Carl Sagan

Biography	Quotations	Links

Home Authors Subjects Resources Contact About		(This is a test effort. The text is copyrighted, I took it from Biography.com. This will not be the final version of the text I use.) Astronomer, author; born in New York City. He began teaching at Harvard University (1962--68) while also working as an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Observatory (1962--68). At Cornell University from 1970, his enthusiasm for space science and the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe stimulated the public's interest through such works as the television series Cosmos (1977) and books like the Cosmic Connection (1973), Contact (1985), and (with Ann Druyen), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992).
Carl Sagan Quotations
*Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter I, "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" *The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter I, "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" (cf. ISLANDS) *There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as many planets as stars, 1011 X 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter I, "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" *On some [planets], intelligent life may have evolved, reworking the planetary surface in some massive engineering enterprise. These are our brothers and sisters in the Cosmos. Are they very different from us? What is their form, biochemistry, neurobiology, history, politics, science, technology, art, music, religion, philosophy? Perhaps one day we will know them. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter I, "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" *We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter II, "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue" *Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life---moderate enough temperatures, liquid water, oxygen atmosphere, and so on. But this is, at least in part, a confusion of cause and effect. We earthlings are supremely well adapted to the environment of the Earth because we grew up here. Those earlier forms of life that were not well adapted died. We are descended from the organisms that did well. Organisms that evolve on a quite different world will doubtless sing its praises too. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter II, "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue" *The asteroid belt may be a place where a planet was once prevented from forming because of the gravitational tides of the giant nearby planet Jupiter; or it may be the shattered remains of a planet that blew itself up. This seems improbable because no scientist on Earth knows how a planet might blow itself up, which is probably just as well. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter IV, "Heaven and Hell" *We are, almost all of us, descended from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about unpredictable or disgruntled deities. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter VII, "The Backbone of the Night" *The scientific world view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have discovered science. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter VII, "The Backbone of the Night" *We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter VII, "The Backbone of the Night" *Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernal of awe. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter IX, "The Lives of the Stars" *The study of the galaxies reveals a universal order and beauty. It also shows us chaotic violence on a scale hitherto undreamed of. That we live in a universe which permits life is remarkable. That we live in one which destroys galaxies and stars and worlds is also remarkable. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter IX, "The Edge of Forever" *We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter IX, "The Lives of the Stars" *Modern physics and chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity: three units put together in various patterns make, essentially, everything. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter IX, "The Lives of the Stars" *The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a singly snowflake striking the ground. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter X, "The Edge of Forever" *If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter X, "The Edge of Forever" *If there were no books, no written records, think how prodigious a time twenty-three centuries would be. With four generations per century, twenty-three centuries occupies almost a hundred generations of human beings. If information could be passed on merely by word of mouth, how little we should know of our past, how slow would be our progress! Everything would depend on what ancient findings we had accidentally been told about, and how accurate the account was. Past information might be revered, but in successive retellings it would become progressively more muddled and eventually lost. Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XI, "The Persistence of Memory" (cf. HISTORY : Niane) *A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person---perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. (Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you.) -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XI, "The Persistence of Memory" *For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XI, "The Persistence of Memory" *Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XI, "The Persistence of Memory" *Or perhaps they [extra- terrestrials] are here, but in hiding because of some Lex Galactica, some ethic of noninterference with emerging civilizations. We can imagine them, curious and dispassionate, observing us, as we would watch a bacterial culture in a dish of agar, to determine whether, this year again, we manage to avoid self-destruction. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XII, "Encyclopaedia Galactica" *There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?" *An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences [between "us" humans and "those" humans] trivial compared to the similarities. The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?" *If we survive, our time will be famous for two reasons: that at this dangerous moment of technological adolescence we managed to avoid self-destruction; and because this is the epoch in which we began our journey to the stars. