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Remembering Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Where Would We Be With Carl?

by Ann Druyan

From the November/December 2006 issue of The Planetary Report

Weather permitting, Carl preferred to think and write outdoors amidst the natural beauty that surrounds our home in Ithaca, New York. As I write this, I look out on the clearing down by the waterfall where he would work, sitting at a table, all but motionless for hours at a time. He said the music of the rushing water provided the perfect background white noise for concentrating. When Carl and I were writing Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, I once looked up from the computer in my office to find him deep in thought, his attention so highly focused on our manuscript that he was completely unaware of the rather large deer peering over his shoulder, as if trying to read what he was writing. The waterfall, the gorge with its record of the aeons inscribed in its strata, and the still-wild animals remain for now. The chair is empty.

We have traveled ten times around the Sun since Carl’s death, and our little world is much changed. With his dazzling mind and vast knowledge, what would he have thought of the direction we, as a civilization, have taken in the years since? How might he have campaigned against the forces of darkness and brutality? How many minds might he have opened? During the last ten years, I have longed for the personal Carl of our love, family, and work together, but I have also keenly missed the man who was a global voice for science, exploration, reason, and democracy. Carl’s ecological niche has remained tragically untenanted for all this time—and in my opinion, the consequences have been profound. My respect for his greatness keeps me from speaking for him with any degree of certainty. I can only offer my conjectures based on our 20 years of intense communication. Some of my speculations are more confident than others, flowing logically from the deeds and words of his life.

The Pale Blue Dot of Earth - Detail Credit: NASA / JPL

For instance, I feel sure that he would have been gratified by the achievements of The Planetary Society and especially thrilled by our boldness in actually launching our own spacecraft, Cosmos 1, the first solar sail. (Only ten years ago, this would have been so prohibitively expensive that even Carl never dared to dream that we could attempt such a feat.) I can see him tipping an imaginary hat in Lou Friedman’s direction for his leadership of the mission. I know Carl would now be knocking on every conceivable door to raise the money necessary to see the project through to its fulfillment as a major milestone in the history of exploration. Given his powers of persuasion, I think we would be well into the countdown to our next launch.

Carl would have been inspired by the discoveries of the Mars missions and very proud that they were led by his students. The revelations of Cassini and Huygens would have taken him to new heights. How I wish he could see the new data from Mars and the outer solar system. If it were possible to share one new image of the planets and moons with him, I would pick a shot of Titan, the object of a lifetime of his scientific imagining. It would be the one taken by the Huygens descent probe of the Titan coast, showing icy highlands with dry rivers and what appears to be the shoreline of a vanished sea. Here the Titan coast looks more like Biarritz than any other place that comes to mind. From his boyhood in Brooklyn in the 1930s, he envisioned a time when the planets and their moons would become real places to us. No matter how inhospitable to humans Titan’s atmosphere may be, that vision of the Titan coast beckons.

Years before the launch of the first space shuttle, Carl criticized it as an unsafe “capability without a mission,” a program that he prophesied would siphon off support from the grudgingly funded space science treasury. I have no doubt that he would have led the fight to protect and enhance federal support for space science. He would have continued to campaign for science and critical thinking against the many different cultural and political assaults of the last several years. It’s not that I think he alone could have turned the tide, but he would have provided critically needed leadership for those of us who have felt unrepresented.

To know what Carl would have thought of the current state of our nation, you need only remember that his pride in being an American stemmed from the integrity of our elections, our system of checks and balances, our respect for the rule of law both domestically and internationally, our high standards of evidence and truthfulness, our long historical recognition of the critical importance of the separation of church and state, our ability to take care of each other in times of disaster, what we stand for on the planet, our commitment to science and public education, and, perhaps most of all, the Bill of Rights guaranteed to us in the Constitution.

