If you watched public television in 1980, there is a good chance Carl Sagan walked you across the cosmos and back and made you feel something along the way.
Sagan was an American astronomer and science writer who became one of the most recognized faces in science during our lifetime. He was born in 1934 and studied at the University of Chicago, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics by 1956. He later worked at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, researching the physical conditions of planets; Venus and Jupiter among them. He spent the final years of his career as director of Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies, until he died of pneumonia in 1996 at the age of 62.
His contributions went well beyond the classroom. According to Britannica, Sagan made it his mission to be a spokesman for science and a popularizer of astronomy. He contributed to numerous NASA projects, including the Viking mission to Mars and the Pioneer and Voyager space probes that traveled beyond our solar system.
He also spent ten years pushing NASA to turn the Voyager 1 spacecraft around and photograph Earth from deep space, beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. In 1990, it finally did. The result was the famous image known as the Pale Blue Dot: our entire planet, reduced to a single pixelated speck of light.
But for many of us, Sagan is best remembered through his voice on Cosmos, the 13-episode science docuseries that premiered on PBS in 1980. He was its presenter, co-creator, and co-writer, alongside Ann Druyan and Steve Soter. The show focused on cosmology, the study of the universe, and how it connected to the origin of life. It was celebrated for its groundbreaking special effects at the time.
Cosmos became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television, a title it held until The Civil War premiered a decade later. To this day, it remains the most widely watched PBS series in the world and won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award.
It was during Cosmos that Sagan shared one of his most lasting lines:
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”
Simple words. But think about what they mean. Sagan was saying that dreaming and imagining are not separate from science; they are its engine. You cannot explore what you cannot first picture in your mind.
He left behind several other lines worth sitting with:
- “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
- “By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.”
- “Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others.”
- “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light.”
- “I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.”
Not bad for a man who spent his life looking up.