Hugh Downs and Carl Sagan for ABC's '20/20', 6/29/78 on the ABC Television Network.
Gallery of Carl Sagan
1980
Carl Sagan and his fiance Ann Druyan at the Waldorf-Astoria circa 1980 in New York City. (Photo by Bettina Cirone)
Gallery of Carl Sagan
1988
United States
Carl Sagan (center) speaks with CDC employees in 1988.
Gallery of Carl Sagan
The Planetary Society members at the organization's founding. Carl Sagan is seated on the right.
Gallery of Carl Sagan
Sagan with a model of the Viking lander that would land on Mars.
Gallery of Carl Sagan
Gallery of Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996) leaning his elbows on his knees and smiling in a laboratory at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He is wearing a turtleneck sweater. (Photo by Santi Visalli Inc.)
Gallery of Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan
Gallery of Carl Sagan
Astronomer Carl Sagan (Photo by Tony Korody)
Achievements
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York City, New York, United States
Stone dedicated to Carl Sagan in the Celebrity Path of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Membership
American Astronomical Society
American Geophysical Union
The Planetary Society
The Planetary Society members at the organization's founding. Carl Sagan is seated on the right.
Awards
NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal
Hugo Award
Campbell Memorial Award
Joseph Priestley Award
Locus Award
Oersted Medal
Peabody Award
Public Welfare Medal
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
UCLA Medal
Grand-Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword
Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996) leaning his elbows on his knees and smiling in a laboratory at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He is wearing a turtleneck sweater. (Photo by Santi Visalli Inc.)
(This book is a product of a unique international collabor...)
This book is a product of a unique international collaboration between a world-famous Russian astronomer and a leading American space scientist, the first popular and modern discussion of the entire panorama of natural evolution.
(Fifteen scientists from different fields such as astronom...)
Fifteen scientists from different fields such as astronomy, physics, meteorolgy, sociology, etc. discuss aspects of UFO's. Here they present photographs, and discriptions of sightings.
(The first international conference on the problem of extr...)
The first international conference on the problem of extraterrestrial civilizations, and contact with them, was held in September 1971 in Soviet Armenia. The conference was a gathering of specialists working in a wide variety of fields - astronomy, physics, radiophysics, computer science and technology, chemistry, biology, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and history - and included many scientists whose reputations are worldwide. For example, Freeman Dyson, Philip Morrison, and Charles Townes were among the American participants; their Russian counterparts were of comparable distinction.
(The facts and photographs sent back to earth by Mariner 9...)
The facts and photographs sent back to earth by Mariner 9 spark this fine, freewheeling exchange about the Red Planet as physical fact and inexhaustible metaphor.
The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
(In 1973, Carl Sagan published The Cosmic Connection, a da...)
In 1973, Carl Sagan published The Cosmic Connection, a daring view of the universe, which rapidly became a classic work of popular science and inspired a generation of scientists and enthusiasts. This seminal work is reproduced here for a whole new generation to enjoy. In Sagan's typically lucid and lyrical style, he discusses many topics from astrophysics and solar system science, to colonization, terraforming and the search for extraterrestrials.
(At an instant some 15-billion years ago, the cosmic clock...)
At an instant some 15-billion years ago, the cosmic clock began to tick- and the universe, or at least its present incarnation, was born.For some 10- billion years the clock ticked away. And then our sun turned on,the planets formed,life and intelligence evolved.
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
(“A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen ...)
“A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday ... It's a delight.” - The New York Times
Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends - and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
(In 1977, two extraordinary spacecraft called Voyager were...)
In 1977, two extraordinary spacecraft called Voyager were launched to the stars. Affixed to each Voyager craft was a gold-coated copped phonograph record as a message to possible extra-terrestrial civilizations that might encounter the spacecraft in some distant space and time. Each record contained 118 photographs of our planet; almost 90 minutes of the world's greatest music; an evolutionary audio essay on "The Sounds of Earth"; and greetings in almost sixty human languages (and one whale language). This book is an account, written by those chiefly responsible for the contents of the Voyager Record, of why they did it, how they selected the repertoire, and precisely what the record contains.
(Cosmos is one of the bestselling science books of all tim...)
