All Entries in the "Memories" Category
Carl Sagan and His Fully Armed Spaceship of the Imagination
Carl Sagan on his Spaceship of the Imagination
My path to Carl Sagan began with magic. In my my early 20′s I developed a hobby for card tricks and slight of hand. Penn and Teller were my main influences and through them I discovered (The Amazing) James Randi. I remember James Randi once saying Richard Dawkin’s book, The Blind Watchmaker should be required reading in all American classrooms. Hearing that I decided to read the book. I found it amazing. After that I read every Richard Dawkins book I could find. Through these books I discovered Carl Sagan.
Reading Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark changed my life. The way he explained the scientific method and the value of skepticism made me want to learn to more. The Demon-Haunted World remains one of my favorite books of all time.
Commander Capricorn gives an order to Major Pisces: Fire the Homeopathic Medicine Ray!!!
In Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, his stories about the Heike Crab, and Eratosthenes’ calculation of the circumference of the earth blew my mind. Today these stories still resonate with me and I look forward to the day when I will share them with my children.
The Cosmos episode, “The Harmony of the Worlds”, in which Sagan challenges Astrology, inspired me to draw the comic. I thought it would be funny to have him encounter the forces of pseudo-science as he flew through the Cosmos in his spaceship of the Imagination. The design of Carl’s spaceship and his iconic wardrobe were fun for me to draw. I enjoy his mannerisms and his careful choice of words, so I tried to echo them in his dialog for the strip.
Homeopathy is no match for SCIENCE!
While Carl Sagan’s books have remained my favorites, I currently enjoy following scientists like Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene and Michio Kaku. I love the quest they are on, the questions they ask, and I appreciate the way they communicate with their readers.
To see the entire storyboard, and to check out the rest of Michael’s work, visit his site Ninjerktsu.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Carl Sagan is Dead. Long Live Carl Sagan!
Zane Selvans is an admitted Amatuer Earthling, and is happy to share his thoughts and explorations on what it means to be a member of the adolescent human species. He lives in California, is both a scientist and a cyclist and wrote this exceptional essay that in part discuses two things — 1) how he came to appreciate that the death of Carl Sagan and the corresponding dearth of new works by the deceased scientist ultimately means its up to us to move the conversation forward, and 2) how ‘joyful and persistent understanding’ are, in the words of Nietzsche, our, “highest and most proper metaphysical,” purpose. Enjoy.
Before I finished Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age in the Salt Lake City airport Monday, I found a book by Carl Sagan in the bookstore. “The Varieties of Scientific Experience”, based on his Gifford Lectures from 1985 (and published posthumously, in 2006 by Ann Druyan). I read half of it in the airport, and the other half last night. It went fast, because I’d heard it all before. The main piece of new information was that a decade and a half after the fact, Carl Sagan is truly dead to me. I’ve read most of his books, I’ve seen his television series Cosmos several times. I love his ideas; they’ve shaped me throughout my life, but I no longer hope to find anything new in them. So long as there were pieces of his mind that had been recorded, but that I hadn’t yet been exposed to, it was as if he wasn’t quite gone. He was still, from my point of view, a dynamic entity.
More than anything else, I think I wanted to hear from him what purpose he thought we ought to assign ourselves. The closest he ever got, in his published work anyway, was Pale Blue Dot, but even this book is still mostly background and introduction. It assumes at some level that you don’t know about Copernicus, Galileo, Percival Lowell or the Voyager spacecraft, and that you need to be convinced that choosing a purpose is both possible and appropriate. I’m just not interested in that conversation any more. I’ve been convinced for a long time. It seems like a meta-conversation to me at this point — talking about talking about what we should be doing. I’ve had this feeling with Joseph Campbell too. It’s as if despite the fact that at some level they’re both decrying the nihilistic, relativist, post-modern take on the world, they cannot bring themselves to state the purposes which they would like us to aspire to. Perhaps for fear of rejection or ridicule? Or because they know they might be wrong? Or because the business of convincing people of a value judgment or aesthetic choice is so different from what we usually do in science or even academe in general. It is much more like art, or politics.
There’s also I think a sense from Sagan that we need to get everyone on board and working together, and that whatever we decide to do, it, and the decision process, should be egalitarian. This would be preferable, certainly, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Those goals which are attainable are the ones which can be reached by only a small subset of humanity working together. Lamentably, there will be times when subterfuge and propaganda are the tools of choice. It might even be the case that in the service of our goals, some kind of violence is the lesser of the available evil options. These are painful thoughts, but I think they’re true.
