Carl Sagan. First citizen of the earth
For many centuries, mankind has been dreaming of establishing contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. But, perhaps, only one person managed to prove to the world that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a serious scientific direction and not a kind of mania. His name was Carl Sagan, and he wrote and sent a real letter to aliens. Even two.
Pioneer means first
In 1972-1973, two research vehicles, Pioneer-10 and Pioneer-11, were sent to Jupiter and Saturn. Their main task was to photograph the gas giants from a more or less close distance. Both "Pioneers" successfully completed their task and set off to drift into deep space.
Along with Voyager 1, which launched a little later, the Pioneers became the first man-made vehicles to leave the solar system and find themselves in deep space. All this was planned.
That is why the "Pioneers" were chosen by the famous astronomer and popularizer of science Carl Sagan in order to carry aluminum plates - messages to distant worlds from brief information about people and the earth.
If a distant alien intelligence ever "catch" any of the devices, even in a million years, he will be able to decipher the pictograms invented by Sagan.
The plates depict the ship itself (for scale), as well as the figures of a man and a woman. Nearby is engraved a diagram of the solar system and a diagram of the location of the Sun relative to the nearest 14 pulsars and the center of the Galaxy (a pulsar is neutron star, which is a source of some kind of radiation, usually radio or light).
The coordinates of the Sun relative to pulsars are unchanged, as are the positions of other stars, which means that aliens will be able to orient themselves. Also on the plates is a schematic representation of a hydrogen atom, the radiation wavelength of which is taken as a unit of measurement (for example, the height of a woman is indicated in them).
Carl Sagan died in 1996, long before the Pioneers left solar system, but he was well aware that he would not live to see contact, if one ever happened. He was just trying to see into the very, very distant future.
How to become an astronomer
Sagan was born in Brooklyn in 1934 to a Russian immigrant who married a girl from New York. The family lived in poverty, especially against the backdrop of the Great Depression.
Carl's parents were ordinary people without education, but his father wanted his son to grow up differently. He took little Karl to the Museum of Natural History, to the planetarium, in 1939 they visited the World's Fair in New York with the whole family.
And soon after the war, the number of the famous almanac Astounding Science Fiction fell into the boy's hands, which, coupled with the general hysteria of that time associated with UFOs, determined the worldview of the future scientist. Carl Sagan wanted to be an astrophysicist.
And he became one, and brilliant. University of Chicago Astronomical Society, graduate school and dissertation on "Physical Exploration of the Planets" - by 1960, the newly minted PhD in physics was considered one of the leading young astrophysicists in the country and showed great promise.
He worked at the University of California, at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, lectured at Harvard, Cornell University, was a consultant at NASA (including training astronauts for flights to the moon).
During his work, Sagan made a number of astronomical and astrophysical discoveries - for example, he discovered high-temperature regions on Venus, explored Titan and Europa (the moons of Saturn and Jupiter). But he was known primarily for his research in the field of alien intelligence. And he became the only scientist whose research on this topic was recognized by the world scientific community.
Where do aliens live
The issue of alien intelligence has bothered Sagan since childhood. He was fond of science fiction (and in 1984 he wrote the science fiction novel "Contact", which entered the golden fund of American fiction), loved comics, and was passionately interested in the UFO mania of the 1950s. When, in the mid-1980s, astronomers Thomas Pearson and Jill Tarter founded the SETI Institute, the main purpose of which was to contact alien races, Carl Sagan, along with another popularizer of alien intelligence, Frank Drake, became one of its leading figures. In fact, he himself stood at the origins of the SETI program back in the 1970s.
It was Sagan who managed to get funding and permission from NASA to install two aluminum, gold-anodized plates on the Pioneer probes.
A few years later, in 1977, Sagan led a commission that prepared another record that went to the infinity of space on the Voyager series research apparatus. Moreover, this message was a record in a different sense of the word.
It records the sounds of the Earth. Most of- this is music (from Bach and Beethoven to Chuck Berry and Georgian choral singing), the smaller one is just human voices and various noises, sirens, hammering, birdsong and animal cries.
At the same time, there are 116 encoded drawings and photographs on the disc, reflecting life on Earth and the structure of the solar system. On the outside of the case, in addition to repeating the image from the Pioneer plates, there is a diagram of a device that allows you to extract information from the plate.
Between the sending of tablets and records, in 1974, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake made another attempt to contact deep space by sending a radio signal there. It is now known as the Arecibo message (after the source radio telescope).
A signal-message lasting 169 seconds was encoded information about human civilization - the numbers in binary system, atomic numbers of the main elements, information about human DNA, humanity in general, the solar system and the telescope itself.
The direction of the radio signal was chosen in the constellation Hercules (globular star cluster M13). Sagan was well aware that the signal would take about 25,000 years to reach its destination, and if it was received by aliens, successfully decoded and answered, another 25,000 years in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, he pinned more hopes on this method of communication than on records, which he described in detail in the novel "Contact".
By the way, this was the second attempt to send a radio signal into space. The words "peace", "Lenin" and "USSR" were sent in 1962 from the Evpatoria Center for Deep Space Communications. Subsequently, many messages were sent to other worlds, but it is Sagan's message that remains the most famous and informative.
Another life
Carl Sagan surprisingly combined a serious scientist-researcher, a science fiction dreamer and a popularizing star. He gave exciting lectures, understandable even to an unprepared person, he knew how to captivate anyone with his ideas and enthusiasm.
His work was a huge success. Dragons of Eden book. Discourses on the Evolution of the Human Brain won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and topped the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks, which is simply incredible for a non-fiction publication.
