His face and voice remain permanently fixed in our memories. There are the familiar gestures of the hands, the boundless enthusiasm for exploration, the unforgettable catchwords and phrases-"nuclear winter," "planetary chauvinism," "starstuff" and, of course, "billions and billions" (which he insisted he never said). There are also the outrageous ideas, such as his proposal to equip the Viking lander with a lamp so it wouldn't miss any nocturnal Martians....Is it really possible that Carl Sagan is no longer here to light up our little corner of the universe?
Sagan, who died on December 20, was uniquely gifted, a supernova of science. Like Einstein, he was the best known scientist of his day, even if he didn't always please his colleagues. In 1980 the public television series "Cosmos" lofted him to international stardom. The 13 episodes were seen by more than a half billion people from his native Brooklyn to Belorussia-or as Sagan might have put it, one out of ten members of our species. (And who knows how many other beings out there, if we consider that the signals are now 17 light-years from Earth?) His books, more than 20 in all, were often bestsellers-with Cosmos, the companion to the TV show, remaining on the New York Times list for 70 weeks.
Main Street loved Carl. His lectures drew huge crowds (and, yes, often whopping fees). He was the consummate explainer, making science seem clear even to those who had long since forsworn the subject after bruising encounters in high school or college. He didn't hesitate to speak his mind. He twitted NASA for emphasizing manned spaceflight over robot space probes, and used the Planetary Society, a space lobbying group he co-founded, to press for solar-system exploration. He made a virtual career of debunking pseudo-science, especially reports of visitations by extraterrestrials. A strong advocate of nuclear arms reduction, he refused invitations to the White House during the Reagan years, debated Edward Teller on the Strategic Defense Initiative and, more recently, opposed his schemes for intercepting asteroids with H-bombs. When he campaigned on behalf of ill-starred Presidential hopeful Gary Hart, many suspected he dreamed of a Cabinet post.
As accomplished as he was in so many diverse areas, Sagan held a special place for science writers. Unlike all too many of his colleagues, he genuinely liked reporters, especially those of us on the science beat (as he made plain in the introduction he generously contributed to NASW's A Field Guide for Science Writers). And they in turn liked him. Long before the emergence of the sound bite, he knew how to explain even complicated scientific ideas simply and eloquently, often with a neat turn of phrase. No editor was ever likely to blue-pencil a Sagan quote as incomprehensible jargon. As a writer himself (with multi-million-dollar book contracts), he knew all about deadlines, and always got right to the point. Even after his books and appearances on the Johnny Carson's Tonight Show made him a celebrity (and became the source of those legendary "billions and billions"), he remained accessible, willingly responding to almost any question. Never reticent, never imposing conditions, never quibbling about having his words read back to him, he seemed almost to feel that science reporters were pursuing a sacred calling.
Every reporter who ever dealt with him probably has a favorite Saganism, such as his response to the complaint that there wasn't a shred of evidence in favor of extraterrestrial intelligence: "An absence of evidence," he would say, "isn't evidence of absence." He loved double negatives: "It's not possible to preclude..." Targeting creationists, he'd point out that "evolution is a fact, not a theory." He could also be a scientific gadfly. As he once told the New Yorker: "Someone has to propose ideas at the boundaries of the plausible, in order to so annoy the experimentalists or observationalists that they'll be motivated to disprove the idea."
Only in the last twenty-four hours of his life would he admit he was dying.
In the last two years of his life, illness forced him to return again and again to Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He was being treated for myelodysplasia, a life-threatening anemia that often foreshadows Hodgkin's disease. He underwent two bone-marrow transplants plus an infusion of T-cells, all contributed by his sister, Cari Sagan Greene. Despite setbacks, he seemed to be winning the battle, though radiation and chemotherapy had turned the eternally youthful guide to the heavens into a wizened old man. Still, Sagan remained indomitable, forever upbeat. "He fought so bravely, with such lion-like determination," says Ann Druyan, his wife and collaborator. "Only in the last twenty-four hours of his life would he admit he was dying."
