Prof. Carl Sagan

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part, 1980–81 television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers, David Oyster, Richard Wells, Tom Weidlinger, and others. It covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe. Owing to its bestselling companion book and soundtrack album using the title, Cosmos, the series is widely known by this title, with the subtitle omitted from home video packaging. The subtitle began to be used more frequently in the 2010s to differentiate it from the sequel series that followed. The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until The Civil War (1990). As of 2009, it was still the most widely watched PBS series in the world. It won two Emmys and a Peabody Award, and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people. A book was also published to accompany the series.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. - Richard Feynman

Daniel Dennett argues that the danger of religion is not simply that people believe things. It is that faith can become an excuse to stop questioning. To stop thinking.

Carl Sagan talks about Radio waves.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that... the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman

In 1960s Carl Sagan developed one of the first quantitative models showing that Venus, with surface temperatures around 465 °C, is heated not merely by its closeness to the Sun, but by a runaway greenhouse effect within its dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. In this view, sunlight enters easily, but heat struggles to escape. The atmosphere acts like a vast insulating blanket, trapping energy and driving the planet into an extreme, self-reinforcing state of warming. This insight did more than explain Venus. It helped transform the study of planetary atmospheres into a rigorous branch of astrophysics and offered a powerful analogy for understanding how greenhouse gases can shape the climate of Earth not in theory alone, but written across an entire world.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before... credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

Right Now, most of the us can relate to this message from the 90's.

Do you agree or disagree with Carl?✍️

Teach your children how to think, not what to think.

Thirty-six years ago, we saw our whole civilization reduced to a single, fragile dot, so small it might scarcely be noticed by the universe itself. And yet, from within that dot, it has often seemed to us as though our small stage were the whole of creation, as though our differences were vast and enduring. Our knowledge has grown, carrying us outward to the edges of the solar system and beyond, but understanding asks something more of us, it asks for humility, for the quiet recognition of our true scale in the cosmos. In that faint, fragile mote of light, suspended in a sunbeam, lies everyone you have ever known, everyone you have ever loved, everyone who ever was. From this distant vantage, our imagined boundaries soften, our quarrels diminish, our certainties grow less certain. Ours is a small world, a pale blue dot adrift in the vast cosmic dark. And it is here, on this lonely speck, that we are called not compelled, but invited to treat one another with greater kindness, and to cherish the only home we have ever known.

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Either we can use our technology to destroy ourselves or to carry us to the planets and the stars. It’s up to us.

When you fear something, learn as much about it as you can. Knowledge conquers fear. — Edmund Burke

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... Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.