meteorological satellites which are doing wonders in helping to uh forecast the weather. Earth resources satellites which monitor the health of crops and uh potential uh mineral resources for prospecting. And

Carl Sagan14:26

So on.

Presenter14:27

But sending men up there is fairly pointless.

Carl Sagan14:30

Well, I believe that for the same investment of money

Carl Sagan14:33

Machines can do a better job than people.

Carl Sagan14:37

for any of the tasks we're talking about.

Carl Sagan14:40

But uh that is not the direction in which we're going.

Carl Sagan14:44

And uh the idea of shuttle is that uh we will be able to have a reusable launch vehicle so you don't throw it away after each use, which is what we've been doing so far, and there are good economic reasons for that.

Carl Sagan14:57

It is, however, the only system which we will have available for launching scientific satellites and probes to other planets. So to that extent it is a scientific mission, but it's not primarily scientific.

Carl Sagan15:11

Your third record has a change of pace, uh piece in the jazz idiom by Roy Buchanan called Fly Nightbird.

Presenter16:16

Fly Nightbird composed and played by Roy Buchanan.

Presenter16:21

Now, Karl, we're chipping away in search of knowledge at one or two near neighbours in space.

Presenter16:26

But let me quote you once again. We live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the universe in which there are more galaxies than people.

Presenter16:38

It's going to take a long time to get all that sorted out, isn't it?

Carl Sagan16:41

Yes, and a good thing, too. Give us something to do.

Presenter16:44

Do you believe it would be presumption to think that only on earth is

Carl Sagan16:48

I do. I think it's a presumption in two different respects. Uh one, the conceit that uh we are especially intelligent and two that there is none elsewhere.

Presenter16:59

Do you think life on earth is intelligent enough to stop blowing itself up before

Carl Sagan17:04

before it's investigated other planets.

Carl Sagan17:07

That's a difficult and tricky question. There's no doubt that we have the capability to uh destroy our civilization and perhaps our species through the proliferation of nuclear weapons. At the same time, it's also clear that uh we have uh an enormous compassion for others and capability to do good and to act wisely and

Carl Sagan17:27

The tension between these

Carl Sagan17:29

two forces uh which go deep into our evolutionary past is uh the major issue that

Carl Sagan17:38

faces us in this time, I believe.

Presenter17:40

It's been said about you you've written something like three hundred scientific papers.

Presenter17:44

written in scientific language for fellow scientists. And it's been said that you're too excited by your subject to undertake the slow, painstaking collection of data which is usual. You want to put your ideas out first, to be to be shot down if necessary.

Carl Sagan18:00

Well, I uh I certainly have spent a great deal of time in the collection of data. Uh space vehicle missions uh often take uh six to ten years from conception to actually acquiring the data. So uh uh you'll have to put the question to whoever, whatever anonymous source made that uh remark. But I I very much feel that it's important to put scientific results out before the public uh in a timely manner because uh first of all the public is tremendously interested in the results and secondly because the public pays for this sort of science and if we scientists expect the public to continue to support what we're doing I think it's reasonably uh urgent that the public understand what we're about.

Carl Sagan18:44

Right, back to music.

Carl Sagan18:47

I'd like to play a portion of Dmitri Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony.

Presenter19:50

An excerpt from the Shostakovich Symphony No. 11, the Houston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stockovsky. What does that music mean to you?

Carl Sagan20:00

Well, it uh it speaks to me. I feel strongly about it, but uh I think if it were possible to uh say in detail, in words, what this was about, it would not have been necessary to uh write the music. I think the music speaks on quite a different level than words do.

Presenter20:17

Now, as you've intimated, you believe in the popularization of of science. You've written a number of scientific books for that uninstructed person known as the general reader.

Presenter20:28

What was the the first popular book?

Carl Sagan20:31

Well, in nineteen sixty-six I did a book which was at least semi-popular with uh a Soviet colleague, uh I. S. Shklovsky.