Sagan was interested in absolutely everything - astronomy and anthropology, psychology and biology, the problems of artificial intelligence and the development of computer networks.
There was no branch of science that he would not pay attention to in his books, lectures, stories. The most important thing that was in Sagan was an unconditional faith in humanity, its limitless possibilities and its inexhaustible resources.
An asteroid is named after Sagan, the landing site of the first rover, a number of awards in various branches of science, and even a special number characterizing the number of stars in the observable universe (approximately equal to 70 x 10 21). The film, staged in 1997 based on the novel Contact, won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Film.
But the main monument to Carl Sagan is four records flying somewhere in the boundless space. They will fly for millions more years, and perhaps someday they will reach their destination. And then the mission of Carl Sagan will be completed.
Tim QUICKLY
Carl Sagan was an outstanding visionary and now his legacy must be preserved for further development our knowledge of life in the universe and the continuation of space exploration for all time.
Daniel Goldin, director of NASA
High science does not tolerate fuss. Most scientists avoid "crazy" hypotheses and do not like to associate with amateurs. But from time to time, visionaries appear who are cramped in laboratories and departments, who want to directly know this whole vast world, penetrating into its secrets and sharing their discoveries. They help us to feel the movement of progress and the beauty of knowledge. Carl Sagan was such a visionary.
Among the stars
The future great popularizer and visionary Carl Sagan has been engaged in scientific research since childhood
Carl Edward Sagan was born on November 9, 1934 to a Jewish family from Brooklyn, New York. The parents of the future scientist were not very educated people, but the boy's curiosity was supported as best they could. Carl's most vivid childhood experience was visiting the New York World's Fair in 1939. All his life he recalled with trepidation various technical curiosities and the famous attraction "Futurama" - a huge model of the city of the future. “The world turned out to be full of miracles that I had not previously suspected,” Sagan wrote much later.
In 1939, the World Exhibition opened in New York, where leading powers and corporations presented their scientific and technological achievements.
The thirst for knowledge led the boy to the city library, and the first book he asked for there was a brochure on the basics of astronomy. Sagan wanted to know what stars were, and he was shocked to learn that they are the size of our Sun, or even larger, but seem small due to their vast distances. At that moment, Karl realized for the first time how big the universe was, and later on he tried to convey this realization to others.
AT school years Carl is into science fiction. His early idols were HG Wells and Edgar Burroughs, and later he discovered Astounding Science Fiction, which at the time was headed by the illustrious John Campbell. Isaac Asimov, Alfred Van Vogt, Lester del Rey, Henry Kuttner, Hol Clement, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn and other classics of the genre were printed there. Seeing how exciting stories can be combined with cutting-edge scientific ideas made Carl even more eager to become a scientist.
At the age of seven, Sagan visited the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan. The tour made a huge impression on him.
In 1948, the Sagan family moved to the industrial town of Rahway, near New York. The school there left much to be desired: the teachers mindlessly followed the program, not developing the talents of the students. The spirit of the explorer in the young Sagan was supported only by fantasy, which opened a window from the musty everyday life to the world of space adventures. At some point, Karl became interested in chemistry, led a school circle, and set up a laboratory at home. But still, astronomy always stood in the first place for him, and it was to her that he decided to devote his life.
In 1951, Sagan entered the University of Chicago in the Department of Physics, which was then headed by the legendary Enrico Fermi. It was different here than at school. The teaching was on the highest level, and among the lecturers came across real stars. For example, supervisor Sagan's dissertation "Investigation of the Physics of the Planets" was the famous Gerald Kuiper, who discovered the satellites of Uranus and Neptune.
At university, Carl worked with chemist Harold Ury on a monograph on the origin of life. Years later from similar works Sagan and other scientists, a new discipline was born at the intersection of astronomy and biochemistry - astrobiology.
A brilliant education and communication with the best minds of our time could not but affect the success of Sagan. He has worked at prestigious universities such as California and Harvard. But there are many such scientists - why do people remember Carl Sagan?
Respond, Martians!
Carl Sagan among the founders of the Planetary Society (1980)
The fact is that Sagan did not hesitate to use in his work the imagination developed by reading science fiction. Already at the dawn of his career, he put forward several "crazy" hypotheses. For example, contrary to the general opinion at that time, he suggested that the surface of Venus had long since turned into a hot desert due to the greenhouse effect. He then predicted that Saturn's moon Titan had methane-ethane seas, and Jupiter's moon Europa had a whole ocean of water hidden under its ice crust. All this was confirmed by research apparatus years later.
But Sagan's imagination took him even further. Since childhood, he believed in aliens (like many Americans of those years), and the science of the 1950s gave hope that life exists at least on Mars. No one hoped to find an advanced civilization there, but there was still a chance to discover the biosphere. Therefore, Sagan became interested in the Red Planet and in the early 1960s took part in the Mariner program, aimed at studying the solar system. Disappointment awaited him: when in July 1965 the Mariner 4 spacecraft sent the first television pictures of Mars, it became clear that there were no signs of life on the surface of the planet.
Telephotos received from the Mariner-4 spacecraft testified: there is no life on Mars
Sagan, like many other astronomers, did not want to acknowledge the results of the mission. "Mariner-4" managed to transmit only 22 frames, the quality of which left much to be desired. It took three more vehicles (Mariner 6, Mariner 7 and Mariner 9) to make it clear even to the most ardent supporters of life on Mars: the Red Planet is a frozen empty ball with craters.
