Carl Sagan's topics - tribe.net

Use Me

Dustin (El Guapo) — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:46:27 GMT

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

posted in Carl Sagan - 1 reply

Carl Sagan's Global Warming Christmas

Yul — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:08:01 GMT

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/71374
I say it's one of the funniest SNL skits of all time!

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

On The Turning Away: Pale Blue Dot (carl sagan)

nomad_earthling — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:57:44 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7xj8xikyD8

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

some food for thought

Dustin (El Guapo) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:50:58 GMT

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1305232673735713060&q=Carl+Sagan&total=955&start=30&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=6

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

The Out Orb Tribute to Carl Sagan

Yul — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:49:02 GMT

Yes! The Out Orb Tribute to Carl Sagan. It's a free mini comic written in English and Esperanto that deals with astronomer Carl Sagan's fictional visit to the also fictional Moonbase Alpha. To order a copy, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to: Out Orb Sagan Tribute, P.O. Box 02222, Detroit, MI 48202-9998.

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

The Ether

marvindublin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:32:07 GMT

http://tribes.tribe.net/2crossroadsofreligion2/thread/7500e88a-3c12-4536-82bc-656a71ef95a3

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Agent Smith or Elrond?

brentt — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 22:29:09 GMT

Doesn't Carl Sagan's voice have a uncanny resemblance to Agent Smith and Elrond?

posted in Carl Sagan - 4 replies

Choose a new moderator ?

marvindublin — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:11:23 GMT

Choose me? : )

posted in Carl Sagan - 5 replies

MARIJUANA

marvindublin — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 02:19:31 GMT

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=carl+sagan+marijuana&spell=1

He stated that most of his best writing was done under the influence of the happy green plant. : )

posted in Carl Sagan - 6 replies

Natural urge to explore?

Yul — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 16:19:55 GMT

As we all know, Sagan was famous for saying that humans have a natural urge to explore. Yet the state of human space exploration is on the decline despite such breakthroughs as the SpaceShipOne launch. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that SOME humans have a natural urge to explore. Most humans seems to prefer to stay in one place.

posted in Carl Sagan - 9 replies

Pale blue dot

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:18:05 GMT

this is on youtube
a song and film tribute to carl.
really blew me.
By an artist called ice core scientist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47EBLD-ISyc

posted in Carl Sagan - 2 replies

Cosmos was a turning point in my life

Hunakai — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 05:02:25 GMT

Hi all,
I owe a lot to the Cosmos series. Many, many years ago I was a punk rock fashion designer who became so inspired by Cosmos that I gave up all the angst and alienation in order to co-found the Hypatia Cluster, an organization to promote women's involvement in space exploration. Cosmos gave me hope for the future. (Hypatia was an early astronomer/mathametician mentioned in his series.) Later his wife, Ann Druyan, served on our advisory board, and I was able to personally meet them both a few times (Carl three times, Annie twice.)
It was wonderful to have had this inspiration in my life. Very significant!

posted in Carl Sagan - 14 replies

Carl Sagan per Wikipedia

marvindublin — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:27:00 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan

I can't imagine a world witthout Wikipedia!

posted in Carl Sagan - 2 replies

New Book and Interview with his widow on NPR

Dustin (El Guapo) — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 17:14:25 GMT

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6664194

http://www.amazon.com/Varieties-Scientific-Experience-Personal-Search/dp/1594201072/sr=8-1/qid=1166980426/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9467875-1833638?ie=UTF8&s=books

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

Carl Sagan's influence on his son's writing

Ali — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 17:30:06 GMT

Nick Sagan wrote Idlewild, Edenborn and Everfree...

I'd love to hear what other folks think about the Carl Sagan's influence on his son.

Ali

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

Anti-war tendencies

Yul — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:35:36 GMT

One thing I think was really cool about Carl Sagan was his strong anti-war tendencies. Remember that last chapter of Cosmos when he made his impassioned please for nuclear disarmament? And what about when he and other researchers discovered the nuclear winter theory? Or how about when he protested nuclear weapons testing with Martin "President Bartlett" Sheen and other celebrities back in the late 1980s? Of course if he were still around today, there's a good chance he'd be among the prominent members of the anti-Iraq war community.

Yup! Sagan was not only a top-notch scientist but also a top-notch peace activist. I think we need more of both these days.

posted in Carl Sagan - 7 replies

Light one up for the man...