Carl Sagan20:40

called Intelligent Life in the Universe.

Carl Sagan20:42

And uh it was enormous fun both because of the collaboration we had never uh actually met until long after the book came out it was uh a collaboration by mail and uh also because I discovered how much pleasure there was in trying to popularize science.

Carl Sagan21:00

So from time to time since then I've uh

Presenter21:02

Yeah, sure.

Carl Sagan21:02

Try to do some.

Presenter21:03

The Dragon of Eden, that one you will pull at Surprise. What's that about? I haven't read that.

Carl Sagan21:07

The Dragons of Eden is subtitled Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, and it's uh

Carl Sagan21:13

It's about how we got to be human. Uh something about uh the connection between our minds and our brains and uh about the evolution of our brains from

Carl Sagan21:25

Very early times, from fish and reptiles and non-human primates to ourselves.

Presenter21:30

And another more recent book, which we'll talk about in a minute. On one of the space probes you sent out a disc, or there was sent out a disc I believe you had a hand in it of all sorts of music, speech, and sounds, in the hope that some day it might fall into the hands of the scientific minded from another planet.

Carl Sagan21:48

The hands are equivalent organs. Yes. Well, uh these are the the Voyager spacecraft that we talked about before that uh have done this spectacular exploration of uh the Jupiter and Saturn systems.

Presenter21:51

Yes.

Carl Sagan22:01

and due essentially to a quirk in celestial mechanics.

Carl Sagan22:06

These uh spacecraft will leave the solar system forever. Their transmitters will be dead. They will not be calling attention to themselves.

Carl Sagan22:14

But in the space between the stars there's very little matter.

Carl Sagan22:18

and things tend to be preserved extremely well.

Carl Sagan22:22

The estimated lifetime of these spacecraft is about a thousand million years.

Carl Sagan22:27

So uh long after uh

Carl Sagan22:29

the British Isles, say, or North America are gone by the geological processes on Earth, these spacecraft will be still pristine in the dark between the stars. Therefore,

Carl Sagan22:45

We thought there was over a thousand million years some chance that uh some other species of space faring civilization might uh come upon this ancient, derelict, primitive ship.

Carl Sagan23:00

And heave too?

Carl Sagan23:02

and uh wonder who had made it.

Carl Sagan23:04

So attached to each spacecraft is a uh phonograph record, a metal disc.

Carl Sagan23:10

with instructions uh for use written in what we hope is clear scientific language on the cover.

Speaker 223:15

Yeah.

Carl Sagan23:15

And a cartridge and stylus we uh we assume if they can find us in the dark between the stars they'll uh

Carl Sagan23:22

be able to figure out how to amplify the sounds.

Carl Sagan23:25

And uh on the disc are uh

Carl Sagan23:28

Greetings of various sorts. We have 116 pictures encoded in digital form with instructions about how to reconstruct the pictures.

Carl Sagan23:37

Greetings in sixty human and one whale language, which there's no chance they'll understand. A sound essay on the evolution of the earth. And perhaps most relevant to us, an hour and a half of what the New York Times called Earth's greatest hits, in the hope that music would convey something more about us than just our science and technology would. Uh

Presenter24:03

That's an interesting musical exercise to to choose something that would still be fully appreciated in a thousand

Carl Sagan24:10

By creatures very different from us. It may be an impossible task. We thought it was uh interesting to try. It was certainly inexpensive and uh I think there's something tremendously hopeful about uh us sending greetings to creatures so far away in time and space that we could never hear anything back from them.

Carl Sagan24:31

Your next record.

Carl Sagan24:32

My next record is in fact one of the pieces that uh was included on the Voyager Interstellar Record, a uh piece for uh a Japanese wind instrument called a shakuhachi. The piece is called Cranes in Their Nest.