Cosmos is one of the bestselling science books of all time. In clear-eyed prose, Sagan reveals a jewel-like blue world inhabited by a life form that is just beginning to discover its own identity and to venture into the vast ocean of space.
The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War
(The Cold and the Dark is the record of the Conference on ...)
The Cold and the Dark is the record of the Conference on the Long-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War, held in Washington, D.C., on October 31 to November 1, 1983. The conference involved over 200 scientists from many nations and drew together the best available scientific information. Its central finding was the phenomenon of nuclear winter: a much more profound and long-lasting devastation of the earth and atmosphere than had been believed possible before.
(The future is here...in an adventure of cosmic dimension....)
The future is here...in an adventure of cosmic dimension. In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who - or what - is out there? In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future - and our own.
A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race
(The spread of nuclear weapons to unstable third world cou...)
The spread of nuclear weapons to unstable third world countries means that despite the dramatic improvement in US/Soviet relations, we are living in a time of unprecedented danger of nuclear war. In 1982, Professors Sagan and Turco made known their discovery of the concept "nuclear winter", a widespread cold and dark, resulting in agricultural collapse and world famine, that would be generated in even a "small" nuclear war. It was a landmark discovery that revealed in the starkest terms how vulnerable our civilization is to the long-term environmental effects of nuclear war. Carl Sagan, Pulitzer prize-winning science writer, and Richard Turco, tell the personal story of their findings, and how, despite the much-heralded thawing of the Cold War, there are dangerous inadequacies in nuclear policy and doctrine that need to be addressed.
(World renowned scientist Carl Sagan and acclaimed author ...)
World renowned scientist Carl Sagan and acclaimed author Ann Druyan have written a ROOTS for the human species, a lucid and riveting account of how humans got to be the way we are. It shows with humor and drama that many of our key traits - self-awareness, technology, family ties, submission to authority, hatred for those a little different from ourselves, reason, and ethic - -are rooted in the deep past, and illuminated by our kinship with other animals.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space Reprint, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan - Amazon.com
(In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history o...)
In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history of our launch into the cosmos and assesses the future that looms before us as we move out into our own solar system and on to distant galaxies beyond. The exploration and eventual settlement of other worlds is neither a fantasy nor luxury, insists Sagan, but rather a necessary condition for the survival of the human race. “Takes readers far beyond Cosmos... Sagan sees humanity’s future in the stars.”—Chicago Tribune
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
(How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasin...)
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.
Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
(These luminous, entertaining essays travel both the vastn...)
These luminous, entertaining essays travel both the vastness of the cosmos and the intimacy of the human mind, posing such fascinating questions as how did the universe originate and how will it end, and how can we meld science and compassion to meet the challenges of the coming century? Here, too, is a rare, private glimpse of Sagan’s thoughts about love, death, and God as he struggled with the fatal disease.
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
(Carl Sagan's prophetic vision of the tragic resurgence of...)
Carl Sagan's prophetic vision of the tragic resurgence of fundamentalism and the hope-filled potential of the next great development in human spirituality The late great astronomer and astrophysicist describes his personal search to understand the nature of the sacred in the vastness of the cosmos. Exhibiting a breadth of intellect nothing short of astounding, Sagan presents his views on a wide range of topics, including the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, creationism and so-called intelligent design, and a new concept of science as "informed worship." Originally presented at the centennial celebration of the famous Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1985 but never published, this book offers a unique encounter with one of the most remarkable minds of the twentieth century.
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
(Carl Sagan, writer and scientist, returns from the fronti...)
Carl Sagan, writer and scientist, returns from the frontier to tell us about how the world works. In his delightfully down-to-earth style, he explores and explains a mind-boggling future of intelligent robots, extraterrestrial life and its consequences, and other provocative, fascinating quandaries of the future that we want to see today.
(Comet begins with a breathtaking journey through space as...)
Comet begins with a breathtaking journey through space astride a comet. Pulitzer Prize-winning astronomer Carl Sagan, author of Cosmos and Contact, and writer Ann Druyan explore the origin, nature, and future of comets, and the exotic myths and portents attached to them. The authors show how comets have spurred some of the great discoveries in the history of science and raise intriguing questions about these brilliant visitors from the interstellar dark. Were the fates of the dinosaurs and the origins of humans tied to the wanderings of a comet? Are comets the building blocks from which worlds are formed? Comet is an enthralling adventure, indispensable for anyone who has ever gazed up at the heavens and wondered why.