And even then, Sagan did not give up: he said that in the harsh conditions of Mars, life could have arisen on a different chemical basis. As an illustration of this idea, he wrote the essay "Can Our Presence Be Detected?" (1972), where he wittily mirrored the situation. He described how a Martian astronomer could not find life on Earth - because the conditions there are not similar to Martian ones!
Carl Sagan next to the laboratory lander of the Viking spacecraft, designed to detect microscopic life forms on Mars (Photo: JPL)
It was then that Sagan decided that science could and should be popularized and began writing for the general reader. His numerous essays and lectures later compiled more than a dozen collections. In many of his books, Sagan addresses the issue of alien life and extraterrestrial intelligence, infecting readers with the belief that space cannot be empty and dead. According to the laws of nature, other civilizations must inevitably appear somewhere, which, like us, strive for contact. Karl decided that this contact should be established by himself.
In 1971, on the initiative of Sagan and his Soviet colleague Nikolai Kardashev, the first international conference on communications with extraterrestrial intelligence was held in Armenia. At the conference, Sagan criticized "carbon chauvinism" - the idea that alien life can only be carbon-based. He argued that life can have a completely different chemical basis and form even in such conditions in which any organisms known to us would die. As a result of the conference, the participants decided not only to continue searching for signals from space, but also to send a message themselves.
After reading the Space Communications collection, the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote to Carl Sagan: “I realized that you are smarter than me. And it's infuriating!"
Carl Sagan dreamed of picking up signals from another civilization
Sagan took on this task personally. In 1974, the largest Arecibo radio telescope (Puerto Rico), located in the mouth of an extinct volcano, sent a powerful signal towards the M13 star cluster in the constellation Hercules. The characteristics of the signal were selected in such a way that after 25 thousand years, having reached the goal, it covered the entire cluster of 30 thousand stars due to scattering. The message itself, which Sagan wrote with Frank Drake (the author of the equation that calculates the hypothetical number of civilizations in the galaxy), contained only 1679 bits of information. They put the most necessary information about us, our biochemical basis and the solar system.
But Sagan believed that you should not be limited to signals alone. He suggested placing earthly artifacts and messages on board spacecraft departing for deep space. NASA listened to him: four devices of the Pioneer and Voyager series carried our messages into space in the mid-1970s. Their content, again, was invented by Carl Sagan himself. On board the Pioneers, the famous gilded aluminum plates with the image of a man, a woman and the solar system (drawn by Linda, Carl Sagan's second wife) went into space. The message also indicated the location of the Sun relative to the nearest pulsars, two states of the hydrogen atom and the trajectory of Pioneer relative to the solar system.
Sagan compiled the contents of the first signal intended extraterrestrial civilizations
On the Voyagers, a record with audio and video recordings went into space, including greetings in 55 languages, musical compositions and terrestrial sounds, photographs of terrestrial landscapes, animals and people. In addition, there were addresses by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and US President Jimmy Carter. By the way, Ann Druyan, the future third wife of Carl Sagan, was responsible for the selection of records.
It was Carl Sagan who suggested sending messages to other civilizations aboard spacecraft.
On February 14, 1990, at the suggestion of Sagan, NASA took a picture of the Earth from a distance of 6 billion km using the Voyager 1 spacecraft. It was named Pale Blue Dot - "Pale Blue Dot". Sagan liked to display it at his lectures.
“Look again at this point,” said the scientist. - It's here. This is our house. This is us. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, everyone who has ever lived has lived their lives on it. Our many pleasures and sufferings, thousands of self-confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every builder and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every couple in love, every mother and every father, every capable child, every inventor and traveller, every ethicist, every deceitful politician, every "superstar", every "greatest leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species has lived here - on a mote suspended in a sunbeam.
Earth is a small stage in the vast cosmic arena... Our posturing, our imagined importance, the illusion of our privileged status in the universe - they all give in to this point of pale light. Our planet is just a single speck of dust in the surrounding cosmic darkness. In this vast void, there is no hint that anyone will come to our aid to save us from our ignorance.”
blow up the moon
In the late 1950s, graduate student Carl Sagan was involved in preparing a nuclear explosion on the moon.
Carl Sagan was, of course, a cosmist, that is, in everything, even in the most mundane phenomena, he found a direct connection with the processes taking place in the Universe. And special place in these processes he assigned to reason. “Through us, the cosmos knows itself,” said Sagan. He believed that humanity would evolve as an intelligent species and someday become a galactic phenomenon, equal in power to the imaginary gods of antiquity.
But for this it is necessary to get rid of the natural aggressiveness that threatens our existence. The prospect of human self-destruction, which seemed quite real in the midst of cold war, scared Sagan. He was familiar with this problem firsthand. Few people know this, but Sagan in his youth prevented the United States from ... blowing up the moon.
In May 1958, the US military invited scientists to prepare a project for a nuclear explosion on the moon. The purpose of the project, called A-119, was to show the superiority of the United States over the USSR, since the explosion would be clearly visible from Earth. It would also allow us to learn something about the lunar surface, part of which would be ejected into space.
To work on the A-119, a team of ten scientists gathered under the leadership of Leonard Reiffel. Among them was Kuiper, who attracted his graduate student Sagan to the work. He was tasked with simulating the expansion of a dust cloud in circumlunar space after the explosion and assessing its visibility from Earth. The team worked until January 1959, after which the project was closed, and this was influenced, among other things, by Sagan's calculations. They showed that radiation contamination would complicate future missions to the Moon.
