Posted on 11/07/2009 5:12:58 AM PST by GolfingRam
Back in 1980 the US space programme was in the doldrums. Apollo was fading into history and there hadn't been a US astronaut in space for five years. The quirky space shuttle, much diminished from its initial vision, was still waiting to make its maiden flight.
But that fall came Cosmos, a revolutionary documentary series with a compelling host. Both the television universe and the real one have never been quite the same.
Carl Sagan, by equal measure professorial and childlike, offered space enthusiasts a new paradigm. Buck Rogers was out; refined and groovy cosmic citizen was in. Here was a visionary whose perspective dwarfed the politics of the space race and who spoke of humanity as a brotherhood with a common past and a transcendent future in the heavens.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
..Carson’s “billions and billions” appearance is still fresh in my mind..*s*
It was the first thing that came to my mind as well. The thing is, if Carl Sagan was alive today, it would be "trillions and trillions"...
remember that as well..*smiles*
ML/NJ
Yes, Carl surely could turn a phrase. He was also self-contradictory in his opposition toward any “intelligent design” thinking. There is nothing “unscientific” in the idea that a pattern of nonrandom configuration of atoms or processes (as in DNA or mitochondrial processes)reflects an Intelligent Designer. Yet Sagan rejected such notions, calling such people names, preferring his closed-system paradigm, that “the universe is all that is, that has been, or ever will be” (or words to that effect). Yet Carl, like other evolutionary astronomers, kept his listening equipment trained on the heavens, yearning to hear some pattern of NONRANDOM signals that might betray the existence of an Intelligent Designer of those very signals.
Perhaps my favorite Larson cartoon—
Carl Sagan as a boy: “Look, Betty Sue! There must be dozens and dozens of stars up there!”
Carl Sagan, alumnus of Rahway High School, along with Milton Friedman and my Aunt Denise.
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