“Cosbros” by Joe Hanson, inspired by this 1971 conversation between Sagan, Bradbury, and Clarke.
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Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken
by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain
everythingness of everything, in cahoots
with the everythingness of everything else.
Diane Ackerman’s poems for the planets, which Carl Sagan sent Timothy Leary in prison on this day in 1974.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. … Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan, who passed away 16 years ago today, on the power and magic of books
Carl Sagan’s apple pie recipe, based on his famous words.
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.
35 years ago today, Voyager 1 launched into the cosmos. Celebrate by revisiting Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, animated.
[Space exploration] is in financial trouble. Yet by many standards, such missions are inexpensive. Mariner Jupiter/Saturn costs about the same as the American aircraft shot down in Vietnam in the week in which I am writing these words (Christmas 1972). The Viking mission itself costs about a fortnight of the Vietnam war.
I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live?
Carl Sagan, in conversation with Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke in 1971, on what we as a culture and a civilization choose to prioritize – a poignant and timely meditation today, some four decades later, when war spending is at an all-time high and the Space Shuttle program is being put to rest.
There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars.
Carl Sagan’s reading list – reverse-engineering one of history’s greatest minds through his wonderfully eclectic, cross-disciplinary information diet.
Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future.
Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan on books, 1980.
