Carl Sagan Day

[VenDexter]

Courtesy of PZ Myers...

Today is Carl Sagan Day.

http://www.carlsaganday.com/

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/happy_carl_sagan_day.php

I remember watching "Cosmos" on PBS when I was younger and it certainly helped to cement my already high interest in science.

Happy Carl Sagan Day! Do something in honor of the fact that "we're made of star stuff."

[Ray Moscow]

I think the public's (and my) appreciation of Sagan continues to grow. He was a great guy who did a lot to promote the public's understanding of science and reason.

[Matty]

sweet. i willbe happy to honor him.

[sticks kettle on, rolls one and grabs Cosmos off the bookshelf. ]

[VenDexter]

sweet. i willbe happy to honor him.

[sticks kettle on, rolls one and grabs Cosmos off the bookshelf. ]

He will be honored...the original Mr. X!

[Ray Moscow]

I just took Cosmos off the shelf, too. And posted the Sagan music video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc&feature=player_embedded)on Facebook.

[lpetrich]

I have several of his books, including the first book of his that I read, Intelligent Life in the Universe, an expansion of Iosif Shklovsky's Universe, Life, Mind. I remember his ancient-astronaut speculations in it.

I also have The Cosmic Connection, The Dragons of Eden, and Cosmos and Broca's Brain and The Demon-Haunted World and Billions and Billions and The Varieties of Scientific Experience. I remember Cosmos the TV show, though I thought that the Evolution part left a LOT to be desired.

There are better examples of artificial selection than the Heike crab, which seems like pareidolia to me. Carl Sagan could have done some comparative anatomy, like X-raying his hands and the paws of dogs and cats and the like -- it could have been made for some great visuals.

But I remember how blissful he looked and sounded, though some people called it Carl Cosmos's Sagan.


As to Contact, I read the book, but I didn't see the movie. I thought that the erasure of the evidence of Prof. Arroway's travels seemed a bit contrived. And claiming that there is a message in the value of pi? I couldn't stomach that.

[lpetrich]

I was unable to find the Carl Sagan books that I have, since they are likely buried behind some other books. But I was able to finish

Galileo and the Mountains of the Moon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S28xVAQl47E)


Carl Sagan had grown up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories of adventures on Barsoom, which is what Mars inhabitants had called the place. But much of his career involved getting very close looks at the planets by previous standards, close looks that firmly established that most of the Solar System is desolate and uninhabitable by even the hardiest microbes.

He recalls in the Cosmic Connection that in 1968, he had a run-in with a Soviet colleague, A.D. Kuzmin, who maintained that the Venera 4 spacecraft had landed on that planet's surface. Instead, CS maintained, it had stopped transmitting about 15 mi / 24 km above that planet's surface. Kuzmin maintained that it had landed on a high mountain. CS responded that there was no evidence of mountains that high, and even if there was, that it would be unlikely that that spacecraft had landed on it. Kuzmin asked what was the likelihood that the first bomb the Germans dropped on Leningrad would kill the only elephant in that city's zoo. CS conceded that that was very unlikely, and Kuzmin replied that that was what happened to that elephant.

But as CS noted, the designers of subsequent Venera spacecraft made them capable of withstanding much higher pressures than Venera 4 could. Venera 7 lasted 20 minutes on Venus's surface and Venera 8 over 40 minutes.


There's a nice bit of Cosmos that I recall: Linda Morabito's discovery of the volcanoes of Io. She had been working in optical navigation, measuring overexposed images of Jupiter's big moons relative to nearby stars to help find out where the Voyager spacecraft were. But one day, she found something like a partial bubble above Io's surface, and she wondered what that could be. She consulted the imaging team, and there was no known artifact that it could be. However, its position on Io's surface was at one of the odd heart-shaped markings that that spacecraft had photographed. There was also someone who had speculated that tidal friction would heat Io enough to make volcanoes erupt.

So she and some others in the Voyager team had concluded that her image was of a plume from an erupting volcano on Io. She recalls her discovery in this Planetary-Society page (http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/voyager/stories_kelly.html)


As to Carl Sagan's wives, his first one was Lynn Alexander, later Lynn Margulis. It was she who revived the endosymbiosis hypothesis for eukaryotic organelles. That hypothesis has become well-established for mitochondria and chloroplasts and related organelles, but most of her other endosymbiosis hypotheses have remained unsupported.

[Ray Moscow]

I remember Cosmos the TV show, though I thought that the Evolution part left a LOT to be desired.

There are better examples of artificial selection than the Heike crab, which seems like pareidolia to me. Carl Sagan could have done some comparative anatomy, like X-raying his hands and the paws of dogs and cats and the like -- it could have been made for some great visuals.


You remember more of the show than I do. I put it on my DVD rental list to give it another watch. (Though it seems that some highlights are on Youtube.)