Presiding over the skies of Earth at the time of the origin of life was a huge Moon, its familiar surface features being etched by mighty collisions … - Carl Sagan
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Presiding over the skies of Earth at the time of the origin of life was a huge Moon, its familiar surface features being etched by mighty collisions and oceans of lava. If tonight´s Moon looks about as large as a nickel at arm´s lenght, that ancient Moon might have seemed as big as a saucer. It must have been heartbreakingly lovely. But it was billions of years to the nearest lovers.
Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect will change the earth's climate system.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, NASA/JPL (Public domain / CC0)
Also Known As
Native Name:
Carl Edward Sagan
Alternative Names:
Sagan
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Carl E. Sagan
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Carl E Sagan
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C. E. Sagan
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C.E. Sagan
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C E Sagan
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C. Sagan
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C Sagan
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Sagan C
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Sagan C.
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Sagan C. E.
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Sagan CE
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The early Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.
There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus... the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. ...in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable.
