Carl Sagan

Carl Edward Sagan (New York, November 9, 1934 - Seattle, December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, writer, and science popularizer. He was initially an associate professor at Harvard University and later a senior professor at Cornell University. In the latter, he was the first scientist to hold the David Duncan Chair of Astronomy and Space Sciences, created in 1976, and also director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies.

He was an advocate of scientific skeptical thinking and the scientific method, a pioneer of exobiology, a promoter of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence through the SETI project. He promoted the sending of messages aboard space probes, intended to inform possible extraterrestrial civilizations about human culture. Through his observations of the Venusian atmosphere, he was among the first scientists to study the greenhouse effect on a planetary scale.

Carl Sagan gained great popularity thanks to the award-winning television documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Journey, produced in 1980, of which he was the narrator and co-author. It was the most watched series in the history of American public television, with an audience of more than 500 million people in some 60 countries. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the 1985 science fiction novel Contact, on which the 1997 film of the same name was based. His publications, containing 595,000 items, are archived at the Library of Congress.

He has also published numerous scientific articles, and has authored, co-authored, or edited more than twenty popular science books. In 1978 he won the Pulitzer Prize for "General Nonfiction Literature"; by his book The Dragons of Eden .

Throughout his life, Sagan received numerous awards and honors for his work as a communicator of science and culture. Today he is considered one of the most charismatic and influential popularizers of science, thanks to his ability to transmit scientific ideas and cultural aspects to the non-specialized public with simplicity that is not exempt from rigor.

Childhood and adolescence

She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of Ukrainian Jews. Her father, Sam Sagan, was a garment worker born in Kamianets-Podilsky, Ukraine, and her mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a homemaker. Carl was named after him in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words "the mother she never knew." He had a sister named Carol.

The family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean in Bensonhurst, a suburb of Brooklyn. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of the three main Jewish groups. Both Carl and his sister agree that his father was not particularly religious, but his mother certainly believed in God, and was active in the temple...; and served only kosher meat.During the height of the Great Depression, his father had to take a job as a movie usher.

According to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagan's internal warfare was the result of his close relationship with his parents, who were opposites in many ways. Sagan attributed her later analytical impulses to her mother, a woman who experienced extreme poverty as a child, growing up near-homeless in New York City during World War I and the 1920s. She had ambitions of her own. of a young woman, but blocked by social restrictions, by her poverty, by being a woman and a wife, and by being Jewish. Davidson points out that she therefore adored her son; he would make her unfulfilled dreams come true.

However, his ability to be surprised came from his father. In his spare time, he gave away apples to the poor or helped defuse tensions between employers and workers in New York's tumultuous textile industry. Although intimidated by Carl's brilliance, by his childish babble about stars and dinosaurs, he took it with calms his son's curiosity, as part of his education. Years later, as a writer and scientist, Carl would draw on his childhood memories to illustrate scientific ideas, as he did in his book The Demons and the World. Sagan thus describes the influence of his parents on his later thinking:

My parents weren't scientists. They didn't know much about science. But when I started skepticism simultaneously and asked questions, they taught me the two ways of thinking that coexist precariously and which are fundamental to the scientific method.

The Universal Exposition of 1939

Sagan recalled that he had one of his best experiences when, at the age of four or five, his parents took him to the World's Fair in New York in 1939, which was a turning point in his life. Some time later he remembered the moving map of the America of Tomorrow :

They looked beautiful highways and crosses at level and small General Motors cars that carried people to the skyscrapers, buildings with beautiful pinnacles, bouncing... and everything looked great!

In other exhibits, he recalled how a lamp shining on a photocell created a crackling sound, and how the sound of a tuning fork was converted into a wave on an oscilloscope. He also witnessed the technology of the future that would replace radio: television. Sagan wrote:

Simply, the world contained wonders that I had never imagined. How could a tone become an image, and a light become noise?

He was also able to see one of the most publicized events of the Exposition: the burial of a time capsule in Flushing Meadows, containing memorabilia from the 1930s to be recovered by succeeding generations of a future millennium. "The time capsule got Carl excited," writes Davidson. As an adult, Sagan and his colleagues created similar time capsules, but to send them out into the galaxy: the Pioneer license plate and the Voyager gold record were the product of Sagan's memories of the World's Fair.

World War II

During World War II, Sagan's family worried about the fate of their European relatives. Sagan, however, was generally unaware of the details of the course of the war. He wrote: "It is true that we had relatives who got caught up in the Holocaust. Hitler was not a popular subject in our house... But, on the other hand, I was quite isolated from the horrors of war. His sister, Carol, said that their mother wanted to protect Carl above all else...She was having an extraordinarily hard time with World War II and the Holocaust. In her book The World and Its Demons (1996), Sagan includes his memories of that troubled period, when his family faced the reality of the war in Europe but tried to prevent it from undermining their optimistic spirit.

