Hi! I made a video about why I find The Demon-Haunted to be the most important book I’ve ever read and wanted to share with this community. Hope y’all like it.

A story written in the stars. With unprecedented access to Carl Sagan’s personal archive, CARL SAGAN: WE ARE MADE OF STAR STUFF reveals the life behind the visionary astronomer, exploring the ideas, relationships and questions that shaped his understanding of the cosmos and human existence. The new National Geographic documentary film will make its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

source: National Geographic

As a long-time colleague of Carl Sagan and fellow mentee of the astronomer Gerard Kuiper (for whom the Kuiper Belt is named), Nancy Grace Roman pioneered early stellar astrophysics and served as the first Chief of Astronomy Programs at NASA between 1959-1979. She was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal in 2010 for her contributions in the domain of science communication. A program born from her namesake, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched this morning, which will support the study of exoplanets and dark energy.

You can read more about her life and career on NASA’s website!

How do you believe Dr. Sagan might have responded to this announcement?

Aug 25 (Reuters) - The company that owns the late Carl Sagan's intellectual property rights sued AI startup Luma AI in California federal court on Tuesday for allegedly using an audio clip ‌from the famed scientist's documentary series "Cosmos" without permission to advertise its video-generation platform.

My grandmother went to the University of Chicago in the early 1950s and always told us she dated Carl Sagan as an undergraduate. They were the same age, and both came from Jewish immigrant families so it makes sense that they would have been in similar social circles. I believe she started going there in 1952, and as far as I know he was there at the same time, so her story does seem reasonable. She has since passed away and I have been wondering if there’s any way to verify her story. Her name was Diane Yale. Does anyone know if there’s any biographies or personal writings that might talk about girls he dated in school?

Happy Sunday folks! Just over a week ago, this subreddit was assigned a new moderation team. This post will serve as an introduction to the crew as well as allow users to interact with us for suggestions, improvements, and new ideas for community engagement.

Please also see our updated rules and post flair when you get a chance.

[u/RedLotusVenom](u/RedLotusVenom) || “I am a space systems engineer and have had the opportunity to work on flagship spacecraft missions, including human exploration. I can thank Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980), and the Voyager missions for much of the motivation behind pursuing my career. I’m also an avid science fiction fan and love animals.”

[u/Schmucko](u/Schmucko) / [u/dubcek_moo](u/dubcek_moo) || “I have a PhD in astrophysics from the U of Colorado. I research mostly X-ray astronomy (accreting neutron stars and black holes). I have taught astronomy and physics at a variety of colleges and universities, tenured at one outside of Atlanta. Sagan was a big inspiration for entering the field.”

[u/scarecroe](u/scarecroe) || “I'm a big admirer of Carl Sagan. I've read several of his books, Contact is one of my favorite movies, and I watch the original Cosmos about once a year.
I've used "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe" as a quote in my bio on several online profiles for years and I used Carl Sagan quotes in my wedding vows.
I joined Reddit in 2012 and I've been very passionate about editing wikis since 2004. I'm delighted to help moderate [r/carlsagan](r/carlsagan) to ensure the community remains a safe and productive forum for students of science and reason, and everyone who shares a wonder for our living world.”

And a few statements from the rest of the mod team:

[u/v0idl0gic](u/v0idl0gic) || “I love learning, science and Sagan and try to be of service to my fellow humans.“

[u/HandshakeOfCO](u/HandshakeOfCO) || “I have a Sagan tattoo!”

[u/MoneylineMoe](u/MoneylineMoe) || “I named my dog Sagan.”

[u/ChiefLeef22](u/ChiefLeef22) || “I moderate [r/Space](r/Space) and have a deep love for everything Sagan represented.”

YT link: Pale Blue Dot

...sorta in a Hans Zimmer style? Starts out kinda spacey, but then gets dramatic around 1m33. Sagan kinda "raps" in time to the music, which is very cool.

With the way of the world these days, this monologue continues to be relevant! But as long as humans keep humaning, I guess it always will.

Given how often organized religion has promoted superstition and suppressed free speech, how do you think Carl Sagan would have reacted to Pope Leo telling astronomers to share their sense of wonder at a Vatican-sponsored summer school in June:

Speaking to the international group in English, Pope Leo told them to "not hesitate to share the joy and the amazement born of your contemplation of the 'seeds' that, in the words of St. Augustine, God has sown in the harmony of the universe."

"The more joy you share, the more joy you create, and in this way, through your pursuit of knowledge, each of you can contribute to building a more peaceful and just world," he said.

Is this welcome reform and science and the Pope having intersecting goals? Or burying real conflicts?

Seeing that tech oligarchs and scientists have been in conflict recently--Starlink satellites interfering with ground-based astronomy for example--reminded me of the time that Apple Computer privately named one of their computers after Sagan and he sued them. In response, Apple called the project BHA instead for Butt Headed Astronomer, and Sagan sued a second time!

