News Report From When I Saw Carl Sagan
April 26th, 2010
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I’ve always felt especially privileged to have met Carl Sagan, if only very briefly and to have seen one of his fantastic lectures while he as alive. For a while I’ve been looking for any photographs or video from that lecture (I distinctly remember that there were cameras), but as of yet I’ve been unable to find any.
However I did recently find this news article from the Schenectady Daily Gazette.
(Click to enlarge)
I was able to confirm the date of the lecture as being October 3, 1994. This news item was published the next day. I was only 12 years old at the time and certainly did not appreciate the importance of who I was seeing nor did I (or anyone there) realize how little time Carl Sagan had left. I do, however, distinctly remember many of the things he spoke of and especially how he answered audience questions, with more insight than a short answer, although I was not lucky enough to be picked for one.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under Events, Good Science, Misc, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 26th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
62 was much too young to lose someone like that.
My favourite quote from him is:
“We are highly motivated to find natural laws because our destiny is to know the universe. Our fate is indissolubly bound up with science. It is essential as a matter of simple survival for us to understand science. Evolution has primed us for this by arranging that we may take pleasure in understanding.”
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April 26th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
I’m jealous that you got to see Carl Sagan. Did you just see him speak or did you actually meet the man?
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April 26th, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Q said:
I saw the lecture and there wasn’t really any official meet and greet or book signing or anything after, but my father and I happened to see him leaving with some of the professors and other dignitaries as we were headed to the car. So I met him extremely briefly
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April 29th, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I saw Carl Sagan give a lecture at UC Berkeley many years ago and feel very privileged to have had that opportunity. I can’t even remember all the topics he covered but I do remember him snapping his fingers as he described rain forest destruction happening at the rate of acre a second, “there goes an acre, there goes an acre”. He was a great scientist and teacher. He left us too early.
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