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.

Restricting the body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a people and leads to spiritual poverty. - Albert Einstein

The false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ - Isaac Asimov

You probably don't need more weapons than what's required to destroy every city on earth. There's only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons - well, we've got more than 25,000!

We're in very bad trouble if we don't understand the planet we're trying to save.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in way9s it was never before. (📷Dr. Carl Sagan and Representative Patricia Shroeder taking part in a demonstration against the first US nuclear explosion of the year.)

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. - Marie Curie

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." - Rene Descartes

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

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.

Death Valley, California, October 26, 1980. Carl Sagan stands beside a model of NASA’s Viking lander. Against the barren ridges, the photograph almost appears to show him standing on Mars itself. The image completed a circle that had begun in his childhood. Long before he became a planetary scientist, Sagan was fascinated by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s stories of an inhabited Mars. But as an adult, he joined the Viking Lander Imaging Team, the scientists responsible for interpreting the first detailed views transmitted from the Martian surface. Viking 1 and Viking 2 reached Mars in 1976 carrying cameras, chemical instruments and biological experiments. They replaced the imagined world of canals and civilizations with an actual landscape of rocks, dust, frost, winds and an atmosphere hostile to life as we know it. The experiments did not provide generally accepted evidence of living organisms, but they transformed Mars from an astronomical object into a place humanity had examined from the ground. Sagan understood that every generation had placed its own desires upon that red point in the sky. In Cosmos, published the same year this photograph was taken, he wrote: “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears.” But he immediately added that our hopes and prejudices must not replace evidence. For Sagan, the real Mars, however different from the Mars of fiction, was more wonderful because it was real.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. ― Ernest Hemingway

"The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever." - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Nations may divide the map, but catastrophe will not respect their borders.

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

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