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?" *The conventional bombs of World War II were called blockbusters. Filled with twenty tons of TNT, they could destroy a city block. All the bombs dropped on all the cities in World War II amounted to some two million tons, two megatons, of TNT--- Coventry and Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo, all the death that rained from the skies between 1939 and 1945: a hundred thousand blockbusters, two megatons. By the late twentieth century, two megatons was the energy released in the explosion of a single more or less humdrum thermonuclear bomb: one bomb with the destructive force of the Second World War. But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. By the ninth decade of the twentieth century the strategic missile and bomber forces of the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet was safe. The energy contained in these weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps, was far more than 10,000 megatons---but with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?" *Something in us recognizes the Cosmos as home. We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the Cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery. -Carl Sagan Cosmos, 1980 Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?"    *For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy.    At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Which even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration. -Carl Sagan Contact, 1985 Part I : The Message, Chapter 2, "Coherent Light" *If we like them, they're freedom fighters . . . If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas. -Carl Sagan Contact, 1985 Part I : The Message, Ch. 2, "Coherent Light" *But don't you have the sense that if they're anywhere, they're everywhere? -Peter Valerian, a character in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part I, "The Message", Chapter 2, "Coherent Light" *Around Santa Fe, the faintest glimmerings of dawn might be seen above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. (Why should a religion, she asked herself, name its places after the blood and body, heart and pancreas of its most revered figure? And why not the brain, among other prominent uncommemorated organs?) -Carl Sagan Contact, 1985 Part I : The Message, Ch. 3, "White Noise" *[Since television programs were the first Earthly broadcasts to travel through space outside our solar system, they may be an extraterrestrial civilization's first glimpse of Earthlings. For instance, the first television message strong enough to reach into space was Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.] "Those goddamn programs are our ambassadors into space . . . the Emissary from Earth." She paused to savor the phrase. "With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years. I'd like to see the network executives come to grips with this one. And that madman Hitler, that's the first news they have about Earth. What are they going to think of us?" -President Lasker, a character in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part I, "The Message", Chapter 6, "Palimpsest"    *"Well, what do you suppose the Message is about?    "I don't see any way to tell, Ms. President. I can only repeat what Dr. Arroway said. It's an intricate and complex Message. The transmitting civilization is eager for us to receive it. Maybe all this is one small volume of the Encyclopaedia Galactica. The star Vega is about three times more massive than the Sun and about fifty times brighter. Because it burns its nuclear fuel so fast, it has a much shorter lifetime than the Sun---"    "Yes. Maybe something's about to go wrong on Vega," the Director of Central Intelligence interrupted. "Maybe their planet will be destroyed. Maybe they want someone else to know about their civilization before they're wiped out." -President Lasker and Peter Valerian, characters in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part I, "The Message", Chapter 6, "Palimpsest" *Once, during a vigorous discussion on the relative merits of the two political systems [communism and democracy], Ellie had boasted that she had been free to march in front of the White House protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War. Vaygay [a Russian] replied that in the same period he had been equally free to march in front of the Kremlin protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War. -Carl Sagan Contact, 1985 Part I : The Message, Chapter 7, "The Ethanol in W-3" *"Every government that prepares for war paints its adversaries as monsters," she said. "They don't want you thinking of the other side as human. If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters." -Eleanor Arroway, the hero in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part I : The Message, Ch. 9, "The Numinous"    *"[W]hy do people say 'make the same mistake again'? What does 'again' add to the sentence? And am I right that 'burn up' and 'burn down' mean the same thing? 'Slow up' and 'slow down' mean the same thing? So if 'screw up' is acceptable, why not 'screw down'?". . . ."And take this phrase 'head over heels in love.' " he continued. "This is a common expression, yes? But it's exactly backward. Or, rather, upside down. You are ordinarily head over heels. When you are in love you should be heels over head. Am I right?" -Vasily Gregorovich Lunarcharsky (Vaygay), a character in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part I : The Message, Chapter 9, "The Numinous" *She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better because of him. -Carl Sagan Contact, 1985 Part I : The Message, Chapter 9, "The Numinous" *[Rankin is a Christian evangelist.] Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it. -Eleanor Arroway, the hero in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part II, "The Machine", Chapter 10, "Procession of the Equinoxes" *As a philosopher in our part of the world once said: 'The artifacts of a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be indistinguishable from magic.' -Devi Sukhavati, an Indian character in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part II, "The Machine", Chapter 11, "The World Message Consortium" *You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry. -Vasily Gregorovich Lunarcharsky (Vaygay), a character in Carl Sagan's Contact, 1985 Part II : The Machine, Ch. 11, "The World Message Consortium" We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy. -Carl Sagan Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Sand The more restrictions there are on what matter and energy can do, the more knowledge human beings can attain. -Carl Sagan Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Sand At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error- correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track. -Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan Links
Yahoo's Carl Sagan Page Britannica Online's Article Usenet: alt.books.carl-sagan Scientific American's Obituary

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