Carl Sagan died in December 1996. He never saw a smartphone. He never saw social media. He never saw a large language model generate a confident lie on demand. He never saw a calendar year pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial level, because that year, 2024, was still twenty-eight years away. And yet the question of what he would say about today’s world is not idle curiosity. It is a way of asking what the evidence demands of us, and he spent his life teaching us how to ask exactly that question. He would recognize this moment. He spent thirty years warning that it was coming. The most useful thing we can do is listen to what he said, because he said it all before, and he said it with the evidence in his hand.

The Room

In November 1983, on ABC’s Viewpoint after the broadcast of The Day After, Sagan described the nuclear standoff in a way that has never been improved on. Imagine a room, he said, awash in gasoline. Two implacable enemies are in that room. One has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000. Each is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger. “Well, that’s the kind of situation we are actually in” (Sagan, 1983).

He would look at today’s world and say the room is still awash in gasoline. There are more people in it now, and the matches are cheaper. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight in January 2026, the closest it has ever been in its history, and the scientists who set it cited nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, and biological threats in the same breath (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2026). The world’s nine nuclear-armed states hold roughly 12,000 warheads, down from a peak of about 70,000 in 1986, and that reduction is real progress, the kind Sagan would have acknowledged without hesitation (FAS, 2026). But he would also have read the fine print, because he always read the fine print. The reductions happened almost entirely in the 1990s. The pace has slowed to a crawl. The number of warheads in military stockpiles, the ones actually assigned to forces, is rising again, with China, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom all increasing their arsenals. The New START treaty has expired, and the United States and Russia no longer exchange data on their deployed warheads. All nine states are modernizing their forces and planning to keep them indefinitely (FAS, 2026).

Sagan would say: the room is still awash in gasoline, and we have stopped counting the matches. He would say the only reason we are alive is that we have been lucky, and luck is not a strategy. He said it in 1983, and he would say it again today, with the same quiet fury, because the numbers have moved in the wrong direction for the first time in forty years.

The Shellac

In 1985, Sagan testified to Congress about the greenhouse effect. He described the Earth’s atmosphere as a coat of shellac on a schoolroom globe, a layer so thin that it is almost unimaginable, and yet it nurtures us, protects us from deadly ultraviolet light, and keeps the surface above the freezing point. “Now that atmosphere, so thin and fragile, is under assault by our technology” (Sagan, 1995).

Forty years later, the assault has a number on it. 2024 was the first calendar year with a global average temperature more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, at 1.60 degrees in the Copernicus dataset, with eleven months of the year above the threshold (Copernicus, 2025). The last ten years are the ten warmest on record. At the current rate of warming, more than 0.2 degrees per decade, breaching the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree target within the 2030s is highly likely (Copernicus, 2025). Sagan would be staggered that we are still arguing about whether the shellac is thinning while the hottest years in recorded history are all in the last decade. He would be staggered, and then he would do what he always did: he would point to the counterexample, because he believed in evidence over despair.

The counterexample is the ozone layer. We diagnosed the problem. We signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987. The controls took effect in 1989, ozone levels stabilized by the mid-1990s, and the layer has been recovering since the 2000s, with the United Nations projecting full regeneration by 2045 (Wikipedia, 2026). The Montreal Protocol is widely considered the most successful international environmental agreement ever negotiated. Sagan would say: that is what a species looks like when it treats science as a way of thinking rather than a menu. We saw the danger, we acted on the evidence, and we fixed it. The climate is the same kind of problem, bigger and slower and harder, and the ozone fix is the proof that we can do it. He would say the proof is not a guarantee. It is a demonstration.

The Bits

Sagan wrote in Cosmos that all the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. “Not all bits have equal value” (Sagan, 1980). He wrote that in 1980, when a year of television was a finite thing. Today that sentence is a rounding error. The average person now encounters more information in a week than a person in 1980 encountered in a lifetime, and the machine that generates it does not care whether it is true.

