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Carl Sagan's 1988 astronomy course had nothing to do with stars. The final exam is still relevant.

"He knew critical thinking was a skill needed to tackle the world's problems."

Public Domain/Library of Congress

Carl Sagan's Astronomy 490 class had little to do with astronomy, at least on the surface.

If you signed up for a college class called Astronomy 490, you'd likely expect it to be a high level study of the cosmos. It would focus on stars, planets, galaxies, black holes, perhaps delving deeper into theories of the world's greatest astrophysicists and cosmologists. Something having to actually do with the night sky at least, right?

Famed astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan offered Astronomy 490 at Cornell University as a senior seminar course in the 1980s, but it was nothing like what one might expect. The focus of the course wasn't stars, but "critical thinking in scientific and non-scientific contexts." The course used examples from Astronomy and other fields and case studies from the history of science as well as "borderline science and medicine, religion and politics." The idea was to help students across all fields of study to become better thinkers through logic and rhetoric and the scientific method.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Students had to be approved by Sagan in order to take the class, and they had to be "well-qualified" and prepared to "assimilate an extensive reading list" as well as participate in class discussions. The book list included textbooks on logic, reasoning, cooperation, and free thought, and class discussion topics ranged from world hunger to Affirmative Action to the Palestinian state.

The Library of Congress houses Sagan's handwritten course notes, which special curator and digital archivist Trevor Owens wrote, "include mention of the important balance between openness to new ideas and skeptical engagement with those ideas in science" and show how "he wanted to use student’s every day experience with things like television to prompt them to think more skeptically about how claims are made and warranted in everyday life."

TV, television, carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking Critical thinking became even more important in the age of television. Giphy

But what was perhaps most interesting about the course is its final exam. Or rather, exams. The Library of Congress has course exams from 1986 and 1988, and they differ in what Sagan asked students to do. However, the purpose was the same: To prompt students to put to use all the critical thinking skills they had gained in the class.

In his 1986 final exam, Sagan asked students to do two thought exercises and write papers about them. The first was to comment on the pros and cons of this quote from George Bernard Shaw, written around 1921:

"Our credulity, though enormous, is not boundless; and our stock of it is quite used up by our mediums, clairvoyants, hand readers, slate writers, Christian Scientists, psycho-analysts, electronic vibration diviners, therapeutists of all schools registered and unregistered, astrologers, astronomers who tell us that the sun is nearly a hundred million miles away and that Betelgeuse is ten times as big as the whole universe, physicists who balance Betelgeuse by describing the incredible smallness of the atom, and a host of other marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment. In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific."


carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking, final exam, college course First page of Carl Sagan's Astronomy 490 final exam in 1988.Library of Congress

The second part of the exam was to design and execute an experimental test of sun sign astrology (such as the daily horoscopes in the newspapers of the time). If that experiment found that evidence for sun sign astrology was poor, students were to explain its popularity. If the experiment found that evidence for sun sign astrology was fair, good, or excellent, students were to explain the scholarly disdain for it. In other words, they had to make the argument against whatever their experiment results were.

In the 1988 exam, students were asked to read "When Prophecy Fails," a short book about a UFO cult known as Clarionites (also Seekers) in the 1950s that had predicted that the end of the world would happen on December 21, 1954. Researchers followed the group to see what would happen when their predicted apocalypse didn't happen.

Sagan asked students to imagine they were part of that research team, but altered the scenario in two ways—adding a new charismatic leader rising up among the Clarionites and some natural disasters occurring on December 21, 1954.

UFO, cult, clarionites, when prophecy fails, end of the world sci-fi ufo GIF Giphy

Then he asked the students to do the following:

- Describe your best estimate of what might have happened as a result of these altered events over the next few years, informed by our readings and class discussions, including the Milgram experiments. [The Milgram experiments tested people's willingness or unwillingness to follow authority when it meant harming other people.]

- Compose a dialogue, taking place 34 years later (i.e.,now) between a believer in Clarionite intervention and a skeptic, making the best case possible for both points of view.

- What lessons, if any, can we draw?

Sagan clarified that there was no correct answer to either of the exam assignments. He simply wanted to see the students' critical thinking in action and for them to show what they'd learned with "coherency and cogency of argument."

carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking, final exam, college course Second page of Astronomy 490 final exam from 1988.Library of Congress

What stands out about these exams is that they ask the students to make arguments on both sides of a controversial topic. After all, critical thinking isn't just about being skeptical or rejecting ideas in the name of science; it's also about being able to understand and construct the arguments someone would make on any side of an issue. If you understand someone's arguments well enough to create them yourself, they become much easier to deconstruct and point out the elements that don't makes sense.

In a time when people have a hard time agreeing on basic facts, conspiracy theories abound, expertise is under attack, and prejudices of all kinds easily cloud people's judgment, perhaps we can take Sagan's final Astronomy 490 goals to heart and work on sharpening our critical thinking skills.

NASA Goddard/Youtube

Pictured is Black hole TON 618, which contains more than 60 billion solar masses.

It’s almost impossible to really comprehend just how tiny the whole of humanity is against the enormously vast universe. But every so often, thanks to folks at NASA, we get jaw-dropping, awe-inspired video proof of it.

On May 3, NASA released an animated video to YouTube highlighting ten known supermassive black holes scattered throughout the cosmos, comparing their various sizes to familiar celestial bodies in our own solar system.

