The famous astronomer and most Muserly explainer of science would have turned 75 on Monday, November 9. Happy birthday, Carl! Sixty-two revolutions on your home planet weren’t nearly enough. Our corner of the cosmos salutes you.
Patience, Please
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Billyuns and Billyuns of years ago…
“Billions and billions” is the one phrase he’s most remembered for — and he never said it!
What he DID say was “Billions UPON billions.”
But yeah, his accent made it sound kind of funny.
“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.
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leavesâ€) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it 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.â€
~Carl Sagan, “The Persistence of Memory,” Cosmos
Ok….. *feels stupid* The name screams at me that I’ve heard it, that I should recognize immediately why (where) I’ve heard it, and at the same time…….I haven’t a clue. Weirdest feeling, ever. *grumbles*
Same here.
And Google searching doesn’t help, because I swear none of the books/TV programs/etc are anything I’ve ever heard of, much less read/watched…….
KaiYves can tell you all about them.
I heard my name, so I came.
Carl Sagan was an astronomer and writer from New York who is famous for his work involving educating the public about science and searching for extraterrestrial life. He was involved with most of the space probes in the ’70s and ’80s, and also helped found the SETI institute. (Those guys who listen for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.)
The 1997 movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster, was based on a novel he wrote about SETI.
SFTPPoPo (Sorry For The Possible PoPo) Luna, why does it seem that we’re on at the same time so often?
Maybe because I’m pretty much on the ‘blog 24/7, except when I’m in classes or when I’m sleeping……The rest of the time, I’m often refreshing the ‘blog every half hour or so, sometimes way more often than that.
Don’t feel bad. When I saw this name, I thought of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
Me too!
It’s because of Carl Cassel and Peter Sag-something. You combine them and get Carl Sagan.
Yep. Our brains seemed to have worked the same way upon seeing that.
Carl Sagan visited my school once. He adored it. There’s a quote from a letter he wrote about it on one of the walls. It was something like us being a gift from our state to the future, I think.
He did? Cool!
Woo, cosmic apple pies all around!
It’s funny, I knew of Dr. Sagan’s work long before I had ever even heard of the man. I saw Contact when it was on TV after it came out, and I learned about nuclear/impact winter from a little booklet thingy on asteroids that my father got at some story, and we learned about the Voyager records in 5th grade, but I never knew that one person’s life connected all these amazing things.
But now I do. Here’s to Carl Sagan.
Happy birthday, Carl Sagan, that book you wrote sounds like a book that my insane science teacher would absolutely love. Mr. Sharp is one of Pseudo’s demigods and, in turn, worships
1) Steven Hawking
2) E.O. Wilson ( “My Boy,” he calls him )
3) Charles Darwin
4) Raymond Kurzweil
5) more to come as I remember them. OH YES, Nikola Tesla.
He worships Sagan and Tesla? Sounds like a great guy.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Brilliant, brilliant man. The Demon Haunted World is fantastic.
KaiYves please tell me about the nuclear/impact winter!
Okay, under certain conditions, the atmosphere can become so full of dust and debris that the sun is blocked out and the world experiences conditions similar to winter throughout the year for a time period proportional to the amount of matter released into the atmosphere. Less sunlight and cooler temperatures means that plants, both wild and farmed, die, creating famine.
On Earth, Dr. Sagan listed events that can cause a release of debris leading to such a “winter”:
1) Massive volcanic erruption. As seen in the 1816 “Year Without A Summer” following the erruption of Mount Tambora, the 1888 record snowfalls after Krakatoa, and recent, but less severe temperature effects from the Mt. Pinatubo explosion in 1991.
2) Asteroid or comet impact. Unlike the first one, not directly experienced within recorded history, but suggested by the fossil record from the extinction of the dinosaurs just after the asteroid strike in the Gulf of Mexico. If the asteroid struck a heavily forrested area, the “winter” would last longer, fueled by the soot and ash of the fires. (The source of the name for the episode of The West Wing titled “Impact Winter”.)
3) Nuclear war. Obviously, never experienced by humanity, but according to mathematical models, the burning of cities after retaliative nuclear strikes would produce a similar cooling effect to the prior two natural events, and additionally create intense ozone deletion, similar to the south polar hole, only worldwide. The thankful avoidance of such a conflict is mentioned in Dr. Sagan’s 1990 “update” at the end of his Cosmos series.
Oh wow, this is great, Carl Sagan is one of my role models.
A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sun rise, but a galaxy rise
I know you guys don’t want me to link, but will the mods please go see that symphony of science is a safe site, and link to it? It features two Carl Sagan songs that are both humorous and inspiring.
I LOVE those songs.
Aren’t they great? I just found them one day on youtube, he’ll probably make more.
I have a Cosmos fan-fiction burried somewhere back there in the Books in Progress archive. (Yes, Cosmos fan-fiction. Somebody had to write it.)
It starts with Post 15 here: https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=1381