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Carl Sagan was a scholar and a visionary. He changed the world. His work still does. As I think back on the time I got to spend in his classes, I realize now what made him the best science communicator of his day. He loved discovery, he encouraged exploration, and he celebrated science. That last one was the refrain of his life’s song. He imbued in us students a reverence for science. He wanted everyone to feel as he did that the process of science was what let humans make great discoveries, and that those discoveries somehow will improve the lives of people everywhere on Earth.

That idea, that bit right there, is the insight that he extolled in life — in his lectures, his writing, and especially in his remarkable Cosmos series and book. It’s the idea that we inhabit a world that is an ordinary planet among what must be, if I may, billions and billions of planets. And wait; there’s more. Despite those billions, our planet and its children must be extraordinary. We won the cosmic lottery. We exist, and we get to know it. He drilled us on the notion that we are made of cosmic dust, star stuff. And that we somehow came to be is astonishing. Therefore fellow citizens, we must be good stewards of our world.

Skeptic » Reading Room » A Tribute to Carl Sagan: Our Place in the Universe