Noting the utter enormity of these fascinating objects, NASA wrote, “These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun.”


In just under 90 seconds, we take a journey through space with these galactic behemoths, starting with a black hole named J1601+3113, containing the mass of 100,000 suns, and ending with TON 618, which contains more than 60 billion solar masses.

Behold:

Awestruck? Terrified? A bit of both? You’re not alone. That was the general consensus in the comments section.

“Just swallowed my brain.”

“We are nothing in this universe but we still have so much ego to be proud of and fight for material things....”

“Mind-blowing.”

“Chills. Bravo!”

“Nobody knows anything anymore.....We're literally ants.”

“Mind blown overwhelmed and scary.”

Everyone might have a general concept of what a black hole is, but in many ways these phenomena remain a mystery. Catching real glimpses of their actual power is a rare, profound and often humbling experience. Same could probably be said of most space matters.

It can be so easy to get caught up in the constant dilemmas in our own world (out of necessity, much of the time). Sometimes all it takes is a larger view to infuse a little more awe back into our lives.

Bill Wurtz's "History of the Entire World, I Guess" is an amazing overview of the history of the universe.

Pondering the entire history of the universe is an overwhelming endeavor for our finite human brains. We have a hard time even conceptualizing "a billion" as a number, much less trying to wrap our heads around the billions of years of the existence of the universe.

It's even overwhelming just to try to imagine the whole of human history on Earth. There's just so much of it. Diving into the history of just one country or region is a lot, and the more we zoom in, the more there is to learn.

But what if we zoom way out? Like, waaaayyyy out. How condensed could we make the history of the world if we took a 30,000- foot view of it? And how could we make it educational and entertaining at the same time?

Those are basically the questions Bill Wurtz answered in his video appropriately titled "History of the Entire World, I Guess," which has been viewed on YouTube more than 139 million times since he posted it in 2017.


Wurtz uses an odd combination of simple animation and graphics, funny descriptions delivered almost in a monotone and some intermittent musical blips to tell the story of the universe from the Big Bang to recent history. And it's impressively comprehensive for being a quick overview of, well, everything. Wurtz told the H3 Podcast that he spent 11 months researching and writing the video, which he originally hoped would be five to seven minutes long. The final product clocked in at just under 20 minutes, but it's totally worth it.

The video starts with the basic fact of our individual existence: "Hi. You’re on a rock, floating in space. Pretty cool, huh?” Then it pulls us back to the very beginning of the universe before slingshotting us through the formation of matter, stars, planets, Earth, life on Earth and finally, the entirety of human history. It's a super high-level overview, and yet you walk away with a better understanding of the basic chemistry, physics, astronomy and geology of the universe, in addition to the geopolitical, religious, military and industrial history of the human race.

It is, in a word, remarkable.

The original video is worth a watch if you're cool with a handful of f-bombs. The version below has had almost all of the profanity removed to make it more kid- and school-friendly. My own kids have watched it at least a dozen times. Despite how quickly it moves, they get so excited when they recognize some slice of history that they've learned about, and they've been inspired to learn more about things Wurtz references in the video. They love it.

Honestly, getting this much history into one video and tying it all together in a coherent way is incredibly impressive. And to have so many clever, laugh-worthy moments thrown in for funsies is just delightful. It doesn't include everything, but how could it? And it can be a little jarring to have huge, devastating events flash by in seconds, knowing how many people's lives were impacted by them. That's the nature of the 30,000-foot view, though. It offers a perspective that feels almost disturbingly detached, but it can also help us see our squabbles as momentary blips in the big picture.

All in all, well done, Bill Wurtz.

For centuries, human beings have looked at the night sky, hoping to see aliens.

Now, a group of scientists is trying to find out where aliens would have to be in order to see us.

Researchers from universities in the U.K. and Germany have identified nine planets that are "ideally placed" for their resident astronomers to detect Earth using the same methods Earth stargazers use to detect them, according to a new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.


The astronomers looked for planets on which observers could view Earth's transit across the sun — the period where, from their perspective, our planet moves in front of its home star, causing it to dim slightly.

An illustration of where an extraterrestrial observer would have to be to notice one of the planets in our solar system passing in front of the sun. Image by 2MASS/A. Mellinger/R. Wells.

The study builds on the work of astrophysicist Rene Heller, who proposed the idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life located in these "transit visibility zones" might already know about Earth in a paper published last year in the journal Astrobiology.

"We've expanded on this by including all of the solar system planets and looking at the known and expected exoplanets in these regions," study lead author Robert Wells, a Queen's University Belfast Ph.D. student, says.

The work was made possible by the revival of the Kepler space telescope, which malfunctioned and was nearly left for dead in 2013.

Instead, engineers used sunlight pressure to stabilize the stellar eye later that year. It has since discovered more than 500 exoplanets — joining the more than 2,300 total detected in the telescope's eight-year run.

A digital illustration of a gas giant planet and moon discovered by Kepler. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt via Getty Images.

The next challenge? Finding where ET might actually be listening for that call.

None of the planets identified in the paper have the conditions to support life. The researchers expect to discover more worlds in the prime Earth-viewing zone in the coming months.

"Our hope is to find some planets which are potentially habitable and can see transits of Earth, which I think will be the best targets for SETI," Wells says.

Here's hoping when do we track our galactic neighbors down, they're not the kind we need Will Smith to deal with.

(Thankfully, we have Will Smith — just in case.)