2024 Ann Druyan Q&A: Voyager Golden Record, Cosmos, and Carl Sagan's Favorite Song

** TURN ON SUBTITLES: This event was hosted and recorded by students on rented equipment, so please forgive us for our video and audio quality! **
On February 13, 2024, the Cornell Astronomical Society and the Carl Sagan Institute were honored to hold an audience Q&A with Ann Druyan after a showing of Episode 6 of Cosmos at Cornell Cinema.
In addition to her work on Cosmos in 1980, Ann Druyan was the writer and producer for the two newer seasons of Cosmos (A Spacetime Odyssey in 2014 and Possible Worlds in 2020). She has written and co-written dozens of books, television shows, and movies, including six books with Carl Sagan and the film adaptation of Contact. She was also a member of the Voyager Golden Record team, which selected pictures, sounds, and music from Earth to cast out into space; her heartbeat and brain waves will roam the stars for millions of years.
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0:00 Opening Remarks
4:45 Q&A - Behind the scenes of Cosmos
12:45 What the Pale Blue Dot still teaches
20:56 Carl Sagan's favorite song
23:20 How to communicate science
28:38 The Voyager Golden Record
45:20 Thank you!

[@CarlSaganInstitute]

Thanks for watching everyone! Please TURN ON SUBTITLES in order to hear it better. Before you ask "Why is the audio so hard to understand?" or "Why is the video quality low?": Our better quality camera was overexposed and everything was washed out, so we had to use this lower quality back-up recording :( As for the audio, there are two tracks here-one recorded directly from the microphone in Cornell Cinema and one from the video camera. Unfortunately, the audio had to be boosted in order for Ms. Druyan to be heard in the theater, but this maxed out the audio recording and made it extremely distorted, so I had to use the echo-y video camera audio for these parts instead. I was extremely bummed out about the audio since we worked so hard on this event. To compensate, I wrote subtitles for everything! I hope everyone can turn those on and still enjoy the video.

[@saganandroid4175]

Can you control the Close Captioning text or is that Google-generated? At 17:39 Ann references the"crown of creation" but it says "ground of creation". Which of course makes no sense 🙂

[@CarlSaganInstitute]

@@saganandroid4175I'll fix that, thanks!

[@saganandroid4175]

40:40 I think Ann refers to Chou Wen-chung. @CarlSaganInstitute

[@CarlSaganInstitute]

@@saganandroid4175Great sleuthing! Updated that as well.

[@saganandroid4175]

@@CarlSaganInstitute still butthurt over lack of Vegan ice cream! 🤬😜😤😲👽🌎

[@saganandroid4175]

22:12 Worth noting that Carl Sagan played piano at Carnegie Hall. No joke.

[@JSalesFilm]

Great to see, love this. Tragic audio, though. Let me know if you all do this again and need help.

[@CASTELLANAful]

good sagan italy

[@saganandroid4175]

46:03 I can tell the card/picture is of a group of people, but who are they and where/what does it show?

[@mikebrigandi_]

I’m excited to see the Carl Sagan movie Voyagers with Andrew Garfield. Wonder if that will come out this year

[@joshyjoseph1017]

How do I send my personal film Walking Over Water to Ann Druyan? Golden Record is a character in WOW and Cinema is the villian in the narrative.How do I reach it to her? I have a Vimeo link protected with password.Dying to share it with Ann..

[@saganandroid4175]

What resolution was this recorded at? At 720p is still looking like 360 or 480 lines. And any idea what caused the audio issue at 7:45?

[@CarlSaganInstitute]

Along with the audio problems, our HD video also came out badly 😅This event was put together and recorded by students (which I am one of) on rented equipment, so we didn't have a whole lot of options. On top of that, the spotlights in Cornell Cinema were broken that night, so the better quality video was overexposed and we had to use this back-up (lower quality) video instead! Trust me, I went through a lot of turmoil over the quality of this video. I wish we could've had a professional recording, but we didn't have access to that. I hope you can still enjoy it!

[@brownjoela]

@@CarlSaganInstitutethank you for making this version available

[@CarlSaganInstitute]

7:45 is when Cornell Cinema increased the volume. This made it easier to hear Ms. Druyan in the theater but started to add serious distortion to the recording (Cornell Cinema doesn't normally record audio, so they weren't aware this would be an issue, and of course you don't realize until after something like this happens)! I used the Cornell Cinema audio as much as I could before switching to our camera's echo-y audio for some of the later parts.

[@saganandroid4175]

@@CarlSaganInstitute Glad you guys had backup equipment. Redundancy is so important in space affairs. It's mindboggling that the Cornell archivist, the Cornell media dept., and the science departments weren't all jockeying to get the best angles to record this. A living legend appears and it's beyond their interest to cover it?

[@saganandroid4175]

@@CarlSaganInstitute well the first 7:45 sounded great. You find out for me who played with the volume without checking levels, and I will personally take them to task. You'd expect better from anyone connected to Cornell.

[@janklaas6885]

📍23:20 Carl was smart, but above all, he was wise.

[@saganandroid4175]

It irritates me that these kids twice refer to "Tyson's version of COSMOS". Tyson read a script from a teleprompter, that's it. The script, the content, etc., was mostly Ann Druyan. And I think Steven Soter was also involved again to a degree.

[@joshyjoseph1017]

There's something wrong about the soundtrack.. it's muffled..from Kerala, India.

[@CarlSaganInstitute]

Hi there! We had issues recording the audio, but I wrote subtitles for everything! You can turn them on in the bottom right.

[@namenotshown9277]

since your students will forgive you for the issues, but non the less very annoying, make your guests comfortable at least a comfortable chair would be a good start, just a simple phone recording would have been better, so thats lesson two, have some redundency built in, like on rockets, just in case something goes wrong, but forgiven for the mistiakes of course. So the western explorers did a bad job, how about the new explorers? SpaceX, China etc, think they will treat other planets with respect? me thinks not, seems we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past........two human failures of character are: desire for control and lack of empathy ...............sort out those two and we have some chance for a good future.