Carl Sagan Talks About Communication Problems With Extraterrestrial Life in a Lost 1985 Interview

In the latest episode of the wonderfully animated lost interview series “Blank on Blank“, the brilliant Carl Sagan spoke about his concern that civilization didn’t have the ability to communicate with extraterrestrial life during a 1985 interview with veteran interviewer Studs Terkel.

Look at timescales, you realize that our civilization is the most backward civilization in the galaxy that could communicate at all, because we’ve just invented radio telescopes,just a few decades ago. We had not the ghost of a chance of communicating with anybody else.So If we receive a message, it can’t be from anybody less capable than we, because anybody less capable can’t communicate at all. So it has to be somebody much in advance of us and maybe as much in advance of us as we are in advance of the ants, say, or the worms.