Sixtieth birthday gift idea

Bill Nye

Professor Carl Sagan had the whole lecture hall looking down on a small organism that was ingesting tiny creatures for sustenance. Well, it turned out we were looking at a picture taken from a satellite of a swimming pool. The ingested creatures were swimmers - people like us.

Professor Sagan had a way of surprising you. He could do it, because he had an intimate knowledge, perhaps deeper than anyone else we'll ever meet, of how one part of the world connected with the rest of the cosmos. He described our universe with words like "elegant, exquisite, and astonishing." And, it is. He made you feel it.

Many of us think of him as a popularizer of science. Bear in mind he was also a topnotch scientist, as well. He predicted the atmospheric physics of dust storms on Mars. He alerted the world to the catastrophic changes in Earth's climates should we recklessly allow an exchange of nuclear weapons. And, he tirelessly checked the purveyors of pseudoscience in steady, compelling essays and debates.

I met him a few times over the years after I took his astronomy course. Each meeting left me refreshed with a new and more intimate understanding of what we had discussed. It came from his easy, deep, and passionate grasp of things. I was always a little awed after each exchange.

He lived at a time when human exploration of space was, for the first time in human history, revealing to us the true nature of Nature. From his boyhood, Carl Sagan not only embraced this new awareness, he understood its significance in a way that most of us don't. He often said, "We are all made of star-stuff," an astonishing idea. He encouraged you to prove to yourself that it was true. His presence as an orator was compelling, his writing is riveting, and his influence on the world's appreciation of science is hard to reckon. It's big; he will be missed.

Bill Nye, who took Introductory Astronomy from Carl Sagan in 1977, is now "The Science Guy" on public and syndicated television.

Leon Jaroff

Carl's imagination and creativity were boundless - and grist for journalists. My first contact with him was in the late '60s, after Mariner 9, in orbit around Mars, had sent back the first close-up pictures of the Red Planet. Instead of the hoped-for signs of civilizations past or present, the pictures showed what seemed to be a bleak, lifeless surface marred by craters. Young Carl, ever the optimist, promptly wrote a paper reporting that he had scanned thousands of weather satellite pictures of Earth, and on only one of them had he spotted any evidence that intelligent life might exist on Earth. Thus, civilizations might well be thriving on Mars, he suggested, just a little beyond the resolution of Mariner's camera. My story in Time magazine, based on an interview with the then little-known Carl, was entitled "Is There Life On Earth?"

Not long afterward, Carl turned his attention to Jupiter and held out the possibility that life could exist on the gas giant. How? In the form of creatures composed largely of gas bags and floating freely in the Jovian atmosphere. That hypothesis, made perhaps with tongue in cheek, was also too much to resist. My Time story was entitled (appropriately) "The Gas Bags of Jupiter."

Over the years, I hounded Carl for stories and seldom came up empty-handed. He was patient, courteous, friendly, and always seemed flattered by my interest. His explanations of difficult concepts were lucid, his quotes lively, and his insights unique. In short, he was a science writer's dream source.

When I last saw Carl at his sixtieth birthday celebration in Ithaca, he seemed a happy, fulfilled man. He had reason to be, secure in the knowledge that he was admired around the world as science's most articulate and imaginative spokesman.

What a loss.

Leon Jaroff was a senior editor and the science editor of Time, for which he still writes, and the founder and first managing editor of Discover.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The following is a eulogy for Carl Sagan (edited slightly) that was delivered by Neil deGrasse Tyson at a February 27 memorial service held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Other speakers included Sagan's wife, two of his children, Stephen Jay Gould, and Vice President Al Gore.

What can I say about Carl Sagan that has not already been said?

Carl Sagan was at the helm of many ships. But the one I have in mind carries people, who, as part of life's priorities, seek to enlighten the public about the beauty of science. Collectively, all of us on this ship deliver lectures, write books, and give interviews with the media. But for each engagement, somehow we know that Carl has been there before - if not in person then in spirit. He has made our work easier, having painted the landscape that now frames our efforts to reach the layperson. I cannot count the number of times I have jump-started an encounter with the public by directly or indirectly referencing a jeweled quote from one of his many literary or media expositions on the universe. With Carl's passing, I now feel that sense of insecurity reminiscent of when you first leave home. I feel not only the loss of a friend but the loss of a leader.

I first met Carl when I was in high school in the mid-1970s. My letter of application to Cornell University was dripping with an interest in the universe. The admissions office, unbeknownst to me, forwarded the application to Carl Sagan's attention. Within weeks I received a personal letter from Carl, inviting me up to Ithaca to visit him. . . . I visited Carl on a snowy afternoon in February. He was warm, compassionate, and demonstrated what appeared to be a genuine interest in my life's path. At the end of the day, he drove me back to the Ithaca bus station and jotted down his home phone number - just in case the buses could not navigate through the snow and I needed a place to stay.

I never told him this, but at every stage of my scientific career that followed, I modeled my encounters with students after my first encounter with Carl.

Although I did not ultimately attend Cornell University, Carl and I re-met several more times over the years. . . .

I last saw him at his sixtieth birthday celebration at Ithaca. An entire evening was spent by friends, loved ones, and colleagues, heaping praises upon Carl. Each testimony was grander than the next. There was the undergraduate who majored in science after a single encounter with Carl. There was the graduate student who shifted his thesis focus to planetary atmospheres upon becoming excited by the science that Carl had described to him. There was the letter to Carl (read by the Astronomy Department Chair) from a student in Africa who launched an astronomy club in his home village after reading Cosmos. Topping that moment, the department had actually flown the student to Ithaca for the occasion and introduced him to Carl in person. Then there were the letters read from top officials of international governments. And then there was the announcement that an asteroid would be named after Carl's wife, Annie Druyan, whose orbit was in eternal resonance with another asteroid that had already been named for Carl.

The praise seemed unending, which led me to ask myself whether the life of any human being could be worthy of this much praise. The next evening, Carl gave a public talk to a standing-room-only crowd in Cornell's Uris Auditorium. His topic was inspired by the contents of his recent book Pale Blue Dot. During the hour of his talk, and the hour that followed of questions he fielded from the audience, I realized that the praise I had witnessed the night before was only the beginning of the praise that he truly deserves - and will continue to receive.

I will miss him.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of New York City's Hoyden Planetarium. He is also a visiting research scientist and lecturer at the Department of Astrophysics, Princeton University.

James Oberg

Sagan's greatest gift, which enriched and rewarded us far more than it did him, was his transparent enthusiasm to "find out and tell about" the advance of human understanding of the universe. He vividly humanized what had been previously regarded as cold-blooded "scientific curiosity"; and in advertising science "with a human face," he brought all the strengths and weaknesses of a human being onto the stage. For all of us exposed to his messages, he encouraged our fervent hope that the human intellect, with all of its inefficiencies and distractions to which none of us are immune, could still come to understand, bit by bit, the incomprehensible universe.

James Oberg is a science journalist and space engineer in Houston.

E. C. Krupp