Curiosity about nature

Shortly after entering elementary school, Sagan began to express a strong curiosity about nature. Sagan remembered his first solo visits to the public library, at the age of five, when his mother gave him a reader's card. He wanted to know what the stars were, since none of his friends or his parents knew how to give him a clear answer:

I went to the librarian and asked for a book about the stars... And the answer was sensational. It turned out the Sun was a star but it was very close. The stars were suns, but so far that they only looked like light puntits... Suddenly, the scale of the universe opened for me. It was kind of a religious experience. There was something magnificent about it, a grandeur, a scale that has never left me. He'll never leave me.

Around the time he was six or seven years old, Sagan and a friend went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There they were at the Hayden Planetarium and wandered through the museum's exhibits of space objects, such as meteorites, and displays of dinosaurs and animals in natural settings. Sagan wrote of those visits:

I was paralyzed by realistic diorama representations of animals and their habitats around the world. Ice penguins barely lit from Antarctica... A family of gorillas, with the male beating his chest... A grizzly bear standing on its back legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring at me in the eye.

Sagan's parents helped fuel his growing interest in science by buying him chemistry sets and reading materials. His interest in space was, however, his main focus, especially after reading the science stories. -fiction by writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, who stimulated his imagination about what life would be like on other planets, like Mars. According to biographer Ray Spangenburg, these early years of Sagan's attempt to understand the mysteries of the planets became a driving force in his life, a continual spark to his intellect, and a quest that would never be forgotten..

Scientific training and career

Get in the 1951 yearbook of Rahway High School

Carl Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1951. He enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the Ryerson Astronomical Society. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1954 with special honors and generals, in 1955 he graduated in Sciences and in 1956 he obtained a master's degree in Physics, before receiving his doctorate in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1960. During his undergraduate period, Sagan worked in the laboratory of the geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller. From 1960 to 1962, Sagan enjoyed a Miller Fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley. Meanwhile, he published a 1961 paper in the journal Science on the atmosphere of Venus, while also working with the NASA Mariner 2 team, and served as "Planetary Science Consultant" for the RAND Corporation From 1962 to 1968, he worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Following the publication of Sagan's article in Science, in 1961 Sagan was offered the opportunity to give a colloquium at Harvard by Harvard University astronomers Fred Whipple and Donald Menzel and subsequently offered a lecturing position at the institution. Instead, Sagan asked to be made an assistant professor, and eventually Whipple and Menzel were able to convince Harvard to offer Sagan the assistant professorship he applied for. Sagan lectured, conducted research, and advised graduate students at the institution. from 1963 to 1968, as well as working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, also located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1968, Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard. He later stated that the decision was highly unexpected. The denial of tenure has been blamed on several factors, including focusing his interests too broadly on a number of areas (whereas the norm in academia is to become a renowned expert in a narrow specialty), and perhaps because of his well-publicized scientific advocacy, which some scientists perceived as borrowing the ideas of others for little more than self-promotion. A consultant from his undergraduate years, Harold Urey, wrote a letter to the ownership committee strongly recommending against granting ownership to Sagan.

So Sagan taught and did research at Harvard University until 1968, when he joined Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he taught critical thinking courses until his death in 1996. In 1971, he was Appointed full professor and director of the Planetary Studies Laboratory. From 1972 to 1981, Sagan was Associate Director of Cornell's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. From 1976 until his death, he was the first holder of the David Duncan Chair in Astronomy and Space Sciences. In London, he gave the 1977 edition of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

Sagan has been linked to the US space program since its inception. Since the 1950s, he worked as a consultant to NASA, where one of his assignments was to give the Apollo Program instructions to participating astronauts before they left for the Moon. Sagan participated in many of the missions that sent robotic spacecraft to explore the solar system, preparing experiments for various expeditions. He conceived the idea of adding a universal and enduring message to ships destined to leave the solar system that could potentially be understandable by any extraterrestrial intelligence that encountered it. Sagan prepared the first physical message sent into outer space: an anodized plaque, attached to the Pioneer 10 space probe, launched in 1972. Pioneer 11, carrying another copy of the plaque, was launched the following year. Sagan continued to refine his designs; the most elaborate message he helped develop and prepare was the Voyager Gold Record, which was sent with the Voyager space probes in 1977. Sagan frequently opposed the decision to fund the space shuttle and space station at the expense of future robotic missions.