Of course, the project was strictly classified. We would never have known about him if not for Kay Davidson's study "Carl Sagan: A Life" (1999). The biographer was astonished to find in Sagan's application for a scholarship mentioning reports "On the possible contribution of nuclear explosions to solving the problems of astronomy" and "Radiological contamination of the Moon nuclear explosions". Former project manager Reiffel took the opportunity to tell the public about it. Even in death, Sagan helped uncover one of the mysteries of history. Quite in his spirit!
By the 1980s, Sagan had become an ardent pacifist and openly campaigned for nuclear disarmament. In many ways, he was influenced by the Marxist views of Ann Druyan. When in 1983 President Ronald Reagan announced plans to build a space defense system dubbed "Star Wars", Sagan publicly opposed it. He took part in a protest at an old nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. As a result, Sagan and hundreds of other participants were arrested.
Carl Sagan became a cult figure during his lifetime
To incline public opinion towards anti-war ideas, Sagan modeled possible consequences massive application atomic weapons. The result was the work "Cold and Darkness: The World After nuclear war(1984) and The Path No One Thought About: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race (1990). In them, Sagan and colleagues argued that climate change that will follow a nuclear war will destroy life on Earth. Subsequently, this concept became known as "nuclear winter". The theory is controversial, but even those who consider nuclear winter a myth admit that it is a myth that can save humanity.
Little green men
In the 1950s, the United States was gripped by a real "plate mania"
Having met the French astronomer and ufologist Jacques Vallier, who worked for NASA, Sagan decided to study the phenomenon of “flying saucers” from the standpoint of science. In 1966, he joined a committee led by physicist Edward Condon that analyzed UFO data. After two years of work, the Condon committee concluded that, although individual cases are difficult to explain from the standpoint of science, there is no serious evidence of contact with aliens.
Even after that, Sagan continued to write about "flying saucers" and devoted an entire episode of the series Cosmos to the UFO problem. True, he always warned readers against hasty conclusions and accompanied the books with cartoons that ridiculed the stereotype of "little green men".
Space travel scientist
By the end of the 1970s, Carl Sagan's authority as a person who knew how to talk about the wonders and secrets of the universe had grown so much that he was offered to do it. The result was the thirteen-episode show Cosmos: A Personal Journey, which ran from September 28 to December 21, 1980.
Screensaver of the television series "Space: a personal journey"
In the project, Sagan acted not only as a co-author of the script, but also as a host - and looked great in this role. An original special effect has become a hallmark of the series: a scientist gives a lecture, sitting in the interiors of a "ship of imagination", reminiscent of the wheelhouse of a starship of the future. He, as it were, travels through space and time himself, becoming a witness of great events and processes - from big bang before the advent of man and the launch of the first interplanetary vehicles. The program of search for extraterrestrial civilizations - SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was not ignored either. But main theme the Universe itself has become: its incredible scale and the mystery of its appearance.
Sagan's Studio in the TV series
The series had a budget of $6.3 million, but it paid off handsomely. "Space: A Personal Journey" was strikingly different from the documentary series of the time, which aroused great interest among the public. It was watched by over 500 million people in 60 countries around the world. It became an example for many other popular science programs. The series won a Peabody Award and two Emmy Awards.
On the television series Space: A Personal Voyage, Carl Sagan co-wrote and hosted all thirteen episodes.
In 1986, a special version of the series with six episodes appeared. Although Sagan's story was shortened, the content was expanded with new scientific data and computer graphics. In 1989, the rights to Personal Journey were acquired by media mogul Ted Turner, after which the series was again finalized: the original episodes were reduced, providing epilogues, where Sagan talked about new discoveries made during recent times. In addition, a fourteenth episode was filmed, consisting of an interview with Sagan taken by Turner.
In 2014, the Fox channel announced the filming of a sequel called Space: Space and Time. The screenwriter was the same Druyan, and the charismatic astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson became the host. The series started on March 9, 2014 and was warmly received by the public.
Carla's widow Ann Druyan and Neil deGrasse Tyson developed Sagan's ideas in the television series "Space: Space and Time"
Studio presenter in the new "Cosmos"
But Sagan remained in history not only thanks to science. He also contributed to his favorite science fiction. In 1979, together with Ann Druyan, he wrote a fantasy film about the work of seekers of extraterrestrial intelligence. At that time, the Cosmos series had not yet been released, so no one could be interested in the project.
Then Sagan reworked the script into a novel. A year later, in the wake of Cosmos' popularity, Simon & Schuster bought the rights to the unfinished book for $2 million, an incredible advance for the time. And it didn't fail. The novel "Contact" became a bestseller: over 1.7 million copies were sold in the first two years. The book won the Locus and the John Campbell Award for best debut of the year.
The secret of success lies in Sagan's ability to combine science with philosophy and religion. The main character, radio astronomer Ellie Arroway, dreams of establishing a connection with an alien civilization. One day, the equipment of her observatory receives a signal from Vega. The message is deciphered, and it turns out that this is a description of a certain machine. Despite the fears of politicians, the car is still being built. She turns out to be a teleporter that uses subspace tunnels to travel instantly.
Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway in the adaptation of Contact
On one of these teleports, an expedition is sent on a space journey, which includes Ellie. Scientists get to the "galactic station", where they are informed that there is a commonwealth of aliens who solve the problem of "thermal death" of the Universe, using astroengineering facilities for this. In addition, travelers will learn that the "tunnels" and "train stations" were built by an even more ancient and powerful civilization and that the digital message from it is contained in the number "pi". It turns out that the Universe itself is an artificial formation created by the superintelligence.