Presenter25:47

A piece of Japanese music, Cranes in Their Nest. In the past there have been a number of spectacular television popularizations of major subjects, Kenneth Clark's Civilization, Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, Attenborough and Natural History. Now you've tackled one, a thirteen-part serial called Cosmos. First, what does the title mean? What what is Cosmos? Cosmos is

Carl Sagan26:10

It's a uh Greek word invented in uh

Carl Sagan26:13

about the sixth century B C

Carl Sagan26:16

which refers to the order and elegance of the universe. Not just the universe, but the uh the way in which it is constructed.

Presenter26:25

What terms of reference did you set yourself for the series?

Carl Sagan26:29

Well, one of our principal objectives was uh to convey the idea that science is accessible to a general audience, that it's fun, that it's exhilarating, that it's a delight. And given the entire cosmos to play with, we certainly were able to pick and choose what to discuss. It is largely, but by no means wholly, oriented towards astronomy. We talk about the history of astronomical ideas, about the space vehicle exploration of the planets with lots of the pictures that we were talking about earlier in the program, about galaxies, pulsars, quasars, the possibility of life elsewhere, the grand cosmological questions about the origin and nature and fate of the universe, but also a wide range of other topics, including uh Champollion's decryption of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a stunning computer animation uh of uh how the master molecule of life, DNA, works, and a uh

Carl Sagan27:29

reconstruction that I'm very pleased with of the great million volume library of Alexandria that was uh put to the torch by a mob in the fifth century AD. Is there enough evidence to have

Presenter27:43

Built that reasonably effectively.

Carl Sagan27:45

Yeah.

Carl Sagan27:46

Yes, there's a fairly good set of scholarly evidence on what the library and its attached research center, the Serapeum, were about. We had to take some liberties where we did not know what it was about. And we built the thing using a stunning new technique called Magicam, in which in effect I am shrunk down to about one inch in height and wander through this detailed model with all the shadows falling correctly. And the thing has been so successful that the Egyptian Tourist Bureau has been, I understand, inundated with requests about how to visit it. How long did it take to to make the series? Cosmos uh took something over three years to do and was uh something like two years in actual production and uh was a very grueling uh task because

Carl Sagan28:39

We were concerned, on the one hand, to get the science right, even.

Carl Sagan28:44

things that we weren't uh specifically talking about. We wanted sophisticated viewers to uh

Carl Sagan28:50

not see any uh any contradictions with what we knew. On the other hand, we wanted it to be immensely accessible to a general audience, and that combination took some work. It's an international production, of course. It is, and uh the BBC uh has been one of our co-producers.

Presenter29:05

Fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution in thirteen hours. It's a tall audit. Yes, and we certainly can't show it all, but we've

Presenter29:13

Uh at least hit the highlights.

Presenter29:16

Another record, number six we got.

Carl Sagan29:18

Top two. This is part of uh another piece by uh Vangelis Papathanasiou on Synthesizer called Alpha.

Presenter29:55

Vengelis again at the synthesizer.

Presenter29:58

Playing Alpha. Now these Vangelist tunes are from the soundtrack of Cosmos.

Carl Sagan30:02

Yes, we made uh an effort to be very ecumenical in the the music for Cosmos and we seem to have been successful. Uh an enormous amount of mail talked to us about uh about the music. And of course you had a ball you put in all your favorites. Uh well I certainly had a chance to put in some of my favorites but uh many of the pieces were almost all of them chosen because they seemed appropriate for the Cosmos series and all of the music that uh is being played in this program uh has been used in Cosmos and uh a special record called The Music of Cosmos uh is just coming out. We tried in Cosmos to appeal not just to the mind but to the heart and uh music plays a very important role in that of course.

Carl Sagan30:47

Yeah.

Presenter30:47

And there's a book to go with it, as one might expect, a big, glossy book with hundreds of colour pictures. Which sequences in the series pleased you most?

Carl Sagan30:55

Yeah.

Carl Sagan30:56

Will

Carl Sagan30:57

I must say that the series far exceeded my fondest expectations before I began.

