A Tribute to Carl Sagan

Celebrating the Life of a Phenomenal Man

Carl Sagan, from the Planetary Society web site.

It has been 11 years since astronomer Carl Sagan died following a battle with myelodysplasia. To commemorate his loss, and more important, to celebrate his life, many of us are blogging about Dr. Sagan or putting comments about him on the Celebrating Sagan blog.

To say that Dr. Sagan was a hero to a great many of us would be an understatement. For all of us who came to science popularization as a result of the phenomenal Cosmos series (created with Ann Druyan), who read his science popularization books, and who followed in his footsteps as writers and researchers, Carl Sagan was the foremost practitioner of science outreach and popularization. Simply put, he embraced and shared a passion for science and truth.

Cosmos may have brought him to public attention in a very broad way, but it was hardly the first thing he did. Do a search on Amazon and you’ll find an amazing number of products—books, music, DVDs, CDs, and so on—that he had a hand in creating (or that he inspired). All are still popular more than a decade after his passing.

One of his greatest hits isn’t something that you can pick up at Amazon or download from iTunes. It’s called the Voyager Record—a sort of audio-visual time capsule that recorded a brief moment of humanity’s time in the universe. There are copies of this album on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, each of which is speeding out from the Sun, never to return. Whenever I think of Carl Sagan, I think of those albums. He headed up the committee that created them; he fought for them to be put on the spacecraft, and in some sense, they carry his vision of humanity (with all our brilliance and foibles) along with them.

The Voyager Record

I often wonder what Carl Sagan would say today, if we were still alive and watching the current rush by some short-sighted politicians in the world to dehumanize science and scientists. These “leaders” seem to care for little more than the next election, the next corporate donation, the next fundamentalist endorsement. Would he have to rewrite the book Demon-Haunted World, where he describes the fallacies of too much reliance on short-sighted religious prophets and the uneducated embrace of pseudo-sciences by people who fear science? Would he need to add on new chapters with examples of people who disregard their critical thinking skills just so they won’t be bothered by uncomfortable truths about their leaders, their country, their planet?

I’ve had many “godly” people tell me that Carl Sagan hated religion, which of course is nonsense. Most times they haven’t taken the time to read his works and understand his points. A careful reading of his works has showed me that Sagan wasn’t about hate. He disliked, intensely, the way that many people willingly let others do their thinking for them. He disapproved of the silliness of pseudo-sciences and those who use science to promote nonscientific theories as a cover for religious indoctrination in the schools. But, hate people or religion? There’s no proof of it. And science is all about the honest search for truth and the proof of it.

Carl Sagan’s greatest legacy is and will continue to be the embrace of science and what it can tell us about the universe. How the cosmos works, where it’s come from, where it’s going, our place in it; those are things that science can tell us about. We have to be willing to do our part, too, by stepping up to the challenge and using science as the exploration tool that it is. And that, along with a record of images and sounds from our planet, is all a large part of what Carl Sagan left for us as a gift and a encouragement to explore our cosmos and all the ideas (whether uncomfortable or not) that exploration brings.

Our Interstellar Reach

Voyager 2 at the Brink of Deep Space

One of my favorite missions made the news this past week. The Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is on its way out of the solar system on a trajectory to deep space, is nearing the limits of the Sun’s influence on space. In August of this year it crossed the solar wind termination shock, a point in space where the solar wind smashes into the thin gas that exists between the stars. The solar wind basically blows a big bubble of gas (from the Sun) into surrounding space; the “edge” of that bubble is called the heliopause. Crossing the “membrane” of that bubble registers as a blip in the data the spacecraft sends back, alerting astronomers that a momentous event has occurred. Voyager passed this goalpost in space did so a bit earlier than astronomers expected, which implies that the heliopause is not as symmetrical as they thought. Because the solar wind varies a bit in its extent, Voyager may well bounce and out of the heliopause.

I first heard about the Voyager mission back in the late 70s, just after it was launched. It sent back some amazing images of Jupiter, and by the time Voyager 2 got to Saturn in 1981, I was working at a newspaper in Denver, Colorado. I asked the managing editor if I could go out to Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California for the Voyager 2 Encounter of Saturn, and before I knew it, I was on my way, duly accredited as a reporter.

It was an interesting experience, and only whetted my appetite for more planetary science. A few years later, I went back to school to study more astronomy and planetary science, and so I always look back on the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn with fond memories. Sometime in the next few years, Voyager 2 will get completely free of the heliopause and truly be in deep space. I remember back in 1981 thinking about Voyager 2 and its future mission; here we are, three decades later, and it’s just NOW getting to the heliopause. This tells us in a very visceral way that space is big!

Front Seats on the Cosmos

Observatories

Well, another little travel break took me out to Gemini Observatory in Hawai’i for a few days of meetings. Then, back to California, where I finally had a chance to show my folks around the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

I like to work with observatories; have been doing it now for a few years. Most of the work I do is in public outreach, helping the astronomers get the message out about the work they do in their domes. Gemini has been a steady client since 2004, and Griffith hired me to write their exhibits in 2005-2006.

The work is endlessly fascinating. Just as an example, there’s a press release out from Gemini Observatory about an odd little star that has a surprisingly active magnetic field. You can read more about it here. I started working on that press release in early autumn this year. The first step was to interview the scientist who headed the research team studying the star. We talked by phone a couple of times, and I did some background reading so that I could weave in some ideas about how stellar magnetic fields are generated. That way, we could make the case for why this star is so unusual.

The next step was to send the first draft of the press release to the folks at Gemini for their review, as well as to the scientist. It went through the review process, and the folks at Gemini then commissioned some space art to illustrate the star.

When I was in Hawai’i, I finished my part of the work, and from there it went to final review before today’s publication date. That’s a pretty typical creation/review process, and while I don’t always write the press releases, I do get in on the review and editing process at some point. Along the way, I get to add to my store of astronomy knowledge, which is a constantly changing treasury.

Writing exhibits is quite a bit different; they reach out to a hugely wider audience than a press release, and each panel in an exhibit tells a story of its own. I was quite happy to show my folks and mother-in-law around Griffith, and was curious to see what they’d take away from what they saw. To my great delight, they got exactly what I’d hoped they’d get out of the visit, asking the questions we’d hoped to spur with our work. Plus, it was hugely satisfying to show off what amounts to the equivalent of a giant book spread out across tens of thousands of square feet of exhibit space!

TheSpacewriter, her folks, and Albert Einstein, at Griffith Observatory.