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The Washington Post Editorial Board tried to scare the U.S. Senate into passing sweeping legislation to fight climate change. The liberal paper’s March 18 editorial headline seemed to suggest Armageddon could happen tomorrow: “The danger of climate change is imminent. The Senate must approve a strong policy.” The editorial reeked of eco-extremist propaganda: “The danger is imminent. The world cannot afford another round of nice-sounding proposals followed by inaction. Congress must go big on climate change.” [Emphasis added.] The Post cried how “THERE HAVE been many moments when it seemed as though the United States would tackle climate change, only...

Saganism Lives On in Futility November 3, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Carl Sagan’s daughter picks up where her dad left off, adding an unexpected twist for creatures on a pale blue dot. Space.com reviewed Sasha Sagan’s new book, For Small Creatures Such As We. Basically, Carl Sagan’s daughter thinks that since humans evolved to be ritualistic, we should come up with some secular rituals that atheists can enjoy during their brief, meaningless lives on a speck orbiting a speck in a speckless universe. Reviewer Chelsea Gohd sums it up in her subtitle: “People are born and people die. We’ve...

A remarkable set of photographs showing how captured Allied soldiers dug a tunnel used for the famous 'Great Escape' have appeared in a new book to mark 75 years since the event. They depict the ingeniously engineered tunnels which helped nearly 80 soldiers escape from the notorious Nazi POW camp Stalag Luft III, in Sagan, Poland on March 25, 1944. Of the 76 Allied airmen who broke out, 50 were later executed by the Gestapo on the direct orders of a humiliated Adolf Hitler - only three successfully evaded capture.

I am a Carl Sagan fan from way back. His 1980 TV miniseries “Cosmos” hit me at just the right age and inflamed a lifelong love of science. But we’ve had nearly 40 years to assess the long-term effects and see how Sagan unwittingly contributed to a trend that muddled public understanding of science. This weekend’s so-called “March for Science” is a perfect example of what went wrong. All you really need to know about the “March for Science” is that it is scheduled for Earth Day. The organizers may say the march is nonpartisan and has a variety of...

Carl Sagan is arguably science's biggest rockstar—the ultimate champion for logic and reason. Which makes it all the more painful to find out that his son is a vehement 9/11 truther. In a recent interview for a radio show called 9/11 Free Fall (already off to a great start), Jeremy Sagan—the younger son of Sagan senior and his first wife, fellow scientist Lynn Margulis—went off on all us closed-minded sheeple. In response to a prompt asking when he first "woke up," Sagan remarks:

A Recent Article Ponders the Rarity of Earth And How Astronomical Are the Odds Against Complex Life in the Universe! By: Msgr. Charles PopeWe have discussed on the blog before the potential flaws in the mere statistical presumption that because there are so many stars there must be billions of other Earth-like planets in the universe that likely support life similar to ours. Why? Because it is not just one or two things that make Earth what it is; it is many, many essential things that make Earth capable of sustaining life for long enough that our civilization has...

It might seem strange to say it, but I am a global warming skeptic because of Carl Sagan. This might seem strange because Sagan was an early promoter of the theory that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are going to fry the globe. But it’s not so strange when you consider the larger message that made Sagan famous. As with many people my age, Sagan’s 1980 series “Cosmos,” which aired on public television when I was eleven years old, was my introduction to science, and it changed my life. “Cosmos&88221; shared the latest developments in the sciences of evolution, astronomy,...

A video for Neil, Michael and Buzz

My orchestration is complete in you in that in fact you have been crushed and fractured as a diamond brushed and honed , thoroughly ground into My existence and pleasure and I wear you as My Signet ring of power and authority in My Name . Therefore only and all you do is by my hand and in My Name ( JESUS ) of the strictest obedience wrapped in the gold and silver of My glory tested in the fire ( COALS) of My Testimony ( JESUS ) and Salvation of My ways , for My words are Life breathed...

Back in 1980 the US space programme was in the doldrums. Apollo was fading into history and there hadn't been a US astronaut in space for five years. The quirky space shuttle, much diminished from its initial vision, was still waiting to make its maiden flight. But that fall came Cosmos, a revolutionary documentary series with a compelling host. Both the television universe and the real one have never been quite the same. Carl Sagan, by equal measure professorial and childlike, offered space enthusiasts a new paradigm. Buck Rogers was out; refined and groovy cosmic citizen was in. Here was...

« Edwin Salpeter and the Gasbags of Jupiter By Larry Klaes‘The Gasbags of Jupiter’ sounds for all the world like the title of an early 1930s novel that would have run in a venue like Science Wonder Stories. In fact, as Larry Klaes tells us below, the idea grew out of Carl Sagan’s speculations about free-floating life-forms that might populate the atmospheres of gas giant planets like Jupiter. Cornell physicist Edwin Salpeter had much to do with the evolution of that concept, helping Sagan produce a paper that was a classic of informed imagination (and one that led to...

If you look up at the awesome Milky Way and smile about its billions and billions of stars, be grateful to Johnny Carson (1925 - 2005) for bringing the universe home through cathode ray technology, his vast talent and avid interest in astronomy. Carson brought two distinguished astronomers and popularizers to The Tonight Show television audience and wider public notice. Robert Jastrow's book, Red Giants and White Dwarfs: Man's Descent from the Stars, first published in 1967, describes scientific discoveries relating humans to the origin and evolution of the cosmos. The book grew from Jastrow's 1964 television lectures as part...

Scientists recently decoded the first confirmed alien transmission from outer space. It said: "Please send 5x10 (to the 50th power) atoms of hydrogen to each of the five star systems listed below. Then, add your system to the top of the list and delete the system at the bottom. Transmit copies of this message to 100 different solar systems. If you follow these instructions, you are guaranteed that within 0.25 degrees of a galactic rotation you will receive in return sufficient hydrogen stores to power your own civilization until the universe reaches inevitable maximum entropy. This really works!" OK, it's...

BreakPoint with Charles Colson Commentary #041124 - 11/24/2004 'The Privileged Planet' Our Special Place in the Universe Do you ever find yourself saying, "I wish so-and-so were still around?" Well, I wish the astronomer Carl Sagan were still around. He died in 1996, but had he lived, he would have found an extraordinary book, The Privileged Planet, by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards, deeply challenging—maybe even disturbing. Here's why: In his frequent appearances on the Tonight Show, and in his public television series Cosmos, Sagan was presented as the visionary sage of science. He spoke cheerfully of being...

Good ideas are often forgotten, but they do not die. They are discovered through reading, or created independently again. The recurring debate on whether humans should be in space omits such an idea. The relationship between human spaceflight and the survival of the human species was explained by the spaceflight pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard, and has since been expressed by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and many others. Sagan’s thoughts are of particular interest, since he devoted his career to space science and the search for extraterrestrial life, not human spaceflight.

The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...

<p>My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.</p>

In what sounds like a purely fantastic voyage, a private US- Russian group that promotes planetary exploration plans to use the power of light to sail a giant windmill-shaped contraption through space. The Planetary Society, founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan and others, said on Monday the vehicle featured reflective surfaces that would be propelled when particles of light - photons - hit it. The craft, with its 30-metre sails, is to be launched on a converted Russian intercontinental ballistic missile from a submarine in the Barents Sea this year at a cost of about US$4 million (HK$31.1 million)....