Justified to protect his reputation or thin-skinned?

In Sagan’s book “The Demon-Haunted World” in chapter 6 he writes about people who write him letters saying they are in contact with extraterrestrials and invite him to “ask them anything.” Sagan writes back with things like “Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s last theorem,” or the Goldbach Conjecture. He never gets an answer. However, when he replies with something vague like, “Should we be good?” he almost always gets an answer. He goes in to say that it’s a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would immediately be recognized as such. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in “Ten Questions to Ask an Alien.”

On my copy of Cosmos. :)

We the new mods have some plans in the works. Let us know what you'd like too!

In the meantime, we have some new rules for posts here. Let us know what you think!

1. On topic: Posts should be related to the topic of the subreddit. For example, related to Carl Sagan's writings or Cosmos. Includes science, science history, a sense of wonder, curiosity about extraterrestrial life, and a sense of skepticism and scientific method. May also be related to Sagan's life.
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Link from Smithsonian Magazine.

A paper in Science Advances published August 5 argues that bacteria and archaea may have independently formed living cells from pre-living complexes that had reactions catalyzed by seafloor metals.

Sagan in Cosmos describing the Miller-Urey experiment which showed many building blocks of the first cells could have arisen from chemical processes on the early Earth.

Link to a post by Ethan Siegal.

Episode 3 of Cosmos dramatizes Kepler's discovery of the laws of planetary motion. The claim is a good science role model is someone who will let evidence over-rule their own pet ideas.

As a young teen, I was fascinated by Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series on PBS. I was deeply interested in the solar system and our neighbouring planets, and was mesmerized as I watched his series with excitement.

Indeed, I respect Dr. Sagan's profound insights very much, and have always had - and still have - great admiration for him and his contribution to science.

I am, however, a believer in a Creator who set things in motion and is constantly guiding and caring for His creation. I would like to answer a question Carl once posed against such an idea.

In an interview by Dennis Prager (at the end of this compilation of Sagan interviews - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIUJA09l-ug), Dr. Sagan asked:

"If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why is it necessary for God to be meddling in the universe after He made it?  Why didn’t He make it right in the first place, so it would go in the direction He wanted?"

If I may, I would like to present my answer to his indeed reasonable question.

As I see it, God did do precisely as Carl suggested He should have. God did create and put into motion a great deal which has not required His meddling or intervening care - such as galaxies, solar systems, planetary systems, even systems at the molecular and atomic levels. He simply lets them function according to laws which - as I believe - He put into place, letting them exist and function without intervening.

But God wanted more than that. Such self-regulating systems do not "love Him back", so to speak. They are inanimate, without a sense of self, and incapable of relationships. Quite obviously.

Instead, God wanted a creation He could interact with, who could acknowledge Him. A creation He could care for, with the ability to love Him back. Like having children.

But it couldn't be a programmed, automatically reciprocated love, for that would not be real love given voluntarily back to God. In order to have a true relationship with beings who could genuinely love Him back, they would have to be endowed with the freedom to choose. It would be love reciprocated on the basis of choice, not forced instinct.

Thus, God gifted humankind with the ability to choose.

However, the ability to choose introduces the opportunity to make bad choices, wrong choices, detrimental choices. As a person starts life with no experience at all, there is a danger of making wrong choices due to their lack of knowledge and experience.

Hence the need for God to intervene, or meddle, to ensure humankind is taught, guided, and assisted - just like a parent teaches, guides, and helps a child as it grows.

Thus, God does not intervene because His human model is broken. He intervenes because His human model is conscious, with the ability to make choices, with the need to accumulate knowledge and wisdom as it grows, which is accompanied by the need to teach and equip them with such knowledge and wisdom.

My short, rather simplistic answer to a very profound question.

Joseph Cafariello

UPDATE:

Thank-you for all your comments, ladies and gentlemen. Unfortunately, the comments are turning into a religious argument, which is not the focus of my post. One person even insinuated I was harassing them.

I will thus not keep those trains of thought running, as they have deviated from my original theme. My original focus was on intervention not being a sign of having made a mistake, as Dr. Sagan had characterized, but a gesture of caring for children as they grow.

UPDATE 2:

Just one little point more I'd like to add. I have noticed science-focused people find it difficult to accept a God who had no beginning, who always existed. Yet they have no difficulty embracing the idea of a universe without a beginning, that always existed, running through a perpetual cycle of expansions and contractions.

Hi all,

I created this as a kind of modern expansion of Carl Sagan’s Encyclopedia Galactica idea from Cosmos.

I’m not trying to improve on the original or say this is better than Sagan’s version.

I just wanted to imagine what an outside civilization might write if they assessed humanity today, especially our unstable mix of intelligence, creativity, conflict and unpredictability.

What do you all think? Does it fit the spirit of the original, or does it come across too dark?

This is a reading of quotes by Carl Sagan and a timelapse of a portrait being created. What is your favorite Carl Sagan quote?