Carl Sagan

Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator, born on November 9, 1934, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He came of age in a modest apartment in a Reform Jewish family during the years after the Great Depression and World War II. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York City; his father, Samuel Sagan, was a Ukrainian-born garment worker. Sagan later said his parents were not scientists and knew little about science, yet they gave him two habits that shaped his life: skepticism and wonder.

That pairing can be seen in the stories he told about childhood. His parents took him to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where he saw exhibits that turned light into sound and sound into visible waves, and where a time capsule was buried for the far future. As a child he also wondered what the stars were. With his first library card, he asked for a book on stars and learned that the stars were suns, only very far away. “The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me,” he later recalled. The thought stayed with him.

Sagan began his academic career as an assistant professor at Harvard and later moved to Cornell, where he became the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He played an active role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager programs, linking research to the first great wave of spacecraft exploration of other worlds. He also proposed the Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1, an image that placed the planet in a stark cosmic setting.

His scientific work was matched by a rare gift for public explanation. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles, along with popular science books beginning with The Cosmic Connection. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Dragons of Eden. In 1980, he co-wrote and narrated Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, a documentary series seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries. It won two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award, and its companion volume became the bestselling science book to date.

Sagan also carried science into symbolic and imaginative forms. A lifelong science fiction fan, he wrote Contact, later adapted as a film. He was a founding member and first president of the Planetary Society. His long interest in extraterrestrial life led to work on messages that might be understood by other intelligences, including contributions to the Arecibo message and a much larger role developing the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager Golden Record.

In his later work, Sagan argued for skepticism and the scientific method, especially in The Demon-Haunted World, where he popularized a toolkit for critical thinking. He made famous the maxim, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Sagan received honors including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal. He married three times and had five children. After developing myelodysplasia, he died of pneumonia on December 20, 1996, at age 62. His words still matter because they invite people to ask clearly, doubt honestly, and keep looking up.