Carl Sagan, Geek Hero
I never knew him. Never even met him. And yet…
For the last several months, I’ve been watching the old Cosmos PBS series via streaming video. It’s the perfect Sunday-afternoon diversion for me: The Missus generally is at her laptop then, in the living room (where the big-screen television is located), and doesn’t like trying to read or work with all the noise and flash of movies and most TV shows in the background. I certainly can’t blame her.
With Cosmos, though, the video is muted. A slow-mo simulation of a cruise through a galaxy doesn’t draw attention from someone focusing on a laptop screen. Better, maybe 90% of the soundtrack consists of nothing more than Carl Sagan’s voice. It’s a lulling, softly nasal voice — he always sounded as though he were just getting over a cold — and I think I could probably get used to his voice reading just about anything.
Sagan’s demeanor, both visual and vocal, could take some getting used to. It still does. In the recent round of Cosmos re-watchings, adjectives which came into my head early in the series included: pompous, pretentious, know-it-all, judgmental… He could be a scold. He could reach a bit too readily for the “Maybe this isn’t dramatic information, but it sure is lyrically presented, isn’t it?” school of narration. He often cocked his head back slightly while addressing the camera, creating the effect of someone literally — by extension, metaphorically — looking down his nose at the viewer.
And yet…
The guy just seemed like such a lovable enthusiast. He loved what he was talking about. He loved, for that matter, that he got to talk about it. When he waxes poetic about our being made of “star stuff,” as he does in several episodes, it’s hard for me to ignore the prickle of hairs rising up on my wrists and the back of my neck, brushing, goosebumped, up against my shirt. Many of the episodes include updates, recorded ten years after the original 1980 broadcast, in which a white-haired and noticeably drawn Sagan explains briefly, without apology, how he was wrong or underinformed earlier, how much better astronomy and physics understands the world and the heavens in 1990: I have difficulty watching these segments without realizing that he’s been gone now for seventeen years, and without, well, choking up .
Yes, we’ve now got Neil deGrasse Tyson (thank the stars, or the gods if you prefer), and yes, he’s done a Cosmos sequel series, first broadcast in 2014 (with a sequel-to-the-sequel somewhere in the pipeline as well). Yes, we’ve got Phil Plait and his Bad Astronomy site (and related projects) not just to watch over our skies, but also to keep our thinking straight about science — and about non-science, masquerading as the real thing.
Still…
I like science — like it a lot — so even though I didn’t choose a science-related profession, maybe my vote, biased as it is, shouldn’t count. But Carl Sagan, boy howdy: now there was a geek who knew and loved exactly what he was doing and knew how impenetrable it must seem to outsiders, yet one who simply couldn’t wait to tell us about it… and a geek who did tell us about it, repeatedly, enjoyably, well: well enough for us to get.
We couldn’t have asked for a better guide. I do miss him.
