Carl Sagan

Sagan grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the son of Samuel Sagan, a Ukrainian-born garment cutter, and Rachel Gruber, a housewife who pushed him hard toward books. At the library one afternoon as a small boy, he learned that the stars were other suns, immensely far away, and later described the realization as close to a religious experience. He studied at the University of Chicago from his teens through his doctorate, taking a bachelor's degree, two further degrees in physics, and a 1960 PhD in astronomy under the planetary scientist Gerard Kuiper. Nothing about the path looked unusual for a promising young scientist, what set him apart came after, when he decided the public deserved to understand it too.

Harvard denied him tenure in 1968 and he moved to Cornell instead, where he stayed for the rest of his career and helped plan the Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions. He designed the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager Golden Record, the two objects humanity has sent furthest from Earth carrying a message. In 1980 his television series Cosmos reached an estimated 500 million people in sixty countries, more than any science documentary before it, and his book The Dragons of Eden won a Pulitzer Prize two years earlier. He published more than 600 scientific papers alongside a shelf of bestsellers, married three times, and turned skepticism itself, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," into something like a personal brand.

The scientific establishment never fully forgave him for the fame. In 1992 the National Academy of Sciences nominated him for membership and then blackballed him in the first round of voting, falling well short of the two-thirds required, one member later said that without the television work, Sagan would probably have gotten in. He also overstated, in public, how certain the science was behind "nuclear winter," the theory that nuclear war would darken the skies and starve the planet, a stance physicist Edward Teller dismissed as propaganda, and one biographers later called his weakest scientific moment. He had also hidden a fact from his own public image for decades: an anonymous 1971 essay praising marijuana's effect on his creativity, published under the name "Mr. X," revealed as his only after he died.

Myelodysplasia, a bone marrow disorder, led to pneumonia that killed him in Seattle on December 20, 1996, at sixty-two, he is buried at Lake View Cemetery there. Two years before his death, the same National Academy that had blackballed him gave him its Public Welfare Medal, a reversal nobody called an apology. His widow, Ann Druyan, finished projects he'd left unfinished and kept the Voyager record's legacy alive, Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom Sagan had encouraged as a teenager, hosted a 2014 reboot of Cosmos built explicitly in his shadow. The blackballing story still circulates as proof that popularizing science carries a professional cost, proof, mostly, of what happened to him specifically.

Carl Sagan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Pioneer plaque invention
  Designed with Frank Drake and Linda Salzman for the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes 1972
• The Dragons of Eden book
  Won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 1977
• Voyager Golden Record invention
  A phonograph record of Earth's sounds, carried past the solar system on both Voyager probes 1977
• Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television
  Reached an estimated 500 million viewers in 60 countries 1980
• Contact book
  A novel, later adapted into the 1997 film 1985

• November 9, 1934 aged 0 Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
• 1960 aged ~26 Earns a PhD in astronomy from the University of Chicago
• 1968 aged ~34 Denied tenure at Harvard and moves to Cornell
• 1972 aged ~38 Designs the Pioneer plaque
• 1977 aged ~43 Designs the Voyager Golden Record
• 1980 aged ~46 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage airs
• 1992 aged ~58 Nominated to and blackballed by the National Academy of Sciences
• 1994 aged ~60 Awarded the National Academy of Sciences' Public Welfare Medal
• December 20, 1996 aged 62 Dies of pneumonia in Seattle

• Neil deGrasse Tyson b. 1958
  Astrophysicist and science communicator who has made cosmology accessible to millions through television. carried Cosmos forward
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. public critic over nuclear winter
• Isaac Asimov 1920–1992
  Writer whose science fiction and popular science helped shape public imagination about robots, technology, and the future. fellow science popularizer
• Richard Feynman 1918–1988
  Theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and his accessible teaching style. contemporary physicist