Sagan, Carl

Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect.Extract of page 14

Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell where he would spend the majority of his career. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He wrote many popular science books, such as '' The Dragons of Eden'', ''Broca's Brain'', ''Pale Blue Dot'' and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series '' Cosmos: A Personal Voyage''. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, ''Cosmos'' has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries. The book '' Cosmos'' was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the 1985 science fiction novel ''Contact'', the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. His papers, containing 595,000 items, are archived at The Library of Congress.

Sagan advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence ( SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book ''The Dragons of Eden'', and, regarding ''Cosmos: A Personal Voyage'', two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award, and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After developing myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996.

Early life and education

Sagan was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, on November 9, 1934. Poundstone 1999, pp. 363–364, 374–375. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in the Russian Empire, in today's Ukraine. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew", Davidson 1999. because she died while giving birth to her second child. Rachel's father remarried a woman named Rose. According to Carol (Carl's sister), Rachel "never accepted Rose as her mother. She knew she wasn't her birth mother... She was a rather rebellious child and young adult ... 'emancipated woman', we'd call her now."

The family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean, in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of North American Judaism's four main groups. Carl and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother "definitely believed in God, and was active in the temple; ... and served only kosher meat". During the depths of the Depression, his father worked as a theater usher.

According to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagan's "inner war" was a result of his close relationship with both of his parents, who were in many ways "opposites". Sagan traced his later analytical urges to his mother, a woman who had been extremely poor as a child in New York City during World War I and the 1920s. As a young woman, she had held her own intellectual ambitions, but they were frustrated by social restrictions: her poverty, her status as a woman and a wife, and her Jewish ethnicity. Davidson notes that she therefore "worshipped her only son, Carl. He would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams."

However, he claimed that his sense of wonder came from his father, who in his free time gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New York's garment industry. Although he was awed by Carl's intellectual abilities, he took his son's inquisitiveness in stride and saw it as part of his growing up. In his later years as a writer and scientist, Sagan would often draw on his childhood memories to illustrate scientific points, as he did in his book ''Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors''. Sagan describes his parents' influence on his later thinking: Spangenburg & Moser 2004, pp. 2–5.

Sagan recalls that one of his most defining moments was when his parents took him to the 1939 New York World's Fair when he was four years old. The exhibits became a turning point in his life. He later recalled the moving map of the '' America of Tomorrow'' exhibit: "It showed beautiful highways and cloverleaves and little General Motors cars all carrying people to skyscrapers, buildings with lovely spires, flying buttresses—and it looked great!" At other exhibits, he remembered how a flashlight that shone on a photoelectric cell created a crackling sound, and how the sound from a tuning fork became a wave on an oscilloscope. He also witnessed the future media technology that would replace radio: television. Sagan wrote:

He also saw one of the Fair's most publicized events, the burial of a time capsule at Flushing Meadows, which contained mementos of the 1930s to be recovered by Earth's descendants in a future millennium. "The time capsule thrilled Carl", writes Davidson. As an adult, Sagan and his colleagues would create similar time capsules—capsules that would be sent out into the galaxy; these were the Pioneer plaque and the '' Voyager Golden Record'' précis, all of which were spinoffs of Sagan's memories of the World's Fair.

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 ongoing war. He wrote, "Sure, we had relatives who were caught up in the Holocaust. Hitler was not a popular fellow in our household... But on the other hand, I was fairly insulated from the horrors of the war." His sister, Carol, said that their mother "above all wanted to protect Carl... She had an extraordinarily difficult time dealing with World War II and the Holocaust." Sagan's book '' The Demon-Haunted World'' (1996) included his memories of this conflicted period, when his family dealt with the realities of the war in Europe but tried to prevent it from undermining his optimistic spirit.

Inquisitiveness about nature

Soon after entering elementary school he began to express a strong inquisitiveness about nature. Sagan recalled taking his first trips to the public library alone, at the age of five, when his mother got him a library card. He wanted to learn what stars were, since none of his friends or their parents could give him a clear answer:

At about age six or seven, he and a close friend took trips to the American Museum of Natural History across the East River in Manhattan. While there, they went to the Hayden Planetarium and walked around the museum's exhibits of space objects, such as meteorites, and displays of dinosaurs and animals in natural settings. Sagan writes about those visits:

His parents helped nurture his growing interest in science by buying him chemistry sets and reading materials. His interest in space, however, was his primary focus, especially after reading science fiction stories by writers such as H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, which stirred his imagination about life on other planets such as Mars. According to biographer Ray Spangenburg, these early years as Sagan tried 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".