So I’ll risk it. Here’s what I think our purpose is: joyful and persistent understanding. This isn’t a polemic, it’s a value judgment. It’s an aesthetic opinion, and unlike facts, everybody is entitled to their own opinion.
These three values: joy, persistence, and understanding, feed on each other. The more persistently we are joyful, the more total joy there is. The more we understand the universe, the deeper our enjoyment and appreciation of it is. An endless and omniscient but miserable existence is nothing worth aspiring to. The greater our understanding of the universe, the greater our potential for persistence is. The longer we persist, the more we are able to understand. Like most value systems, this is a tautology. That’s okay!
In the service of these values, it is our duty to protect and foster life and intelligence where it exists, and to spread it as widely as possible throughout the Universe, for only those highly ordered systems are vehicles capable of understanding. Our sworn and everlasting enemy is entropy. So far as we can tell, it will one day win, but not yet.
Today, so far as we can tell for sure, humanity is the only vessel for deep intelligence, and the Earth is the only abode of life. Maybe it will sound strange, but I think we have too much understanding at the moment. I think understanding without joy — without compassion and wonder — is a threat to persistence. Love without Truth lies. Truth without Love kills. Destruction is easier than creation. If we do one day approach godliness, transcending our mortality and limited capacities for understanding and manipulation of the Universe, I think we should consider ourselves extraordinarily lucky. I don’t think either success or failure are assured, but it does seem that one is much more likely than the other.
Popularity: 62% [?]
Doctor Tony Prescribes a Healthy Dose of Idealism and Carl Sagan
Frustrated the modern cultural fixation on cynicism? So is Tony. That is why he’s glad that he’s found Carl Sagan. Check out this post he wrote for his blog, Your Daily Dose of Vitamin T.
I get so tired of cynicism, even in myself. It’s so easy to say that we’re going to, as a species, kill ourselves off, destroy the world, all of that, and I’ll admit that I subscribe to that view myself sometimes when I run into the truly stupid members of our species. That’s why, when I discovered Carl Sagan, a man who was absolutely brilliant and so obviously hopeful for us… it warmed the baseball-glove-sized radiator that I use for a heart.
Popularity: 52% [?]
The Day Neil deGrasse Tyson met Carl Sagan
Popularity: 51% [?]
The Known Universe
Danny Ledonne says, “Beautiful stuff – Sagan would want a front row seat.”
Popularity: 12% [?]
Remembering Carl Sagan
Alex Michael Bonnici at The Discovery Enterprise writes:
Today on Discovery Enterprise we commemorate the memory of Carl Sagan who died an untimely death thirteen years ago today. Carl Sagan, was an astronomer, astrochemist, author, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). For me personally he will always be remembered and revered as a great teacher who communicated the joys and transcendence of scientific discovery. Carl Sagan’s enduring legacy will always be linked to his ability to convey the wonders of science to the general public and his skill in inspiring the next generation of scientists. Carl Sagan’s name will also be forever linked to the greatest science television series in history – Cosmos.
Popularity: 17% [?]
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch…
Popularity: 92% [?]
God, the Universe and Everything Else
Popularity: 53% [?]
Galaxy Garden.
Regular Celebrating Sagan contributor Larry Klaes sent an email notifying us about the new ‘Galaxy Garden’ website.
The Galaxy Garden is a 100-foot diameter outdoor scale model of the Milky Way, mapped in living plants and flowers and based on current astrophysical data.Artist Jon Lomberg conceived and designed the garden to encourage scientific education about our place in the Universe.
Popularity: 22% [?]
Altair VI: Sagan on Mars Landing Sites
Journalist Larry Klaes sent us this link at Altair VI, where David Portee’s wrote an excellent blog post about Sagan’s roll in determining landing sites for a Mars lander.
Carl Sagan, an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard, and Paul Swan, Senior Project Scientist at Avco Corporation, published results of their study of possible Voyager Mars landing sites in the January-February 1965 issue of the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. For their study, they invoked a Voyager design Avco had developed in 1963 on contract to NASA Headquarters. The “split-payload” design comprised an orbiter “bus” and a landing capsule. They would leave Earth together on a Saturn IB rocket with an “S-VI” upper stage.
The Voyager lander would be sterilized to prevent biological contamination of Mars. Near Mars it would separate from the orbiter, enter the martian atmosphere, and float to the surface on a parachute. It would operate on Mars for 180 days. The Voyager orbiter, meanwhile, would fire rockets to slow down and enter martian polar orbit, where it would photograph the surface and serve as a radio relay for the lander.
Popularity: 12% [?]
