Today is Carl Sagan Day

Yes, today is Carl Sagan Day. And I wanted to honor him or, rather, his memory.

When I grew up, I found Sagan to be entertaining, and even funny. His voice was quite distinctive, as anyone who remembers him knows well. But he always spoke of the stars, of astronomy, and that got me thinking and dreaming.

More recently, I remember seeing Carl Sagan honored while I was working at Rahway Pubic Schools, particularly the high school. Sagan graduated from this high school - I believe from the actual, physical building that the high school is still housed in - back in 1951. It made me reminisce about him, and I began to explore some of his television programs, at least the ones that were and/or are available on Youtube. 

Now, here's the thing: I am not a scientist. When I look out into the skies at night and see the stars, I think about some of the things that I have heard about other planets and stars and galaxies and black holes and the universe. Sometimes, I look at the moon, and remember the history, and particularly the video clips of when Kennedy's goal o us reaching the moon and bringing men safely back to Earth safely, which surely was one of the finest hours for the United States, and even of humanity. It was an undeniable triumph. Still, I do not have much of a capacity to actually understand science. So all I know is what television personalities like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye say, and the few clips that I have seen of scientists of the past, particularly Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin and Einstein. I even tried to read a couple of Stephen Hawkings books (and technically, I guess I did), but only understood the very beginning of it, his introduction. 

The thing is, science seems to not be overly valued today. Oh, people love certain things that science and technology have brought us, particularly all of the modern conveniences that it made possible. Certainly, they also like medications that have helped to make us healthier. But then many of these same people who love that aspect of science and technology then turn around and deny the legitimacy of scientists when they talk about things like evolution and especially climate change.

Sigh.

You know, recently I saw a response to that from comedian Michelle Wolf, which actually felt like a genius response. I know this does not have much to do with Carl Sagan, but it seemed worth sharing anyway:

Michelle Wolf @michelleisawolf 

You know, in high school if you didn't believe in science it was just called failing. 

6:36 PM · Feb 6, 2017 ·Twitter Web Client 

3,460  Retweets 87  Quote Tweets 8,424  Likes

https://twitter.com/michelleisawolf/status/828749361395990529?lang=en

Well anyway, back to Sagan. Since this is the anniversary of his birthday, it seemed appropriate to share some of my favorite quotes from him. So, here goes:

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” 

― Carl Sagan

It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another. We must all help one another or all perish together.” 

– Carl Sagan

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.”   

― Carl Sagan

There are a few fantastic quotes that he has on the power of reading:

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”

Here are a few more Carl Sagan quotes that seemed worth sharing:

"Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star."

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”

“At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“We are bathing in mystery and confusion… That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

Now here is another amazing (albeit a bit lengthy) quote, but which is both one of his most famous and even iconic quotes ("The Pale Blue Dot"):

“Look again at that 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.  

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  

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. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.  

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.  

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Wow. Isn't that both somehow humbling and inspiring at the same time?

Here is one that feels like it speaks not only for some of the saddest chapters throughout human history, but perhaps particularly to us now, in the modern day United States:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

A few years ago, I ran into another quote by Sagan that just blew my mind. It seemed as if he had somehow had a crystal ball and could see into the future  our present - and saw what would go wrong, particularly in the United States which, as you will remember, was still doing quite well as the world's leading superpower during Sagan's own lifetime. So to predict such a bad slide into troubling, disturbing times feels particularly amazing to me. 

This quote basically tells of a future that he saw for America. Not a good, promising one, but rather a grim future during an information age of, in his words, "awesome technological powers" that remain "in the hands of a very few" and where leaders cannot even begin to understand the issues of the day, let alone be trusted to fix them.

In this alarmingly accurate vision, he saw his country slipping "almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."

Well, that is indeed a fascinating quote, and it seems very understandable why it was floating around so prominently around the internet, given how accurate it appears to be in this age of a Donald Trump presidency, where facts and the plain truth no longer seem to hold currency in the opinions of most, and where our "leaders" offer dumbed down "solutions" which are actually themselves at least part of the problem, if not outright the problem themselves. This dark world was one of very short soundbites and television programming that catered exclusively to the lowest common denominator and where the entire culture seemed to be sacrificed to "a kind of celebration of ignorance."

Sagan predicted, back in 1995 (over a quarter of a century ago now) exactly the kind of nation that we now live in. Look at this quote:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...  

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”  

~  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Man. To borrow from a popular sitcom song from the seventies, and alter the lyrics just a bit, we sure could use a man like Carl Sagan again!

However, we still have his books, his words, and some incredible video clips that have aged quite well. So we can remember him and his spirit, his enthusiasm for learning, and his warnings for what might lay ahead for the country. We certainly could do worse than listen to what Carl Sagan had to say back then, as well as what scientists today have to say.

Happy Carl Sagan Day!