Sasha Sagan
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sasha Sagan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
tribe or island somewhere where when the children come of age and their teeth start falling out of their mouths they put it under their pillow and then like a mystical like spirit from the forest with wings comes and takes part of their body that has fallen out and leaves them the like you know, leaves the money, the currency, the local currency.
I don't think it's, I mean, I have to do some research to tell you. We haven't done a full tooth fairy episode yet, but that is something I really want to do. But no, I think it's definitely Western culture. I don't think it's global. I'm going to look into it. This is a good question.
Oh no, this is like my favorite thing to talk about. I know. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's 10 questions, but it's really one question. And so my perspective is in order to believe for me to believe something, I need evidence. I need real evidence. And so to say, when people say, do you believe in something? This is like,
The implication is, like, is it what you, like, your best guess, your hope, whatever. And my position is I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in anything, you know, in the air quotes, like, paranormal, because I... Without evidence, how can we possibly know what is just our hopes and our wishes and our confirmation bias or our fears and what is real?
I mean, that is to say, also, we are getting more information. That's the magic of science. But if any of this were real... And there comes a day where it is proven true. It will be supported by some evidence. It will stand up to scrutiny, right? There are lots of things we didn't understand in human history that now we understand.
I mean, if you said, like, a few, you know, millennia ago, like, I believe that the moon controls the ocean, controls the tides, right? That... Could be like something like a person.
Yeah. Totally. What a witch would say. A hundred percent. But then once you get gravity and like Newton kind of works out how this could work, it becomes real. And what I think is sort of.
The key is that can we still hold on to like the awe and enthusiasm and the sense of like, oh, my God, holy shit, this is amazing and stunning and exhilarating and spine tingling about the stuff that we have evidence for that is real. Yes. And hold out, just hold an open space for the stuff that could just be wishful thinking or fears or hopes or ancient rumors.
And I just think, you know, like the example I always give is. there is a secret code in your blood that connects you to your ancestors that can solve mysteries that we did not know about like a few decades ago, you know, 60, 70 years ago. And that it can like, is, is like the key to answering so many questions, reuniting lost family members, figuring out like what, All these, you know, history.
And, like, if you... By the time you're doing, like, your allele worksheets in middle school, DNA doesn't seem like this magical, mystical, thrilling thing. But I think it is. And so whatever...
things that we currently categorize as paranormal, you know, we have to just like hold an empty space until there's evidence because we humans are so inclined to fall into the traps of our own belief systems.
Sure. And like the thing that my parents always told me that's so magnificent about science is it has this error correcting mechanism, right? You're a better scientist if you prove that the conventional wisdom is wrong, if you can really prove it, like if you really, it can really stand up to scrutiny. And sometimes we believe things for centuries and then they end up being disproven.
But like this system is our best bet because we're not that good at figuring out what's real and what's not historically. Yeah.
Like, the universe, like, beyond Earth?
You asked me about when people would come up to me and when I was a kid and people would come up to my dad. I mean, he would get in airports and restaurants like, Dr. Sagan, great to meet you. Do you believe in aliens? Aliens, where they at? Yeah, exactly. And people really wanted to know and they were genuinely, I mean, who wouldn't want to know? I mean, it was like genuine curiosity.
You're a smart guy. I'm a moron. You tell me what you think.
And I mean, this is like before like social media or anything. And so you're just like, oh, my goodness, perfect person to ask this question. And he would say, I don't know. And they would say, oh, but what does your gut tell you? And he would say, well, I don't use my gut for this. I, you know, use my brain. And we just don't. And he would have a.
loved, and I can't underscore this enough, he would have loved to have lived to see some evidence that there was life elsewhere in the universe. But he, like the quote that you just mentioned, he wanted, he didn't want to just fall back on his wishes and hopes. He wanted to really know. And so I think just like holding that space open for not knowing.
But your question about like, is science uniformed?
I think things would be entirely different, but I think that if we think about... I mean, science as like the nature, the way we understand nature, the way the physical laws of nature exist, it's not a set of like, it's not a list of like, things like figures and formulas. It's a method to understand. And whatever we were to encounter somewhere else, surely it would be like amazingly different.
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