Carl Sagan, the late astronomer, cosmologist, and enthusiastic champion of science, had the credentials for the job.
Sagan, who died in 1996, held BA and MA degrees in physics and a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics. He lectured at Harvard and Cornell, was a long-time advisor to NASA, and was part of the briefing team for the Apollo astronauts.
In the early 70s, Sagan helped design the plaques on Pioneer 10 and 11, which featured a pictorial message describing Earth and its human inhabitants.
In 1977, he helped create the two gold phonograph records aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which contain sounds and images portraying life and culture on Earth.
In addition, Sagan worked on the Mariner, Viking, and Galileo missions. And he helped create the SETI Institute, which listens for possible signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence.
On top of all that, Sagan wrote 20 books, 600-odd scientific papers, and gave us the TV series Cosmos, the most widely-viewed program in PBS history.
Sagan was passionate and committed, not only to his work, but also to important societal issues.
I loved to hear him rail against Ronald Reagan’s escalation of the arms race and the sheer stupidity of the “Star Wars” missile shield program, which Republican boneheads still tout today.
I applauded him in the late 1980s when he was arrested, twice, for climbing over a chain link fence during anti-nuclear protests at the Nevada Test Site.
I cheered when he stepped forward, using the tenets of real science and critical thinking, to debunk another tin-foil-hat idea from the world of pseudoscience.
Most of his colleagues simply ignored the loony claims and non-scientific nonsense, but Sagan chose to confront and rebut.
Sagan believed in science and logic. In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, he presented a set of tools he called a “baloney-detection kit.” It was a method of constructing a reasoned argument that exposes and rejects false, fraudulent, and biased ideas.
Among the examples he gave of the nutty ideas floating around: ghosts, UFOs, ESP, fortune-telling, faith-healing, witchcraft, and the many manifestations of pseudoscience — often fed to a gullible public for political or economic gain.
I occasionally disagreed with Sagan (he used marijuana and advocated its legalization, and I don’t), but I always regarded him highly.
Some people thought he was a bit of a prima donna, too fond of the public eye. I never got that sense about him. I considered him to be a brilliant guy who effectively used his considerable intellect for good purposes.
And he was brilliant, no question. Isaac Asimov, a long-time member of Mensa (the organization of certified brainiacs), once said he knew only two people who were more intelligent than himself: mathematician Marvin Minsky of MIT and Carl Sagan.
A clear case of unfettered honesty.
If you met me on the street, and you asked, “Rocky, when you think about the late, great Carl Sagan, what about him comes first to mind?”
That’s easy. It’s the wonderful concept he put forth that man invented books and libraries because we needed “external hard drives” to supplement our brains.
Sagan explained that in the beginning, when life forms were simple, they were able to store the necessary survival information in their genes.
But as life became more complex, so did the data needed to survive. To accommodate that growing volume of information, the brain evolved.
In time, the human brain emerged as the most advanced, most efficient organic storehouse of information ever.
But life and life forms continued to grow in complexity, taxing the ability of all those individual brains to keep up.
Sagan described it this way:
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When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains.
So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies.
We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.
One glance at [a book] and you hear the voice of another person — perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
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Books and libraries, then, are the elements of a collective intelligence.
So, what is the next stage? The answer, clearly, is in information technology — computing devices, internet access, cloud storage, and knowledge bases yet to come. Modern IT allows any one of us to store vast amounts of information and retrieve it in seconds.
But key questions exist about what we store online and inside our millions of individual computing machines. How permanent is the data?
A well-tended book can last for centuries. But hardware and software programs become obsolete regularly. When they do, the information they contain may well be lost.
If someone like me elects to stop maintaining a personal website, that information, too, may disappear. Perhaps not immediately, but soon.
It’s a genuine concern, but not unsolvable. Sagan probably would be confident science will figure it out.
To the public, Carl Sagan often is remembered for the dramatic use of the term, “billions and billions.” The fact is, he never used that phrase publicly.
In the Cosmos TV series, Sagan was careful to emphasize the “b” when he used the word “billions.” He did it to make sure the viewers knew he meant billions, not millions.
During a Tonight Show skit, Johnny Carson picked up on Sagan’s emphasis of the letter b and, imitating Sagan’s delivery, quipped “billions and billions.”
The joke was a hit, so Carson regularly repeated it.
Privately, Sagan was not amused. He probably didn’t like being ridiculed before a national audience on a continuing basis.
But he mellowed over time. The title of his last book, published the year after his death, was Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium.
In 1990, 13 years after the its launch, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles from Earth, at the edge of the Solar System. At Sagan’s request, Voyager turned its camera around and took a photograph of Earth across deep space.
The photograph became known as the Pale Blue Dot photo. In it, Earth appears as a tiny, blueish-white speck.
A few years later, Sagan published Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, in which he eloquently explained the significance of Voyager’s final photograph:
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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 rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
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. It is up to us.
It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
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After the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken in 1990, NASA instructed Voyager to power off its camera.
Voyager’s journey is still underway. But it won’t encounter anything worth photographing for at least 75,000 years.
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