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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carl Sagan | 2/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:17:36.414677+00:00 | kb-cron |
He wondered what the stars were, but no one could give him a clear answer. He recalled: As soon as I was old enough, my parents gave me my very first library card. I think the library was on 85th Street, an alien land. Immediately, I asked the librarian for something on stars. She returned with a picture book displaying portraits of men and women with names like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. I complained, and for some reason then obscure to me, she smiled and found another book—the right kind of book. I opened it breathlessly and read until I found it. The book said something astonishing, a very big thought. It said that the stars were suns, but very far away. The Sun was a star, but close up... I was innocent of the notion of the inverse square law for light propagation. I had not the ghost of a chance of calculating the distance to the stars. But I could tell that if the stars were suns, they had to be very far away—farther away than 85th Street, farther away than Manhattan, farther away, probably, than New Jersey. The Cosmos was much bigger than I had guessed. He said: "The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me." At age six or seven, he and a close friend took trips to the American Museum of Natural History. They were impressed by the displays of dinosaur fossils and nature dioramas and by the Hayden Planetarium. Sagan's parents nurtured his growing interest in science, buying him chemistry sets and reading matter. Per biographer Ray Spangenburg, Sagan's desire to understand the Cosmos became a "driving force in his life, a continual spark to his intellect, and a quest that would never be forgotten." His fascination with outer space deepened after reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars books. In 1947, he discovered Astounding Science Fiction, which introduced him to more hard science fiction speculations: "Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding. I read Verne and Wells, read, cover‐to‐cover, the first two science‐fiction anthologies that I was able to find, devised scorecards, similar to those I was fond of making for baseball, on the quality of the stories I read. Many ranked high in asking interesting questions but low in answering them."
=== Education ===