Carl Sagan was one of the most well-known scientists of the 1970s and 1980s. He studied extraterrestrial intelligence, advocated nuclear disarmament, and co-wrote and hosted 'Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.'
Background
Astronomer Carl Sagan was born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew."
When Carl was four, his parents took him to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This became a turning point in his life and little Sagan developed an early interest in skyscrapers, science, space, and the stars. His parents encouraged his growing interest in science by gifting him chemistry sets and books.
Education
Sagan had lived in Bensonhurst, where he went to David A. Boody Junior High School. He had his bar mitzvah in Bensonhurst when he turned 13. The following year, 1948, his family moved to the nearby town of Rahway, New Jersey for his father's work, where Sagan then entered Rahway High School. He graduated in 1951.
Sagan attended the University of Chicago, which was one of the few colleges he applied to that would consider admitting a 16-year-old, despite his excellent high-school grades. Its Chancellor, Robert Hutchins, structured the school as an "ideal meritocracy", with no age requirement. The school also employed a number of the nation's leading scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, along with operating the famous Yerkes Observatory.
During his time as an honors program undergraduate, Sagan worked in the laboratory of the geneticist H. J. Muller and wrote a thesis on the origins of life with physical chemist Harold Urey. Sagan joined the Ryerson Astronomical Society, received a B.A. degree in laughingly self-proclaimed "nothing" with general and special honors in 1954, and a B.S. degree in physics in 1955. He went on to earn a M.S. degree in physics in 1956, before earning a Ph.D. degree in 1960 with his thesis Physical Studies of Planets submitted to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Sagan had a Top Secret clearance at the U.S. Air Force and a Secret clearance with NASA. While working on his doctoral dissertation, Sagan revealed US Government classified titles of two Project A119 papers when he applied for a University of California at Berkeley scholarship in 1959. The leak was not publicly revealed until 1999, when it was published in the journal "Nature". A follow-up letter to the journal by project leader Leonard Reiffel confirmed Sagan's security leak.
From 1960 to 1962 Carl Sagan was a fellow in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1962 to 1968 he worked at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. His early work focused on the physical conditions of the planets, especially the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter. During that time he became interested in the possibility of life beyond Earth and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a controversial research field he did much to advance. For example, building on earlier work by American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, he demonstrated that amino acids and nucleic acids - the building blocks of life - could be produced by exposing a mixture of simple chemicals to ultraviolet radiation. Some scientists criticized Sagan’s work, arguing that it was unreasonable to use resources for SETI, a fantasy project that was almost certainly doomed to failure.
In 1968 he became the director of Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He became a full professor there in 1971. Sagan remained at Cornell until his death from pneumonia, a complication of the bone-marrow disease myelodysplasia, at age 62.
Sagan contributed to many of the robotic spacecraft missions that explored the Solar System, arranging experiments on many of the expeditions. Sagan assembled the first physical message that was sent into space: a gold-plated plaque, attached to the space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972. Pioneer 11, also carrying another copy of the plaque, was launched the following year. He continued to refine his designs; the most elaborate message he helped to develop and assemble was the Voyager Golden Record, which was sent out with the Voyager space probes in 1977. Sagan often challenged the decisions to fund the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station at the expense of further robotic missions.
Although Sagan did important research on planetary atmospheres, in astrobiology, and on the origin of life on Earth, he made his reputation primarily as a spokesman for science and a popularizer of astronomy. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was probably the best-known scientist in the United States. Both an advocate for and a showman of science, he invested much of his career in improving public understanding of science and defending its rational nature. In 1973 he published, with Jerome Agel, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, which earned him prominence as a popular science writer. The following year he confronted the American writer Immanuel Velikovsky in a public debate over Velikovsky’s theories of the history of the solar system. In 1980 Sagan co-founded the Planetary Society, an international nonprofit organization for space exploration. That same year he reached the height of his public fame with the television series Cosmos, which he wrote with his wife, Ann Druyan. The accompanying book, with the same title, became a best seller. It was followed by several other books, including the science-fiction novel Contact (1985), which in 1997 was made into a successful film, and Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994).
