Carl Sagan asked a Brooklyn librarian about stars and got film stars
A small boy in Bensonhurst walked into the public library and asked for a book on stars. The librarian handed him portraits of Hollywood actors. When she found the right book, it told him the stars were distant suns, and Carl Sagan later called that moment close to a religious experience.
Sagan was born in Brooklyn in 1934 to a housewife whose own intellectual ambitions poverty had crushed and a garment worker who had emigrated from what is now Ukraine. He credited his mother with his analytical streak and his father with his sense of wonder. The 1939 New York World's Fair, with its gleaming model city of the future, left a lasting impression, and trips to the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium fed his curiosity. Reasoning that if the stars were suns they must lie farther off than Manhattan or even New Jersey, he realised the universe was vastly larger than he had assumed.
School bored him. A straight-A student in Rahway, New Jersey, he ran the chemistry club, built a home laboratory and made cardboard models of molecules. One administrator urged a school for gifted children, which his parents could not afford. Discovering that astronomers were actually paid for their work was, he said, a splendid day. A prize-winning school essay argued that meeting advanced aliens might go as badly for humanity as European contact did for Native Americans.
At 16 he entered the University of Chicago, where he met Enrico Fermi's physics department, studied with Harold Urey, whose 1952 experiment with Stanley Miller turned him toward the origin of life, and learned planetary astronomy from Gerard Kuiper. He later taught at Harvard and Cornell, worked on the Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions and wrote more than 600 papers and articles.
His biggest audience came through Cosmos, the 1980 television series, which has reached at least 500 million viewers across 60 countries. He helped design the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager Golden Record, proposed the Pale Blue Dot photograph, won a Pulitzer for The Dragons of Eden and popularised the maxim that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. He never actually said billions and billions. He died in 1996, aged 62.
Source: Carl Sagan