Throughout the ordeal, even while confined to his hospital room or waiting out his treatments with his family in a rented Seattle house, he continued his multi-track career. As co-producer of the film Contact, an adaptation of his science-fiction novel about the first encounter with extraterrestials, he watched closely over the script and other production details. In anticipation of the arrival of the comet Hale-Bopp this spring, he and Ann revised their 1985 book Comet, as well as developing a treatment of it for a filmed IMAX version. Under the slightly self-mocking title, Billions and Billions: Random thoughts on life and death on the brink of the millennium, he assembled a collection of what he considered his best writings. While essentially a private person, he wrote movingly about his illness for Parade magazine ("There are scientific problems whose outcomes I long to witness-such as the exploration of many of the worlds in our solar system and the search for life elsewhere"). Only three days before his death, he composed the keynote message to a White House conference on future U.S. space policy. "It was very stirring," says Druyan. "It touched on the major themes of his career."
Brushing aside all vanity, Sagan also kept right on making public appearances, even though he had lost his familiar shock of black hair and looked disturbingly thin and sallow. In December when ABC's Nightline asked him to discuss two sensational discoveries on subjects very close to his heart-hints of ancient microbial life on Mars and of present-day water on the moon-he accepted without a blink. Then it was off to California for two speaking engagements. But in San Francisco, says Druyan, "We realized something was terribly wrong. He been feeling very well and was quite optimistic, but suddenly he lost his appetite and became very weak." Instead of returning to Ithaca, the Sagans rushed to Seattle, where his doctors immediately hospitalized him. Less than two weeks later, he was dead of pneumonia. He was 62 years old.
Sagan's many public activities did not sit well with some of his colleagues. "He's only a popularizer" was a favorite sneer-and his showman side probably cost him a membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Long after he had given up all hope of election, he was surprised to find he had been nominated by the astronomy section in 1992. But when his name came before the general membership, one academy member raised strong objections and, after some debate, Sagan failed to receive the required two-thirds vote. Two years later, as if in penance, the academy honored him with its prestigious Public Welfare Medal for his "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare." He accepted it without bitterness. "He was much too generous in his heart for angry feelings," says Druyan, though she herself thought the rejection was driven by jealousy.
By any measure, Sagan's credentials were impressive. He made innumerable contributions to our understanding of the solar system. These ranged from the first precise calculations of the blast-furnace temperatures of our neighbor Venus, long depicted as a planetary Eden with a benign tropical climate, to explaining the changing appearance of Mars' wind-swept surface and Titan's organic-soup-like seas. Says radio astronomer Frank Drake, a former Cornell colleague with whom he collaborated on searching for radio signals from extraterrestrials: "He was a brilliant, high-quality scientist who sometimes irritated colleagues with his far-out speculations, but these also opened eyes to the fact that the universe is far more complicated than we thought and has a tremendous range of phenomena." For nearly three decades, he directed Cornell's Laboratory of Planetary Studies, encouraging pioneering investigations into a new area called "exobiology," the study of the possibility of life out there. He was thesis adviser to 15 doctoral candidates, including such scientific stars-to-be as James Pollack, Brian Toon and David Morrison. He also was the longtime editor of Icarus, the leading journal of solar system studies. Though Cornell's David Duncan professor of astronomy and space sciences cut back on his teaching load as his interests expanded, the classes he did hold were inevitably oversubscribed. He asked the "big questions," says his Cornell colleague Ed Salpeter, something more cautious scientists may be reluctant to do but which nonetheless pushes science ahead.
While cynics might say that he courted the press for the publicity he might get, he also reached out in ways that couldn't possibly benefit him. Druyan notes that among the thousands of letters of condolence she has received from around the world, many came from people who wrote to say how Sagan had personally inspired them. Not just by his books and the Cosmos series but by the interest he showed in them personally. Says Druyan: "One woman in West Africa recalled that as a youngster, she had written to ten scientists asking for advice on a career in science, but only Carl answered. And not just with a pro forma reply, but in a thoughtful, interested way. The woman is now a biologist."