From 1968 to 1979, Sagan was editor of Icarus Magazine, a professional publication on planetary research. He was a co-founder of the Planetary Society, the world's largest group dedicated to space research, with more than one hundred thousand members in more than 149 countries, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the SETI Institute. Sagan also served as Chairman of the Division of Planetary Science (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society, Chairman of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Geophysical Union. American for the Advancement of Science.

Scientific achievements

The founders of the Planetary Society. Carl Sagan, sitting right.

Sagan's contributions were vital to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus. In the early 1960s, no one knew for sure what the basic conditions of the planet's surface were, and Sagan listed the possibilities in a report that was later released in a Time-Life book entitled Planets. In his opinion, Venus was a very hot and dry planet, as opposed to the temperate paradise that others imagined. He had investigated the radio emissions from Venus and concluded that its surface temperature must be about 380°C. As a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he participated in the first Mariner Program missions to Venus, working on project design and management. In 1962, the Mariner 2 probe confirmed his conclusions about the surface conditions of the planet.

Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that one of Saturn's moons, Titan, might harbor oceans of liquid compounds on its surface, and that one of Jupiter's moons, Europa, might have subterranean oceans of water. This would make Europa potentially inhabitable by life forms. Europa's subterranean ocean of water was later confirmed indirectly by the Galileo space probe. The mystery of Titan's reddish haze was also solved with Sagan's help, due to complex organic molecules constantly raining down on the surface of the Saturnian moon.

Sagan also contributed to a better understanding of the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter and of the seasonal changes of Mars. He determined that Venus' atmosphere is extremely hot and dense, with pressures gradually increasing up to the planetary surface. He also perceived global warming as a growing man-made danger, and compared its progress on Earth to the natural evolution of Venus: on its way to becoming a hot planet and unfit for life as a result of a runaway greenhouse effect. He also studied the color variations on the surface of Mars and concluded that these were not seasonal or plant changes, as many believed, but rather displacements of surface dust caused by wind storms.

However, Sagan is best known for his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including the experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids by radiation and from basic chemical reactions. He and his Cornell colleague Edwin Ernest Salpeter, speculated about the possibility of the existence of life in the clouds of Jupiter, given the composition of the dense atmosphere of the planet, rich in organic molecules.

Activism

Pacifist

Sagan believed that Drake's equation, in the absence of more reasonable estimates, suggests the formation of a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations, but the lack of evidence for their existence, highlighted by the Fermi paradox, would indicate the tendency of technological civilizations towards self-destruction. This gave rise to his interest in identifying and publicizing the various ways in which humanity could destroy itself, in the hope of averting such a catastrophe and eventually enabling humans to become a species capable of travel. through space. Sagan's deep concern about the potential destruction of human civilization in a nuclear holocaust was captured in a memorable sequence in the latest episode of the series Cosmos, titled Who Speaks for Earth?. Sagan had just resigned from his position on the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Council and voluntarily withheld permission to access top-secret matters in protest of the Vietnam War. Following his marriage to writer and activist, Ann Druyan, In June 1981, Sagan increased his political activity, specifically in his opposition to the nuclear arms race, during the Ronald Reagan presidency.

At the height of the Cold War, Sagan devoted some effort to raising public awareness of the effects of nuclear war when a mathematical model of climate suggested that a nuclear exchange of sufficient proportions could destabilize the delicate balance of Life on earth. He was one of the five authors (the author & # 34; S & # 34;) of the TTAPS report, as said research paper was known. Finally, he was co-author of the scientific article that hypothesized a global nuclear winter after a nuclear war.In his book The World and its Demons , Carl Sagan recounted his participation in the political debates on the nuclear winter. He was also co-author of the book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race. #34;), a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of nuclear winter.

In March 1983, Reagan unveiled the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative, a project in which billions of dollars were invested to develop a complete defense system against nuclear missile attacks, which was popularly known as Star Wars Program. Sagan opposed the project, arguing that it was technically impossible to develop such a system to the required level of perfection, that it would be far more expensive to develop than for an enemy to circumvent it by decoys or other means, and that its construction would seriously upset the nuclear balance. between the United States and the Soviet Union, making any progress toward nuclear disarmament impossible.

When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, beginning on August 6, 1985, the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Reagan administration dismissed the dramatic initiative calling it propaganda, and refused to follow the Soviet example. In response, US anti-nuclear and peace activists staged a series of protests at the Nevada test site, beginning on Easter Sunday 1986 and continuing through 1987. Hundreds of people were arrested, including Sagan, who he was arrested twice when trying to jump a security cordon.