In 1947 he discovered ''Astounding Science Fiction'' magazine, which introduced him to more hard science fiction speculations than those in Burroughs's novels. That same year inaugurated the " flying saucer" mass hysteria with the young Carl suspecting that the "discs" might be alien spaceships.

High-school years

Sagan had lived in Bensonhurst, where he went to David A. Boody Junior High School. He had his bar mitzvah in Bensonhurst when he turned 13. The following year, 1948, his family moved to the town of Rahway, New Jersey, for his father's work, where Sagan then entered Rahway High School. He graduated in 1951. Rahway was an older semi-industrial town.

Sagan was a straight-A student but was bored due to unchallenging classes and uninspiring teachers. His teachers realized this and tried to convince his parents to send him to a private school, the administrator telling them, "This kid ought to go to a school for gifted children, he has something really remarkable." However, his parents could not afford it.

Sagan was made president of the school's chemistry club, and at home he set up his own laboratory. He taught himself about molecules by making cardboard cutouts to help him visualize how molecules were formed: "I found that about as interesting as doing hemicalexperiments," he said. Sagan remained mostly interested in astronomy as a hobby and in his junior year made it a career goal after he learned that astronomers were paid for doing what he always enjoyed: "That was a splendid day—when I began to suspect that if I tried hard I could do astronomy full-time, not just part-time."

Before the end of high school, he entered an essay contest in which he posed the question of whether human contact with advanced life forms from another planet might be as disastrous for people on Earth as it was for Native Americans when they first had contact with Europeans. Poundstone 1999, p. 15. The subject was considered controversial, but his rhetorical skill won over the judges, and they awarded him first prize. By graduation, his classmates had voted him "most likely to succeed" and put him in line to be valedictorian.

University education

Sagan attended the University of Chicago, which was one of the few colleges he applied to that would, despite his excellent high-school grades, consider admitting a 16-year-old. Its chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, had recently retooled the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago into an "ideal meritocracy" built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations and early entrance to college with no age requirement. Poundstone 1999, p. 14. The school also employed a number of the nation's leading scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, and operated the famous Yerkes Observatory.

During his time as an honors program undergraduate, Sagan worked in the laboratory of the geneticist H. J. Muller and wrote a thesis on the origins of life with physical chemist Harold Urey. Sagan joined the Ryerson Astronomical Society, received a B.A. degree in laughingly self-proclaimed "nothing" with general and special honors in 1954, and a B.S. degree in physics in 1955. He went on to earn a M.S. degree in physics in 1956, before earning a PhD degree in 1960 with his thesis ''Physical Studies of the Planets'' submitted to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

He used the summer months of his graduate studies to work with his dissertation director, planetary scientist Gerard Kuiper, as well as physicist George Gamow and chemist Melvin Calvin. The title of Sagan's dissertation reflects his shared interests with Kuiper, who throughout the 1950s had been president of the International Astronomical Union's commission on "Physical Studies of Planets and Satellites". In 1958, the two worked on the classified military Project A119, the secret Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear warhead on the Moon.

Sagan had a Top Secret clearance at the U.S. Air Force and a Secret clearance with NASA. While working on his doctoral dissertation, Sagan revealed US Government classified titles of two Project A119 papers when he applied for a University of California, Berkeley scholarship in 1959. The leak was not publicly revealed until 1999, when it was published in the journal '' Nature''. A follow-up letter to the journal by project leader Leonard Reiffel confirmed Sagan's security leak.

Career and research

From 1960 to 1962 Sagan was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Meanwhile, he published an article in 1961 in the journal ''Science'' on the atmosphere of Venus, while also working with NASA's Mariner 2 team, and served as a "Planetary Sciences Consultant" to the RAND Corporation.

After the publication of Sagan's ''Science'' article, in 1961 Harvard University astronomers Fred Whipple and Donald Menzel offered Sagan the opportunity to give a colloquium at Harvard and subsequently offered him a lecturer position at the institution. Sagan instead asked to be made an assistant professor, and eventually Whipple and Menzel were able to convince Harvard to offer Sagan the assistant professor position he requested. Sagan lectured, performed research, and advised graduate students at the institution from 1963 until 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 indicated that the decision was very much unexpected. The tenure denial has been blamed on several factors, including that he focused his interests too broadly across a number of areas (while 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. An advisor from his years as an undergraduate student, Harold Urey, wrote a letter to the tenure committee recommending strongly against tenure for Sagan.

