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.