The ghost of cosmos past

In my previous entry about the Whole Earth Catalogue I mentioned that it offered a book by Carl Sagan. That just happened to be something that caught my eye as I perused the big pages of the catalogue - I could just have easily spotted and mentioned a thousand other items. But I guess that grabbed me because Sagan was always a fascinating person to me - a true scientific genius to whom normal people could relate and who could present weighty scientific subject matter in a way the masses could stomach. The guy had an unbelievable resume and a massive bibliography of published works including hundreds of scientific papers, books, and even a novel, Contact, that became a Hollywood movie. He was also, as most people who operate at high levels like that are, controversial. His tenure at Cornell's Laboratory For Planetary Studies was not without problems. He wasn't just some boring planethead.

So that was my first mention of him.

Sunday I drove down to Ithaca with Gilmore to see a John Hiatt/Lyle Lovett concert. We had time to kill so I was showing him some sights I came to know when I was working on some long-term projects that kept me there during the week for extended periods in the early 80s. I got to know the town pretty well. I told him I was going to take him down the best street in Ithaca, one I'd found in my evening cruises back then. It was immediately below the Cornell campus, alongside the Cascadilla Creek gorge (Ithaca is Gorges, after all). It's drastically steep in that area so there are lots of sharp switchbacks, and it's very narrow but lined with these beautiful tudor-style homes. Sort of the Finger Lakes answer to Lombard Street.

Having been years since I had been on the street, it took a while to find, but that was alright because in our search we found a couple of other great spots I'd never seen before. Eventually we found it (Cascadilla Park Road) and as we were descending I mentioned Sagan's name again because back when I was working down there I had heard that he had lived on this street. I never confirmed that it was true but it always seemed plausible and gave the street a little more mystique than it already had to me.

We headed in to the concert (in the newly-renovated State Theater), and the show was outstanding. It was an acoustic set, with these two very formidable musicians sitting side by side and trading witty banter when they weren't playing their formidable songs. Much of the conversation came in the form of Lovett doing some pseudo psychoanalysis on Hiatt. It was humorous and entertaining. I don't really remember why or how but somewhere along the line they got talking about the Dalai Lama and his name resurfaced two or three times before the show was over. It was sort of an odd, out-of-context thing, as his name wouldn't be a typical relate in a country and blues show.

Tonight I watched a portion of a documentary about Ronald Reagan with Annette. The show was all about his unbending foreign policy with regard to the Soviet Union and how that ultimately resulted in the end of the Cold War. I'm not here to extol the virtues of Reagan, but it was an interesting look back at a pretty heady time in world history. A big part of the story was, of course, the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). One passage showed some of the silly, cartoonish animated renderings that were made to try to explain to the public just what SDI was. It showed little green satellites shooting laser beams back and forth and blowing up missiles. And there in the middle of that segment came a brief flash of a press conference with Carl Sagan. He was cleverly mocking the whole concept of SDI and imitating the little cartoon and the laser gun sounds, much to the entertainment of the press.

Since that was my third close encounter with Carl Sagan in a short period of time, I took that as a sign and did some further digging. I Googled his name, and up comes the link to carlsagan.com, better known as "The Carl Sagan Portal." Oooohh. The first word on the menu that catches my eye is "Blog." Is Carl blogging from his new place in the cosmos? I click on it and it turns out to be written by his widow, Ann Druyan (his third wife, and her resume is equally impressive) and without really reading any of it, I scroll down the window of text and immediately come upon this picture:













His book Cosmos is supposedly the best-selling science book ever published in English, and his Cosmos series is supposedly the most watched show ever shown on PBS.

One of his most intriguing ventures may have been his involvement with the possibilities of communication with life elsewhere in the solar system and the universe. He chaired the committee that planted the gold-coated phonograph discs on the Voyager spacecrafts that contain information from and about Earth. Elvis has left the building and Voyager I has left the solar system, and is now steaming into the great beyond (currently in the heliosheath) carrying a gold platter that has on it some Chuck Berry music, thanks to Carl.

Sagan is buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, just a meteorite's throw from the switchback road where he may or may not have lived, and probably under billions and billions of particles of soil: