On Carl Sagan

For someone who spent such a long and productive career explaining to us the size of the universe, the sheer exponentiality of it, the “billions and billions” of worlds out there, “the power and beauty of quantification” to be found in its vastness—you’d think that such a person might have a realistic sense of his own place in that universe. But in the case of Carl Sagan, you’d be dead wrong.

I should probably take time to point out, as Sagan himself so often did, that he never really did use the term “billions and billions,” not on Cosmos and not anywhere else (until, of course, he started talking about how he never used it). That was just something goofy his friend Johnny Carson came up with; something to better caricature the way he approached the word “billions”’s pronunciation, with that biting aggressive “b,” and then the languorous loll of the “l”s, before rolling out the nasal finality of its last syllable—“yuns”—in perfect Brooklyn-adenoidal-by-way-of-Cornell. Or something like that. Really you’d have to ask Johnny.

Speaking of whom: to the straightman who came with the question “How did you become a star?,” it was Johnny who said: “I started in a gaseous state and then I cooled.” That’s a great line, and it would have sounded perfect in the mouth of Carl Sagan, except that he never really did cool; he just sort of flamed out, too soon at the age of 62, from pneumonia and cancer. A lot of people say he was an arrogant prick until his last wife, Ann Druyan, smoothed him out and brought him down to Earth. No less an ego-weird eccentric than Stanley Kubrick got the vapors just being around him.

He never cooled because he never stopped fighting the good liberal-humanist fight, never stopped his very public and active assault on warmongers, destroyers of Earth, anti-choicers, nuclear jingoists, trickle-down econo-misers, the callous and the crude, basically the ignorant in all their many hideous manifestations. It must be hard, maybe impossible, not to look smug when you hold hard to such an astronomical estimation of Homo sapiens’ potential, in spite of all competing evidence to the contrary.