Today, November 9, would have been Carl Sagan’s birthday.
Sagan inspired so many of us, and although he sadly died in 1996 (he would have been 88 today), he continues to inspire a young generation of scientists and readers of all kinds with his popular science book – one of the most popular science books ever! – entitled: “Cosmos”, and many other books he's written.
This is my copy of the book of Cosmos; I could have practically placed a sticky bookmark on every page!
Sagan had a way of educating about the universe in a such an inspiring yet poetic way; there hasn’t really been any science communicator since able to teach with his voice and style of writing.
Sagan has done so much in his career, and so much has been written about him that I will simply share the first paragraph from his Wiki page to introduce him:
“[Carl Sagan was] an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect."
Apart from highly recommending reading his books, I can only really share a few of his own quotes. There are so many to choose from and so many tug at the heart (how did he do that by merely speaking about science!), but these here are the three I will share, for the importance of their message and how powerful they are - today more than ever.
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
And the last one is a lot more than a quote, but one of his most shared pieces of writing, and one that goes with the photo here below, about the “Pale Blue Dot”:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, Apart from hd to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
A happy birthday to this wonderful human who keeps inspiring us, Carl Sagan.
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