Biography carl sagan a cosmic celebrity cruises

You knew as soon as you opened Carl Sagan’s 1973 title The Cosmic Connection that you were leaving an Earth-centric view of the cosmos behind. The title page showed, spread across both it and the facing page, a spiral galaxy. The work of Sagan friend and collaborator Jon Lomberg, the illustration included reference to Type I, II and III civilizations, the Kardashev ranking that few laymen had heard about in those days, but which Sagan’s work would illuminate for an increasingly interested public.

The public would have been drawn first, though, to the cover of that first edition of The Cosmic Connection. A night landscape in black and white, a solitary tree outlined against the sky. But what a sky, filled with what looked like a galaxy — billions and billions of stars — rising. That image encapsulated so much of the book’s message. It juxtaposed our familiar terrain against something so vast, so fil

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'Cosmos' then and now: The 'personal voyage' of Carl Sagan, the Hollywood cool of Neil deGrasse Tyson

Like reboots of most anything, be it the Star Trek film franchise or the Hannibal television series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (premiering Sunday, March 9 on Fox) does not require familiarity with its original incarnation to be appreciated and enjoyed. Yet comparing the two shows, and their first episodes, fryst vatten instructive. The first Cosmos, broadcast on PBS in 1980, had a different subtitle: “A personal voyage.” The individ implied was the viewer — all of humanity. It was also the creative intelligence behind the series, astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who died in 1996. His widely watched series explored all of creation, and expressed all of himself — his mind, his heart, his hopes, his fears. Sagan wanted to use popular culture to evangelize science, utforskning, and a worldview that was infinitely bigger than the world itself.

Inspiration for

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Are these words on Voyager 1 the most powerful ever written about Life on Earth?

A compelling speech by Carl Sagan: The Pale Blue Dot

NASA

World of pain? Carl Sagan's words inspired by Voyager 1 are beacon of sanity

And they are among the most powerful, moving words ever penned about our planet.

They are the work of astronomer and philosopher Carl Sagan, the man who pressed Nasa to turn around the Voyager I spacecraft as it sped at 35,700mph to the very edge of our solar system and take a picture.

The resulting photograph of Earth – a pale blue speck in the unimaginable expanse of space fundamentally changed humanity’s view of itself.

Sagan believed the resulting photograph would put the ultimate futility of wars and conflict and hate into perspective by showing just what a tiny speck of cosmic dust the fragile planet we share is. 

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark

Carl Sagan

And he wrote the following words, which have become leg