Cosmos

One of the most famous astrophysicists of the 20th century, Sagan popularized the idea of the Earth’s place in the Cosmos in his series and book of the same name. His particular pronunciation of the phrase “billions and billions” made him a pop culture icon in the 1980s. Spending most of his career at Cornell University, Sagan also supported the SETI Institute. An acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the organization has continued Sagan’s lifelong pursuit of contact with intelligent life beyond the planet Earth. The Carl Sagan Center for Research at SETI is named in honor of the author’s impassioned pursuit of new discoveries and new worlds.

In Cosmos, Sagan reveals much about this preoccupation: “All my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere” (24). In childhood, he read “with breathless enthusiasm the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs” (110), which led to a lifelong fascination with that planet and, eventually, the universe beyond. Sagan subtitled the television series “A Personal Voyage” for a reason; while it largely consists of scientific and historical material, it is also informed by Sagan’s skeptical but hopeful desire to discover life on other planets. This optimism is underscored by Sagan’s conviction that whatever life we find will be similar to our own: “I am, reluctantly, a self-confessed carbon chauvinist” (126), he writes, arguing that since all evidence points to carbon as a fundamental building block of life, on Earth and possibly elsewhere.