Search for Alien Life

Sagan championed the search for extraterrestrial life, urging the scientific community to use radio telescopes to search for signals from potentially intelligent alien life forms. Sagan was so persuasive that, in 1982, he managed to publish in the magazine Science a petition defending the SETI Project signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners, which was a huge boost. to the respectability of such a controversial field. Sagan also assisted Dr. Frank Drake in preparing the Arecibo message, a radio broadcast directed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, intended to inform possible extraterrestrial beings of the existence of Earth.

Marijuana Advocate

Sagan was a consumer and advocate for the use of marijuana. Under the pseudonym Mr. X, contributed an essay on smoked cannabis to the 1971 book, Marihuana Reconsidered. The essay explained that marijuana use had helped inspire some of Sagan's work and enhance their sensory and intellectual experiences. After Sagan's death, his friend Lester Grinspoon disclosed this information to biographer Keay Davidson. The publication of the biography Carl Sagan: A Life in 1999 brought media attention to this aspect of Sagan's life. Shortly after his death, his widow, Ann Druyan, agreed to serve on the advisory board of NORML, a foundation dedicated to cannabis law reform.

Private life, ideas and beliefs

Marriages and offspring

Sagan was married three times: in 1957, to biologist Lynn Margulis, mother of writer Dorion Sagan and computer programmer and businessman Jeremy Sagan; in 1968, with artist and screenwriter Linda Salzman, mother of writer and screenwriter Nick Sagan; and in 1981, with the writer and activist Ann Druyan, mother of the producer, screenwriter and director Sasha Sagan and Sam Sagan; Union that would last until the death of the scientist in 1996.

Science and religion

Writer Isaac Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he had ever met whose intellect surpassed his, the other being computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky.

Sagan often wrote about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about the conventional conceptualization of God as a knowing being:

Some people think of God imagining an old man, of great dimensions, with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, carrying the death account of each sparrow. Others — for example, Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein — considered that God is basically the total sum of the physical laws that describe the universe. I do not know of any signs of weight in favor of some patriarch capable of controlling human destiny from somewhere privileged hidden in heaven, but it would be foolish to deny the existence of physical laws.

In another description of his view of God, Sagan states flatly:

The idea that God is a white man of great dimensions and of long white beard, sitting in the sky and bearing the account of the death of each sparrow is ridiculous. But if by God one understands the set of physical laws governing the universe, then it is clear that God exists. This God is emotionally unsatisfactory... it doesn't make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

In the book The World and Its Demons (1995), Sagan exemplifies the fallacy of the special argument with exclusively religious examples:

A special argument, often to save a proposition in a deep rhetorical problem (e.g.: How can a compassionate God condemn to torment future generations because, against their orders, a woman induced a man to eat an apple? Special argument: You do not understand the subtle doctrine of free will. Or: How can there be a equally divine Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the same person? Special argument: You do not understand the divine mystery of the Holy Trinity. Or: How could God allow the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam—obliged each in their way to heroic measures of affectionate kindness and compassion—to perpetrate so cruelty for so long? Special argument: Again you do not understand free will. And, in any case, the ways of God are mysterious;

In 1996, in response to a question about his religious beliefs, Sagan replied: I am an agnostic. Sagan's view of religion has been interpreted as a form of pantheism comparable to Einstein's belief in Spinoza's God. Sagan maintained that the idea of a creator of the universe was difficult to prove or disprove, and that the only scientific discovery that could challenge it would be that of an infinitely old universe. According to his late wife, Ann Druyan, Sagan was a non-believer:

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for being a non-believer, many people approached me — it still happens sometimes — to ask me if Carl changed at the end and became a believer in the other life. They also ask me often if I think I'll see you again. Carl faced his death with untiring courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragic thing was knowing we'd never see each other again. I don't expect to meet Carl again.

In 2006, Ann Druyan edited the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, delivered by Sagan in Glasgow in 1985, including them in a book called The Diversity of Science: A Personal View of the Search for God, in which the astronomer expounds his point of view on divinity in the natural world.

Freethinker and Skeptic

Carl Sagan (in the center) talks with CDC workers in 1988.

Sagan is also considered a freethinker and skeptic; one of his most famous phrases, from the Cosmos series, is: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This phrase is based on an almost identical phrase by his fellow founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Marcello Truzzi: An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. This idea originated with Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), a French mathematician and astronomer, who said that the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportional to its rarity.

Throughout his life, Sagan's books built on his naturalistic and skeptical worldview. In The Demon World, Sagan presented tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacies and fraud, essentially advocating extensive use of critical thinking and the scientific method. The collection Billions , published in 1997 after Sagan's death, contains essays such as his views on abortion, and his widow, Ann Druyan's, account of the death of him as skeptic, agnostic and freethinker.

