Family Concerns

Carl Sagan’s Education And Career

Carl Edward Sagan was born in 1934 and died December 20, 1996 and was an American scientist - especially know for astronomy and science populizer best known for his PBS Series Cosmos. You may remember Episode 3: “The Harmony of the Worlds” discussing ancient Astronomers. Dr. Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a garment workerand a housewife. Sagan got undergraduate and masters degrees in physics from the University of Chicago. And earned his doctorate in astronomy from New York University in 1960. After getting his doctorate, he served as an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with added duties as an annual lecturer at Harvard University through 1968. He relocated to Cornell University in 1969, and became the director of studies of the planets there. He earned full professor there in 1971.

Other than his work in the academic world, Sagan was an active consultant for the US space program since its inception, 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.

=======================================

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)

=======================================

Carl Sagan’s Astronomical Influence And Honors

As a planetary astronomer, Sagan was vital to the discovery of the hellish conditions on Venus. Before his research, the prevailing concept of Venus was of a unchanging swamp with cloud cover. Sadly, the Mariner 2 provided radar data that proved Sagan right, and over the course of only days, changed how human beings saw other planets in the solar system.

Sagan was among 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 abnormal magnetic field that would correspond to the interaction of a very large amount of salt water interacting with Jupiter’s magnetic fields.)

Sagan also gave very valuable 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 the theory that dust storms were responsible for 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 about the same as the Earth would have been exposed to millenia ago.

Carl Sagan And Society

While a noted researcher, Sagan hit his mark as an advocate for the popularization of science, most notably through his mini series on PBS called Cosmos. It is estimated that more amateur astronomers and future scientists got ‘the bug’ to think objectively and critically, 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 myths related to supernatural powers. Later in his life, he took up writing, both science fiction and science advocacy. One of his books, Contact, was made into a 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster.

Sagan and Astronomer News, Yours Free in your email every week. Sign up now.

Endless Free PLR gives you your own 100% unique version of my articles just by reloading a webpage.