Sagan had his foibles. He could be irascible and haughty, even a little self-righteous, although these characteristics are hardly unknown among the tenured class. During the filming of Cosmos, he nearly drove the experienced British director Adrian Malone (The Ascent of Man) to despair with his insistent demands. When Time decided to put him on its cover after the series began setting PBS audience records, he agreed to pose for a photograph only after he was promised a makeup person during the shoot. More recently, when he learned that Apple Computer scientists developing a new machine had nicknamed it "Sagan," he threatened to sue. They quietly retaliated by speaking of the machine among themselves as "BHA" (for butt-head astronomer). At times he also seemed oddly gullible. While I was having dinner with him in a Manhattan bistro many years ago, he suddenly pulled out a photograph of the crowd in Dallas' Dealey Plaza after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. He pointed to a tiny figure in the throng that he insisted resembled Lee Harvey Oswald. If it was Oswald, he said, in whispered tones, he couldn't have been the assassin. It was conspiracy theorizing worthy of Oliver Stone-and all the more surprising coming as it did from a renowned skeptic who would later berate me for allowing Discover to give up its "Skeptical Eye" column, which exposed pseudo-scientific nonsense like the "Face of Mars" caper.
It was ... all the more surprising, coming as it did from a renowned skeptic ...
Sagan was married three times. His first wife was Lynn Margulis, who-like Carl-was a precociously young undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. After bearing Carl two sons, she went on to become a distinguished biologist and was elected to the National Academy (she was among his stoutest defenders on the matter of his membership). They remained friends after their divorce, as I learned when I saw her, attired in a gold-trimmed sari, at Sagan's gala 60th birthday party at Cornell in 1994. Ann had made a special point to invite her.
As a guest myself, as well as a presumably "serious" science reporter, I felt slightly uncomfortable contemplating the personal lives of my hosts, but the Sagans didn't mind. To help pay my way to Ithaca, I had arranged to profile Carl, on "his 60th trip around the sun" (as Druyan put it poetically), for the Los Angeles Times. And despite the three days of virtually nonstop festivities (cocktail parties, a scientific symposium, a public lecture, banquets), both graciously sat down with me for interviews.
Ann freely admitted she was still "absolutely and unabashedly in love" with Carl even after 14 years of marriage. She also spoke openly about the origins of their relationship, a subject, she said, of much nasty gossip at the time. They had met at a Manhattan soiree hosted by writer Nora Ephron: Carl came with his second wife Linda Salzman Sagan, the artist who drew the famous greetings-from-Earth nudes on the Pioneer 1 space probe; Ann came with her fiancee. There was instant rapport, and the foursome went off to California to work together on assembling a golden disk of earthly sounds and images ("Murmurs of Earth") for JPL's solar system-exiting Voyager spacecraft. During their work, Carl and Ann realized they were in love, left their partners and began a relationship that eventually led to marriage and two children-a daughter, Alexandra, now 13, and a son, Samuel, 5. (Sagan also had a son from his second marriage.) "If I've made one mistake in life," Carl told me, "it's not finding Annie sooner.")
To commemorate the birthday, an astronomer friend, JPL's Eleanor Helin, wanted to name a newly discovered asteroid after Sagan. But he told her that since one asteroid already bore his name, he would be much happier if she named it after Druyan, who, he said, never got enough credit for her contributions to their working partnership. Helin gladly obliged, and pointed out that the two asteroids, in their orbits between Mars and Jupiter, formed double wedding rings around the sun. Now, she said of the comets 2709 Sagan and 4973 Druyan, "they'll be eternal companions."
Fred Golden, a Santa Barbara-based freelance, is a former science editor of Time and assistant managing editor of Discover.