Carl Sagan

Mitch is reporting on one of my personal heroes, Carl Sagan. I was privileged to meet him when he came to my undergraduate campus in the '70s. He inspired me to think philosophically about what it means to be "starstuff, contemplating the stars"... and everything else.

• Carl Sagan explains evolution in 8 minutes
• Carl Sagan in a children's book: "Star Stuff"
• Carl Sagan on literacy and democracy
• Carl Sagan on mystery & living with the unknown
• Carl Sagan on the meaning of life
• Varieties of Religious Experience by William James AND Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan
• Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known... We are a way for the cosmos to know itself... it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." Carl Sagan
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"The cosmic calendar begins on January 1..." Sagan on "the beginning"
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"Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish, a hundred million years ago, something like mice; then million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, New York: Random House, 1994, p. 332.

...Who Speaks for Earth? We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far. 

These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. It has the sound of epic myth, but it is simply a description of the evolution of the cosmos as revealed by science in our time. And we, we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we have begun at least to wonder about our origins -- star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth, and perhaps throughout the cosmos. 

Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring! Cosmos

...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... pbd

”For Neil, a future astronomer -- Carl.” At the end of the day, he drove me back to the bus station. The snow was falling harder. He wrote his phone number -- his home phone number -- on a scrap of paper. And he said if the bus can’t get through: call me, and spend the night at my home with my family. I already knew I wanted to become a scientist, but that afternoon I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become. He reached out to me, and to countless others, inspiring so many of us to study, teach, and do science. Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations..." Cosmos 2014, ep.1 

Carl Sagan Writes a Letter to 17-Year-Old Neil deGrasse Tyson (1975)