Carl made me want to be the best human being I could be. - Ann Druyan

These are stories that make me more optimistic about our future. Through them I have come to feel more intensely the romance of science and the wonder of being alive right now, at these particular coordinates in spacetime, less alone, more at home, here in the cosmos.

We have the means to get through these terrible troubles, but we have to get our act together,” Druyan insists. “And one of the ways, in my view, is to spread the knowledge of science and high technology to the widest possible public once again.”

Science has nothing in common with fundamentalism or with superstition, but it has a lot in common with that desire to understand where we came from and who we are.