Happy Sagan Day

It's the birthday of the man that Smithsonian Magazine called "truly irreplaceable": that's astronomer Carl Sagan, born in Brooklyn (1934)...
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-thursday-0a1?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

 

 

Pale Blue Dot, PBD text, PBD video, Who Speaks For Earth video, Cosmos, Cosmic Connection...Sagan@dawn...Contact opening scene... 

and Carl's & Ann's daughter Sasha's For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

More Carl quotes [but he didn't say the first one]...