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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carl Sagan | 9/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:17:36.414677+00:00 | kb-cron |
In March 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative—a multibillion-dollar project to develop a comprehensive defense against attack by nuclear missiles, which was quickly dubbed "Star Wars". Sagan, along with other scientists, spoke out against the project, arguing that it was technically impossible to develop a system with the level of perfection required, and far more expensive to build such a system than it would be for an enemy to defeat it through decoys and other means—and that its construction would seriously destabilize the "nuclear balance" between the United States and the Soviet Union, making further progress toward nuclear disarmament impossible. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons, which would begin on August 6, 1985—the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—the Reagan administration dismissed the dramatic move as nothing more than propaganda and refused to follow suit. In response, US anti-nuclear and peace activists staged a series of protest actions at the Nevada Test Site, beginning on Easter Sunday in 1986 and continuing through 1987. Hundreds of people in the "Nevada Desert Experience" group were arrested, including Sagan, who was arrested on two separate occasions as he climbed over a chain-link fence at the test site during the underground Operation Charioteer and United States's Musketeer nuclear test series of detonations. He was an advocate for free speech and civil liberties. His professor Edward Condon, during the McCarthy era, was accused by HUAC of being a "revolutionary in physics". Sagan quotes Condon as replying: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B. C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws…", going on to invoke Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell. The committee was not amused. "But the most they were able to pin on Condon, as I recall, was that in high school he had a job delivering a socialist newspaper door-to-door on his bicycle." When visiting the Soviet Union, he and Druyan would smuggle in banned books.
In a speech given at Monticello on July 4, 1992, Sagan emphasized the importance of science to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and democracy in America: It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal corruption are more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is the error correction machinery in politics. He notes that "New ideas, invention, and creativity in general, always spearhead a new kind of freedom—a breaking out from hobbling constraints. Freedom is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of science—which is one reason the Soviet Union could not remain a totalitarian state and remain technically competitive. At the same time, science—or rather its delicate mix of openness and skepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and debate—is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in an industrial and highly technological society."
He concludes: Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.
== Personal life and beliefs == Sagan was married three times. In 1957, he married biologist Lynn Margulis. The couple had two children, Jeremy and Dorion Sagan. According to Margulis, Sagan left her to do the majority of the domestic duties, believing he was above them. Their marriage ended in 1964. Sagan married artist Linda Salzman in 1968 and they had a child together, Nick Sagan, and divorced in 1981. During these marriages, Carl Sagan focused heavily on his career, a factor which may have contributed to Sagan's first divorce. In 1981, Sagan married author Ann Druyan and they later had two children, Alexandra (known as Sasha) and Samuel Sagan. Carl Sagan and Druyan remained married until his death in 1996. Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from potential intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms. Sagan was so persuasive that by 1982 he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners. This signaled a tremendous increase in the respectability of a then-controversial field. He may have contributed to Frank Drake's Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo Observatory on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing potential extraterrestrials about Earth. Sagan was chief technology officer of the professional planetary research journal Icarus for 12 years. He co-founded The Planetary Society and was a member of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees. Sagan served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). While teaching at Cornell University, he lived in an Egyptian revival house perched on the edge of a cliff in Ithaca. While there he drove a red Porsche 911 Targa and an orange 1970 Porsche 914 with the license plate PHOBOS.