Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. 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. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect.
Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell where he would spend the majority of his career. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. Wikipedia
"When I was twelve, my grandfather asked me – through a translator (he had never learned much English) – what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered, "An astronomer," which, after a while, was also translated. "Yes," he replied, "but how will you make a living?" I had supposed that, like all the adult men I knew, I would be consigned to a dull, repetitive, and uncreative job, astronomy would be done on weekends. It was not until my second year in high school that I discovered that some astronomers were paid to pursue their passion. I was overwhelmed with joy; I could pursue my interest full-time.
Even today, there are moments when what I do seems to me like an improbable, if unusually pleasant, dream: To be involved in the exploration of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; to try to duplicate the steps that led to the origin of life four billion years ago on an Earth very different from the one we know; to land instruments on Mars to search there for life; and perhaps to be engaged in a serious effort to communicate with other intelligent beings, if such there be, out there in the dark of the night sky.
Had I been born fifty years earlier, I could have pursued none of these activities. They were then all figments of the speculative imagination. Had I been born fifty years later, I also could not have been involved in these efforts, except possibly the last, because fifty years from now the preliminary reconnaissance of the Solar System, the search for life on Mars, and the study of the origin of life will have been completed. I think myself extraordinarily fortunate to be alive at the one moment in the history of mankind when such ventures are being undertaken." [Carl Sagan]
"I was an experimenter around the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. And after they swept by the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune systems, it was possible to do something I had wanted to do from the beginning, and that is to turn the cameras on one of these spacecraft back to photograph the planet from which it had come. And clearly, there would not be much scientific data from this because we were so far away that the earth was just a point - a pale blue dot.
But when we took the picture, there was something about it that seemed to me so - poignant; vulnerable, tiny. And if we had photographed it from a much further distance, it would have been gone, lost against the backdrop of distant stars. And to me, it - I thought there - that's us. That's our world. That's all of us - everybody you know, everybody you love. Everybody you ever heard of lived out their lives there, on a mote of dust in a sunbeam.
And it spoke to me about the need for us to care for one another, and also, to preserve the pale blue dot, which is the only home we've ever known. And it underscored the tininess, the comparative insignificance of our world and ourselves." [Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot" (Talk of the Nation : Science Friday)]