“We can do #Science and with it we can improve our lives”

#COSMOS #CarlSagan

Today marks the #anniversary of the Pale Blue Dot, an image that forever shifted our perspective on #Earth . Captured by #Voyager1 at the urging of beloved astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan in 1990, it shows our home as a speck against the vast canvas of #space .

This…

“The trick is to know which books to read”

From COSMOS: A Personal Voyage, episode 11 “The Persistence of Memory”

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.
Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times…

“Carl believed that our best hope of preserving the exquisite fabric of life on our world would be to take the revelations of science to heart.”

- Ann Druyan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience #CarlSagan

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science.”

- Carl Sagan

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.”

- Carl Sagan

On this Solstice Day of briefest light and longest darkness, a day sacred to the generations of humans, our most distant emissary, NASA’s Voyager 1, is sending back replies to our commands that no longer make sense. After 46 years of exploring our solar system and its environs,…

“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest…

I wish Carl was around to see this!

“Let the long-term take of itself, I get re-elected on the basis of what I do in the short-term”

“Many of the problems facing us may be soluble, but only if we are willing to embrace brilliant, daring and complex solutions. Such solutions require brilliant, daring and complex people. I believe that there are many more of them around—in every nation, ethnic group and degree…

“This combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces”

It's our 44th birthday! 🎂 On November 30, 1979, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman founded The Planetary Society. Thanks to our members and supporters over the past four decades, we're a step closer to understanding the Cosmos and our place in it. 💫

“The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

“Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of…

Our science and our technology have posed us a profound question. Will we learn to use these tools with wisdom and foresight before it's too late? Will we see our species safely through this difficult passage so that our children and grandchildren will continue the great journey…

“Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

- COSMOS

“Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World