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Born in 1934, Carl grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, developing a remarkable talent to connect with ordinary people around the world. He often wrote of the awe he felt about science since the time, as a kid, when he sought explanations in the local library for questions his parents couldn't answer like "What are the stars?" Despite parochial roots, Carl approached his science globally, starting with his mid-1960s collaboration with Soviet astronomer Iosif S. Shklovskiy that culminated with their still-compelling book, INTELLI- GENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. As president of The Planetary Society, Carl fostered Russian/American dialog in order to achieve mutual understanding and lessen the chances of nuclear winter -- the planetary catastrophe he researched and feared most.
Carl was a humane, responsible citizen, always battling prejudice, narrowmindedness, and irrationality. He opposed ethnocentricism and chauvinism of any sort. A voice for moral responsibility in the scientific community, he recently expressed concern that efforts to defend Earth from asteroids would violate United Nations protocols against using nuclear weapons in space and could be turned, by a future despot, into weapons against humanity. Carl's political efforts were tempered by scientific rationality. Unlike many scientists, he could modify his views in response to new research.
Carl was innately skeptical of authoritative teachings, whether from "common sense", the Bible, or other scientists. His openness to alternative views brought him full circle, to a point that distressed his colleagues but made him uniquely able to explain science to the public. Most planetary scientists, for instance, regard the supposed stone "face" of Mars as a ludicrous joke. Yet in his recent book, THE DEMON- HAUNTED WORLD, Carl treated popular fascination with the "face" respectfully and refused to declare that it cannot exist. Some researchers oppose taking even a few pictures of the edifice with the two spacecraft now en route to Mars. Yet Carl advocated doing so, if only to help the awestruck face-believers to understand that this humanoid feature is (almost) surely a creation of our yearnings and imagination, just like elephants perceived in the clouds. Carl's willingness to entertain possibilities that popular fancies might prove true gave him access to the broader public that is abandoned by more narrowly rigid academics.
Carl's advocacy of exobiology was considered disreputable by some scientists and drew criticism, further fueled by their jealousy of his public renown. I recall, with some shame, publically poking fun myself at Carl's idea of floating life forms in Jupiter's atmosphere. And Carl could desert logic, as when he privately bet me that the soon-to-arrive Viking landers had a 50-50 chance of photographing polar bears on Mars, a prospect he raised in his 1975 paperback book, OTHER WORLDS (Carl never paid up; he would probably say that we still haven't explored Mars enough to disprove the hypothesis.)
Nonetheless, Carl practiced science with rigor. His studies of greenhouse heating on Venus, windblown dust on Mars, hydrocarbon seas on Titan, and dark stuff in the outer solar system exemplify the best of planetary research. Yet Carl was sometimes wrong, as we all are, and his work may not have such lasting significance as that of a few of his contemporaries, including the late James Pollack and others among his many ex-students. Parochial astronomers, unappreciative of Carl's multidisciplinary breadth, could not handle the mismatch between his fame -- he was the most famous astronomer, perhaps scientist, in the world -- and his "mere" A- achievements in planetary astronomy.
I believe that Carl was a greater scientist than any other American astronomer. Our lives are increasingly dominated by science and technology, whether the machines of war, the computer revolution, or civilization's impact on the ecosphere. Meanwhile, public education in science has retreated steeply from the post-Sputnik era. One can hardly find a science book to buy (except by Sagan), or a television show to watch, amid the shelves of books on the occult and X-Files copycats. Carl exemplified the highest calling of a scientist, not merely writing narrow research papers but ensuring that his or her work is done and communicated within the context of human culture.
I recall an evening spent one-on-one with him in Pasadena, soon after his first appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. We dined at a Japanese restaurant, then saw a movie. Carl told me that he was at a crossroads in his life, torn between whether to embark on a new direction as a public explicator of science or to continue giving his scientific career top priority. He wisely realized that he couldn't do both effectively. He asked me what he should do, as I'm sure he asked other friends and colleagues. I told him to go public. He would have done so even if everyone had counselled otherwise. The world is richer for his choice.
Yet it took Carl years to relinquish the time-consuming editorship of ICARUS, the undistinguished publication he had transformed into the respected chief journal of planetary science. He rationalized that retaining the editorship, his Cornell professorship, and his NASA principal investigator status would underpin his public role with scientific legitimacy. But research was Carl's first love, and I think he simply could not fully abandon it.
I first met Carl when, as an undergraduate, I took his course on "The Planets" in 1965. Even then he had the unique speaking style that became his trademark. I recall vividly his teaching that one cause for Earth's far-out-of-equilibrium abundance of methane is "bovine flatulence," as he put it, intoning "bovine" like his now-infamous "billions". My lecture notes are mostly equations and rigorous proofs in planetary physics, but they show that Carl's applications were as often to Earth as to all the other planets combined. His early concern for our world plus his gift for teaching science foreshadowed his rise as the superstar of "Cosmos". Can we imagine anyone else captivating so many millions to the marvels of science?
We astronomers -- amateur, arm-chair, professional -- are fortunate that such an eloquent spokesman for science should have come from our midst. With Carl Sagan gone as post-Cold War civilization approaches the next millennium, the world sorely requires new writers, scientists, and educators to emulate Carl's efforts to bring about a more rational, humane, and wondrous future for the inhabitants of this "pale blue dot" called Earth.
Clark R. Chapman, Institute Scientist, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado
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