A Tribute Page to Carl Sagan

A man whose message echoes throgh the cosmos

an image of Carl Sagan smiling

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 — December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation

Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.

Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain, Pale Blue Dot and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries.

His papers, containing 595,000 items, are archived at The Library of Congress.

Interesting Facts About Carl Sagan

  1. He supported the legalization of marijuana.

    Carl Sagan wrote an essay for Time Magazine under a pseudonym outlining the benefits of marijuana. He even credited the drug for some of his most profound inspirations in art, science, and music.

  2. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, was a former student of Carl Sagan.

    When Bill Nye was a student at Cornell, he took a class with Carl Sagan. Bill Nye remembers the lessons fondly, “If you saw the series Cosmos,” he says" “his lectures were like those television shows.

  3. There is a unit of measurement named after him.

    Sagan’s “billions of billions” was later (jokingly) turned into a unit. A “Sagan” is defined as a large quantity of something, at least four billion.

  4. On that note, Sagan never really said “billions of billions.”

    While the phrase “billions of billions” became inseparable from Carl Sagan, Johnny Carson was actually the first to use the term on a skit on The Tonight Show. The phrase later became associated with Carl Sagan.

Source

If you have time, you should read more about this incredible human being on his Wikipedia Entry