Carl Sagan and his many Accomplishments

                                                          

Carl Sagan

 

Born: November 9, 1934

Died: December 20, 1996

Carl Sagan was a man of many great accomplishments that benefited many fields of study such as Philosophy, Astronomy, Cosmology, Astrophysics, Astrobiology, Space Science, Science Communication, and Planetary Science. In addition, he was a TV show star and an Author! He got his education from many Universities such as Cornell, Harvard, and Berkeley. He was also the winner of many awards:

• Klumpke- Roberts Award
• NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal
• Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
• Emmy and Peabody Award for his TV show
• Received 20 degrees
• Oersted Medal
• Medals for exceptional scientific achievement and for distinguished public service TWICE
• Apollo Achievement Award
• Asteroid 2709 Sagan named after him
• John F. Kennedy Astronautics Awards of the American Astronautical Society
• The Explorers Club Award on their 75^th Anniversary
• Konstantin Tsiolkovsky medal of the soviet cosmonautics federation
• Mazursky award of the American astronomical society
• Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science

Among his previously mentioned awards, he also had a lot more accomplishments and contributions:

• Being the Consultant and Advisor to NASA
• Had the chance to brief the Apollo Astronauts before their flight to the Moon
• Helped with the process on the Mariner, both Vikings,  both Voyagers (trips to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) , and Galileo expeditions to other planets. 
• He also had a theory that Venus did not posses tropical climate similar to Earth, which was confirmed after the Mariner trip to Venus
• Solved the Mystery of the high temperatures in Venus (the results of a massive greenhouse effect)
• Founder and First President of the Planetary Society
• Confirmed that the color variations in Mars were due to dust in wind storms which was confined on expedition to Mars

Carl Sagan has an extreme impact on space sciences and astronomy, but first I want to hit on what he gave to philosophy. Even though Sagan believed highly in the existence of extraterrestrial life, he took a strong stance AGAINST pseudosciences such as astrology, UFO sighting, alternative medicines, and alien abductions. I found a quote on this website from his book Cosmos on page 333 that seems to cover what his philosophy is pretty well: 

"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. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths, all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true..."

I think this quote also matches nicely with one of his book that he wrote

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

In this book, he elaborates about the scientific method to what he called ‘laypeople’ (who were not qualified in giving a professional opinion because they don’t have knowledge of the topic). He tried to encourage people to adopt skeptical thinking. And that we should tests new ideas with skeptical thinking and rigorous questioning. 

So not only was Sagan a HUGE believer in being skeptical, but he was a ever bigger believer in extraterrestrial life. He believed that there must be other life and other planets that went through similar processes such as Earth to form life. He claimed that "The most exciting thing we can find in science is life on another planet. And I agree!

Sagan was so set on this hunt for other forms of life that he made an Institution for it! He called it 

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

The purpose of the institute was to find life forms on other planets. They would do this by sending transmissions to other plants which was only possible by the recent invention of the radio. With SETI’s more recent research, we have found that there are tens of billions of worlds like us in our galaxy. Currently they are working on a way to search for laser flashes to find other signals present in the galaxy. They are also working on updating their systems so that they can monitor the entire sky simultaneously instead of one pixel at a time! This will be revolutionary technology! But it has barely begun. The SETI is now the new home to the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

Carl Sagan Video Talking about SETI

Carl Sagan Video Talking about Extraterrestrial

Two more accomplishments I would like to comment on about his assistant with space travel are the Voyager Golden Records and the Pioneer Plaque.

The Voyager Golden Records

The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were on the Voyager Spacecraft that launched in 1977. The records have sounds and images that would best display the diversity of life and culture on Earth. They are made to be a sort of a time capsule and are there in case any intelligent extraterrestrial life that can find it and access it. I find this one of the most interesting things Carl Sagan has done.

The Pioneer Plaque

Two ships (the Pioneer 10 and 11 that Sagan also assisted on) had similar things to the Voyager Golden Records, but instead they were metal plaques that held their time and place of origin in case any others wandering through space could find them in the future. Carl Sagan created these plaques so that any alien civilization that found them knew who made them and where so we could make contact. This photo gives our location in the galaxies and has a naked woman and man drawn to show the relation to the spacecraft.

