Sagan capitalized on the power of that symbol in a commencement address he gave in 1996 a few months before his death: Earth showed up as a pale blue dot – a single pixel in the grainy image. Sagan convinced NASA to have Voyager 1, as it exited the solar system in 1990, turn its view back toward the sun and snap one last photo of our planet. Messages that could, in some distant future, possibly be found by aliens and be a remembrance of our civilization.īut the Pale Blue Dot always makes me cry. I love how he convinced NASA to put messages on the Pioneer and Voyager probes that would be leaving our solar system. He was a great agnostic skeptic of tremendous eloquence and sincerity. I loved his books, especially Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, and the “baloney detection kit” from his The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. His PBS television series Cosmos influenced me greatly with its spectacular scope and vision. The other day I had to choke back the tears in class again, for I always break down when I mention Carl Sagan and the Pale Blue Dot.Ĭarl was a great popularizer of science and astronomy, perhaps best known for his inimitable way of saying “billions” where he always emphasized the b.
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