Born on this day – Carl Sagan:

Carl Sagan

Astronomer

Planetary scientist

Cosmologist

Astrophysicist

Astrobiologist

Writer

November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996

Credits:

Books:

Contact (1985); Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966); Planets (1966); The Cosmic Connection (1973); Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (1974); Other Worlds (1975); Dragons of Eden (1977); Broca's Brain (1979); Cosmos (1980); Murmurs of Earth (1983); The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War (1984); Comet (1985); Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992); Pale Blue Dot (1994); The Demon-Haunted World (1995); Billions & Billions (1997); The Varieties of Scientific Experience (2006); The New Solar System (1981); The Eloquent Essay (2000).

Movies and television:

Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2020); Star Stuff: A Story of Carl Sagan (2015); Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014); FanGirl Academy: 101 (2014); Pale Blue Dot (2009); Contact (1997); The Earth Day Special (1990); Cosmos (1980); Voyager Golden Record (1977).

Recommended reading - 3 books by Carl Sagan:

3 books by Carl Sagan.

Cosmos

Published 1980.

ISBN-10: 9780345539434

ISBN-13: 978-0345539434

Description:

With a new Foreword by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

This visually stunning book with over 250 full-color illustrations, many of them never before published, is based on Carl Sagan’s thirteen-part television series. Told with Sagan’s remarkable ability to make scientific ideas both comprehensible and exciting, Cosmos is about science in its broadest human context, how science and civilization grew up together.

The book also explores spacecraft missions of discovery of the nearby planets, the research in the Library of ancient Alexandria, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the origin of life, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies and the origins of matter, suns and worlds.

Sagan retraces the fifteen billion years of cos-mic evolution that have transformed matter into life and consciousness, enabling the Cosmos to wonder about itself. He considers the latest findings on life elsewhere and how we might communicate with the beings of other worlds.

Cosmos is the story of our long journey of discovery and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science, including Democritus, Hypatia, Kepler, Newton, Huy-gens, Champollion, Lowell and Humason.

Sagan looks at our planet from an extra-terrestrial vantage point and sees a blue jewel-like world, inhabited by a lifeform that is just beginning to discover its own unity and to venture into the vast ocean of space.

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Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Published 1994.

ISBN-10: 0345376595

ISBN-13: 978-0345376596

Description:

In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time.

Future generations will look back on our epoch as the time when the human race finally broke into a radically new frontier—space. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history of our launch into the cosmos and assesses the future that looms before us as we move out into our own solar system and on to distant galaxies beyond. The exploration and eventual settlement of other worlds is neither a fantasy nor luxury, insists Sagan, but rather a necessary condition for the survival of the human race.

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Contact

Published 1985.

A science-fiction novel.

ISBN-10: 0671004107

ISBN-13: 978-0671004101

Description:

In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history.

Who – or what – is out there?

In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe.

In Contact, he predicts its future – and our own.

Carl Sagan, on imagination:

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were.

But without it, we go nowhere.

- Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan, on books and writing:

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.

Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions,

binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.

Books break the shackles of time.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

- Carl Sagan.