Carl Sagan31:04

Some sequences were just so much better than I had at the very earliest stages imagined. For example,

Carl Sagan31:12

An extremely brilliant uh computer scientist named James Blynn.

Carl Sagan31:18

constructed a sequence on the

Carl Sagan31:22

mechanism by which DNA, the nucleic acid that is is at the heart of life on earth, works. It's never been done before. Not only do we see where all the atoms are, thirty thousand atoms all in the right position,

Carl Sagan31:37

But uh these molecules are kind of molecular machines. They articulate, they do things, they reproduce themselves, they correct any errors that they've made. And we see the mechanism of operation uh at the heart of life, and it's done in just a breathtaking way.

Carl Sagan31:55

And uh likewise the the simulation of the Great Library of Alexandria that I talked about, I think is stunning. Some of the historical reconstructions, for example, of the life of

Carl Sagan32:06

The uh

Carl Sagan32:08

The sixteenth-century mystic Johannes Kepler, who is also the father of much of modern astronomy, was done, I think, in a very appealing way. Now, after this.

Presenter32:17

Well, anything at Cornell is going to be a bit of an anticlimax, no.

Carl Sagan32:20

No, not at all, because science is so exciting and compelling that uh as fun as all this was, uh doing real science is still more fun in in my opinion.

Carl Sagan32:32

Record number seven. Number seven.

Carl Sagan32:34

is an exquisite performance by Arthur Grummio of uh one movement of the Bach Partida number three for unaccompanied violin.

Presenter33:23

Otto Grumio playing Gervatt in Rondo from the Bach Patita No. three in E major. How good will you be as a castaway? Could you look after yourself? Are you a practical man?

Carl Sagan33:33

Uh

Presenter33:34

Yeah.

Carl Sagan33:34

I think I would uh probably be a spectacular failure as uh as a castaway, but uh it'd be fun to give it a try. Have you any hobbies that might be useful? Do you fish? Uh no, I don't think I've ever done it in my life. No anything. Well, I've tried, but uh not successfully as a as a youngster. Small boats? No, not at all.

Presenter33:47

No.

Carl Sagan33:54

Would you try to get away?

Carl Sagan33:55

I guess I would uh stay around for a while until I got completely bored and and then try to take off if I could.

Presenter34:01

Yeah, I could.

Carl Sagan34:02

How

Presenter34:02

How much boredom brings confidence and we've got

Carl Sagan34:08

Uh yes. This is a uh I think exquisite piece of folk music from Bulgaria where Eastern and Western traditions have merged. Um it's a shepherdess's song sung by Valja Balkanska.

Speaker 235:12

He's the

Presenter35:23

A Bulgarian Shepherdess song.

Presenter35:25

If you could take only one disc out of the eight you've played a switch would it be?

Presenter35:29

I th

Carl Sagan35:30

I think it would have to be uh the uh Bach Unaccompanied Violin by Grummio. Right.

Presenter35:36

Uh

Carl Sagan35:36

And

Presenter35:36

One luxury to take with you, nothing of any practical use at all.

Carl Sagan35:40

I think I would take as large a reflecting telescope as you would let me. You can spend the evenings very nicely looking at the stars.

Presenter35:48

Right.

Carl Sagan35:48

Okay.

Presenter35:48

And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island.

Carl Sagan35:53

Uh

Presenter35:53

The books of

Carl Sagan35:54

Of no other religion, just just the Judeo-Christian tradition?

Carl Sagan35:57

I'm afraid so. There just isn't room. I guess then I would take the Boy Scout Handbook in an effort to be as practical as I could.

Carl Sagan36:06

Yeah.

Presenter36:06

And thank you, Carl Sagan, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Carl Sagan36:10

Thank you very much, Roy. I enjoyed it immensely. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 136:22

You've been listening to a download from the Desert Island Discs archive.

Speaker 136:26

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