🇺🇸Carl
Sagan

He was five years old when he first asked what stars were. His parents had told him they were lights in the sky, but that answer did not satisfy him. A librarian in Brooklyn handed him a book that contained the actual answer — that stars were suns, enormously distant, and that the sun was itself a star — and the sensation Carl Sagan described for the rest of his life was one of vertigo combined with wonder: the sudden expansion of the world into something almost incomprehensibly vast. He never recovered from it. For the next six decades, until his death from myelodysplastic syndrome at the age of sixty-two, he dedicated his life to transmitting that feeling of cosmic wonder to everyone he could reach, which turned out to be several hundred million people.

Carl Edward Sagan was born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Sagan, a garment worker who had emigrated from Ukraine, and Rachel Molly Gruber, a homemaker of intense intellectual ambition who saw in her son the fulfilment of possibilities denied to her by the gender conventions of her era. She pushed him relentlessly and joyfully, and he absorbed science the way other children absorbed baseball statistics. By age twelve he had read every science book in the local library. He entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship at sixteen and received his bachelor's degree in 1954, when he was nineteen. He stayed for his master's and then his doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics, completing his PhD in 1960 with a dissertation on the physical conditions of Venus's atmosphere.

At Cornell University, where he joined the faculty in 1968 and remained for the rest of his career, Sagan built a research program that touched on an extraordinary range of planetary science questions. He correctly predicted, before the Mariner missions confirmed it, that Venus was a scorching, pressure-crushed hell rather than a tropical paradise. He investigated the conditions that might support life on Mars and elsewhere. He was one of the principal scientists behind the Voyager Golden Records — the gold-plated copper disks sent aboard Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977, containing sounds and images representing life and culture on Earth, addressed to any extraterrestrial intelligence that might someday find them drifting between the stars. He co-founded the Planetary Society in 1980 and spent thirty years advocating for the scientific and financial seriousness of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

But his most lasting achievement was Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the thirteen-part television series he co-wrote with Ann Druyan and Steven Soter and hosted for PBS in 1980. The series was unlike anything that had been on television. It combined rigorous science with lyrical language and extraordinary visual ambition, carrying viewers through the history of astronomy, the scale of the universe, the origin of life, the evolution of intelligence, and the prospects for humanity's future in space. Sagan's narration — delivered in a distinctive cadence that would be quoted and parodied for decades — carried genuine emotional weight: this was a man in the grip of a real love for the universe, and the camera recorded it faithfully. Cosmos was watched by an estimated 500 million people in sixty countries, making it the most widely watched PBS documentary series in history at that time.

He was also a serious literary figure. The Dragons of Eden, his 1977 exploration of the evolution of human intelligence, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1978. Broca's Brain followed in 1979, Cosmos the book in 1980, and Pale Blue Dot in 1994 — perhaps his most philosophically searching work, prompted by his successful lobbying of NASA to direct Voyager 1's cameras back toward Earth in 1990, producing the photograph of Earth as a fraction-of-a-pixel mote of light suspended in a ray of sunlight, which he called the Pale Blue Dot. His novel Contact, published in 1985, was adapted into a film in 1997. He published more than 600 scientific papers and popular essays and testified repeatedly before Congress on behalf of the space program, planetary defense, and, in the early 1980s, on the scientific evidence for nuclear winter — his research group's finding that a large-scale nuclear exchange would produce a catastrophic cooling of the Earth's atmosphere. Carl Sagan died on December 20, 1996, in Seattle, Washington. He was sixty-two years old, and the universe he loved was, by his own repeated calculation, approximately thirteen billion years old.