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Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer who pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and science in general.
He is less well known for his skepticism.
File:Sagan small.jpg
Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking Lander. Click image for larger version.
Photo credit: Jet Propulsion Library, free for non-commercial use.
Sagan was a professor and lab director at Cornell University. He contributed to most of the unmanned space missions that explored our solar system. He conceived the idea of adding an unalterable and universal message on spacecraft destined to leave the solar system, that could be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it. The most elaborate such message he helped to develop is the Voyager Golden Record.
He was well known as a coauthor of the paper that warned of the dangers of nuclear winter. He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot life-hostile planet through greenhouse gases. His interest in these topics was in large part motivated by his interpretation of the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox. He believed that the Drake Equation suggested that a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations would form, but that the lack of evidence of such civilizations suggests that technological civilizations tend to destroy themselves rather quickly. This stimulated his interest in identifying ways that humanity could destroy itself, with the hope of avoiding such destruction and eventually becoming a space-faring species.
He wrote (with Ann Druyan, whom he later married) and narrated the highly popular thirteen part PBS television series Cosmos; he also wrote books to popularize science (The Dragons of Eden (which won a Pulitzer Prize), Broca's Brain, etc.) and a novel, Contact, that was a best-seller and had a film adaption starring Jodie Foster in 1997. The film won the 1998 Hugo award. From Cosmos Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions" which he never actually used in the television series. (He simply often used the word "billions.")
Sagan caused mixed reactions among other professional scientists. On the one hand, there was general support for his popularization of science, his efforts to increase scientific understanding among the general public, and his positions in favor of skepticism and against pseudoscience. On the other hand, there was some unease that the public would misunderstand some of the personal positions and interests that Sagan took as being part of the scientific consensus rather than his own personal views, and there was some unease, which some believe to have been motivated in part by professional jealousy, that scientific views contrary to those that Sagan took (such as on the severity of nuclear winter) were not being sufficiently presented to the public.
After a long and difficult fight with myelodysplasia, Sagan passed away at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996.
See also : extraterrestrial life