The day my hero died.

It's a grim anniversary, and it's hard to believe I was only 15 when it happened, but today - in 1996 - Carl Sagan died.

Wired.com was nice enough to remind me, but I remember when Driver sent me a similar memorial a few years back.

My grandma wondered last night why, now that all that's in the news is global warming stuff, more people didn't listen to Dr. Sagan and his greenhouse theory. All we had to do was look at Venus to see our future, he said, if we don't start behaving.

Grandma and I finished his landmark "Cosmos" series a few weeks ago - a Christmas present I got her a few years back.

He's what got me into astronomy and world events and humanism and scientific skepticism. He's probably my biggest non-political hero.

Well, was. But he still is, because he lives on whenever I pull out one of his great books and devour it.

We still miss you, Dr. Sagan.

Postings from the Pale Blue Dot.

Every time I see an image of the Earth from space - what Carl Sagan called the "Pale Blue Dot" - I want to cry.

I remember Al Gore surprising me with an image at the end of "An Inconvenient Truth." At the end of that moving movie was the most moving image that a human could look at, besides the actual face of god. It was the Earth, the first picture of it ever taken from space, and it never fails to impress me.

Wired has an image gallery from the Voyager spacecraft planetary visits, and I fought back tears again on seeing the above image - the first ever taken of the Earth and our Moon together in space.

Of course they include a picture of Dr. Sagan, the brains behind the whole operation. Sagan has been a hero of mine since childhood, and it's because of projects like Voyager that help me revere his memory.

There's something about seeing an image of the Earth from space that makes you feel humble. In a vast and unforgiving universe, we are mites in the carpet. You can't see national borders, or political parties, or anything built by human hands - besides the Great Wall of China - from space. Not one shred of evidence of our existence can be seen from orbit, and yet we think our everyday goings-on matter so much.

From our perspective they do, because we're stuck here on terra firma. We know people and we go places and we accomplish goals that have impact on the world, however small it is, around us.

But from up there, we're nothing.

And Dr. Sagan helped me to feel okay about that. There's comfort in knowing that, in all the universe, we've fought tooth and literal nail to get where we are - to inhabit a tiny ball of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen and make it our own.

Sometimes I imagine what it would've been like, on Voyager 1 and 2, on the day Jupiter loomed large enough to make out its many moons and cloud bands. I imagine what it was like when those spacecrafts zipped by Neptune - its clouds a bright, electric blue - and the other outer planets that dwarf our own. On its way out of the solar system, into that interplanetary limbo where not much at all exists, Voyager took a shot of Earth from way out - and it makes me fall in love with Earth every time.

I love the planet because I'm biased, but also because it has its own beauty and splendor, as does each of the planets in our neighborhood. And I love it because it's home, and when you step foot on it you can see so many wonderful things.

The cosmos is hard to fathom because our brains can't well handle the idea of infinity. And if the universe isn't infinite in size, it might as well be. It's pretty damn big.

And here we sit, on our pale blue dot, floating around in space, doing our own thing.

The Voyager mission showed worlds outside of our own, and how spectacular they were. It's only our own world, however, that tears me up - every damn time, it gets me.

'Worlds Away' pays tribute to Carl Sagan

[Much thanks to Driver for sharing this Washington Post article with me. Definitely brought some sunshine into this cloudy day.]




Worlds Away
When it came to earthly obsessions, Carl Sagan took the long view

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, April 23, 2006; W15

We moved offices, and I began to purge files, stuff I don't need and haven't looked at in years. Digging deep, I came across a fat file marked "Sagan." The astronomer died in December 1996.

Save? Throw away?

From the documents, a voice emerged.

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that there is anyone who will come and save us from ourselves."

Carl Sagan! You could hear those explosive consonants. Who else could utter a phrase, with a straight face, like "the great enveloping cosmic dark"? Sagan insisted that we think bigger. Look upward and outward, he said. Get cosmic.

It's something you don't hear so much these days, and not just because the space program is in a funk. Our concerns are extremely terrestrial: war, disease, hatred, poverty. The preoccupying figure of this decade is not the astronaut but the terrorist.

Sagan cared about earthly subjects, too. He was your basic progressive liberal, a college professor, a peace advocate. But he saw our human obsessions as trivial in the grand scheme of things. The universe isn't about us, he would say. He railed against human arrogance, against "our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe."

And yet the voice in the file is that of a person who liked human beings, who rooted for them. Perhaps because Sagan had seen so many desert worlds out there in our solar system, so many cold, airless, sterile planets and moons, he appreciated the one place where we know life has proliferated, and where intelligence has somehow appeared. Here's Sagan explaining why he wouldn't ban all medical research using animals: "I'm sure if I were a lizard, I would be arguing about sacrificing the humans so we can get better medicine for the lizards. I'm sorry. I can't help it. I'm a human."

Throughout his career, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Sagan was fascinated with life beyond Earth, a subject that carries with it the hazard of sounding very silly. In a Scientific American article, he wrote, "If a silicon-based giraffe had walked by the Viking Mars landers, its portrait would have been taken." Sagan didn't actually think there might be silicon Martian giraffes, but he was glad that the Viking landers would be ready to take pictures of any animals bounding around.