Sagan warned against the human tendency toward anthropocentrism. He was an advisor to the Cornell Alumni for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Towards the end of the chapter Blues for a Red Planet, of the book Cosmos, Sagan wrote: «If there is life on Mars I think we shouldn't do anything with the planet. Mars would then belong to the Martians, even if the Martians were only microbes."

The UFO Phenomenon

Sagan has shown an interest in reports of the UFO phenomenon since at least August 3, 1952, when he wrote a letter to US Secretary of State Dean Acheson asking how the US would respond if the flying saucers turned out to be of origin. alien. Subsequently, in 1964, he had several discussions on the matter with Jacques Vallée. Despite his skepticism about getting any extraordinary answers to the UFO question, Sagan believed that scientists should study the phenomenon, if only because of the great interest that the matter aroused in the public.

Stuart Appelle comments that Sagan “wrote frequently about what he perceived to be logical and empirical fallacies about UFOs and abduction experiences. Sagan rejected the extraterrestrial explanation of the phenomenon but felt that examining UFO reports would have empirical and pedagogical benefits, and that the matter would therefore be a legitimate subject of study."

In 1966, Sagan was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Review of Project Blue Book, promoted by the US Air Force to investigate the UFO phenomenon. The committee concluded that the Blue Book left something to be desired as scientific study, and recommended a university-level project to submit the phenomenon to more scientific scrutiny. The result was the formation of the Condon Committee (1966-1968), led by the physicist Edward Condon, and which, in its final report, formally ruled that UFOs, regardless of their origin and significance, did not behave in a consistent manner for represent a threat to national security.

Ron Westrum writes: "The high point of Sagan's treatment of the UFO issue was the 1969 AAAS symposium. Participants expounded a wide range of views formed on the subject, including not only supporters such as James McDonald and J. Allen Hynek but also skeptics like astronomers William Hartmann and Donald Menzel. The list of speakers was balanced, and it is to Sagan's credit that the event took place despite pressure from Edward Condon." Together with physicist Thornton Page, Sagan edited the lectures and discussions presented at the symposium; these were published in 1972 under the title UFOs: A Scientific Debate. In some of Sagan's numerous books the UFO question is examined (as in one of the Cosmos episodes) and the existence of a religious background to the phenomenon is affirmed.

In 1980, Sagan revealed his views on interstellar travel again in the series Cosmos. In one of his last works written by him, Sagan stated that the probability of alien spacecraft visiting Earth was very small. However, Sagan believed that it was plausible that Cold War concerns contributed to governments misleading citizens about UFOs, and that "some of the UFO analysis and reports, and perhaps voluminous files, have been declared inaccessible to the tax-paying public… It is time those files were declassified and made available to all.” He also cautioned against drawing conclusions from redacted UFO data and insisted that there was no clear evidence that possible aliens had visited Earth either in the past or present.

Deviation Dilemma

In his later years, Sagan advocated the creation of an organized search for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could impact the Earth. Many experts, among other solutions, suggested the creation of large nuclear bombs, to be able to alter the orbit of a NEO susceptible to impact against Earth. For Sagan, this would present a "deflection dilemma": since there is the ability to move an asteroid away from Earth, there is also the ability to deflect a non-threatening object towards it, thus creating a true weapon. of mass destruction.

Wrong assumption

Due to the Kuwaiti oil fires that started in January 1991, Sagan and his colleagues at "TTAPS" They warned that if the fire raged for several months, enough smoke from it could reach such heights that it could dismantle agricultural activity in South Asia. These claims were the subject of a televised debate between Carl Sagan and physicist Frederick Singer for Nightline, in which Sagan claimed that the effects of the smoke would be similar to those of a nuclear winter.

The fires continued for several months before they could be put out and did not cause any continental-size cooling. Sagan later acknowledged, in The World and its Demons, that this prediction did not turn out to be correct: it was pitch-dark at noon and temperatures dropped between 4 and 6 °C in the Gulf Persian, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared. In 2007, a study applied modern computer models to the Kuwaiti oil fires, finding that individual plumes of smoke are not capable of rising up into the stratosphere, but that smoke from fires that cover a large area, such as some forest fires or the burning of entire cities due to a nuclear attack, would raise significant amounts of smoke to stratospheric levels.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Sagan briefly served as a consultant on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick. He proposed that the film suggest, without showing it, the existence of extraterrestrial superintelligence.

