Happy Birthday Carl

It’s Carl Sagan’s birthday today; an apt time to re-read some of his words and view classic video:

    “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

    “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in     
    our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” 

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly
anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

    “The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not  
    that there's something new in our way of thinking -- it's that credulous and confused  
    thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.”

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

In memory...