Here's a 1981 letter from Sagan to someone who thought alien life forms would be very much like creatures on Earth. Sagan disagreed:

"We have a worrisome tendency to think that what we see is all that can be. . . But why five fingers? Why fingers rather than tentacles? Why the agonizingly slow data processing in our neurological systems? Why not multi-spectral infrared sensing? It's easy to think of a wide range of anatomies, physiologies and sensory modalities that have not been adopted by humans or indeed by any other creatures on the Earth."

Which is a much more elaborate response than simply, "Thank you for your interesting letter."

Sagan would be so useful today, what with all the debates about science and religion. By most definitions he would be called an atheist, but he hated the term. "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid."

He didn't think science drained any of the majesty from the universe, but quite the opposite.

"The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos."

Here's Sagan's text for a statement he persuaded President Jimmy Carter to include on the Voyager Record, a disc designed to be heard by an alien civilization should it ever intercept the Voyager spacecraft:

"This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America, a community of 240 million human beings among the 4.2 billion who inhabit our planet Earth. We are still divided into nation states, but are rapidly becoming a single global civilization which covers our tiny but very beautiful world . . . We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems which face us, to join a community of galactic civilizations."

We haven't solved our problems. Some people on Earth aren't even fully ready to join human civilization, far less a galactic one. Sagan would be saddened by much of what he sees today.

But he'd be out there fighting for science and the human future, imploring us to be smarter, braver, more cosmic. So the Sagan file will stay. Some people you need to keep around forever.

Read Joel Achenbach weekdays at washingtonpost.com/achenblog.

The center of the universe

It's probably not hard to believe, but there are still folks who believe the universe - the sun, the moon, the stars, everything - revolves around the Earth.

I remember reading a survey not long ago about how some 25 percent of Americans didn't know that the Earth, in fact, goes around the sun. But then some Americans don't know that George Washington was our first president, or that there are - surprise! - 50 states.

Don't laugh - I'm serious. Look it up. Jay Leno shows this all the time.

But now it seems "geocentrists" are getting serious airplay. I opened up Saturday's Citizen Patriot to find, in the "Religion & Ethics" section, the headline "This world view has sun revolving around the Earth."

Welcome, folks, to 1524 AD.

The guy in the article, Robert Sungenis, believes that "Galileo was wrong" and that the Bible is all he needs to know that geocentrism is the way to go.

"If you see the Earth as just a humdrum planet among stars circling in a vast universe, then we're not significant, we're just part of a crowd" Sungenis says. "But if you believe everything revolves around the Earth, it gives another picture - of purpose, a meaning of life."

The key phrase in there, I believe, is "believe."

This is kind of like saying America is God's chosen nation, a citadel on the hill that was blessed by the Creator to Do Great Things. And you could make a case, but I haven't read anywhere in the Bible "The U.S. can doeth no wrong."

You can believe the sky is striped, pickled, and polka-dotted, but that don't make it so.

Normally I wouldn't care much about some wacko spouting his wacky ideas, but because this article appeared on the front page of the "Religion" section, it's like saying the argument has some merit. Of course the journalist who wrote it gave time to scientists, who said geocentrism is (rightly) flat wrong. But that wasn't the focus of the article.

There was even a Catholic organization who offered $1,000 cash-money (how much is the world worth, anyway?) who could prove heliocentrism, or a sun-centered solar system, was correct.

Let's forget, for a moment, that heliocentrism has landed men on the moon, sent probes to the gaseous giant planets, landed a rover on Mars, and has provided evidence for the governing laws of the cosmos. Let's pretend all that is in doubt (which it isn't, if you're sane).

The rub here is that this guy believes he's right, and that's all he needs. No evidence, no proof, not even a large cadre of scientists and theologians who back him up.

The thought that the Earth isn't the center of the universe just drives this guy crazy, so he invents a system (or revives it, depending on your viewpoint) that makes his ideas correct. I heard a similar line of reasoning from a guy in the Nineteenth Century, who was so scared of hellfire that he invented a religion that didn't have a hell.

Today, we call these folks Jehovah's Witnesses.

We know the Earth isn't the center of the universe. Einstein even showed us that there is no such thing as the "center of the universe." We know the planets, Earth included, orbit the sun, which orbits the Milky Way galazy, which is part of a cluster of galaxies called the Local Cluster...and so on. The Earth is a humdrum planet, taking the entire cosmos into perspective. There's nothing special about us, except that we're alive - and that's only, so far, because of good luck.

Science works. It's not perfect, but it has a tremendous, prophetic power to make workable predictions about how the universe operates. Nothing comes close to making as accurate predictions as science. Believe what you want - that much we know.

But giving airtime to any nutjob who comes along and says "This I believe" is irresponsible. Questions and skepticism of science is fine - bring it on. The only requirement is you do a better job of explaining the world than what's already here, and you back it up.

Belief, unfortunately, doesn't have what it takes.