Carl Sagan, 1975 recipient of the Priestley Award, looks through Joseph Priestley’s burning glass.
jesus
Carl Sagan has arrived to eat your babies.
“carl satan from an alternate dimension is here to teach you some psuedoscience”
319
“Maybe we’re on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there - the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Maybe we’re on Mars because we have to be, because there’s a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process, we come after all, from hunter gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we’ve been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to, is Mars. But whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.” — Carl
![moon-adventures:
Carl shares his enthusiasm with the world as Voyager II returns data of stunning Saturn [x]
The happiness is literally exploding from his face](http://24.media.tumblr.com/3bcac433aea37b535cb677a6ad6201c1/tumblr_ml7wxm7B6s1r6l3y2o1_500.jpg)
Carl shares his enthusiasm with the world as Voyager II returns data of stunning Saturn [x]
The happiness is literally exploding from his face
"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."
Carl Sagan
"This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arouse the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…"
Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan - The Abortion Debate
"Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions. Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole, or when is the world’s birthday, or why we have toes. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys many adults. A few more experiences like this, and another child has been lost to science. There are many better responses. If we have an idea of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don’t, we could go to the encyclopedia or the library. Or we might say to the child: “I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out."
Carl Sagan
"
There may be a hundred billion planetary systems in the galaxy awaiting exploration. Not one of those worlds will be identical to Earth. A few will be hospitable; most will appear hostile. Many will be achingly beautiful. In some worlds there will be many suns in the daytime sky, many moons in the heavens at night, or great particle ring systems soaring from horizon to horizon. Some moons will be so close that their planet will loom high in the heavens, covering half the sky. And some worlds will look out into a vast gaseous nebula, all those skies, rich in distant and exotic constellations, there will be a faint yellow star — perhaps barely seen by the naked eye, perhaps visible only through the telescope — the home star of the fleet of interstellar transports exploring this tiny region of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The themes of space and time are, we have seen, intertwined. Worlds and stars, like people, are born, live and die. The lifetime of a human being measured in decades; the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of the billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.
In all these other worlds in space there are events in progress, occurrences that will determine their futures. And on our small planet, this moment in history is a historical branch point as profound as the confrontation of the Ionian scientists with the mystics 2,500 years ago. What we do with our world in this time will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully determine the destiny of our descendants and their fate, if any, among the stars.
"
Carl Sagan — Travels in Space and Time — Cosmos
Contact Opening Scene (by SolVideoHD) Still one of my favorite opening scenes from any film.
same
"We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."
Carl Sagan
"Between the times of Aristarchus and Huygens, humans answered the question that had so excited me as a boy growing up in Brooklyn: What are stars? The answer is that the stars are mighty suns, light-years away in the vastness of interstellar space."
Carl Sagan - Cosmos
