60 Fun Facts About Carl Sagan

Which animated-comedy creator paid for the Library of Congress to buy Sagan's papers and co-produced the 2014 Cosmos revival?

Seth MacFarlane. The Family Guy creator, a space buff since childhood, called Sagan's work a profound influence on his life and dismissed much of television's science as 'fluff'.

For which book did Sagan win the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction?

The Dragons of Eden. The astronomer won his Pulitzer not for a book about space but for one speculating on how human intelligence evolved.

Which director filmed Sagan's novel Contact, finishing it after the author's death?

Robert Zemeckis. Sagan was co-producing the film with Ann Druyan when he died in the middle of the shoot, so it fades out on the dedication 'For Carl'.

In which New York City borough was Sagan born in 1934?

Brooklyn. As a boy there he asked everyone what the stars were and got answers like 'They're lights in the sky, kid', so he took the question to the public library.

What was the trade of Sagan's Ukrainian-born father, Samuel?

Garment worker. Samuel cut coat patterns from stacks of cloth with what Carl called 'a very scary power saw', and by the late 1940s he was managing the factory.

Sagan described a visit to which 1939 event, home of the Futurama exhibit, as a defining moment?

The New York World's Fair. Its buried time capsule, meant for people of the far future, thrilled the small boy, and as an adult he helped launch time capsules of his own aboard space probes.

When the young Sagan asked a librarian for something on the stars, what did she first bring him?

Portraits of Hollywood actors. The picture book was full of stars like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, and the librarian found his complaint hilarious before fetching the right kind of book.

In Sagan's Contact, the aliens' first message turns out to contain a replay of which television broadcast?

Hitler opening the Berlin Olympics. In the story the 1936 Games were the first television signal strong enough to leave Earth, so they were the first thing listeners 26 light-years away could send back.

Sagan's high school contest entry compared human contact with advanced aliens to what?

Native Americans meeting Europeans. The contest's theme was Columbus, then a revered figure, and calling his arrival a disaster for the people he met was close to unsayable for a schoolboy around 1950.

Which university, then home to physicist Enrico Fermi, admitted Sagan when he was just 16?

The University of Chicago. It was one of the few colleges that would take a 16-year-old, and its Great Books curriculum had the future astronomer reading Aristotle and Freud alongside his physics.

Who supervised Sagan's doctoral thesis on the physical study of the solar system's worlds?

Gerard Kuiper, of Kuiper belt fame, was then almost the only full-time planetary astronomer, and Sagan credited him with the habit of testing any idea with quick sums on the back of an envelope.

Secret 1958 Project A119, on which the young Sagan worked, planned a nuclear detonation where?

On the Moon. The US Air Force wanted a blast visible from Earth as a show of strength in the space race, and Sagan's job was to model the dust cloud it would throw up.

In the early 1960s Sagan argued that which planet, then imagined by some as a balmy paradise, was a searing desert?

Venus. Its radio emissions convinced him the surface was hot enough to melt lead, and in 1962 Mariner 2, the first probe to report back from another planet, proved him right.

Nobel laureate Harold Urey, once Sagan's adviser, wrote a letter opposing his bid for tenure at which university?

Harvard. Urey thought his former student speculated too freely and courted publicity; Sagan, unaware of the letter, was turned down and in 1968 moved to Cornell for the rest of his career.

Which future TV science presenter took Sagan's astronomy class while studying engineering at Cornell?

Bill Nye. At his ten-year reunion he won five minutes with Sagan to pitch a children's show about bridges and bicycles, and was told to stick to pure science because kids 'resonate' to it.

At Cornell, Sagan directed the Laboratory for what?

Planetary Studies. Much of the lab's work was chemistry: Sagan's team made amino acids from simple gases to test whether the building blocks of life could form on other worlds.

As a NASA adviser, Sagan briefed which astronauts before their flights?

The Apollo crews. He also lobbied to have the first men back from the lunar surface kept in quarantine, in case they carried alien microbes home with them.

Sagan devised a message for any alien finders, an engraved plaque bolted to which 1972 probe?

Pioneer 10. NASA gave him three weeks to prepare it, and because his wife Linda drew the man and woman unclothed, some newspapers censored the picture before printing it.

Alongside Bach and Beethoven, which rock and roll star's music is on the Golden Record launched in 1977?

Chuck Berry. Sagan first called 'Johnny B. Goode' awful, then defended it: when a folklorist on the panel sneered that rock was adolescent, he replied that Earth has plenty of adolescents.

Sagan and physicist Edwin Salpeter imagined balloon-like creatures called 'floaters' drifting through the clouds of which planet?

Jupiter. In a 1976 paper the pair reasoned that an atmosphere so dense and so rich in organic molecules might support life, even on a world with no solid ground to stand on.