Sagan's contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus. In the early 1960s no one knew for certain the basic conditions of Venus' surface, and Sagan listed the possibilities in a report later depicted for popularization in a Time Life book Planets. His own view was that Venus was dry and very hot as opposed to the balmy paradise others had imagined. He had investigated radio waves from Venus and concluded that there was a surface temperature of 500 °C (900 °F). As a visiting scientist to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he contributed to the first Mariner missions to Venus, working on the design and management of the project. Mariner 2 confirmed his conclusions on the surface conditions of Venus in 1962.
(The future is here...in an adventure of cosmic dimension....)
1985
Religion
In reply to a question in 1996 about his religious beliefs, Sagan answered, "I'm agnostic." Sagan maintained that the idea of a creator God of the Universe was difficult to prove or disprove and that the only conceivable scientific discovery that could challenge it would be an infinitely old universe. Sagan's views on religion have been interpreted as a form of pantheism comparable to Einstein's belief in Spinoza's God. His son, Dorion Sagan said, "My father believed in the God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature but as nature, equivalent to it."
Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about the conventional conceptualization of God as a sapient being. For example: "Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others - for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein - considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws."
Politics
Sagan sometimes used his prestige for political purposes, as in his campaign for nuclear disarmament and his opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative of U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan. In 1983 he co-wrote the paper that introduced the concept of "nuclear winter," a catastrophic global cooling that would result from a nuclear war.
Views
A tireless advocate of scientific rationality, Сarl argued strongly against tendencies toward pseudoscience and occultism, most comprehensively in his last major book, The Demon-Haunted World (1996), significantly subtitled Science As a Candle in the Dark.
Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from potential intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms. Sagan was so persuasive that by 1982 he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners. This signaled a tremendous increase in the respectability of a then-controversial field. Sagan also helped Frank Drake write the Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing potential extraterrestrials about Earth.
In his later years, Sagan advocated the creation of an organized search for asteroids/near-Earth objects (NEOs) that might impact the Earth but to forestall or postpone developing the technological methods that would be needed to defend against them. He argued that all of the numerous methods proposed to alter the orbit of an asteroid, including the employment of nuclear detonations, created a deflection dilemma: if the ability to deflect an asteroid away from the Earth exists, then one would also have the ability to divert a non-threatening object towards Earth, creating an immensely destructive weapon. In a 1994 paper he co-authored, he ridiculed a 3-day long "Near-Earth Object Interception Workshop" held by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1993 that did not, "even in passing" state that such interception and deflection technologies could have these "ancillary dangers."
Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that Saturn's moon Titan might possess oceans of liquid compounds on its surface and that Jupiter's moon Europa might possess subsurface oceans of water. This would make Europa potentially habitable. Europa's subsurface ocean of water was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft Galileo. The mystery of Titan's reddish haze was also solved with Sagan's help. The reddish haze was revealed to be due to complex organic molecules constantly raining down onto Titan's surface.
He further contributed insights regarding the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, as well as seasonal changes on Mars. He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot, life-hostile planet through a kind of runaway greenhouse effect. Sagan and his Cornell colleague Edwin Ernest Salpeter speculated about life in Jupiter's clouds, given the planet's dense atmospheric composition rich in organic molecules. He studied the observed color variations on Mars' surface and concluded that they were not seasonal or vegetational changes as most believed, but shifts in surface dust caused by windstorms.
Sagan warned against humans' tendency towards anthropocentrism. He was the faculty adviser for the Cornell Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In the Cosmos chapter "Blues For a Red Planet," Sagan wrote, "If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes."
Sagan was a user and advocate of marijuana. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X", he contributed an essay about smoking cannabis to the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered. The essay explained that marijuana use had helped to inspire some of Sagan's works and enhance sensual and intellectual experiences. After Sagan's death, his friend Lester Grinspoon disclosed this information to Sagan's biographer, Keay Davidson. The publishing of the biography, Carl Sagan: A Life, in 1999 brought media attention to this aspect of Sagan's life. Not long after his death, widow Ann Druyan went on to preside over the board of directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), a non-profit organization dedicated to reforming cannabis laws.
