Carl Sagan the People's Astronomer

Carl Sagan's Education And Career

Carl Edward Sagan was born November 9, 1934 and died in 1996 and was an American scientist - especially know for astronomy and science populizer best known for his PBS Series Cosmos. You may remember Episode 12: "Encyclopedia Galactica" telling about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction and UFOs. Dr. Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a garment worker. His mother was a housewife. Sagan got undergraduate and masters degrees in physics from the University of Chicago. And earned his doctorate in astronomy from NYU in 1960. After receiving his doctorate, he was employed as an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with added duties as an annual lecturer at Harvard in Boston through 1968. He moved to Cornell University in 1969, even becoming the director of planetary studies there. He made full professor there in 1971.

Outside of academics, Sagan was an active consultant for the US space program since its founding, doing some work for them even back to his undergraduate days in the 1950s. He gave the briefing to Apollo astronauts before their flight to the moon, and he contributed guidance and instrument packages and experiments to most of the robotic spacecraft that explored the solar system. Among Sagan's contributions are adding the "Sagan Plaques" to the Pioneer spacecraft (which showed pictures of human beings, and gave a set of coordinates for where Sol lies, in relation to nine pulsars), and extended this even further for the Voyager Golden Record.

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Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days. Pale Blue Dot (1994)

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Carl Sagan's Astronomical Influence And Honors

As a planetary astronomer, Sagan was very important in the discovery of the hellish conditions on Venus. Before his research, the prevailing concept of Venus was of a mono-environmental swamp with cloud cover. Much to our surprise, the Mariner 2 provided radar evidence that proved Sagan right, and over the course of just a few days, changed how human beings saw other planets in the solar system.

Sagan was one of the first to propose that the Saturnian moon of Titan had oceans of liquid ethane and methane, and that the lines and striations on the surface of Europa revealed by the Voyager probe were strongly suggestive of a world ocean under a thick covering of ice. (The Galileo probe, arriving after his death, gave the best indirect confirmation of this theory yet, by discovery of an anomalous magnetic moment that would correspond to the interaction of a very significant amount of salt water interacting with Jupiter's magnetic fields.)

Sagan also gave precient estimates of Martian climate conditions, used for the Viking landings and, later, refined for other probes going to Mars; he was the first advocate of theories of dust storms making the changes in color observed on Mars from telescopes on Earth.

Sagan is most famous for his studies of, and advocacy for, the search for ET. He was part of the team of scientists that produced amino acids (the fundamental building blocks of proteins) by radiating basic chemicals with radiation similar to what the Earth would have been exposed to millenia ago.

Carl Sagan And Society

While a noted researcher, Sagan hit his mark, and made his largest impact as an advocate for the popularization of science, most notably through his mini series on PBS called Cosmos. It is estimated that more future astronomers and amateur scientists got 'the bug' to think logically, by watching Cosmos than from any other source.

Sagan was also a firm proponent of nuclear disarmament, and was one of the authors of the original Nuclear Winter paper, and he was a staunch opponent of the Reagan era Strategic Defense Initiative. He was arrested more than a few times for participating in acts of civil disobedience relating to the nuclear test ban treaty.

Sagan was one of the founding members of CSICOP, an organization dedicated to skeptical inquiry and debunking of hoaxes related to the supernatural. Later in life, he took up writing, both science fiction and science advocacy. One of his books, Contact, was made into a movie.