Rico's rants: Another brilliant one gone

09 November 2015

Another brilliant one gone

The BBC has an article by Sari Zeidler about the late Carl Sagan:

On 9 November 2015, a chorus of voices on this pale blue dot we call Earth are paying homage to the late, renowned American scientist, Carl Sagan (photo). It would have been his eighty-first birthday.
Much of the praise heaped on the famous communicator and author is being shared in the form of his own words, as internet memes. We collected a few of our own favorites here.
Such sharing is arguably a fitting way to remember the man who brought science to the masses with his talents as an orator, constantly reminding us that, at the heart of technical and scientific innovation, is the notion that we are all connected in our shared journey through this vast Universe. But Sagan’s words did more than inspire a raft of #Saganisms, they had an impact on the way the American public viewed and supported the field of space exploration from the 1970s until his death in 1996.
An accomplished scientist, Sagan was an outspoken and inquisitive astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and astrobiologist. He earned more than three degrees, was a Harvard lecturer, Cornell University professor, and founder of the International Planetary Society, to list only a few of his credentials. He is remembered for his contributions to Mariner 2, the world’s first successful interplanetary spacecraft, NASA’s exploration of Mars, and authoring hundreds of scientific papers.
But most notably he is remembered for his gift for translating scientific endeavor into the language of human emotion. While many might remember him as the host of The Cosmos or the man who said “We’re made of star stuff”, he’s less often credited as one of the driving factors behind Voyager’s Golden Record.
In 1977, Sagan led the project to share the voice of humanity with the cosmos. He gathered a group of scientific and cultural advisors that built the collection of 115 images, natural sounds from Earth, a selection of music, and the infamous greetings recorded in 59 languages that travel through space as a way of saying “hello” to any life-forms that might cross the record’s path. At the time, he had to fight a long list of hurdles and red tape to achieve his mission, which is chronicled in his book Murmurs from Earth.