Pale blue dot

I’m a product of the TV age, so when I think of public speakers I generally think of the ones in my own living room. Not everyone who narrates a TV show does so with the structured, literary elegance that qualifies them as a ‘public speaker’, but one who did was Carl Sagan, with his show 'Cosmos' in the 80s.

Not every great writer is a great speaker – and not every great speaker writes their own material. But Carl Sagan could do both. He had the ability to set the scene of a

Carl Sagan.      Photo credit: gizmodo.com

story with a beautiful economy of means, letting viewers join the dots as they listened. Then suddenly you would find that the story had leapt from a suburban backyard like your own, off into the endless night of space, taking you on a journey back billions of years and then forward again, through the history of human civilisations.

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What made him so good at this? He could paint a picture as he spoke, so that the listener’s imagination came along for the ride. He started an explanation in the right place, so the dots your mind had to join were dots of imagination or common sense, not unknown academic theory dots.  His delivery was calm and measured, but expressive; he might get all fired up about something but he never sounded whiney. He had a way of putting things into context that was easy to understand, and a knack for explaining how things were connected. Sagan himself once said that what made him so good at explaining was his experience at university, where understanding didn’t come easy to him – he had to work hard to understand what cleverer students grasped immediately. “I can remember what I had to do to figure it out. The very brilliant ones figure it out so fast they never see the mechanics of understanding.”

Above all I think what made Carl Sagan such a good speaker was that he cared. He

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had a strong social conscience, believing that scientific knowledge should be in the public arena, easily available and readily understandable. He was committed to education for everyone, not just the privileged, seeing ignorance as the driver of social injustice and misery throughout human history.

I especially love this clip from a talkback radio show, where in order to effectively answer the caller’s question, Sagan hangs up on his heckling, then continues calmly with his explanation. It’s a beautiful illustration of the difference between asking a question because you want to know, to find out, to discover something new – versus asking with no intention of listening to the answer, just because you think you can prove someone wrong. As a scientist, Carl Sagan’s approach was always the first, and it should always be ours, as we question the world with our eyes, our ears and our minds wide open to the possibility that anything we think we know might just be wrong.