Why Carl Sagan is Truly Irreplaceable
- Kind
- Magazine Article
- Date
- March 2014
- Publisher
- Smithsonian Magazine
- Retrieved
- Mar 3, 2014
3 memes from this reference
The Great Demotions and the Promotion of the Human Race
Sagan had talked of the “great demotions.” Humanity had learned, painfully, that it did not live on a planet at the center of the universe, and further demotions followed. We were not (in Sagan’s view) the purpose of the Creation, not specially chosen by a divine authority, and were in fact just one evolutionary twist…
The Silence of the Universe is Significant
Geoff Marcy, the University of California at Berkeley astronomer who has found scores of exoplanets, and who has diligently searched for signs of anything artificial in the data, says the silence is significant: “If our Milky Way Galaxy were teeming with thousands of advanced civilizations, as depicted in…
Why Carl Sagan Could Explain Things So Well
The adult Sagan always sounded like the smartest person in the room, but in the papers we encounter this interesting note in a 1981 file, right after “Cosmos” hit it big: “I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn’t entirely easy for me. Some things that the most brilliant students were able to see…