The finale of the novel describes Sagan's attitude towards the idea of God. Charles was ready to admit its existence if irrefutable evidence was presented, and condemned those atheists who deny God, relying only on unfounded assertions. At the same time, the Almighty, according to Sagan, could not be a handsome old man on a cloud. If it exists, then our naive ideas about it must be very different from reality.
The film based on this story was still released in 1997 - it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, director of the Back to the Future trilogy. Sagan did not live to see the premiere: he died in December 1996 after a two-year battle with cancer. The Hugo Award-winning film is dedicated to his memory.
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He looked for life on Mars and predicted oceans on Europa. He prevented the US from bombing the moon and scared the world with the idea of a nuclear winter. He infected thousands of people with a love of knowledge and wrote the screenplay of the most science fiction film. Biography of Carl Sagan is an excellent example to follow. To deeply know the world, you need to enjoy its beauty. To discover something new, you need to give free rein to the imagination. To live fully, you need to appreciate life. That's what Carl Sagan did. And he bequeathed it to all of us.
> > Carl Sagan
Biography of Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
Short biography:
Name Story by: Carl Sagan
Education: University of Chicago
Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York, USA
A place of death: USA, Seattle
Carl Sagan- American astronomer and astrophysicist: biography with photo, popularizer of space, famous books, Mariner launch, Viking, Galileo, Apollo, Cosmos.
One of the leading astronomers of our time, Dr. Carl Edward Sagan was born November 9, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. He received his bachelor's degree in 1955 and his master's degree in 1956 from the University of Chicago. Sagan taught at Harvard University in the early 1960s. He moved to Cornell in 1968 where he became a professor in 1971. During its brief biographies Sagan also played a leading role in NASA's missions to other planets: Mariner, Viking, Voyage, and Galileo. He received NASA medals for exceptional scientific achievements and twice for Distinguished Public Service and the Apollo Space Program Achievement Award.
Carl Sagan, perhaps better known for his work on the TV series Cosmos. The series won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award and became the most watched series in public television history. It was seen by more than 500 million people in 60 countries. The book was on the bestseller list NY Times for 70 weeks and was the best-selling science book ever published on English language.
Dr. Sagan was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Planetary Science Laboratory at Cornell University. He has played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyage planetary expeditions, for which he received the NASA Medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and for Outstanding public service. Dr. Sagan was also a research assistant Nobel Prize in the field of genetics Muller. His research on the origin of life began in the 1950s. The Masura Award from the American Astronomical Society reads: "His outstanding contribution to the development of planetary science. As a scientist in astronomy and biology, Dr. Sagan has made constructive contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres, the planet's surface, Earth history, and exobiology. Many of the most productive planetary scientists working today are his current and former students and colleagues.
Dr. Sagan has published over 600 scientific works and popular articles. He has authored and co-authored or edited over 20 books, including Dragons of Eden, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1978. His book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision for Humanity's Future in Space has appeared on bestseller lists around the world. Reading his abridged version on audiocassette was nominated for a Grammy and was cited as one of the "two best audiobooks of the year." Sagan also published Demon-Ghostworld: Science Like a Candle in the Dark, which became Sagan's eighth New York Times bestseller. Along with his By his wife, Ann Druyan, he co-produced a Warner Bros. motion picture based on the novel Contact.
Sagan was also one of the founders of the Planetary Society. This organization, which has about 100,000 members, is the largest spatial interest group in the world. The Society supports the main research programs: the study of near-Earth asteroids, the study of Mars. Sagan was invited as a Distinguished Scientist to the California Laboratory. He was also an editor at the Journal, where he published many articles on science and disease, which overcame him in 1996.
The American scientist astrophysicist Carl Sagan is one of those people who shape the intellectual atmosphere of the era. A brilliant scientist and popularizer of science, he dealt with the problems of space research, communication with extraterrestrial civilizations, and exobiology. In his books, he raised philosophical problems about the place of man in the universe, about his purpose and role in the universe.
Sagan was born in New York in 1934. He graduated from the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees, and then became a doctor of astrophysics and astronomy. He worked at Berkeley, taught at Harvard, and at Cornell University became the head of the Planetary Research Laboratory. The range of his scientific interests is unusually wide.
Exobiology
Exobiology is the science of life outside the earth's atmosphere. So far, the only biological objects that we know are terrestrial organisms. And the final answer about the origin of life on Earth still does not exist. Carl Sagan conducted experiments on the formation of compounds in the earth's pre-atmosphere. Subsequently, when information was received from space probes, he studied the possibility of such a synthesis in the matter of comets and on Saturn's satellite Titan.
space research
Carl Sagan was engaged in the study of objects in the solar system. He suggested that there were oceans on Titan and Europa (a moon of Jupiter). And in these oceans, under a layer of ice, there may be life. Sagan studied seasonal changes on Mars, and proposed a hypothesis about their nature. In his opinion, these changes are not caused by vegetation, as previously thought, but by dust storms.
The 1997 Mars Pathfinder landing site was named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.
The landing site of the Mars Pathfinder is shown in the movie Star Trek. There we see a quote from Sagan:
Whatever the reason you are on Mars, I am glad you are here and would love to be with you.
By studying the atmosphere of Venus, he modeled the possibility of a greenhouse effect on Earth from an excess of carbon dioxide.
At the same time with Soviet academician N. N. Moiseev Sagan expressed the idea of a nuclear winter, which threatens the Earth as a result of a nuclear war.
Are we alone in the universe?
Is there intelligent life in the universe? Many would like to answer this question in the affirmative.