Long before the ill-fated tenure process, Cornell University astronomer Thomas Gold had courted Sagan to move to Ithaca, New York, and join the faculty at Cornell. Following the denial of tenure from Harvard, Sagan accepted Gold's offer and remained a faculty member at Cornell for nearly 30 years until his death in 1996. Unlike Harvard, the smaller and more laid-back astronomy department at Cornell welcomed Sagan's growing celebrity status. Following two years as an associate professor, Sagan became a full professor at Cornell in 1970 and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there. From 1972 to 1981, he was associate director of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research (CRSR) at Cornell. In 1976, he became the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences, a position he held for the remainder of his life.

Sagan was associated with the U.S. space program from its inception. From the 1950s onward, he worked as an advisor to NASA, where one of his duties included briefing the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. Sagan contributed to many of the robotic spacecraft missions that explored the Solar System, arranging experiments on many of the expeditions. Sagan assembled the first physical message that was sent into space: a gold-plated plaque, attached to the space probe '' Pioneer 10'', launched in 1972. '' Pioneer 11'', also carrying another copy of the plaque, was launched the following year. He continued to refine his designs; the most elaborate message he helped to develop and assemble was the Voyager Golden Record, which was sent out with the Voyager space probes in 1977. Sagan often challenged the decisions to fund the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station at the expense of further robotic missions.

Scientific achievements

Former student David Morrison described Sagan as "an 'idea person' and a master of intuitive physical arguments and 'back of the envelope' calculations", and Gerard Kuiper said that "Some persons work best in specializing on a major program in the laboratory; others are best in liaison between sciences. Dr. Sagan belongs in the latter group."

Sagan's contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus. In the early 1960s no one knew for certain the basic conditions of Venus' surface, and Sagan listed the possibilities in a report later depicted for popularization in a Time Life book ''Planets''. His own view was that Venus was dry and very hot as opposed to the balmy paradise others had imagined. He had investigated radio waves from Venus and concluded that there was a surface temperature of . As a visiting scientist to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he contributed to the first Mariner missions to Venus, working on the design and management of the project. Mariner 2 confirmed his conclusions on the surface conditions of Venus in 1962.

Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that Saturn's moon Titan might possess oceans of liquid compounds on its surface and that Jupiter's moon Europa might possess subsurface oceans of water. This would make Europa potentially habitable. Europa's subsurface ocean of water was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft ''Galileo''. The mystery of Titan's reddish haze was also solved with Sagan's help. The reddish haze was revealed to be due to complex organic molecules constantly raining down onto Titan's surface.

Sagan further contributed insights regarding the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, as well as seasonal changes on Mars. He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot, life-hostile planet through a kind of runaway greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect would change the earth's climate system. Sagan and his Cornell colleague Edwin Ernest Salpeter speculated about life in Jupiter's clouds, given the planet's dense atmospheric composition rich in organic molecules. He studied the observed color variations on Mars' surface and concluded that they were not seasonal or vegetational changes as most believed, but shifts in surface dust caused by windstorms.

Sagan is also known for his research on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation.

He is also the 1994 recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare". He was denied membership in the academy, reportedly because his media activities made him unpopular with many other scientists.

, Sagan is the most cited SETI scientist and one of the most cited planetary scientists.

''Cosmos'': popularizing science on TV

In 1980 Sagan co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 13-part PBS television series '' Cosmos: A Personal Voyage'', which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until 1990. The show has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 countries. The book, ''Cosmos'', written by Sagan, was published to accompany the series.

Because of his earlier popularity as a science writer from his best-selling books, including ''The Dragons of Eden'', which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1977, he was asked to write and narrate the show. It was targeted to a general audience of viewers, whom Sagan felt had lost interest in science, partly due to a stifled educational system.Browne, Ray Broadus. ''The Guide to United States Popular Culture'', ''Popular Press'' (2001) p. 704.

Each of the 13 episodes was created to focus on a particular subject or person, thereby demonstrating the synergy of the universe. They covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of humans' place on Earth.

The show won an Emmy, along with a Peabody Award, and transformed Sagan from an obscure astronomer into a pop-culture icon. '' Time'' magazine ran a cover story about Sagan soon after the show broadcast, referring to him as "creator, chief writer and host-narrator of the show". In 2000, "Cosmos" was released on a remastered set of DVDs.

