And the chances of contacting other advanced civilizations were slimmer, but he did not lose hope and encouraged us to try to do so. He favored the second idea - that there was probably life in millions of places. Is there life out there, could it be another nature? The big question of whether life is an exceptional or abundant phenomenon is still unresolved four decades later. He delivered clear answers and also posed great questions. Sagan, a physicist and astrophysicist, showed us the universe with his charisma, and the aid of rustic visual effects (cutting edge for the time), historical dramatizations and the beautiful music of Vangelis. Back then, photos of Mars landscapes were beginning to emerge, albeit not in high definition. Nonetheless, significant steps had been taken towards the comprehension of the near and distant stars, thanks to the probes. Sagan bemoaned the fact that space research was being cut back while military spending was on the increase. The series was made at a time when the fascination with the space race was on the wane, hampered by budget cuts during the oil crisis. But it didn’t require too much correction. Sagan threw in some updates at the end of the episodes in 1989 with the latest findings. The original, consisting of 13 one-hour episodes, has aged remarkably well. There is also a modern and compelling version of Cosmos, presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson. (I personally knew of a publication where the page editors, an old trade, amused themselves by interchanging the paragraphs of each star sign, and no one ever noticed). They are all so vague that they could apply to anyone all so different from each other that they cannot respond to any rationale. He picks up several newspapers and reads out the fortunes for one sign: Libra.

And, like any good advocate of rationalism, he took the opportunity to ridicule horoscopes. The legendary science communicator Carl Sagan provided a marvelous explanation in his Cosmos series, which aired in 1980. In ancient cultures, astrology also served the political power, which sought to control it, as, at the time, predicting the fall of a tyrant was tantamount to instigating his toppling. With progress, astrology was gradually replaced by astronomy - at the beginning they were the same thing. On top of that magic, those who gazed at the stars also observed their patterns, just as Ptolemy did many centuries before Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler became fascinated with them. There was something magical about the way the sky would appear unchanged when chaos prevailed on Earth. When prehistoric humans would put out their campfires at night, they were alone with the stars.

Carl sagan contact first edition