User:Zodiark111

Scientific and critical thinking advocacy

Sagan's ability to convey his ideas allowed many people to understand the cosmos better—simultaneously emphasizing the value and worthiness of the human race, and the relative insignificance of the Earth in comparison to the Universe. He delivered the 1977 series of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in London. He hosted and, with Ann Druyan, co-wrote and co-produced the highly popular thirteen-part Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

Sagan in Cosmos (1980)

Cosmos covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the Universe. The series was first broadcast by PBS in 1980, winning an Emmy and a Peabody Award. It has been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people, making it the most widely watched PBS program in history. In addition, Time magazine ran a cover story about Sagan soon after the show broadcast, referring to him as "creator, chief writer and host-narrator of the new public television series Cosmos, [and] takes the controls of his fantasy spaceship". However, Sagan was criticized for putting too much attention into the series, with several of his classes at Cornell being cancelled and complaints from his colleagues.

Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from potential intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms. Sagan was so persuasive that by 1982 he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal Science and signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners. This was a tremendous increase in the respectability of this controversial field. Sagan also helped Frank Drake write the Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing potential extraterrestrials about Earth.

Sagan was chief technology officer of the professional planetary research journal Icarus for twelve years. He co-founded The Planetary Society, the largest space-interest group in the world, with over 100,000 members in more than 149 countries, and was a member of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees. Sagan served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The Planetary Society members at the organization's founding. Carl Sagan is seated on the right.

At the height of the Cold War, Sagan became involved in public awareness efforts for the effects of nuclear war when a 1982 mathematical climate model, titled "Twilight at Noon" suggested that a substantial nuclear exchange could trigger a nuclear twilight and upset the delicate balance of life on Earth by cooling the surface. In 1983 he was one of five authors—the "S"—in the follow-up "TTAPS" report, as the research paper came to be known, which contained the term "nuclear winter" for the first time, a term coined by his colleague Richard P. Turco. In 1984 he co-authored the book The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War and in 1990 he co-authored the book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race, which explains the nuclear winter hypothesis and with that advocates nuclear disarmament.

Sagan also wrote books to popularize science, such as Cosmos, which reflected and expanded upon some of the themes of A Personal Voyage and became the best-selling science book ever published in English; The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, which won a Pulitzer Prize; and Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. Sagan also wrote the best-selling science fiction novel Contact in 1985, based on a film treatment he wrote with his wife in 1979, but he did not live to see the book's 1997 motion picture adaptation, which starred Jodie Foster and won the 1998 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Pale Blue Dot: Earth is a bright pixel when photographed from Voyager 1 six billion kilometers out (beyond Pluto). Sagan encouraged NASA to generate this image.

from Pale Blue Dot (1994)

"On it, everyone you ever heard of...The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. . . .

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."

Carl Sagan, Cornell lecture in 1994

He wrote a sequel to Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which was selected as a notable book of 1995 by The New York Times. He appeared on PBS' Charlie Rose program in January 1995. Sagan also wrote the introduction for Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Sagan was also known for his popularization of science, his efforts to increase scientific understanding among the general public, and his positions in favor of scientific skepticism and against pseudoscience, such as his debunking of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction. To mark the tenth anniversary of Sagan's death, David Morrison, a former student of Sagan's, recalled "Sagan's immense contributions to planetary research, the public understanding of science, and the skeptical movement" in Skeptical Inquirer.

Following Saddam Hussein's threats to light Kuwait's oil wells on fire in response to any physical challenge to Iraqi control of the oil assets, Sagan and his "TTAPS" colleagues warned in January 1991 in the Baltimore Sun and Wilmington Morning Star newspapers that if the fires were left to burn over a period of several months, enough smoke from the 600 or so 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires "might get so high as to disrupt agriculture in much of South Asia ..." and that this possibility should "affect the war plans"; these claims were also the subject of a televised debate between Sagan and physicist Fred Singer on 22 January, aired on the ABC News program Nightline.

Sagan admitted he was wrong about the extent of danger from the Kuwaiti oil fires.

In the televised debate, Sagan argued that the effects of the smoke would be similar to the effects of a nuclear winter, with Singer arguing to the contrary. After the debate, the fires burnt for many months before extinguishing efforts were complete, the results of the smoke did not produce continental-sized cooling. Sagan later conceded in The Demon-Haunted World that the prediction did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4°–6 °C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared".

In his later years Sagan advocated the creation of an organized search for asteroids/near-Earth objects (NEO) that might impact the Earth, and to postpone developing the technology to defend against them. He argued that the nuclear detonation, along with the other methods of deflection proposed as a means to alter the orbit of an asteroid, created a Deflection Dilemma: if the ability to deflect an asteroid away from the Earth exists, then one would also have the ability to deflect a close approaching asteroid towards Earth, creating an immensely destructive weapon. In a 1994 paper, he co-authored, he ridiculed a 3-day long "Near-Earth Object Interception Workshop" held by LANL in 1993 that did not, "even in passing" state that such interception and deflection technologies could have these "ancillary dangers".

Sagan however was hopeful that the natural impact threat and the intrinsically double edged essence of the methods to prevent these threats, would serve as a "new and potent motivation to maturing international relations". Later acknowledging that, with sufficient international oversight, in the future a "work our way up" approach to fielding nuclear explosive deflection methods could be fielded, and when sufficient knowledge was gained, to use them to aid in mining asteroids. His interest in the use of nuclear detonations in space grew out of his work in 1958 for the Armour Research Foundation's Project A119, concerning the possibility of detonating a nuclear device on the Lunar surface.

Sagan was a critic of Plato. Sagan said of Plato: "Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans. This tendency found its most effective advocate in a follower of Pythagoras named Plato" and "He (Plato) believed that ideas were far more real than the natural world. He advised the astronomers not to waste their time observing the stars and planets. It was better, he believed, just to think about them. Plato expressed hostility to observation and experiment. He taught contempt for the real world and disdain for the practical application of scientific knowledge. Plato's followers succeeded in extinguishing the light of science and experiment that had been kindled by Democritus and the other Ionians."

Popularizing science

Speaking about his activities in popularizing science, Sagan said that there were at least two reasons for scientists to explain what science is about. Naked self-interest was one because much of the funding for science came from the public, and the public had a right to know how their money was being spent. If scientists increased public excitement about science, there was a good chance of having more public supporters. The other reason was the excitement of communicating one's own excitement about science to others.

"Billions and billions"

See also: Sagan's number

File:Sagan Viking.jpg

Sagan with a model of the Viking lander that would land on Mars. Sagan examined possible landing sites for Viking along with Mike Carr and Hal Masursky.

From Cosmos and his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions". Sagan said that he never actually used the phrase in the Cosmos series. The closest that he ever came was in the book Cosmos, where he talked of "billions upon billions":

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars.

(Richard Feynman, a precursor to Sagan, is observed to use the phrase "billions and billions" many times in his "red books".) However, Sagan's frequent use of the word billions, and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions with a 'b'", in order to distinguish the word from "millions"), made him a favorite target of comic performers, including Johnny Carson, Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers, Bronson Pinchot, Penn Jillette, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa satirized the line in the song "Be in My Video", noting as well "atomic light". Sagan took this all in good humor, and his final book was entitled Billions and Billions, which opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of this catchphrase, observing that Carson was an amateur astronomer and that Carson's comic caricature often included real science.

He is also known for expressing wonderment at the vastness of space and time, as in his phrase "The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."

As a humorous tribute to Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a sagan has been defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to a very large number of anything.