Carl Sagan dealt with this issue a lot. The book by I. Shklovsky "The Universe, Life, Mind", published in the Soviet Union in 1962, made a great impression on Sagan. He co-authored its translation into English in 1966. The book was published under the title: Intelligent Life in the Universe. Sagan shared his article "Problems of Interstellar Communication" with Shklovsky. He was a supporter of the Seti search program. As part of the program, radio telescopes scanned the sky and sent blocks of signals to users' computers around the world. Those wishing to participate had to install a small client program on their computer that processed the signal in the background. In more than twenty years of work, there have been several points of interest that have not yet received a final explanation.
Despite his fascination with alien life forms, Sagan was very skeptical about the so-called. ufology. He considered most of the information about UFOs to be speculative and charlatan.
Pioneers
The Pioneer-10 and Pioneer-11 spacecraft were launched from Earth to explore the outskirts of the solar system.
Pioneer 10 was supposed to be the first artificial body to leave the solar system. Knowing this, Sagan offered to send a message on these devices to intelligent beings of other worlds. The messages were gilded aluminum plates measuring 6x9 inches. They depict a man and a woman in front of a spaceship, a hydrogen atom (the most common connected atomic system in the universe). The wavelength of hydrogen radiation (21 cm) serves as a measure of measurement of all objects in the figure. The solar system with the flight path of the apparatus is also shown. The coordinates of the solar system are given by a pictogram with reference to the most noticeable pulsars, which can be considered as a kind of beacons. The author of the drawings was the wife of Carl Sagan.
In 1983, Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Pluto and left the solar system. It received signals to Earth until 2003. Now the station is moving towards Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus. It takes him about two million years to get there.
Popularizer of science
Wishing to make the fantastic successes of science available to a large number of people, Sagan wrote books and made popular science films.
Written by Carl Sagan "World Full of Demons". This book is devoted to the story of the basic principles of scientific knowledge. It talks about how to distinguish true scientific knowledge from pseudoscientific ones, formulates principles that make it possible to distinguish true knowledge from pseudoscientific fabrications. This book was published in 1995. The principles outlined in the book can also be used in Everyday life. They will help solve problems that, at first glance, seem unsolvable.
Carl Sagan "Blue Dot. The Cosmic Future of Mankind" - this book appeared in 1994. The book is dedicated to debunking the myth of the exclusivity of our planet, tells about the prospects for a possible space expansion of mankind. He talks about the planets of other systems, talks about the possibility of life on them. Knowledge about these planets allows us to get to know our Earth better, to see its problems from the outside. Carl Sagan's Blue Dot is a warning to humanity.
There are many more interesting books in Sagan's bibliography. They are waiting for their reader.
Carl Sagan, whose books led many researchers to science, was actively involved in social activities. He participated in the struggle for peace. He criticized American attempts to put weapons systems into space. Got from him and the USSR for totalitarian regime and lack of democracy.
Carl Sagan died in 1996. He was buried in New York.
American astronomer Carl Sagan was a tireless researcher and popularizer of science. Sagan was actively involved in exobiology, studying the origin of life on Earth. A complete list of what he did would be prohibitively large, because he worked in different areas and everywhere very fruitfully. Although as a scientist Sagan was engaged in experimental planetary astronomy, his scientific works covered many related disciplines: from astrobiology to radio astronomy, and the range of interests was almost limitless.
Carl Edward Sagan was born on November 9, 1934 in New York. In 1954, he completed his basic education at the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor's (1955) and master's (1956) degrees in physics, and in 1960 he became a doctor of astronomy and astrophysics. In 1960-62. worked at the Institute for Basic Research at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1962-68. taught at Harvard University and worked at the Astrophysical Observatory of the Smithsonian Institution, and in 1968 came to Cornell University, where since 1970 he has been a professor of astronomy and became director of the Planetary Research Laboratory.
Sagan was actively involved in exobiology, studying the origin of life on Earth. In 1963, he took part in experiments to simulate the synthesis of organic molecules in the Earth's primary atmosphere. Sagan's latest work is devoted to comet matter and organic aerosols on Saturn's moon Titan.
The problem of the origin of life on Earth and the possibility of its search in the Universe were of great interest to Sagan. He admitted that he was greatly influenced by the ideas of the famous Soviet astrophysicist Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky (1916-1985) and especially Shklovsky's book "The Universe, Life, Mind" (1962). A translation of Shklovsky's book into English was published in the USA under the title "Intelligent Life in the Universe" (1966). Carl Sagan became a co-author of this work. It was the first in a series of his non-fiction books and brought him wide fame.
Sagan's first standalone book was The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (New York: Doubleday, 1973), dedicated to the prospects for human extraterrestrial activities. From this book, written in the era of lunar expeditions and the preparation of the first messages to extraterrestrial civilizations, it breathes romance of space, the expectation of new brilliant discoveries and contacts with brothers in mind.
Sagan did not have ordinary books, and yet among the ones he created, a small book, Dragons of Eden, stands out. A Discourse on the Evolution of the Human Brain (1977, Russian translation 1986), which won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize. It was written in the wake of Sagan's November 1975 lecture at the University of Toronto in memory of renowned science popularizer Jacob Bronowski. Discussing the biological aspects of brain evolution, Sagan takes the reader up the ascending ladder of evolution, discussing not only the morphology of the thinking part of organisms, but also the psychology of their behavior in nature and society.
