"In
my review, for The Times of London, of The
Demon-Haunted World, I mentioned a chapter heading of Carl
Sagan's Cosmos: "Who Speaks for Earth?". I
went on that it was "a rhetorical question that expects no
particular answer, but I presume to give it one. My candidate for
planetary ambassador, my own nominee to present our credentials
in galactic chancelleries, can be none other than Carl Sagan
himself. He is wise, humane, polymathic, gentle, witty,
well-read, and incapable of composing a dull sentence." In
the Financial Times this year, I described him as
"a beacon of clear light in a dark world of alien abductions
and 'real-life X-files', of psychic charlatans and New Age
airheads, of fatcat astrologers giggling all the way to the
millennium." I met him only once, so my feeling of
desolation and loss at his death is based entirely on his
writings. Carl Sagan was one of the great literary stylists of
our age, and he did it by giving proper weight to the poetry of
science. It is hard to think of anyone whom our planet can so ill
afford to lose." --Richard Dawkins
( appeared with other tributes in an issue of The Skeptical Inquirer
) 
" I remember that before Carl Sagan, I kind of believed in UFO's. After, I believed in Extra Terrestrials. It's a subtle distinction, but one that he had no trouble explaining. At the time, there were so many things that needed explaining. The Voyager and Viking missions were streaming megabytes of photos and data back home. We watched the news clips, read the articles and got back to earthly living, but Carl Sagan showed us that it could mean so much more. He became a generation's tour guide, on a journey through the universe, a universe that the public hardly knew.
My brother and I watched Cosmos from our home in Brooklyn, the city where Carl Sagan grew up. We both already loved science and understood the topics, but I still literally got a chill during many moments of that series.
Today, the gigabytes pour in of incredible images from the Galileo probe. I view them on my web browser and read the stories in total interactive control. But something is missing; the tour guide is gone. We in America are left walking on foot with a ten dollar map in hand, and it's just not the same at all. I want to thank Dr. Carl Sagan for all he has done, and I will miss him very much. " --John Catalano
Web
Pages about Dr. Carl Sagan
Related Links
News Stories
Tributes
Biographies
Carl Sagan : A Life by Keay Davidson, Hardcover - 540 pages (September 1999) John Wiley & Sons
Donations in Carl Sagan's name can be made to:
The Children's Health Fund of New York
317 East 64th Street
New York, NY 10021
or
The Carl Sagan Memorial Fund
The Planetary Society
65 N. Catalina Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91106
"Who Speaks for Earth?"
[HOME] John Catalano catalj@spacelab.net