Sagan showed that the seasonal colour changes on Mars, long blamed on vegetation, were really caused by what?

Windblown dust. The irony is that the darkening had been the best evidence for life on Mars, and it was knocked down by the astronomer who most wanted to find some.

In 1985 Sagan testified to the US Congress about which threat to Earth's climate?

The greenhouse effect. He came to the subject from astronomy: his early research had shown how the same process, run out of control, could turn a neighbouring planet into a furnace.

Sagan spent twelve years editing which planetary science journal, named after a figure from Greek myth?

Icarus. When he took over in 1968 many astronomers still saw planetary science as a fringe pursuit, and by the time he stepped down it had become the field's leading journal.

Sagan co-founded which organisation in 1980 and served as its first president?

The Planetary Society. Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman set it up to prove, simply by its existence, that the public wanted other worlds explored, and to wave that fact at politicians.

Sagan's first wife, who later updated his Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Life, was which biologist?

Lynn Margulis. She met Sagan at 16, and after their marriage ended she became a leading evolutionary biologist by arguing that complex cells arose from mergers of bacteria.

Sagan delivered the 1977 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on what subject?

The Planets. Half of his six lectures dwelt on a single one, Mars, because the Viking landers he had helped to target had touched down there just the year before.

Cosmos drew notably on which earlier documentary series by Jacob Bronowski?

The Ascent of Man. The debt was direct: its producers Adrian Malone and David Kennard moved to California and made Cosmos in the same style, one presenter roaming the world with a personal view.

The production of Cosmos recreated which lost building of the ancient world?

The Library of Alexandria. The great halls Sagan seems to stroll through were an intricate miniature, with the presenter placed inside the model by special effects.

Besides Bach and Vivaldi, which electronic composer's music featured prominently in Cosmos?

Vangelis. A movement of his 1975 album Heaven and Hell became the series theme, and the worldwide success of Cosmos carried the Greek composer's music to a far bigger audience.

Sagan wrote the introduction to which physicist's runaway bestseller?

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Sagan's introduction recalls wandering into a London ceremony in 1974 and watching a young man in a wheelchair slowly sign a book that Isaac Newton had signed.

Sagan's Cosmos sequel took its title from an Earth photo taken by which spacecraft?

Voyager 1. Sagan spent years urging NASA to turn its camera around for one last look home, and in the 1990 picture, taken from 6 billion kilometres away, Earth is smaller than a single pixel.

When Sagan's draft of Contact sent its heroine through a black hole, physicist Kip Thorne told him to use what instead?

Wormholes. Thorne explained that nobody could survive a plunge into a black hole, and working out how a wormhole might be held open led him into serious research on time travel.

Sagan met Stanley Kubrick once, in 1964, and gave what advice about the aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Suggest them, never show them. Kubrick wanted actors as humanoid aliens and Sagan argued that life elsewhere would look nothing like us; the aliens stayed unseen, though historians doubt his advice was the reason.

Which science fiction author said he had met only two people cleverer than himself, Sagan and Marvin Minsky?

Isaac Asimov. He made the admission in his autobiography, and he and Sagan were allies as well as friends: both were founding members of the skeptics' committee set up to test claims of the paranormal.

Sagan first set out his rules for 'baloney detection' in a 1987 article for which magazine?

Parade. Tucked into Sunday newspapers across America, it was then the country's most widely read magazine, which let him put skeptical thinking in front of readers who never opened a science journal.

Sagan helped found the skeptics' committee CSICOP in 1976 alongside Martin Gardner and which stage magician?

James Randi. The conjuror known as the Amazing Randi joined Sagan among the founders at a time when skeptics feared that belief in psychics, astrology and the paranormal was surging.

Which controversial author of Worlds in Collision did Sagan confront at a 1974 science symposium?

Immanuel Velikovsky. Before a standing-room-only crowd Sagan picked apart his tale of a giant comet ravaging Earth in biblical times, and Velikovsky went home with an abiding hatred of him.

In Cosmos, Sagan retold how which ancient Greek worked out the size of the Earth from shadows in two Egyptian towns?

Eratosthenes. He learned that the noon Sun cast no shadow in one town while a stick farther north still did, measured that small angle and scaled it up to the whole globe.

Sagan insisted he never said 'billions and billions', so which talk-show host's impression made it his catchphrase?

Johnny Carson. For years Sagan refused to say the phrase even when audiences begged him to, then gave in and made it the title of his final book.

After Sagan objected to an Apple computer code-named after him, engineers renamed it 'BHA', meaning what?

Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued Apple for libel over the new name and lost: the judge ruled that a figurative insult like 'butt-head' could not be read as a statement of fact.

Sagan was the 'S' in TTAPS, the 1983 paper that put which Cold War term into the language?

