He thought of the idea of putting a message on spacecraft which could be understood by any life from another planet that might find it. He helped many unmanned spacecraft to explore outer space. Sagan became a teacher and director at Cornell in 1971. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996. He married three times and had five children.

Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Dragons of Eden, and, regarding Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award and the Hugo Award. He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence ( SETI). His papers, containing 595,000 items, are archived at The Library of Congress. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series.

The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries. He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain and Pale Blue Dot, and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. Sagan argued the now accepted hypothesis that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to and calculated using the greenhouse effect. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. He is best known for his work as a science popularizer and communicator. Pollack, Owen ToonĬarl Edward Sagan ( Novem– December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences.

The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan