On November 9, 1934, in a small Brooklyn apartment, a baby named Carl Edward Sagan was born to a Russian immigrant garment worker and a sharp-witted homemaker. When Carl was five, his parents took him to the 1939 New York World's Fair, where he saw a vision of the future filled with rockets and robots. He never forgot it. At the library he checked out books about stars and dreamed of other worlds. By the time he was a teenager, he was writing letters to professional astronomers asking serious questions about Mars.
Sagan went on to become one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. He worked with NASA on missions to Venus, Mars, and the outer planets, and helped design the gold-plated records aboard the Voyager spacecraft, which carry greetings from Earth in 55 languages and are now drifting between the stars. He was the one who convinced NASA in 1990 to turn the Voyager 1 camera back and snap a photo of Earth from nearly 4 billion miles away - a tiny blue speck he called the pale blue dot.
Millions of people first met Sagan through his 1980 TV series Cosmos, where he stood in his rust-colored turtleneck talking about black holes, dinosaurs, and billions and billions of stars. He had a special gift for explaining huge ideas in friendly words, and he made science feel like an adventure anyone could join. Sagan died in 1996, but kids still watch his shows, scientists still launch missions he helped imagine, and the Voyagers keep sailing outward, carrying his voice into the dark.