Nuclear winter. The five authors took computer models first built to study the atmosphere of Mars and showed that smoke from burning cities could blot out the Sun and cool the whole Earth.

Sagan was arrested twice in the 1980s during protests at which US facility?

The Nevada Test Site. At the second protest, in 1987, he was one of more than 400 people arrested trying to enter the nuclear proving ground, among them the actors Martin Sheen and Kris Kristofferson.

Sagan quit an Air Force scientific advisory board in the mid-1960s in protest at what?

The Vietnam War. It was an early sign of the campaigner he became: two decades later, spurred on by Ann Druyan, he was a leading critic of the nuclear arms race and Reagan's missile-defence plans.

Sagan's son Nick went on to write episodes of which television franchise?

Star Trek. Nick had been sent towards a far bigger audience at the age of six, when his greeting, 'Hello from the children of planet Earth', was recorded for the Voyager Golden Record.

Sagan's orange Porsche 914 wore a licence plate naming which moon of Mars?

PHOBOS. He had a claim on it: when a Mariner probe sent back the first clear pictures, Sagan and his team-mates became the first people to see the little moon's face.

Sagan refused the label 'atheist', so which label did he accept instead?

Agnostic. An atheist, he argued, is someone certain that God does not exist, and he knew of no compelling evidence that would justify being sure either way.

Writing as 'Mr. X', Sagan contributed an essay to a friend's 1971 book in praise of which drug?

Cannabis. He wrote that it heightened his senses and even helped to inspire some of his work; the friend, Lester Grinspoon, revealed who Mr. X was only after Sagan's death.

In 1952 the teenage Sagan wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson asking how America would respond if what proved extraterrestrial?

Flying saucers. The boy who fervently hoped they were real grew into the scientist who found no good evidence for alien craft, yet still argued that the reports deserved serious study.

Who donated the bone marrow for the transplants Sagan underwent during his final illness?

His sister. Cari proved a compatible donor and gave her marrow more than once; Sagan wrote that she was 'unstintingly generous' with it.

The landing site of which 1997 mission to the red planet was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station?

Mars Pathfinder. The lander bounced to a stop on airbags on 4 July 1997, less than seven months after Sagan's death, and released Sojourner, the first rover to drive on another planet.

Which body voted down Sagan's membership in 1992, then gave him its Public Welfare Medal two years later?

The National Academy of Sciences. Opponents said his research record was too thin, while his supporters blamed resentment of his fame, and the medal was the Academy's attempt to salve the wound.

Who hosted the 2014 sequel series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey?

Neil deGrasse Tyson. As a 17-year-old applicant he was invited by Sagan to spend a day in Ithaca, and he said he learned that afternoon 'the kind of person I wanted to become'.

Cosmos was the most-watched American public TV series until which 1990 documentary overtook it?

The Civil War. Ken Burns told it through thousands of old photographs and readings from wartime letters, and his slow pans across the still pictures became known as the Ken Burns effect.

Sagan died in December 1996 in which city, home of the Fred Hutchinson cancer centre where he was being treated?

Seattle. He had crossed the country because the Fred Hutchinson centre was a leader in bone marrow transplants; he died there of pneumonia at 62 and was buried back home in Ithaca.

Sagan's former student Steve Squyres led the science on which Mars rover, built to last 90 days, that ran for 14 years?

Opportunity. Built to drive about a kilometre, it became the first vehicle to cover a marathon's distance on another world, and NASA did not hear its last signal until 2018.

In Ithaca's Sagan Planet Walk, a scale model Solar System, where does the marker for the nearest star beyond the Sun stand?

Hawaii. At one five-billionth of true size everything out to Pluto fits along a stroll through downtown Ithaca, but Alpha Centauri lands about 5,000 miles away, so its station was set up at an astronomy centre in Hilo in 2012.

Sagan helped solve the mystery of the reddish haze on which moon of Saturn?

Titan's haze is a smog of complex organic molecules. Sagan and Bishun Khare cooked up the same reddish-brown gunk in the lab, named it 'tholin', and admitted they had been tempted to call it 'star-tar'.

In Cosmos, Sagan said that to make what from scratch 'you must first invent the universe'?

An apple pie. Sagan's point was that many of its atoms were forged in the lives and deaths of stars, so the recipe really begins billions of years before the kitchen.

Which US president wrote the message to alien civilisations carried on the Voyager Golden Record assembled by Sagan's committee?

Jimmy Carter. Because the record was likely to survive a billion years, he wrote it as a note to the far future: 'We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.'

Which actor played astronomer Ellie Arroway in the 1997 film of Sagan's novel Contact?

Jodie Foster. Sagan and Ann Druyan first wrote Contact as a film treatment; when the project stalled he turned it into a novel, and the film finally opened months after his death.