The Apple Case

In 1994, Apple Computer engineers codenamed the Power Macintosh 7100 personal computer Carl Sagan. The name was only used internally, but Sagan was concerned that it would become a means of promoting the product and sent Apple a letter of withdrawal. Apple agreed, but the engineers responded by changing the internal codename to BHA (abbreviation for Butt-Head Astronomer - Astronomo Caraculo). Sagan sued Apple for defamation in federal court. The court accepted Apple's motion to dismiss Sagan's claim and opined, in obiter dictum, that a reader placed in the context would understand that Apple was clearly trying to respond in a humorous and satirical manner. , and that strengthen reason in concluding that the defendant was attempting to criticize the plaintiff's reputation or competence as an astronomer. The expertise of a scientist is not seriously attacked by using the indeterminate expression & # 34; caraculo & # 34;. Sagan, then, denounced the initial use of his name for allusions, but lost again and Sagan appealed the ruling. In November 1995, a settlement was reached out of court, and Apple's patent and trademark office issued a conciliatory statement: 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.

Illness and death

Two years after being diagnosed with myelodysplasia, and after undergoing three bone marrow transplants from his sister, Dr. Carl Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 at the Center for Cancer Research Fred Hutchinson of Seattle, Washington, on December 20, 1996. He was buried in Lakeview Cemetery, Ithaca, New York.

Acknowledgments and Awards

NASA Medal to Distinguished Public Service. Sagan got it in 1977.

Carl Sagan has received various awards, decorations and honors, including:

• Miller Research Fellowship (1960-1962) of the Miller Institute.
• NASA Apollo Program Award.
• Klumpke-Roberts Award (1974) of the Pacific Astronomical Society.
• John W. Campbell Special non-fiction Memorial (1974) by The cosmic connection.
• NASA Medal to Distinguished Public Service (1977).
• NASA Medal to the Exceptional Scientific Body.
• Pulitzer Prize (1978) in the category of general non-fiction work to the essay The dragons of Eden.
• Lowell Thomas Award from the Scout Club at the 75th Anniversary.
• Peabody Award (1980) to the series Cosmos.
• Emmy Award (1981), in the category of Individual Highlighted Logro, by the series Cosmos: a personal journey.
• Award Primetime Emmy (1981), in the category of Featured Documentary Series, by the series Cosmos: a personal journey.
• Annual Televisive Excellence Award (1981) granted by Ohio State University to the series Cosmos: a personal journey.
• Hugo Award for the "Best Report of No Fiction" (1981) to the book Cosmos.
• Humanist of the Year (1981) of the American Humanist Association.
• John F. Kennedy Prize for Astronautics (1982) of the American Astronautical Society.
• Joseph Priestley Award — "For outstanding contributions to the well-being of humanity."
• Konstantin Tsiolkovski Medal awarded by the Soviet Federation of Cosmonauts.
• Locus Prize (1986) to the novel Contact.
• Elogio de la Razón Award (1987) of the Committee for Scientific Research of the Paranormal Affirmations
• Masursky Award of the American Astronomical Society.
• Medalla Oersted (1990) of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
• Galbert Prize for Astronautics.
• Helen Caldicott Award to Leadership – awarded by the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament.^{[chuckles]required]}
• Public Welfare Medal (1994) of the National Academy of Sciences outstanding contributions to the application of science to public welfare..
• Isaac Asimov Prize (1994) of the Committee for Scientific Research of the Paranormal Affirmations.
• San Francisco Chronicle Award (1998) by Contact.^{[chuckles]required]}
• Post 99 in the ranking of major Americans, on 5 June 2005, in the series The Greatest American Discovery Channel.
• Member of the New Jersey Fame Hall since 2009.

Poshumous recognition

Pendant dedicated to Carl Sagan on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Path of Famous.

The 1997 film Contact, based on Sagan's novel of the same name and finished after his death, ends with the dedication To Carl.

Also in 1997, the Sagan Planet Walk, a recreation of the solar system, was inaugurated in Ithaca, New York, with an extension of 1.2 km, from the center of the pedestrian zone (called The Commons) to the Sciencenter, a participatory science museum, of which Sagan was a founding member of the advisory board.

The landing site of the Mars Pathfinder drone was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station on July 5, 1997. In addition, asteroid 2709 Sagan is named after the scientist.

Nick Sagan, son of Carl, is the author of several episodes of the Star Trek franchise. The episode of the series Star Trek: Enterprise titled Terra Prime, shows a brief image of the remains of the rover Sojourner, which was part of the Mars Pathfinder mission , located next to a memorial at the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, on the Martian surface. The monument features a quote from Sagan: For whatever reason you're on Mars, I'm delighted you're here, and I wish I were with you. Steve Squyres, Sagan's student, led the team that successfully deposited the Spirit rover and the Opportunity rover on Mars in 2004.