One thing that I found while doing research was another not-well-known book that Sagan wrote called

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

In this book (written in 1977), Carl Sagan combined all his fields of knowledge (computer science, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology) to give people an insight on how human intelligence may have evolved. He discusses how he wants to find way to measure intelligence and one of his ways if measuring the brain to body mass ratio. Fun Fact: Humans have the highest ratio and dolphins have the second highest. The scale, however, doesn’t work when you get down to smaller animals such as ants! Another method he found was looking into the evolutions of the neocortex functions of the brain. He would do this by looking at “the evolutionary purpose of sleep and dreams, demonstration of sign language abilities by chimps and the purpose of mankind’s innate fears and myths”. While reading this article I also found out that the title of the book represents the early struggles that mankind had to survive in the face of predators such as reptiles (dragons).

Did you also know that Carl Sagan played a huge part in the Nuclear Arms Race?!

Nuclear Arms Race

He was a strong believer that “humans’ beings were altering their environment in a way that would become unsustainable”, he was also an early believer of global warming. In 1983 he published an article with a photo that described “nuclear winter”. This image showed a scenario of “the world half-covered in gray shadows, dotted with white snow. Alongside this scene of devastation were the words: ‘Would nuclear war be the end of the world?”. Sagan tried to show everybody how serious this war was and not only the short-term effects of lost lives, but the long-term effects it would leave on this planet. He stated, “even a less-than-full-scale nuclear exchange…could cause global cooling and collapse of agriculture.”

Carl Sagan Interview about Arms Race

 

Now onto his biggest achievements!

Cosmos and Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

The point of this book and the TV Show that paired with it were used to explain scientific ideas to anyone who was interested in learning. It mainly hit on the points of cosmic evolution and the development of science and how it affected the civilizations around it. He mixes ideas of the scientific method and philosophy to predict the future of science. He was also a strong believer that television was “one of the greatest teaching tools ever invented”. I would love to see what he thinks about the technology we have now! 

I also found two interesting quotes that Sagan made in Cosmos:

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” 

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” 

First Episode of Cosmos: Personal Voyage

Finally I have THE PALE BLUE DOT!

Voyager 1

Earth ("The Pale Blue Dot")

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 (1990) from 6 billion kilometers (3728227153.424 miles). In the photograph, the Earth is nothing more than less of a pixel compared to the vastness of space. The Voyager one as it was in the final stages of completing its mission was requested by Carl Sagan to turn around and take one last photo of Earth. The book he wrote as a sequel to Cosmosconveys how small we are. We are almost nothing of significance in the entirety of space and we will leave no impression when Earth is gone. As if nothing ever happened. No other planets or life forms would have known we existed, and we do not know of any others that have existed.

 

It really makes you think about how small we are. I feel very small when I look at the sky and see the stars and how big they are in scale to us. Nobody (that we know of) knows we are here besides us and none of our accomplishments or discoveries will mean anything to anyone that doesn’t live on Earth. It is crazy to think that all we have created truly doesn’t matter. All the hard work and lives sacrificed don’t really matter in the scheme of this. We are a useless speck in the universe and our lives are less than a grain of sand in an hourglass. 

Sometimes I can be poetic! :) 

Neil deGrasse Tyson reading of the Pale Blue Dot

Here is another interesting quote I found from the Pale Blue Dot:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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…”

When looking at photos of the Pale Blue Dot, it reminded me of something I once learned in my High School Astronomy Class and something I am sure we touched on during this class, but I cannot recall when: The Copernican Principle. The Copernican Principle states that you are not special. This is not meant to offend anyone! You don’t live in a special place, a special time, you don’t see things from a special perspective. This is to show us a different frame of reference of the world. In addition, this extends to the Earth and our place in the universe. The Earth isn’t special, we are just a random rock floating through space. Nothing about us is special in relation to how vast the universe is. There are tons of stars like our Sun, there also may be other planets with life! We are not an anomaly.

And now I leave you with some questions :)

1. Do you think we are alone in this Universe?
2. Have you ever made a time capsule?
3. What thing would you send off into space to tell the aliens of Earth
4. Do you think the most "exciting thing we can find in science is another life"? If not, then what is?