Quotations:
"A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life."
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses."
"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas."
"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."
"We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster."
"I know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring good deeds out into the world."
"Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions."
"Science is [...] a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility."
"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."
"Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact."
"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking."
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
"There is a popular contention that half or more of the brain is unused. From an evolutionary point of view this would be quite extraordinary: why should it have evolved if it had no function? But actually the statement is made on very little evidence."
"The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it. Foretelling disaster is probably not much fun; Pollyanna was much happier than Cassandra. But the Cassandric components of our nature are necessary for survival."
"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
"It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million."
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
"Matter is composed chiefly of nothing."
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are."
"Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid."
"Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group."
"Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another."
"We could not guess how different from us they (extraterrestrials) might be."
"In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always."
"There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny."
"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."
"Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse."
"History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again."
"It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."
"The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star."
"Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history."
"Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term."
"Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth."
Membership
Sagan served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He also co-founded The Planetary Society.
American Astronomical Society
,
United States
American Geophysical Union
,
United States
American Association for the Advancement of Science
,
United States
The Planetary Society
,
United States
Personality
Sagan is widely regarded as a freethinker or skeptic. Former student David Morrison describes Sagan as "an 'idea person' and a master of intuitive physical arguments and 'back of the envelope' calculations."
In 1994, engineers at Apple Computer code-named the Power Macintosh 7100 "Carl Sagan" in the hope that Apple would make "billions and billions" with the sale of the PowerMac 7100. The name was only used internally, but Sagan was concerned that it would become a product endorsement and sent Apple a cease-and-desist letter. Apple complied, but engineers retaliated by changing the internal codename to "BHA" for "Butt-Head Astronomer". Sagan then sued Apple for libel in federal court. The court granted Apple's motion to dismiss Sagan's claims and opined in dicta that a reader aware of the context would understand Apple was "clearly attempting to retaliate in a humorous and satirical way", and that "It strains reason to conclude that Defendant was attempting to criticize Plaintiff's reputation or competency as an astronomer. One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'butt-head'." Sagan then sued for Apple's original use of his name and likeness, but again lost. Sagan appealed the ruling. In November 1995, an out-of-court settlement was reached and Apple's office of trademarks and patents released a conciliatory statement that "Apple has always had great respect for Dr. Sagan. It was never Apple's intention to cause Dr. Sagan or his family any embarrassment or concern." Apple's third and final code name for the project was "LAW", short for "Lawyers are Wimps".
Quotes from others about the person
"Some persons work best in specializing on a major program in the laboratory; others are best in liaison between sciences. Dr. Sagan belongs in the latter group." - Gerard Kuiper
"Carl was an incredible visionary, and now his legacy can be preserved and advanced by a 21st century research and education laboratory committed to enhancing our understanding of life in the universe and furthering the cause of space exploration for all time." - NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin
"The work of Carl Sagan has been a profound influence in my life, and the life of every individual who recognizes the importance of humanity's ongoing commitment to the exploration of our universe." - Seth MacFarlane
Interests
Writers
H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs
Connections
Sagan was married three times. In 1957, he married biologist Lynn Margulis. The couple had two children, Jeremy and Dorion Sagan. After Carl Sagan and Margulis divorced, he married artist Linda Salzman in 1968 and they also had a child together, Nick Sagan. During these marriages, Carl Sagan focused heavily on his career, a factor which may have contributed to Sagan's first divorce. In 1981, Sagan married author Ann Druyan and they later had two children, Alexandra and Samuel Sagan. Carl Sagan and Druyan remained married until his death in 1996.
1981 - Ohio State University - PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
1981 - Ohio State University - PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
Apollo Achievement Award
National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded Carl Sagan with Apollo Achievement Award.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded Carl Sagan with Apollo Achievement Award.
Emmy Award
1981 - PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Outstanding Individual Achievement;
1981 - PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Outstanding Informational Series.
1981 - PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Outstanding Individual Achievement;
1981 - PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Outstanding Informational Series.
1981 - Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Best Dramatic Presentation;
1981 - Cosmos - Best Related Non-Fiction Book;
1998 - Contact - Best Dramatic Presentation.
1981 - Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Best Dramatic Presentation;