On November 9, 2001, the 67th anniversary of Sagan's birth, NASA's Ames Research Center dedicated the site of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos to the scientist. NASA Chief Daniel Goldin said: "Carl was an incredible visionary, and now his legacy can be preserved and expanded by a 21st century research and training laboratory dedicated to improving our understanding of life." in the universe and to uphold the cause of space exploration forever and ever". Ann Druyan was at the opening of the Center's doors on October 22, 2006.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Sagan's death, David Morrison, one of his former students, recalled Sagan's immense contributions to planetary research, public understanding of science, and the skeptical movement in Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

There are at least three awards named after Sagan in honor of him:

• The Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science Awarded by the Council of Presidents of the Scientific Society (CSSP). Sagan was the first winner in 1993.
• The Carl Sagan Memorial Award, awarded as a whole since 1997 American Astronautical Society and the Planetary Society.
• The Medal Carl Sagan to Excellence in the Divulgation of Planetary Science, awarded since 1998 by the Planetary Sciences Division (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society, the active planetary scientists who have done some outstanding outreach work. Sagan was one of the members of the original DPS organizing committee.

In 2006, the Carl Sagan Medal was awarded to astrobiologist and writer David Grinspoon, son of Sagan's friend Lester Grinspoon.

On December 20, 2006, the tenth anniversary of Sagan's death, blogger Joel Schlosberg organized a blogathon to commemorate the event. The idea was supported by Nick Sagan, and many members of the blogging community participated.

In August 2007, Sagan was posthumously awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Independent Research Group (IIG), an honor also given to Harry Houdini and James Randi.

In 2009, the record company Third Man Records organized an electronic music project called Symphony of Science by the musician John Boswell, composed from sound fragments and remixed videos of various popular science works, including the series Cosmos. The resulting videos stored on YouTube have received more than twenty million views. Thanks to remix tasks, Sagan has been able to "sing" on the topic A Glorious Dawn and "contribute" in others.

Since 2009, at the initiative of the Center for Inquiry, various organizations in favor of secular humanism and scientific research promote the celebration of Carl Sagan Day on November 9 of each year.

The 2014 Swedish sci-fi short film Wanderers uses excerpts from Sagan's narration from his book Pale Blue Dot, played over digitally created images of humanity's possible future expansion into outer space.

In February 2015, Finland-based symphonic music band Nightwish released the song "Sagan" as a non-album bonus track for their single "Élan". The song, written by the band's composer/keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen, is a tribute to the life and work of the late Carl Sagan.

In August 2015, it was announced that Warner Bros. was planning a biopic of Sagan's life.

Billions

From his appearance on Cosmos and his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Sagan was coined the thousands of millions and billions -in American English, billions and billions. Sagan claimed that he never used that phrase in the series.The closest he came to expressing it is in the book Cosmos , where he talks about & # 34;thousands and billions & # 34;:

A galaxy consists of gas and dust and stars, of thousands and billions of stars.

However, his frequent use of the word billions, emphasizing the pronunciation of the "b" (intentionally so as not to resort to more cumbersome alternatives, such as saying billions with a "b", so that the viewer could clearly distinguish said word from millions —millions—), made him a favorite target of humorists such as Johnny Carson, Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers, Bronson Pinchot, Penn Jillette, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa lampooned the expression in his song Be In My Video, along with the term "atomic light" (atomic light). Sagan took all this in good humor to the point that his latest book was entitled Billions, opening it with a mocking analysis of the famous expression, noting that Carson himself was an amateur astronomer and that his numbers often included elements of real science.

His habitual descriptions of enormous quantities on a cosmic scale instilled in popular perception the wonder of the vastness of space and time, such as his phrase The total number of stars in the Universe is greater than that of all the grains of sand from all the beaches on planet Earth. As a humorous tribute, a sagan has been defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to at least four billion, since The smallest number that can be described as billions and billions is two billion plus two billion.

Informative work

A pale blue point: The Earth is only a bright pixel photographed from the Voyager 16 billion kilometers away (beyond Pluto). Sagan convinced NASA to generate this image.

Sagan was known for his work as a popularizer of science, for his efforts to increase the general public's understanding of science, and for his position in favor of scientific skepticism and against pseudoscience. He wrote popular science books that reflect and develop some of the topics covered in Cosmos, including The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the evolution of human intelligence (1977), which won a Pulitzer Prize and became the best-selling English-language science book of all time; and Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science.

He also wrote, in 1985, the successful science-fiction novel Contact, based on a screenplay project he devised with his wife in 1979, but would not live to see the film adaptation of it, released in 1997. After Cosmos, wrote a book called A Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which was selected as a 1995 Outstanding Book by The New York Times. In January of that year, Sagan appeared on The Charlie Rose Show on PBS. He also wrote an introduction to Stephen Hawking's bestselling book, A Brief History of Time, in its first English-language edition. (1988). Said introduction was replaced in later editions because Sagan was the owner of the copy rights.

