54 pages • 1 hour read
Carl SaganPale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was an influential astronomer and popularizer of science. At the time of writing Pale Blue Dot, he was a Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences, Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies, and Associate Director of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University, as well as a long-time consultant for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was in high demand in the 1950s, when very few other scientists were working across astronomy, chemistry, and biology. By 1960, he began working with NASA and became involved with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Soon he earned a research reputation for exobiology and atmospheric chemistry.
Sagan played a major role in NASA’s Mariner, Viking, and Voyager missions and contributed to the Apollo and Galileo missions. His most notable discoveries at NASA include his work on the greenhouse effect on Venus, the methane atmosphere on Titan, and the climate effects of dust on Mars. The last of which led to his highly publicized participation in the “nuclear winter” debates in the 1980s. Sagan also cofounded the Planetary Society in 1980 to promote space exploration, and he was an influential voice in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He also edited Icarus, the flagship journal of planetary science in the United States, from 1968 to 1979. Despite these accomplishments, Sagan was famously denied tenure at Harvard University and then rejected by the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. This phenomenon—when a scientist’s public fame and success in popular fields leads to the discredit of their academic research—is now known as the “Sagan Effect.”
Sagan is best known for his popular science books and work on television. He is the author of The Dragons of Eden, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and Cosmos, which became the best-selling science book of all time. He also wrote the novel Contact, which became a popular film directed by Robert Zemeckis. His celebrity stems mostly from his on-screen role on Cosmos as well as his interviews with Rolling Stone magazine and on the Tonight Show. His celebrity was helped by his charismatic personality, on-air wit, and countercultural sympathies. His greatest talent was his ability to write poetically about scientific research across multiple fields while remaining easy for readers to understand.
Ann Druyan
Ann Druyan, born in 1949, was Sagan’s wife and frequent collaborator. She is best known for her work as the cowriter of the original PBS television program Cosmos as well as the creator, producer, and writer of two follow-up programs, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey in 2014, and Cosmos: Possible Worlds in 2020. She has served as the Creative Director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which produced the golden records sent on the Voyager probes, a program director for Cosmos 1, and in leadership capacities for many other programs where astronomy, education, and cultural caretaking overlap. She has authored two books on her own: a novel, A Famous Broken Heart, in 1977, and a companion volume to Cosmos: Possible Worlds in 2020.
Druyan cowrote six best-selling science books with Sagan including Comet, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and The Demon-Haunted World. While she did not cowrite Pale Blue Dot, occasionally Sagan references conversations with Druyan to introduce topics in the book’s early chapters. Much of Pale Blue Dot is probably shaped by conversations between Sagan and Druyan, especially the sections about religion. Druyan is considered a key figure among atheist and skeptic communities. Druyan’s and Sagan’s relationship has been enshrined by the naming of the asteroids 4970 Druyan and 2709 Sagan, which are in orbit around each other.
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was an Italian scientist. He is considered the father of many research fields including astronomy, physics, and engineering. He innovated the refracting telescope and was one of the first people to consider the laws of nature to be based on mathematics. He is known for his discoveries by telescope, including the phases of Venus, four moons of Jupiter, Saturn’s rings, the Moon’s craters, and sunspots. And he is best known for his public stance in defense of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory and subsequent investigation by the Inquisition. In 1632, he wrote Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which unapologetically defended his belief that Earth revolved around the Sun. In response, the Inquisition forced him to recant and spend the rest of his life under house arrest.
The Galileo mission to Jupiter is named in his honor. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan identifies Galileo as one of history’s greatest heroes for not submitting to the church and thus advancing astronomy into the modern era. Sagan refers to the moment “when Galileo turned the first telescope toward the heavens” as the opening of “the era of modern astronomy” (193-94). Galileo made many of the first discoveries, setting the standard for all astronomers after him. He also serves as a symbol, for Sagan and many others, for the persecution of scientists throughout history as well as the victory of the scientific method over comfortable myths.
Voltaire
Francois-Marie Arouet, more famously known as Voltaire, was a French writer in the 18th century. He was famous for his wit and polemics against dogmatic religion, intolerance of all kinds, and slavery. He wrote histories, philosophic works, and plays, but his most famous work today is the novel Candide, a satire that ridicules Leibnizian optimism.
Sagan quotes Voltaire extensively in Pale Blue Dot, adopting him as one of his authorities for delivering Enlightenment values. The Enlightenment marked a paradigm wherein reason is considered more important than tradition and superstition, an extension of the philosophies of Isaac Newton and John Locke. In many ways, Enlightenment philosophies take the scientific method of the previous century and apply it to all aspects of religion, society, and the world. By experience and observation (or even experiments), rather than by assuming that which has been taught is true, Enlightenment thinkers learned about the world around them. One of the most influential thinkers of that age, Voltaire fought for the freedom of religious practice and progressive thinking. His approach, like Sagan’s, was often to render human conceits ridiculous by reconsidering perspective.
Robert H. Goddard
Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) was an American physicist who invented the first liquid-fueled rocket. His 1919 book A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is now considered a foundational text in rocket science. His rocket prototype successfully launched in 1926, ushered in the era of space flight. Goddard is now known as a founding father of rocketry and the man who ushered in the Space Age. Early in his career, however, Goddard was subject to public ridicule for believing that rockets might one day reach the Moon, most notably by The New York Times (who later apologized, after the Moon landing). Much of his early science is directly inspired by science fiction and he would die before seeing many of his theories proven correct. In 1959, US Congress posthumously gave him an award as the “father of space flight” and NASA named the Goddard Space Flight Center in his honor.
Pale Blue Dot is in many ways a book about shaping the human future through imagination. Sagan refers again and again to Goddard as a person whose vision for the future was so vibrant and before its time that it would persist through his public ridicule to influence the future. Goddard and a similar figure, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky—a recluse living in pre-Soviet Russia—serve as guiding stars in the book. Both men believed it was an inevitability that humans would travel into and eventually through space, and neither was taken seriously in their lifetimes.