Frozenstars — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:21:49 GMT

From: http://www.wunderland.com/LooneyLabs/StonerFluxx/CarlSagan.html

Carl Sagan was an Avid Pot Smoker:

When you're talking about scientists who achieved rock-star status in the second half of the twentieth century, the late astronomer and biologist Carl Sagan is right up there with Stephen Hawking. His Cosmos (1980) is one of the most popular science books ever written, planting itself on the New York Times bestseller list for 70 weeks and staying perpetually in print ever since. It was a companion for the PBS television series of the same name, which t along with numerous Tonight Show appearance t introduced Sagan and his emphatically stated phrase "billions and billions" into pop culture. His sole novel, Contact, was turned into a love-it-or-hate-it movie starring Jodie Foster as an erstwhile scientist searching for extraterrestrial life, with Matthew McConaughey as a New Age flake who, inevitably, makes his own form of contact with her.

Besides his pop-culture credentials, Sagan was pals with numerous legendary Nobel Prizewinners while still in college, picked up a Pulitzer Prize for his book Dragons of Eden, and consulted for NASA, MIT, Cornell and RAND. He designed the human race's postcards to any aliens that might be out there t the plaque onboard the Pioneer space probes and the record on the Voyager probes.

So it might come as a bit of a surprise that Sagan was an avid smoker of marijuana. Some might even call him a pothead.

In his definitive biography of the celebrity scientist, Keay Davidson reveals that Sagan started smoking regularly in the 1960s and that Dragons of Eden -- which won the Pulitzer -- "was obviously written under the inspiration of marijuana." Davidson says of Sagan:

He believed the drug enhanced his creativity and insights. His closest friend of three decades, Harvard psychiatry professor Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a leading advocate of the decriminalization of marijuana, recalls an incident in the 1980s when one of his California admirers mailed him, unsolicited, some unusually high-quality pot. Grinspoon shared the joints with Sagan and his wife, Anne Druyan. Afterward, Sagan said, "Lester, I know you've only got one left, but could I have it? I've got serious work to do tomorrow and I could really use it."

Perhaps letting Sagan bogart the pot was Grinspoon's way of returning a favor, since Sagan had contributed an essay to Marihuana Revisited, Grinspoon's classic 1971 book on the benefits and low risks of reefer. For almost three decades, the author of this ode to Mary Jane was anonymous, but in 1999 Grinspoon revealed that "Mr. X" was Sagan.

In the essay, Sagan wrote that weed increased his appreciation of art, music, food, sex, and childhood memories, and gave him insights into scientific and social matters:

I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious [sic] in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I had found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics... . I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

The staunchly atheistic/humanistic Sagan comes perilously close to mysticism in some passages:

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow man. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness... .

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.

.html

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

Books to read? Movies to see? TV series?

ash — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 12:14:43 GMT

I've really enjoyed reading Cosmos, Comet, Billions & billions and I've seen the Contact movie (co-written by his partner Ann Drugan).

What else is worth tracking down?

posted in Carl Sagan - 9 replies

I just found this interesting...

Frozenstars — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:31:37 GMT

Read into it what you may -- I myself just found it interesting:

MSNBC: May 2, 2006

Carl Sagan’s spiritual quest: He was often asked whether he believed in God, and his stock answer was that it all depended on what your definition of "God" was.
He's been called an atheist, even though he's also quoted as saying that "by some definitions atheism is very stupid."

When it came to his spiritual perspective, the late astronomer Carl Sagan was always a bit hard to pin down, even though much of what he had to say about the cosmos was filled with spirituality. This year, however — a decade after his death from a rare bone-marrow disease — some of Sagan's deepest thoughts on the ultimate questions are being brought to light in a newly rediscovered collection of lectures titled "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God."

The book, due for publication in November by The Penguin Press, is based on a series of talks Sagan gave at the University of Glasgow in 1985 as part of the Gifford Lectures on natural theology. After lying hidden for decades in Sagan's archives, the transcripts of the nine taped lectures were rediscovered just a few months ago, said Ann Druyan, the scientist's widow and longtime collaborator.

The title of the new book plays off "The Varieties of Religious Experience," a compilation of the Gifford Lectures given by American psychologist/philosopher William James a century ago, Druyan told me today.

"I wanted this book," Druyan said of the new volume, "because Carl put so much of his soul and heart and brain into giving lectures that were nearly perfect as spoken."
Druyan, who is now the chief executive officer of Cosmos Studios, edited the transcripts of the lectures, including the Q&A sessions that followed each talk. She also updated the text's scientific references with the aid of astrophysicist Steven Soter.
"Part of this experience gave me the happy fantasy that I was working with Carl again," she said, "because his voice was talking inside my head even more than it usually does."
So what did Sagan really think about God and religion? Druyan told me that's still the question she sees most frequently in the e-mail she gets via the CarlSagan.com Web site. She doesn't have a simple answer. If you had to put a label on Sagan's views, "agnostic" might come closest to the mark — but it's not agnosticism in the sense of an absence of knowledge, or a sense that the spiritual search is irrelevant.