Books

Arranged chronologically, the years correspond to the dates of first publication in English. The ISBN may not be related to the year.

• Smart Life in the Universe (Iósif Shklovski; co-author) (1966) - ISBN 978-84-7634-911-3
• Planets (Jonathon Norton Leonard; co-author) (1966) - About the possible origin, composition, atmosphere and surface of the planets, and their possibilities of housing life.
• Communication with extraterrestrial intelligences (1973) - ISBN 978-84-320-3551-7
• The cosmic connection (1973) - Discuss the probability of the existence of intelligent alien life - ISBN 978-84-01-47090-5
• Mars and the mind of man (Arthur C. Clarke et al.; co-author) (1973) - Discussion between various authors in relation to Mars, on the occasion of the arrival of Mariner 9 to that planet - ISBN 978-0-06-010443-6
• Other worlds (1975) - ISBN 978-0-552-66439-4
• The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977) - ISBN 0-394-41045-9
• Broca's brain: reflections on the exciting world of science (1979) - Collecting scientific articles - ISBN 978-84-253-1334-9
• Cosmos (1980) - Complementary book on the homonymous documentary series; it is its most popular and influential outreach work, and that made it world famous - ISBN 978-84-08-05304-0
• Earth Walls: Voyager's Interstellar Message (1981) - ISBN 978-84-320-3598-2
• The comet (with Ann Druyan) (1985) - About the origin of comets, was written in advance of the Halley comet step in 1986 - ISBN 978-84-320-4368-0
• Contact (1985) - Novel about an eventual contact with an alien civilization; served as the basis for the 1997 homonymous film - ISBN 978-84-01-46223-8
• The cold and the darkness: the world after a nuclear war (Paul R. Ehrlich; co-author) (1986) - ISBN 978-84-206-9525-9
• Nuclear Winter (with Richard Turk) (1991) - Analyzes the possible consequences of a nuclear war on terrestrial climate - ISBN 978-84-01-24037-9
• Shadows of forgotten ancestors (with Ann Druyan) (1993) - About the origins of the human species and the development of prehistoric societies - ISBN 978-84-226-4853-6
• A pale blue point: a vision of the human future in space (1994) - Planted as sequel Cosmos, discusses the position of the human being in the Universe and analyzes its possibilities as a traveling species in space - ISBN 978-84-08-05907-3
• The world and its demons: science as a light in darkness (1995) - A defense of the scientific method and skepticism against superstition and pseudoscience - ISBN 978-84-08-06015-4
• Thousands of Millions: Thoughts of Life and Death in the Millennium Preamble (1997) - Last written by Sagan, considered his ideological will - ISBN 84-406-8009-9
• The diversity of science: a personal vision of the search for God (by Ann Druyan) (2006) - Posthumous compilation of Sagan's interventions at the Gifford Conferences on Natural Theology - ISBN 978-84-08-07455-7

"Cosmos" Series

In 1980, Sagan hosted, co-wrote and co-produced, with his wife Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, the popular thirteen-part television series, Cosmos: A Personal Journey, produced by PBS., and which followed the format of the series The Rise of Man, presented by Jacob Bronowski. This covered a wide spectrum of scientific matters that included the origin of life and the evolution of the Universe and the culture of the human species, raised as a means of self-knowledge of the former. It is his most popular and influential popularization work, and the one that made him world famous.

The series won an Emmy Award and a Peabody Award. It has been broadcast in more than 60 countries and watched by more than 600 million people, making it the most-watched PBS program in history. In addition, Time magazine published a cover story on Sagan shortly after the premiere, referring to him as the creator, main author, narrator and host of the new public television series Cosmos.

The “Sagan Effect”

Sagan's success and fame, due to his dedication to outreach, caused him professional problems and ridicule from some colleagues. In the 1990s, the idea spread among the academic world that he was dedicated more to dissemination than to research, and thus he lost the opportunity to enter Harvard University and the United States National Academy of Sciences as a numerary. However, Sagan's scientific production had maintained the same levels. This type of situation, which is relatively common among scientists who are also dedicated to popularizing science and exposing themselves to public opinion, is known as the "Sagan effect" following the case of the astrophysicist.

Carl Sagan in popular culture

• Carl Sagan appears in some of the musical videos that make up John Boswell's Symphony of Science:A Glorious Dawn», «We are all conected», «Our place in the Cosmos», «The Unbroken Thread», «The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)», «The Case of Mars», «A Wave of Reason», «The Big Begining», «Ode to the Brain» and «Beyond the Horizon».