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 Carl Sagan - Your Friendly Neighborhood Astronomer

Carl Sagan's Education And Career

Carl Edward Sagan was born November 9, 1934 and died in 1996 and was an American scientist - especially know for astronomy and science populizer best known for his PBS Series Cosmos. You may remember Episode 11: "The Persistence of Memory" speaking of the frontal lobes as critical in long-term planning. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a garment workerand a housewife. Sagan got undergraduate and masters degrees in physics from the University of Chicago. And got his doctorate in astronomy from NYU in 1960. After earning his doctorate, he served as an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with additional service as an annual lecturer at Harvard in Boston through 1968. He relocated to Cornell University in 1969, and became the director of planetary studies there. He earned full professor there in 1971.

Besides his academic work, Sagan was an active consultant for the US space program since its founding, doing some work for them even back to his undergraduate days in the 1950s. He gave the briefing to Apollo astronauts before their flight to the moon, and he contributed guidance and instrument packages and experiments to most of the robotic spacecraft that explored the solar system. Among Sagan's contributions are adding the "Sagan Plaques" to the Pioneer spacecraft (which showed pictures of human beings, and gave a set of coordinates for where Sol lies, in relation to nine pulsars), and extended this even further for the Voyager Golden Record.

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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...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. Pale Blue Dot (1994)

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Carl Sagan's Astronomical Influence And Honors

As a planetary astronomer, Sagan was vital to the discovery of the hellish conditions on Venus. Prior to his studies, the prevailing idea of Venus was of a unchanging swamp with cloud cover. Surprisingly, the Mariner 2 provided radar evidence that proved Sagan right, and over the course of only days, changed how human beings saw other planets in the solar system.

Sagan was among the first to propose that the Saturnian moon of Titan had oceans of liquid ethane and other gasses, and that the lines and striations on the surface of Europa revealed by the Voyager probe were suggestive of a world ocean under a thick shell of ice. (The Galileo probe, arriving after his death, gave the best indirect confirmation of this theory yet, by discovery of an unusual magnetic effect that would correspond to the interaction of a very large amount of salt water interacting with Jupiter's magnetic fields.)

Sagan also gave valuable estimates of Martian climate conditions, used for the Viking landings and, later, refined for other probes going to Mars; he was the first advocate of the dust storm hypothesis for the changes in color observed on Mars from telescopes on Earth.

Sagan is most famous for his studies of, and advocacy for, the search for ET. He was part of the team of scientists that produced amino acids (the fundamental building blocks of proteins) by irradiation of basic chemicals with radiation much as the Earth would have been exposed to many thousands of years ago.

Carl Sagan And Society

While a noted lecturer, Sagan made his largest impact as an advocate for the popularization of science, most notably through his mini series on PBS called Cosmos. It is estimated that more amateur astronomers and future scientists got 'the bug' to think critically, by watching Cosmos than from any other source.

Sagan was also a firm proponent of nuclear disarmament, and was one of the authors of the original Nuclear Winter paper, and he was a staunch opponent of the Reagan era Star Wars plan. He was arrested more than a few times for participating in acts of civil disobedience relating to the nuclear test ban treaty.

Sagan was one of the founding members of CSICOP, an organization dedicated to skeptical inquiry and debunking of myths and hoaxes related to supernatural powers. Later in life, he took up writing, both science fiction and science advocacy. One of his books, Contact, was made into a 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster.