Carl sagan

It's fact
Sagan predicted on ABC's Nightline in 1991 that smoky oil fires in Kuwait set by Saddam Hussein's army during the first Gulf War would cause an ecological disaster and send black clouds into the atmosphere resulting in global cooling. Retired atmospheric physicist and climate change sceptic Fred Singer dismissed Sagan's prediction as nonsense,predicting that the smoke would dissipate in a matter of days. In his book The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan gave a list of errors he had made, including his predictions about the effects of the Kuwaiti oil fires, as an example of how science is tentative, a self-correcting process which displayed Sagan's modesty. 

Carl sagan
````````(1934-1996)
~~~~~~The popularizer of the "Cosmos"


Born: November 9, 1934 Brooklyn, New York 
Died: December 20, 1996 (aged 62) Seattle, Washington, U.S. 
Residence: Ithaca, New York, U.S. 
Nationality: American 
Field: Astronomy and planetary science 
Institutions: Cornell University, Harvard University 
Alma mater: University of Chicago 
Known for: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Cosmos: A Personal Voyage Voyager Golden Record Pioneer plaque, Contact 
Notable prizes: Oersted Medal (1990) NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (twice) Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (1978) NAS Public Welfare Medal( 1994) 


Carl Sagan contributed to the space projects and helped to popularize science among the public. In fact he wanted to give the layman the joy of learning astronomy by his books as astronomy made a very big impression on Sagan's life. In fact it was his life blood.


In the 1990's film The Contact", academy award winning actress Jodie Foster plays an astronomer who discovers extra terrestrial signals from space. This film was based on a book by an astronomer whose passion for astronomy and science was unparalleled in 20th century science.. He died in 1996 and the afore mentioned film was dedicated to his memory. He is none other than Carl Sagan.



Sagan attended the University of Chicago, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in physics, before earning his doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics. Sagan lectured at Harvard University until 1968, when he moved to Cornell University to become a full professor in 1971 and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there. From 1972 to 1981 he was associate director of the Center for Radio Physics and Space Research at Cornell. 

Sagan was involved in the U.S. space program since its inception and worked as an adviser to NASA since the 1950s. He had to brief the Apollo astronauts before their actual flight and contributed to robotic spacecraft missions to the planets. He brought forward the idea of adding a universal message on spacecraft so that any intelligent life in the universe that comes in contact with the message can understand our existence. Sagan assembled the first physical message that was sent into space: a goldanodized plaque that was attached to Pioneer 10 and 11. 

He was among the first to hypothesize that Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa may possess a subsurface ocean under its icy covering. This hypothesized water ocean on Europa made it potentially habitable for life. Europa's subsurface ocean was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft Galileo, thus giving credibility to Sagan's idea. Following his studies about the temperature of Venus, he perceived global warming as a growing, manmade danger and likened it to the natural development of runaway green house effect on Venus. Sagan was a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to "listen" with radio telescopes for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life forms. So persuasive was he that by 1982, he was able to get a petition advocating SETI(search for extraterrestrial intelligence)published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists including seven Nobel Prize winners. Carl Sagan also helped Dr. Frank Drake write the Arecibo message,a radio massage beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope. It was aimed at informing extraterrestrials about Earth the human race.

Sagan's ability to describe things clearly and lucidly enabled him to popularize astronomy among the public. He hosted and, with Ann Druyan, cowrote and coproduced the highly popular thirteenpart PBS television series "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage" modelled on Jacob Bronowski's television programme "The Ascent of Man". Sagan also wrote books to popularize science, such as Cosmos, which reflected and expanded upon some of the themes of A Personal Voyage, and became one of the bestselling science books ever published in English. 

Late in his life, Sagan's books developed his skeptical, naturalistic view of the world. In The "Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, " he presented tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent ones, essentially advocating wide use of critical thinking and the scientific method. The compilation, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, published in 1997 after Sagan's death, contains essays written by Sagan, such as his views and his widow Ann Druyan's account of his death as a skeptic, an agnostic, and as a freethinker. 

Posted in: Greatest Astronomers