Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Saganwas an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known for his contributions to the scientific research of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth9 November 1934
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said "billion" many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said "billions and billions." For one thing, it's too imprecise. How many billions are "billions and billions"? A few billion? Twenty billion. A hundred billion? "Billions and billions" is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked-and sure enough, I never said it.
Your god is too small for my universe.
Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.
If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
The passion to explore is at the heart of being human.
There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design.
The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience...
[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.
The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.
Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.
Nobody listens to mathematicians.
The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal