Those of you who follow this blog undoubtedly already know what a book lover I am. I’m constantly in search of new reading material, be it a good novel or historical treatise. And I’m always on the lookout for any new Steven King work for he is my all-time favorite author of fiction. At this very moment, I’m rereading his 1977 book The Shining to refresh my memory so I can move on to the 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep which follows up on the life of the child character of The Shining. However, deep in the recesses of my mind there has always been this love of science which began in the early 60’s during our race-to-space, the Mercury Project. Those first seven astronauts were my childhood heroes and I followed the program avidly all the way through to the moon landings.

However, that love did not carry over to my schooling. Though a Junior Beta Club Member, just as my son is now, as soon as I hit high school, I became a mediocre student, more interested in fun than learning. And as for science, I was a total flop. Math, the language of science, was a mystery to me and when it came to chemistry, you may have well have been asking me to read Greek or Latin.

Still…the fascination with science lurked within me and was rekindled when I discovered the book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence by Carl Sagan. Sagan was an astrophysicist, astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist (some resume, huh?) as well as an author who popularized science, writing and editing over 20 books in such a way that it opened the door in plain simple language for the normal, everyday man. And he even wrote one science fiction novel, Contact, which  had to do with making a first contact with extraterrestrial life. It was later made into a motion picture starring Jodie Foster based on a story outline written by Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan. Definitely one of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time as well as a mesmerizing movie.

It’s no wonder that he wrote such a tale for he was a great proponent of SETI,  the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In this project, radio telescopes are used to investigate the cosmos using large radio antennas, monitoring radio frequencies for signs of transmissions from civilizations on other worlds. As a young man, he expressed the belief that UFOs might be alien spaceships, but in later years he stressed that there was no strong evidence that aliens were visiting the Earth either in the past or present though he felt that scientists should study the phenomenon.

Since discovering Sagan, I’ve read many of his books over the following years. Just to name a few there was The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective; Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science; Cosmos; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors; Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space; The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark; and Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. Fascinating all! Of these my favorite is The Demon Haunted World in which Sagan encourages people to learn critical or skeptical thinking to help in understanding the difference between ideas that are considered valid science, and other ideas that can be considered pseudoscience, as in phony. And there are many ideas out there in society that are taken as pure fact, much of it based on superstition or just not knowing or bothering to research the true facts. That idea is one of the reasons for my continued reading and learning about many things before making any conclusions based on limited knowledge.

Sagan’s love of science began when he visited the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Later, his father, though in awe of Carl’s boyish chatter about stars and dinosaurs, wrote it off to being part of his growing up. His mother, an intellectual in her own way but prohibited by the times in expressing such, adored Carl and he later went on to fulfill her dreams. And in their own way they encouraged his blossoming intelligence. Speaking of them later in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Sagan said, “My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.”

I find it interesting that he, just as I, fell in love with science at a young age. He, however, took it to a level beyond my comprehension. In a Psychology Today article he made a couple of interesting observations concerning kids and science:     “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.” And,  “In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields—mathematics, physics, some others—the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters.” Sagan later on inspired my imagination even more on TV with the thirteen-part series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which aired on PBS, presenting the wonders of our universe and science to the general public. And just this past year, the series was reprised by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was mentored by Sagan. He is director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and his updated series in tribute to Sagan was titled Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Both are inspiring works that filled my mind with wonder, firing even more my desire to learn about the world and universe we live in.

I find even more inspiring the origin of the term, ‘pale blue dot’, which came to be the title to one of his books. What it refers to is a photograph of Earth , taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in February, 1990, 3.7 billion miles from earth.  Voyager was about to leave the Solar System entering interstellar space, and at the request of Sagan, its camera was turned to take one last photograph of Earth across the great expanse of space. In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space. Now at twenty five years later, Voyager is over 12 billion miles away from home and still traveling after 38 years in space. That ‘pale blue dot’ would now appear 10 times more pale as compared to the photo of 25 years ago. Sagan wrote eloquently of this photo in his book “Pale Blue Dot”: “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.” In essence, he was pointing out that our earth-centric, egotistical vision of our importance was of little significance when compared to the vastness of the millions of universes that exist out there.

On Voyager 1 there was placed two golden phonograph records that Sagan was instrumental in creating, just as he was with the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques which displayed pictorial messages showing the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The Voyager phonographs contain sounds and images portraying the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. Sagan noted, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Voyager 1′s mission is estimated to go on until around 2025 when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will no longer supply enough power to operate any of its scientific instruments. Still. Voyager 1, and its sister ship Voyager 2, launched within 3 weeks of each other, will continue their travels, and according to NASA, “The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way.” His work on these space-faring vehicles are but a few of the endeavors Sagan was associated with in working with NASA as an advisor.

Unfortunately for me as that quintessential book lover, any new Sagan book will not be something I anxiously await and search for because he died much to early in 1996 at the age of 62. But what an astounding legacy he left behind, and in my constant rereading of his books, I still find that young kid who fell in love with the thought of space travel and the idea of billions of miles of unexplored territories out there in the universe.

But as a humorous aside concerning the word ‘billions’, there’s another legacy Sagan left behind which he used as the title of his book Billions and Billions. He appeared on The Johnny Carson Show almost thirty times over the years. Carson himself was an amateur astronomer, and at times he’d do skits, dressed up in a corduroy jacket and turtleneck sweater and a mop-like wig, walking around the stage saying the phrase ‘billions and billions’ while imitating Sagan, though actually including real science in the monologue. Initially, Sagan was unhappy with it. He certainly used the term billions many a time in speaking of outer space, but the closest he ever came to that phrase was when he said “billions upon billions” in his book Cosmos.  He had to live with it, though, and finally in the book Billions and Billions he wrote: For a while, out of childish pique, I would never utter or write the phrase, even when asked to. But I’ve gotten over that. So, for the record, here goes: “Billions and Billions.”

An amusing anecdote, but certainly not the reason I’ll remember Carl Sagan. His written word in books and spoken word on TV will forever fill my mind with wonder at the power of science and what it’s meant to our existence and advancement as a race. And that to me is worth ‘billions and billions’ of thanks to the man who gave me the gift of his vision and wisdom.