Скачать или смотреть Day 28 Celebrate Reason, Science, Free Inquiry and Free Inquiry

Carl Sagan was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a  Pulitzer Prize winning author and creator of the Emmy and Peabody award-winning PBS television series, Cosmos. His life was devoted to the same qualities Graham's life undermined--reason, science, free inquiry and wonder. Freethinkers celebrate Sagan's birthday on November 9.

Carl Sagan played a key role in NASA's robotic spacecraft missions. As a consultant and adviser to NASA since the 1950's, he briefed Apollo astronauts before their flights to the moon. A participant in the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo expeditions to the planets, he designed the Golden Record embedded in the two Voyager probes, now departing our solar system. This record contains sounds and images of life and culture on Earth. Perhaps, someday, this record will be discovered and enjoyed by advanced life forms from a spacefaring civilization. Wouldn't that be something? (That was a rhetorical question. Of course it would be something. Something mind-boggling and transformative, for better or worse.)

Sagan won nearly as many honors in his lifetime as Billy Graham conducted religious revivals. He was awarded NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and for Distinguished Public Service. An asteroid was named after him. He was given the John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award of the American Astronautical Society, the Public Welfare Medal (the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences), the Explorers Club 75th Anniversary Award, the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Medal of the Soviet Cosmonauts Federation and the Masursky Award of the American Astronomical Society. The latter included a plaque that read, in part: For his extraordinary contributions to the development of planetary science.

As a scientist trained in both astronomy and biology, Dr. Sagan made seminal contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres, planetary surfaces, the history of Earth, and exobiology. Many of the most productive planetary scientists working today are his students and associates.

Carl Sagan helped millions recognize and appreciate the wonder and importance of science, in part by writing best-selling books, including Cosmos, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations of the Evolution of Human Intelligence and The Demon-Haunted World. The latter by itself, if read by all, would be an effective antidote or mental vaccine against the folly of Billy Graham-like revivals. Anyone who read this book would be 100 percent immune to the fear-mongering, ignorance and superstition employed by Graham to enrapture vulnerable victims of magical thinking.

Who better to summarize Carl Sagan's legacy than his co-collaborator and spouse, Ann Druyan?

I think that his voice was a great, great service to our culture