In November, we celebrated 90 years since Carl Sagan was born. On Valentine’s Day, we celebrate 35 years since the birth of—thanks to Prof. Sagan’s persuasion—one of the greatest photographs of all time.
The Pale Blue Dot was the first image of Earth that humanity had ever taken from the outer Solar System. Voyager 1 snapped the picture on February 14th, 1990, and saved it to an on-board tape recorder and before sending it back to Earth from March through April. The signals rushed back at the speed of light, but still took 5.5 hours to span the vast distance Voyager 1 had traveled. From so far away, Earth was smaller than a single pixel, awash in camera-bent sunlight, surrounded by empty space and optic noise. This was the tiny home of “every human being who ever was,” Prof. Sagan said, floating on a planet no bigger than “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
There are many ways to celebrate Pale Blue Dot Day! The obvious way is to listen to Carl Sagan’s timeless speech, of course, and to endeavor to be kind to one another, today and forever. At the Carl Sagan Institute, we’ve also taken the opportunity to compile memories of Carl Sagan from those who knew him—as students, as fellow professors, and as partners in work and life—to celebrate the example he left for us, the ideals he lived by, laid out so clearly in his Pale Blue Dot speech.
The memories are spread across two videos on YouTube and their video descriptions. We hope you enjoy, and have a Pale Blue Dot Day full of awe and love!
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Beyond those featured in the video, we spoke to Steven Soter (astrophysicist and writer for Cosmos) and Steve Squyres (former Cornell Professor of astronomy) over the phone!
Dr. Soter was a PhD student and "delighted” when Carl Sagan first came to Cornell. Dr. Soter was later invited to write Cosmos with Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, which he described as “exhilarating. It was great fun.” Of course, the experience was not without its tribulations—the background footage for the episode about Kepler had been entirely filmed without a voiceover script due to tight production schedules. “Ann and I were assigned to stay up all night. The film people had done a very good job, but we then had to write script to fit what they had filmed,” Dr. Soter said. “And we did! We were kind of amazed that we managed to pull that off, Ann and I…There were a couple of rough spots that we couldn't quite finesse, and Carl managed to do that. So it was, in some ways, always running to try to catch up to the schedule of production. But we did it!”
And, regarding Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan: “I had never seen two people so intensely in love as they were.”
Dr. Squyres was similarly a graduate student during Carl Sagan’s tenure at Cornell. “I went [to the Space Sciences Building] one day and there was a note in my mailbox saying ‘Carl Sagan wants to see you’… I’d never met him before… and he was there to tell me that he wanted a graduate student to work on the Voyager mission!”
Dr. Squyres took a graduate course from Prof. Sagan, and it was “just spectacular… while [Astronomy 102] was the course Carl was best known for, this was a much higher level course, and it was just as good—he was such a good teacher at any level."
“He was actually able to teach what many people sort of view as being 'scientific intuition.' And that sounds bizarre, but he really could do it. I remember he would go to the board and he would write out some complicated equation with nine or ten terms in it, big complicated thing… but then what he could do was go, ‘Well, look, yes, there are a lot of terms in here, some of them we don’t know very well—but this one, this one, and this one, we know are all small enough that they don’t really matter… and these two: when this one goes down, the other goes up, so they balance each other and we can ignore those for a moment too.’” Squyres says that Prof. Sagan could distill down equations and teach students how to "not solve it quickly, but look at it quickly… and figure out how to invest your time. It was tremendously valuable.”
Dr. Squyres also attributed an aspect of his own science communication to Carl Sagan. “He was really one of the first scientists… to recognize that if you are so fortunate as to be able to carry out your career based on billions of dollars that come from taxpayers… you have not just an opportunity, but an obligation to share what you’re doing,” Dr. Squyres said. “I realized that I had, personally, a special obligation to share what we learned in an accessible way” with the Mars rovers. “I really took that to heart, and I did the best that I could with that.”
Above all, “he was a great teacher, he was a valued scientific colleague, and he was a great inspiration to me.”
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Video chapters:
0:00 Inspiration for "Contact"
2:32 Updating Cosmos for today's world
7:45 Steve Soter and favorite dessert
13:37 In work and in life
18:12 Special thanks
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