Carl Sagan
Astronomer and the great popularizer of science, with Cosmos.
Ideas
- The cosmic perspective
- Seeing Earth as one small world among billions should make us kinder to each other and more careful with it.
- The baloney detection kit
- The Demon-Haunted World's toolkit for spotting bad arguments: independent confirmation, rival hypotheses, falsifiability.
- We are star stuff
- The atoms in our bodies were made in stars, so the universe is not something we just look at. We are part of it.
- Reaching out
- He helped design the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager Golden Record, and championed the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
In their words
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.”
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.”
Start with
- The Dragons of Eden (1977)
- Cosmos (1980)
- Contact (1985)
- Pale Blue Dot (1994)
- The Demon-Haunted World (1995)
