9 November: Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, astronomer and author was born on this date in 1934. For this reason, today is Carl Sagan Day. If you want to celebrate Carl Sagan day, wear a turtleneck sweater with a Brown jacket, and celebrate the beauty and wonder of the cosmos. And read these 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was one of the first people to discover the greenhouse effect, by observing the planet Venus. He wrote, “The surface environment of Venus is a warning: something disastrous can happen to a planet rather like our own.” He also concluded that Mars is red because of dust rather than red vegetation which would later be proved correct by NASA's explorations.
2. The TV show he presented, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, aired in the 1980s with Sagan explaining complex principles in a way that viewers could easily understand. The series won three Primetime Emmy Awards, a Hugo Award and a Peabody Award in 1981. It was watched by 500 million viewers from 60 different countries and remains the world's most-watched series from American public television.
3. Thanks to the series, he became known for wearing turtleneck sweaters and for the catchphrase, "billions and billions", relating to the number of stars in the universe, although he never actually said it. What he did do was emphasise the "B" in billions to distinguish it from millions. He was, for a while, quite peeved that the phrase was associated with him. He wrote, "Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers... But I never said 'billions and billions.' For one thing, it's too imprecise." Sagan's estimate of the number of stars was 10 sextillion, but emphasised that nobody could know for sure. The number of stars in the universe would later be dubbed Sagan's number in his honour, and there's also a unit of measurement called the sagan, which is defined as a number equal to at least 4 billion.
4. His irritation at the catchphrase which wouldn't go away was probably one of the reasons he got so peeved with Apple Computers for using his name as a codename for the Power Macintosh 7100 that he sued them. Apple engineers used the codename "Carl Sagan" because they hoped it would make "billions and billions" of dollars for Apple (it didn't). Sagan didn't want to be seen as endorsing the product and wrote to Apple demanding they change the codename. Apple complied, changing it to BHA an acronym for "butt-head astronomer." Sagan sued for libel but was unsuccessful, tried again, lost again and began a lengthy appeal process. Sagan and Apple eventually settled out of court and the codename got changed to LAW, for "Lawyers are Wimps."
5. He fell in love with his third wife and got engaged to her during a phone call, without ever having been on a date. They had met and worked together on compiling the recording to send into space on the Voyager probe, but were strictly friends and colleagues until that phone call. The woman in question was Ann Druyan, a writer and producer. She'd been looking for a Chinese melody to include on the recording and was so thrilled when she finally found the right one (a 2,500-year-old song called Flowing Stream) that she phoned Sagan and left a message. When he called back they ended up talking for an hour, and by the time they hung up, were engaged. Sudden as it may seem, the couple stayed married until Sagan's death. Druyan had the electrical impulses of her brain and nervous system as she was falling in love recorded so that it could be turned into music and included on the Voyager message; and on Sagan's 60th birthday Eleanor Helin announced that she was naming her recent asteroid discovery Asteroid 4970 Druyan after his wife. It so happened that this asteroid was locked in an eternal orbit with another asteroid, which had already been named Asteroid 2709 Sagan.
6. Sagan wrote several books on science and one work of fiction, a novel called Contact, which later became a sci-fi film starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. Originally, though, the concept was not for a novel but a video game in which players would control an alien carrying a message of peace to Earth, while avoiding calamities along the way. The game was never created. When writing his books, Sagan would dictate the first draft onto tape and then get someone to transcribe it. After that, the draft would be edited multiple times. There are 20 drafts of Sagan’s 1994 book Pale Blue Dot in the Library of Congress.
7. Talking of which, the collection of Sagan's papers in the Library of Congress owes its existence to none other than Seth McFarlane, creator of the Family Guy cartoon. At the time of Sagan's death the papers were stored in his former residence, a house in New York which had once been headquarters to a secret society at the university known as the Sphinx Head Tomb. His widow had been looking for an institute to donate Sagan's life's work to, but none of them provided the mix of meticulous care and thoughtful exhibition she had in mind. She met McFarlane when they worked together on a reboot of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and McFarlane put up an undisclosed sum to help the Library of Congress buy more than a thousand boxes of Sagan's material, which now forms The Seth MacFarlane Collection of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, which opened in 2013. The collection even includes some of his school report cards.
8. Sagan was an advocate for the legalisation of marijuana. In 1969, he anonymously published an essay in favour under the name "Mr. X." He observed that marijuana enhanced his appreciation for art, music, food and sex and concluded: “the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.” Denying it as a palliative drug to terminally ill people was also outrageous in his view.
9. His family were Jewish but Sagan identified as agnostic. "The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every Sparrow is ludicrous," he wrote. God, to him, was the laws of physics which govern the universe, but "This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity." He didn't identify as atheist, because an atheist "is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence." The universe was so vast and unknown, Sagan concluded, that no-one could be certain whether God existed or not.
10. If there was life on Mars, Sagan said, there should be no further exploration of the planet. "Mars then belongs to the Martians," he said, "even if the Martians are only microbes." He wasn't keen on the Space Shuttle program, either, and would have preferred to send robotic probes to other worlds. A space station would only be worth it, he argued, if it was preparing humans for long-term journeys to space.

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