"The little we do know is inspiring," Druyan said. "It's not true that we know nothing. We know something. It's tiny. But it's enough to base a kind of spiritual outlook on."
Druyan said Sagan's main theme was "the devoutness of the search itself, of being absolutely true in your searching to the methodology of science, to the error-correcting mechanism."

"In a way it makes someone who thinks that our spiritual understanding of the universe is complete seem that much less devout," she said. "His argument is not with God in this book. His argument is with those people who think that we know everything that we need to know about God. Rather than being dismissive or contemptuous of anybody, he takes the science he knew, everthing that he gathered in his life, and offers it as a way of explaining how he came to believe what he believed."

Druyan said two of the lectures serve as a "brilliant anticipation" of the claims for intelligent design — that is, the idea that some elements of nature are so complex that they had to have been designed by an intelligent agent (e.g., God). Back then, the concept was framed as creationism, or creation science.

"Every 20 years or so it rears its head once again, and scientists have to deal with it," Druyan said.

But it wasn't Sagan's style to belittle the defenders of the faith. "This is a deep Carl, it's a very loving Carl, it's a Carl who is not out to make other people look foolish," Druyan said. Rather, Sagan saw the varieties of scientific experience as stages in a quest on the scale of the spiritual quest.

"Whether he knew it or not — and I think he did ... he was talking about science as a kind of informed worship," Druyan said. "Scientists have been very squeamish about this, about really going into it in any depth, until recently. Scientists have been loath to really talk about the oneness and that soaring feeling that science can give us. It's been part of their truce with religion. You know, 'You don't burn us at the stake anymore, and we won't try to attract your clients away from the way that you look at creation.' There have been some really great scientists and writers who hit these notes in one way or another, but I think this is a tremendously fulsome, beautiful expression of that impulse."

Although Druyan herself has been recognized as "one of the world's outstanding atheists," it's clear that her own views are as complex as Sagan's were. She said reviewing her husband's observations on natural theology reinforced life lessons "which I had forgotten, or which I received in a new light."

"Most of all, it was just a confirmation of what a great soul Carl was," she said. "At times I would become really choked up by the complexity and the depth of him as a person. It was a very powerful experience. Carl's been gone nearly 10 years, and yet his presence is more palpable in his absence than most people are when they're vibrantly alive."

posted in Carl Sagan - 4 replies

Carl Sagan as a campaigner

ash — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 14:21:31 GMT

apart from his books/tv show etc it seems like CS was passionate about a few things:

"The late astronomer Carl Sagan, a fervent campaigner for science over obscurantism, pointed out some years ago how very few daily newspapers carried a science column; but they all carried a horoscope - some even had two!"

"A campaign to obtain basic freedoms (from murder, torture and imprisonment) for the Great Apes...many scientist have endorsed this petition including Carl Sagan"

"Carl Sagan had been a regular marijuana user from the early '60s on...Ann Druyan, Sagan's former wife, is a director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws"

- are there any other issues he was passionate about?

posted in Carl Sagan - 2 replies

Birthday

Yul — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 21:45:34 GMT

Isn't Nov. 9 Carl Sagan's birthday?

posted in Carl Sagan - 1 reply

It's almost time for Carl Sagan stamps!

Yul — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:35:25 GMT

It's almost time for Carl Sagan stamps! I say this because, as I understand it, the U.S. Postal Service usually prints stamp honoring people who've been dead at least 10 years. So now sounds like the right time to lobby the Post Office to print Sagan stamps. How about it?

posted in Carl Sagan - 3 replies

SF/SF eZine Looking for Writers and/or Photographers

jean-the-dancing-machine — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:26:56 GMT

A new online fanzine, SF/SF: Science Fiction/San Francisco, is trying to get coverage of all areas of fandom (science fiction, fantasy, Cosplay, LARP, SCA, science, paranormal, horror, anime, comics, etc.) in the SF Bay Area and would like to find a writer (and/or photographer) or more who would be willing to cover events and do feature articles.

Anyone here interested? If so, drop a line to sfinsf@gmail.com, or you can send me a note and I’ll set you up.

Thanks,
Jean

posted in Carl Sagan - 0 replies

On the Science Channel: Cosmos, 25th year anniversary...

Frozenstars — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 18:11:55 GMT

This is what I got so far:

Carl Sagan's Cosmos 25th Anniversary, digitally remastered and enhanced, only on The Science Channel — September 2005.

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So, how about that Cosmos show

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:53:13 GMT

Any of you cats see that crazy TV series? I bought the entire thing on DVD. Let me know if you want to watch it with me. First come first served. Whoa, slow down there!

posted in Carl Sagan - 5 replies