Saturday, October 16, 2010

Carl Sagan's Final Legacy, 1996

This man perfectly embodied and represented my view of reality. This is the legacy I hope to pass on to my daughter.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

My uncle named his oldest son "Sagan" ... for obvious reasons.

Logtar said...

I have a post titled "where is the Carl Sagan of our generation" and I have never posted it. We need to go back to science and innovation or we will be living in the village.

AnnoyingJoe said...

When I was 'round 10, My aunt and uncle gave me a copy of Cosmos. I spent the next 8 years thumbing through it over and over. First, I reveled in the pictures of the Viking landers and the Voyager probes and the macroscopic paintings of foreign moons and planets and stars. As I got older, I began to read the chapters and began to accept, in some small way, that i am simultaneously everything and nothing. That was his genius: to take what we all already know, and put in it words.

Great post.

Xavier Onassis said...

AnnoyingJoe - You get it. In a very Zen-like way, our nothingness is what makes us special.

If some Supreme Being can simply "speak" us into existence and circumvent physical laws, then there is nothing unique or special about us.

We are nothing more than the result of a supernatural magician's conjure. A cheap slight of hand by an all powerful trickster who can do the same thing over and over again anytime He/She/It wants.

But if the universe is a random, uncaring, unscripted banging together of recycled subatomic particles, atoms and molecules and we still exist and can think deep thoughts, create works of art and can contemplate the nature of the universe, the reason for our existence and our ultimate destiny???

That's a fucking metaphysical miracle! That makes us special and unique!