Good morning.
It really is an honor to address you all.
Through an old but serviceable telescope from our front yard right here in Northwest Washington,
my father showed me the moon and the planet Saturn for the first time, and I shall never
forget it.
Seeing those objects up close changes you.
And so it was with Professor Sagan's astronomy class.
It changed me every bit as profoundly as the craters on the moon or the rings of Saturn.
He empowered us, indeed he emboldened us, to come to know our place in the cosmos, our
place among the stars, what I like to call our place in space.
Every day in his class there was something astonishing to behold.
He showed us pictures from Mars that no one outside of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had
seen before.
He challenged us to figure out just what you'd have to do to really find life on another
world.
Along with that, he demanded to know what record best suited to inclusion on the Voyager
spacecraft, and we strongly suggested 'Johnny Be Good'.
In was in his class that I became aware, for the first time, of the Tunguska Air Burst
Event, the remarkable, terrible destructive power of an impacting asteroid or meteorite.
It's an issue that our leaders today are just beginning to understand, they're just beginning
to see that it's a small step from impacter science fiction to impacter science fact.
Here's hoping we can imagine the consequences and just not let an impact happen.
I wrote a paper for Professor Sagan about the paranormal illusion called Kirlian photography,
pictures of imaginary life aure, or auras, halos.
In other words, although it was a class about astronomy, my final paper was about pseudo-science,
a topic seemingly unrelated to the stars.
But Carl Sagan wanted us, wanted me, to know and appreciate the process of science much
more than the facts of astronomy.
He made a skeptic.
He made me a critical thinker.
He changed me.
It was Carl Sagan who introduced the phrase 'comparative climatology' to us and to the
world.
And when we made these comparisons in his class, we came to behold that our Earth is
not just a special case, but is astonishingly special.
Carl Sagan's insights showed the world that the greenhouse effect is a terribly important
thing to understand.
After having spent a great deal of time with the notion of comparative climatology over
the last 33 years, I can remind anyone that virtually every mathematical climate model
that we have today can trace its beginnings to Carl's work on nuclear winter.
His first set of assumptions, his first set of insights as to what's important in such
a model are still with us today.
It really is remarkable.
As an educator, and engineer, a citizen of the Earth, I hope that we soon stop denying
and start doing all we can to slow climate change and mitigate the consequences of our
soon to be displaced populations.
I came of age as an engineer in a world that featured the Ford Pinto, [laughter] an older
reference lost on many of the younger listeners.
The Chevy Vega, leisure suits, the removal of a perfectly functioning solar hot water
system from the White House roof, and the decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle
on a particularly cold day.
I was troubled by my country's willingness to embrace the mediocre.
I often felt Professor Sagan was troubled by this trend as well.
And by the time of my tenth college reunion, I was fired up to do a television show for
children about science.
Because of what I had viewed as the short-sightedness in, well, in everything.
[Laughter] In government, and in industry.
I wanted to influence kids so that we might have a more scientifically literate society
for a better tomorrow, for all of us.
It took a letter and several phone calls to arrange a meeting with my old professor, who
probably had no idea what an unremarkable former student would want from him.
But he agreed to meet with me, and by all accounts, he took the time to meet with almost
anyone who made a good case for it.
In those five minutes, he once again changed my life forever.
In short, he said that he could see that I loved engineering, the business of using science
to make things and solve problems.
But he encouraged me to focus my educational work on pure science.
He said, and I shall never forget it, he said, "Kid's resonate to pure science."
That sentence redirected me.
It led directly to what become the popular Bill Nye, the Science Guy show.
And it's quite a thing for someone to utter just one thought and change a man's life.
I will be forever grateful.
Professor Sagan told me in so many words, mine was a good and worthy pursuit, "kids
resonate to pure science."
With the tremendous, almost incredible, success of both the Viking missions to Mars and the
Voyager missions to our neighboring worlds, Carl and his colleagues became very, very
concerned that government support for robotic missions of this sort was drying up at the
very moment in history when we should be investing more, and pressing farther and deeper into
space.
So he and Bruce Murray, who was the head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time,
and Lou Friedman, a Jet Propulsion Lab employee, formed the Planetary Society, it quickly became,
and still is, the world's largest non-governmental space interest organization.
And they formed this at what they thought was a crossroads in the history of the exploration
of space, and I suggest we are at another crossroads that's very, very similar.
So as a former student, I guess, I was put on the mailing list.
I joined and became a member, then three years ago something happened.
I, I left the room or something and I came back and now I'm the CEO.
[Laughter] Now, the Planetary Society is growing for the first time in many years, and we're
going to, at last, fly two solar sail missions.
Solar sail missions were something near and dear to Carl's heart.
So I can say that, as an engineer, as a professional, and as a citizen, Carl Sagan's legacy is part
of me.
Now looking around and being part of this event today makes me wonder that perhaps Carl
Sagan's life's work is just now bearing new fruit.
He inspired enough of the Earth's citizens to take our place in space seriously, to know
and appreciate the fragility of our world, that we have so far avoided a nuclear weapon
war, that we started thinking about the climate of Mars, and especially the climate of Venus
as comparable to the climate of Earth, that his landmark television series is being updated
and broadcast to new generations.
There are more science websites today than ever in history, more science interest than
in the last 30 years.
Perhaps this new fruit will help us, dare I say it, change the world.
Perhaps we've begun a new enlightened era of scientific discovery, and that we'll soon
include people everywhere.
Although it has taken decades, Carl Sagan may yet save the world as we know it.
With his class, his advice, his science, his Planetary Society, he utterly changed my life,
and I am so very grateful.
Professor Sagan helped me come to know that I, that we all, are part of a greater whole.
The greater whole - the greatest whole that seems to be, the cosmos.
You changed the world, Carl Sagan.
Thank you, and thank you from all of us here on Earth.
Let's go forward and, dare I say it, change the world in his name.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you.
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