Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

This is unrelated to India...Note that this is being posted on December 20th EST despite the time stamp (which is India standard time).

Since this is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan's death, Joel Schlosberg has proposed a Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon, and as a fan of Carl with a blog, I decided to participate. I have several indirect links to and memories of Carl (2 degrees of separation?)

0) A friend of mine from my days of working at the University of Rochester, NY named Kirk Birrell actually took a course from Carl at Cornell. Since I remember thinking this was really cool, this proves to me that I knew of Carl before 1979 when I left Rochester.

1) While I have always been a space fan, I was totally blown away by Cosmos. I've never seen so many hours of TV that had me emotional to the point of tears so often.

2) I have been a member of the Planetary Society, founded by Carl, since nearly day 1. Can you imagine a completely donation-funded organization that has organized a space mission, funded space research, proposed and developed instrumentation for NASA and Russian planetary missions, and puts out a great monthly magazine and a great web site? That's the Planetary Society. You should join.

3) As a member of TPS, I was invited to the opening of one of the Society's projects, a SETI radio observatory at the Haystack Observatory in Harvard MA. I thought it was especially cool since so many space-related activities happen in California or Texas or Florida. Here was something close to me! This was in 1996 (does the year sound familiar?). Carl was to be a speaker, so I was even more excited. The opening was really neat, but Carl was ill and TPS Executive Director Lou Friedman spoke in his place. Little did I know at the time that Carl was not to recover from his illness.

Carl was one of those rare people who could not only inspire the public and explain science to the public, but was also a respected scientist who did serious and important work as well. We need more people like him; they are few and far between.

Raise a glass to Carl tonight. Think about what you can do to continue his legacy.