Very special works of Sagan and his colleagues were messages to extraterrestrial civilizations. The first message was sent on March 3, 1972 from the Pioneer-10 interplanetary station outside the solar system. In 1973, the same message was sent with Pioneer 11. 6" x 9" gold-plated aluminum plates with an engraved design were affixed to the side of the craft. The idea of the message belongs to Carl Sagan. He discussed the content of the drawing with Frank Drake, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial radio messages, and the figures of people were painted by Sagan's first wife, the artist Linda Saltzman-Sagan. It took 3 weeks from the birth of the idea to the solemn attachment of the plate to the board of the Pioneer! The content of the drawing is very simple. People are depicted against the background of the silhouette of the spacecraft for size scale. Below is a diagram of the solar system with the flight path of Pioneer. At the top left, the hydrogen atom, the main element of the universe, is shown twice. The circle denotes the orbit of the electron, and the stick with a dot denotes the direction of the spin (i.e., the axis of its own rotation) of the electron and proton. In the right figure, the spins of the particles coincide in direction, while in the left they are opposite. Every physicist (including extraterrestrial) knows that when spins rotate, a hydrogen atom emits a radio pulse with a frequency of 1420 MHz and, accordingly, a wavelength of 21 cm. This length and frequency (i.e., a measure of time) serve as measures of all other distances and times indicated in the figure. The most important message is encrypted in the "asterisk", which is to the left of the center. This is our “return address”: in the middle is the Sun, and the rays stretching from it indicate directions and relative distances to the natural beacons of the Galaxy - radio pulsars. Each pulsar has its own period, which is written along the ray in binary code. All developed civilizations should know these pulsars. And knowing their coordinates, it is easy to find the position of the Sun in the Galaxy. By the way, the longest horizontal beam indicates the direction and distance to the center of the Galaxy. On board the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, Carl Sagan and his colleagues placed brief encyclopedias Earths - video disks with drawings, photographs, music, people's speech, sounds of animate and inanimate nature. It is possible that someday the main business of Sagan's life will be the message he sent on the Voyagers to other worlds.
As a solar system explorer, Sagan was prolific and constantly on the cutting edge. As a university lecturer, he has earned the love of thousands of students and trained dozens of active scientists. But no less important, no less difficult and, perhaps, more responsible work of his life, he considered popularizing work. But he certainly was not a popularizer in the usual sense of the word, but rather an educator or even an initiator of public interest in astronomy. A brilliant lecturer and organizer, Sagan was not afraid to discredit himself as a scientist by participating in amateur societies and speaking to any audience capable of listening and hearing. He was not afraid to spoil his scientific reputation by publishing popular articles and even a novel, he did not hide his literary face under a pseudonym. In total, he wrote more than 600 scientific and popular articles, and was the author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books, which will forever remain the message from Carl Sagan to our civilization.
After the launch in 1977 of the Voyagers to the giant planets and beyond the solar system, Sagan and friends published in the book "Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record" ("Whisper of the Earth", 1978) the history of the preparation and contents of the video records sent to the stars.
The first radio message to extraterrestrial civilizations was sent on November 16, 1974 from the Arecibo observatory using the world's largest radio telescope with a diameter of 305 m in the direction of the globular star cluster M 13 in the constellation Hercules. There are about a million stars in this cluster, similar to the Sun, so the probability that the message will be received by someone is quite high. True, the signal will get there only after 25 thousand years. The message was sent at 2380 MHz (wavelength 12.6 cm) and contains 1679 bits of information. It is a 23 x 73 frame. Of the two options expansions, - 23 lines and 73 lines - only the second leads to a clear picture. It shows the figure of a man (I wonder who, besides the man himself, will be able to guess about this?), Below it is a diagram of the solar system with the third planet raised to highlight. To the right of the figure is its height in units of wavelength (14 x 12.6 cm = 176 cm). To the left of the figure is the population of the Earth, approximately 4 billion people. Below is a diagram of the radio antenna. At the top of the message is a math lesson: a sequence of numbers from 1 to 10 in binary code. Then follows a rather strange sequence of numbers: 1, 6, 7, 8, and 15. They indicate the numbers of the most important for us chemical elements- hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus. Below them are 12 groups of five numbers each - these are the formulas of the most important molecules for life. And below is a diagram of a DNA molecule.
Sagan's Cosmos (1980) became the largest-circulation English-language non-fiction publication ever; she stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 70 weeks; PBS turned it into a wonderful 13-episode non-fiction film starring Sagan, which became the most watched series in the history of state television: it was seen by 500 million viewers on the screens of 60 countries around the world. The book was translated into Russian in 2004.
The video project of Carl Sagan "Cosmos" has become a new era in the popularization of astronomy and space research. For three years (1977-79), Sagan's team worked on the film, traveling around many countries that gave the world great philosophers, astronomers, and engineers. Unfortunately, they were not allowed into our Kaluga to film the episode about Tsiolkovsky.
Sagan performed a lot of public duties: in 1968 he was one of the founders, and in 1975-76. directed the Planetary Division of the American Astronomical Society; he stood at the cradle of the organ of this department - the magazine "Icarus", now a very prestigious international scientific publication devoted to the study of the solar system. From 1970 to 1979 Sagan was the editor-in-chief of this magazine. He was also President of the Planetary Science Section of the American Geophysical Union and Head of the Astronomical Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And yet he was one of the founders of the Planetary Society, which now has more than 100 thousand members and carries out not only educational, but also serious scientific activity for the study of planets and outer space, as well as financial support for large projects to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Sagan's account of the exploration of Mars is the account of a professional. Back in the 1960s, analyzing the results of Mars radar, Sagan suggested the existence of large elevation changes (up to 16 km) on it, which was soon confirmed by measurements from spacecraft. To explain the seasonal variation in the contrast between dark and light areas, Sagan hypothesized that dust was transported by wind from the highlands to the valleys and back. He participated in experiments to explore Venus (Mariner 2, 1962), Mars (Mariner 9, 1971; Viking 1 and -2, 1976) and giant planets (Voyager 1 and -2 ", 1977; "Galileo", 1989).
