I think it’s safe to say that if Carl Sagan hadn’t put together the “Cosmos” series for Public Television, I might not have become a science writer when I did. He burst on the scene at a time when public fascination with space and astronomer was in need of a jump-start. When “Cosmos” first came out, I had just written my first planetarium documentary script and was working part-time at a newspaper. I screwed up the courage to ask my editor if I could go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to cover the upcoming Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn (this was in 1981, about a year after PBS first aired the 13-part series).
Fortunately, my editor said “yes” and I found myself out at JPL, surrounded by scientists and writers, all focused on the excitement of discoveries at Saturn.
During that time, I met (or rather, re-met) Carl Sagan. (It turned out the first time I met him, at a meeting during my second year at the University of Colorado in 1974, he wasn’t nearly as well-known as in later years, and I was pretty much wet behind the ears.)
While at JPL for the Voyager 2-Saturn encounter, I remember feeling pretty fan-girl-ish about Sagan. I also remember screwing up the courage to tell him how much his work meant to me. But, he put up with it and pushed me to continue my work as a science writer. “We need more good science writers,” I remember him telling me.
Fast-forward to 1992, when I was in graduate school, working as a graduate researcher in an astrophysics research lab. My mentor and advisor was a fellow who’d gone to graduate school with Carl. It felt like a pretty small world to me. He told me a few stories about Carl from those grad school days, and (as Carl did) also encouraged me to continue my science writing.
More than three decades have passed since I first met Carl Sagan for the first time. We met several more times in the intervening years, the last time just a year before he died. He remained, even at his most ill, an encourager, a mentor, and a visionary who knew to his core that humanity’s eyes turn to the stars for more than inspiration and knowledge. We look to the sky because, as he put it in “Cosmos,” we are all star stuff. And thus, we are looking at the place from where we came.
It has been ten years since Carl died, but his ideas and visions of the cosmos have not. A whole legion of us are traveling along the same way he did, bringing a love of the stars, planets, galaxies, and cosmos to anyone who cares to read our books, see our shows, listen to us talk. Thanks for the push, Carl. I haven’t forgotten you and the encouragement you gave me on the several occasions we had a chance to talk.
For more about Carl Sagan, visit the web site built in his name:The Carl Sagan Portal.
If you don’t have a copy of “Cosmos” (either the book or the DVD), or his wonderful book on science and superstition, called The Demon-Haunted World, please consider them for a spot on your reading/viewing list. It would be the best tribute to one of the world’s best-known science popularizers, a man who, like Patrick Moore and many others, have brought their love of the stars to billions of people.
