An article I wrote after the death of Carl Sagan in 1996. Published in "Haaretz" in a slightly different version
Avi Blizovsky
The astronomer Carl Sagan, who was also a gifted narrator, and who dealt with the mysteries of the universe in lectures, books and a well-known television series, died in December 96 at the age of 62 after a two-year battle with bone marrow cancer. Sagan died of rosacea at the Chinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where he had a bone marrow transplant in April '95, center spokeswoman Susan Edmonds said. The center diagnosed his disease as myeldoplasia, a type of anemia, also known as pre-leukemia.
Sagan moved scientific thought from the ivory tower to the living room of ordinary people through his popular writing and impressive television appearance. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his book Dragons of Eden, Speculations on the Evolution of Human Reason. In 1980, the 13-part series Cosmos was the most-watched series in the history of American public television, a record broken only by the Civil War series. The series made him a national celebrity. Comic book artists have parodied his catchphrase "billions upon billions of stars." While pure scientists have accepted that he oversimplified and even misinterpreted along the way, Sagan did not shy away from the label of popularizer of science. "I carry that label with genius." he said in a 1994 interview.
Besides his approach to making scientific ideas fascinating and perfect, Sagan also built an impressive record of research, always insisting that scientific inquiry was his first priority. "Ever since I was a little boy, the only thing I really wanted was to be a scientist, to actually do science, to explore nature, and to find out how things work," he said. "And that was the fun. If you're in love with it, you want to tell the whole world."
In his early twenties, Sagan shattered the accepted fact that the planet Venus had the right climate for life. He discovered that it is actually a hostile place as the temperature on its surface reaches 500 degrees Celsius. This discovery, according to what he wrote in the book "Broca's Mind" led him to worry that the earth might also have a similar fate, due to the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of human activity. In response to the people of Du Point, who claimed that it was something theoretical, Sagan replied that we must not take risks that could cause damage to our planet, because we have no other place to live.
While teaching astronomy at Harvard in the XNUMXs, he discovered that dust-moving winds, rather than seasonal changes in vegetation, explain the bright and dark patterns that appear on Mars. Harvard did not provide him with tenure, so when Cornell University offered him to establish a laboratory for the study of the planets, Sagan immediately agreed.
Sagan has helped plan robotic space missions for NASA since the late 9s, Sagan used the data obtained on these flights to conduct simulations about the dust storms on Mars or the greenhouse effect on Venus. Due to his showmanship skills, he was the one who always represented science to the highest circles, always moving between a series of lectures about one spacecraft sighting or another, to his writing desk in Ithaca, New York. When he got stuck on one research project, he moved on to the next, letting his consciousness solve the problem, which helped XNUMX out of XNUMX problems, he said.
Sagan was the clearest and clearest speaker of rational science, who did not accept anything, no proof of God, and no proof of the existence of aliens, despite this he was convinced of the existence of intelligent beings in outer space, and even spearheaded lobbying in Congress to approve funding for a multi-year program to search for life in space through Listening to radio waves on millions of frequencies simultaneously. The project is called SETI, an acronym in English for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. His power did not stand up to him when Congress decided to cut the meager budget of the project, a few million dollars, arguing that it was something not serious, and that this money should be given to the poor of Washington. To that end, he founded the Planetary Society, an association that collects donations for the continuation of this life operation of Sagan. In his book "Contact" he described the possible effect of contact with a superior culture of our own on the human race.