A quarter of a century after the publication of the book "Cosmos", its translation was also published in Russian. This is nice, especially since we received the book for the author's anniversary: in 2004, Sagan would have turned 70 years old.
Carl Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan co-authored Comet (1985), a large, superbly illustrated and very entertaining book about comets in general and, in particular detail and depth, Halley's comet visiting the vicinity of the Sun in 1986 G.
Together with colleagues, Sagan studied the problem of the formation of the solar system. Their numerical model, demonstrating the birth of planets in the process of accretion, was one of the first in this area. Some versions of the model turned out to be very similar to the real solar system, while others, as we now understand, to exoplanetary systems with "hot Jupiters".
Sagan developed a greenhouse model of Venus's atmosphere that explained the high temperature of its surface. He made calculations of the evolution of the Martian climate, in particular, the change in temperature during dust storms. From these calculations, the idea was born of the possibility of a nuclear winter on Earth: clouds of dust raised by explosions can block access to the surface of the planet to solar radiation, which will lead to a catastrophic drop in temperature. Sagan very seriously studied the possible consequences of nuclear war and its threat to the Earth's biosphere. He drew public attention to this problem and, to a certain extent, stimulated détente and the beginning of the process of nuclear disarmament.
In 1985, Sagan's science fiction novel Contact was published (Russian translation 1994). The content of the novel is rich in many realities. scientific work, many non-trivial, multi-layered ideas and unexpected predictions. Sagan's novel is especially appealing to science lovers. In "Contact" we meet not only with elegant passages of an encyclopedically educated person, but also with thoughts that are seditious for an astrophysicist, for example, about the possible not birth, but the creation of the Universe! At the same time, the generally accepted idea of God has nothing to do with it. It’s just that Sagan’s materialism, his adherence to Darwin’s theory, is consistent and almost limitless: developing thoughts about the evolution of the brain in the novel Contact, he quite naturally comes to the idea of superbeings capable of creating universes with predetermined properties. Such an interpretation of the anthropic principle would earlier have been called idealistic, but this is a completely consistent, albeit unrestrained (and partly naive) extrapolation of the evolutionary idea. Based on the novel, together with Ann Druyan, Sagan filmed a feature film at the Warner Brothers studio. The film was finished without him and was released in 1997.
In 1995, Sagan published Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1995), which The New York Times noted as one of best books year, and the audio cassette read from this book by Sagan himself received a Grammy Award and became one of the two best audio books of the year. Finally, his eighth bestseller was The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, 1996). In the final years of his life, Sagan was worried about the same problems that hit our society in the same years: complete freedom of enterprise in the absence of citizenship and a common culture is fraught with regression in intellectual development person.
Astrophysicist Kip Thorne became interested in the problem of tunnels ("wormholes") in space-time in 1985 after getting acquainted with the manuscript of Carl Sagan's novel "Contact". Thorne figured out how to connect two black holes with a tunnel and stabilize it so that (keeping the tunnel short) one could push the holes to any distance and use them to instantly move between two distant points in space.
For his scientific, educational and literary work, Sagan was awarded dozens of honorary degrees, medals and prizes. Among them are the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) "for a great contribution to the use of science for the benefit of society" and a medal to them. K. E. Tsiolkovsky from the Federation of Cosmonautics of the USSR. When it comes to UFOs and other parascientific activities, Sagan was an uncompromising fighter.
Sagan's friends believe that he had the gift of foresight. His classmate at the University of Chicago, Peter Vadervoort, recalls that in March 1957, Carl Sagan bet a friend over a box of chocolate bars that a man would land on the moon by 1970. It actually happened in July 1969, but Vadervoort doesn't know if Carl got his chocolates. Sagan's ability to foresee is probably due to the fact that he closely followed social processes. The meticulous reader will find especially many predictions in the novel "Contact". Surprisingly, the most incredible of them have already begun to justify themselves.
The Department of Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society has established a medal to them. Carl Sagan for success in popularizing the sciences of the planets. Since 1998, the medal has been awarded to outstanding science popularizers.
On Mars, which Sagan loved so much, there was a memory of him: the Sagan crater and, to the north of it, the Sagan Memorial Station at the landing site of the first Sojourner rover, delivered to the planet on July 4, 1997 by the Mars Pathfinder probe » (NASA, USA).
Carl Sagan died on December 20, 1996. He was 62 years old. He died of pneumonia, caused by a two-year struggle of the body with bone marrow disease. It happened within the walls of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, where in April 1995 Sagan received a bone marrow transplant for myelodysplasia, a pre-leukemic syndrome. After this operation, he returned to work, supervised graduate students and students, but in December 1996 he suddenly became worse ... The disease tried to break Sagan for many years, but he never had time to grow old, forever remaining "young and dapper", as Shklovsky remembered him. In a review of the book Contact, a journalist from Time wrote: “When we have people like Carl Sagan around us, who needs aliens?” ("With terrestrials like Carl Sagan, who needs extras?"). Sagan is no more. But the science that he loved so much will always exist as long as there is intelligence in the Universe. Anyone who loves the sky and the stars, his name is not indifferent. Sagan traveled widely; He visited our country more than once. Many of us remember this charming and deep man. And will be remembered for a long time
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