"Billions and billions"

After ''Cosmos'' aired, Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions," although he never actually used the phrase in the ''Cosmos'' series. Sagan & Druyan 1997, pp. 3–4. He rather used the term "billions ''upon'' billions."

Richard Feynman, a precursor to Sagan, was observed to have used the phrase "billions and billions" many times in his " red books". However, Sagan's frequent use of the word ''billions'' and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions with a 'b, in order to distinguish the word from "millions") made him a favorite target of comic performers, including Johnny Carson, Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers, Bronson Pinchot, Penn Jillette, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa satirized the line in the song "Be in My Video", noting as well "atomic light". Sagan took this all in good humor, and his final book was entitled '' Billions and Billions'', which opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of this catchphrase, observing that Carson was an amateur astronomer and that Carson's comic caricature often included real science.

Sagan unit

As a humorous tribute to Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a '' sagan'' has been defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to a very large number – technically at least four billion (two billion plus two billion) – of anything.

Sagan's number

Sagan's number is the number of stars in the observable universe. This number is reasonably well defined, because it is known what stars are and what the observable universe is, but its value is highly uncertain.

* In 1980, Sagan estimated it to be 10 sextillion in short scale (10²²).
* In 2003, it was estimated to be 70 sextillion (7 × 10²²).
* In 2010, it was estimated to be 300 sextillion (3 × 10²³).

Scientific and critical thinking advocacy

Sagan's ability to convey his ideas allowed many people to understand the cosmos better—simultaneously emphasizing the value and worthiness of the human race, and the relative insignificance of the Earth in comparison to the Universe. He delivered the 1977 series of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in London.

Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from potential intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms. Sagan was so persuasive that by 1982 he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal '' Science'', signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners. This signaled a tremendous increase in the respectability of a then-controversial field. Sagan also helped Frank Drake write the Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing potential extraterrestrials about Earth.

Sagan was chief technology officer of the professional planetary research journal ''Icarus'' for 12 years. He co-founded The Planetary Society and was a member of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees. Sagan served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

At the height of the Cold War, Sagan became involved in nuclear disarmament efforts by promoting hypotheses on the effects of nuclear war, when Paul Crutzen's "Twilight at Noon" concept suggested that a substantial nuclear exchange could trigger a nuclear twilight and upset the delicate balance of life on Earth by cooling the surface. In 1983 he was one of five authors—the "S"—in the follow-up "TTAPS" model (as the research article came to be known), which contained the first use of the term "nuclear winter", which his colleague Richard P. Turco had coined. In 1984 he co-authored the book '' The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War'' and in 1990 the book ''A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race'', which explains the nuclear-winter hypothesis and advocates nuclear disarmament. Sagan received a great deal of skepticism and disdain for the use of media to disseminate a very uncertain hypothesis. A personal correspondence with nuclear physicist Edward Teller around 1983 began amicably, with Teller expressing support for continued research to ascertain the credibility of the winter hypothesis. However, Sagan and Teller's correspondence would ultimately result in Teller writing: "A propagandist is one who uses incomplete information to produce maximum persuasion. I can compliment you on being, indeed, an excellent propagandist, remembering that a propagandist is the better the less he appears to be one". Biographers of Sagan would also comment that from a scientific viewpoint, nuclear winter was a low point for Sagan, although, politically speaking, it popularized his image amongst the public.

The adult Sagan remained a fan of science fiction, although disliking stories that were not realistic (such as ignoring the inverse-square law) or, he said, did not include "thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures". He wrote books to popularize science, such as ''Cosmos'', which reflected and expanded upon some of the themes of ''A Personal Voyage'' and became the best-selling science book ever published in English; '' The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence'', which won a Pulitzer Prize; and '' Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science''. Sagan also wrote the best-selling science fiction novel ''Contact'' in 1985, based on a film treatment he wrote with his wife, Ann Druyan, in 1979, but he did not live to see the book's 1997 motion-picture adaptation, which starred Jodie Foster and won the 1998 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Sagan wrote a sequel to ''Cosmos'', '' Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space'', which was selected as a notable book of 1995 by '' The New York Times''. He appeared on PBS's ''Charlie Rose'' program in January 1995. Sagan also wrote the introduction for Stephen Hawking's bestseller ''A Brief History of Time''. Sagan was also known for his popularization of science, his efforts to increase scientific understanding among the general public, and his positions in favor of scientific skepticism and against pseudoscience, such as his debunking

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