Carl died five years before the attacks on September 11, 2001, but he saw growing religious fundamentalism—whether it was in Mecca or the Bible Belt—as a looming threat, from without and within, to everything we value. He knew but one antidote for the magical thinking that lies at its root: the ability to weigh contending hypotheses and evaluate them by using the scientific method. So, despite the fact that he was battling a fatal disease and undergoing the “medieval torture” we call bone marrow transplants, he found the strength to write The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It would be one of two books that he would write during his last illness. His doctor told me that he had never had a patient who was able to read two books during the months it takes for a bone marrow transplant, let alone to write them.

I hope that, believing as he did in the profound relationship between science education and effective citizenship in a democratic society based on science and high technology, Carl would have shared my excitement in the current project we at the Carl Sagan Foundation have chosen to support: the Carl Sagan Academy, the nation’s first humanist public charter school. CSA serves middle schoolers in the Tampa area of Hillsborough County, Florida who otherwise might never have any experience of the wonders of nature as revealed by science. It is the result of a remarkable collaboration of the American Humanist Association of Florida and the local Baptist churches, the kind of cooperation between people with radically different ideologies that exemplifies the world of which we dream. CSA is now in its second year, with a student body consisting of 78 of some of the most underserved children in America. I hope Planetary Society members who share Carl’s dream of a scientifically literate and critically thoughtful public will contact us at the Carl Sagan Foundation.

This past summer, as I watched former Vice President Al Gore’s film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, I thought how proud Carl would have been of his former student at Harvard and longtime friend. More than once in the film, Al acknowledges Carl’s influence on his thinking, and his evocation of Carl’s “Pale Blue Dot” meditation provides the film with its final spiritual impact. I was reminded of how long it has been since we had a tireless, rigorously scientific, eloquent advocate for the planetary perspective to connect with people everywhere and to awaken us from our stupor; to move us to act in defense of our life-support system.

The briefcase Carl carried with him on that last trip to the hospital remained locked, exactly as he left it in December of 1996. It’s a kind of time capsule of what he was working on and thinking about during those last days of his life. I had carried it home on that last trip from Seattle, but something kept me from exploring its contents. When I sat down to write this article, it occurred to me that it was probably time to open it and look inside. I tried a couple of likely combinations. When I got to my own birthday, bingo, the golden hasps flew open. The case contained photos of our family; a Saturn-shaped birthday card from our then-14-year-old daughter, Sasha; a clutch of NASA security badges; an issue of Science with a false-color Galileo image of Europa on the cover; slides of various planetary surfaces; a note from Chris Chyba about a visit that was never to be; Carl’s reply to Neil Tyson, whom he had known and admired since Neil first wrote to him as a Bronx high school student contemplating a career in science; Charlene Anderson’s request that Carl respond to a Planetary Report reader’s question (“How can simple gases turn to organic residues when exposed to UV rays?”), to which, of course, his answer was “yes”; a message to artist Don Davis regarding the astronomical imaging for the motion picture Contact; another from scientist/artist Bill Hartmann about cratering on Mars; and letters of thanks for his agreement to give the keynote addresses to NASA’s 1997 Early Mars Workshop and to the December White House Conference on the Future of Space Exploration.

In the last week of his life, Carl wanted desperately to somehow get to that conference. He knew he was about to die, and he wanted to leave us with a vision of how to build on the epochal achievements of the first 40 years of the space age. He was worried that we were losing our way and our resolve to continue on the long road to the stars. As he lay dying, he managed, with an effort I found heart-wrenching, to dictate the speech.

A few days later, Vice President Gore opened the meeting by reading Carl’s words aloud. It was one of the last things I was able to tell him and be certain that he understood. He smiled at the news. What I saw in those hazel eyes was a mixture of affection for Al Gore, a sense of relief that he had been able to communicate with the space science decision makers, and a flicker of concern about the future, one that proved to be, in the short term at least, all too well-placed.

Well, maybe two steps forward, one step backward is how we as a species wend our way through history. Perhaps these little detours have some selective advantage as a means of processing change along our pathway to the stars. In the meantime, a global community of people coalesces around Carl’s legacy. The chair may be empty, but the ideas, the values, and even the dreams of the man are here now.