He would look at artificial intelligence and see the ultimate test of his warning. He said in 1990 that we live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology, and he called it “a clear prescription for disaster” (Sagan, 1990). On Charlie Rose in his last year, he sharpened it: “This combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?” (Sagan, 1996). He would look at the people building the most powerful technology in human history, the people governing it, and the people affected by it, and he would note that those are three different groups with almost no overlap. He would say the dragon in the garage, the claim that cannot be tested, the belief that cannot be falsified, is now generated on demand in infinite quantity by machines that have no stake in being right.

And he would say the failure mode of this age is not too much skepticism. It is too little, plus a new cynicism that insists no fact can be known at all. He would say both are the same disease, the surrender of the skeptical attitude, and he would hand us the baloney detection kit and tell us it matters more now than when he wrote it. “If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along” (Sagan, 1996). He would say the charlatan has arrived, and he has a model, and he never sleeps.

The Democracy

Sagan insisted, to the end, that science and democracy are the same project. “That kind of skeptical, questioning, ‘don’t accept what authority tells you’ attitude of science is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don’t think you can have one without the other” (Sagan, 1996). He said it on Talk of the Nation in May 1996, seven months before he died. He said it because he meant it, and he meant it because he had watched what happens to societies that stop asking questions.

He would look at the current wave of autocratization, the share of the world’s population living in autocratizing countries rising from 6 percent in 2009 to 34 percent in 2019, and he would say this is not a political accident. It is an epistemological failure first. A society that cannot agree on what is true cannot govern itself, and the people who benefit from that failure know it. “I think people in power have a vested interest to oppose critical thinking” (Sagan, 1996). He said that in his last year, and he would say it again today, because the evidence for it is everywhere. The attack on the skeptical attitude is not a side effect of the political crisis. It is the political crisis. The cure is not more authority. It is more skepticism, the same medicine for both diseases, because they are the same disease.

The Stand

Here is the part that would surprise people who only remember the warnings. Sagan would not despair. His optimism was not temperamental. It was evidential, and the evidence is real. The arsenals that once held 70,000 warheads are down to 12,000. The ozone layer is healing. Renewables got cheaper faster than anyone predicted. Democracy has been written off before, in the 1930s and the 1970s, and it came back, because the skeptical attitude is not a luxury. It is a survival trait, and it is the one thing the charlatan cannot counterfeit for long.

He would say the future is not written. He would say the next decade is the hinge, the same hinge I wrote about in “The World in 2075: Two Paths,” because the climate is decided by the emissions of the 2030s, the political order is decided by whether the current wave of autocratization is reversed, and the technology is decided by whether the coming breakthroughs are governed in the direction of diffusion and access or concentration and control. He would say the people who will live in 2075 are mostly alive, and they are not the ones who will decide what 2075 looks like. We are. And he would say it without comfort, because he never offered comfort, only clarity.

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers” (Sagan, 1980). He wrote that in Cosmos, and it is the closest thing he ever gave to a creed. He would say the questions are the same ones he asked, and the answers are still being written, and the writing is done by ordinary people in ordinary rooms, asking whether the evidence supports the claim, whether the authority deserves the trust, whether the bit has value. He would say the Earth is where we make our stand, and he would say it the way he said it in Pale Blue Dot, with the whole planet in the frame: “Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand” (Sagan, 1994).

So here is what he would say about today’s world, in one sentence, the sentence he spent his life earning: the room is awash in gasoline, the shellac is thinning, the bits are lying, and the only thing standing between us and the charlatan is the courage of our questions.

And here is what he would ask of you, because he always asked, and he always asked in the second person. Read the primary source, not the summary. Ask who benefits from the claim. Demand the evidence, and when the evidence is withheld, say so out loud. Vote for the people who can be corrected, and correct them when they are wrong. Treat the baloney detection kit as a civic duty, not a hobby. Teach a child to ask why, and mean it. And when the machine generates a confident lie, do not shrug. The machine is not the charlatan. The charlatan is the one who tells you not to check.

He would say we do not have the luxury of despair, because despair is a form of surrender, and surrender is what the room, the shellac, and the bits are all counting on. He would say the clock is at 85 seconds, and the seconds are ours. He would say the questions are the only thing that has ever worked, and they still work, and they work because they are free, and they are free because we keep asking them. Ask. Ask again. Ask until the answer holds up, and then ask the next question. That is what he would say. That is what he did say. The only question left is whether we are listening.

Sources

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