Carl Sagan Facts For Kids

Sagan (age 16) in the 1951 Rahway High School yearbook.

Sagan in the University of Chicago's 1954 yearbook

Sagan and the Viking spacecraft

Image by PBS, licensed under Public domain in the United States

Sagan in Cosmos (1980)

Image by User:Efbrazil, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Carl Sagan popularized the Cosmic Calendar as a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its current age of 13.8 billion years to a single year to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes.

The Planetary Society members at the organization's founding. Sagan is seated on the right.

Pale Blue Dot: Earth is a bright pixel when photographed from Voyager 1, 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) away.[82] Sagan encouraged NASA to generate this image. from Pale Blue Dot (1994)[83] On it, everyone you ever heard of... The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. ... Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Carl Sagan, Cornell lecture in 1994

Sagan admitted that he had overestimated the danger posed by the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires.

The United States and Soviet Union/Russia nuclear stockpiles, in total number of nuclear bombs/warheads in existence throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War era