i just thought it was funny :shrug-outta-hecks:
I love me some Cosmos.
No wonder he knew he had chemistry with a 14 year old prostitute. He's a scientist!
Sagan died in 1996. "New Atheism" that brown nosed neocons like Christopher Hitches and Sam Harris was a thing in the early 2000s. Also Sagan was merely agnostic, not Atheist, and he was born to a working class Russian Jewish family in New York in the 30s. He never had that reactionary vibe. He was kinda lib on some things but his whole politics can be summed up as: science good, give people what they need to survive, avoid nuclear war with USSR. Ted Turner asked him if he was a Socialist when he was dying of cancer and he said "I'm not sure what a Socialist is" but then proceeded to describe what are essentially standard DSA type politics. I'd say Sagan's politics are pretty close to someone like Bernie Sanders rather than Sam Harris.
i loved carl sagan as a child. is he bad? always thought he was just a lib. yeah anti religion and pro weed.
Sagan was fundamentally a believer in that things could be better and was not a anti communist zealot .
I would honestly peg him as left-adjacent. He saw science and technology as things that should be used to better human lives and in his own word "cherish" the home we have through ecology. He was never an anti-communist, I think as a scientist he saw himself as a bit "above" that kind of politics. I am sure he was an admirer of the ambitions of socialism and the soviet space program. He was fervently against nuclear war.
Maybe I'm still a lib for it but I get tears in my eyes when I watch Contact and the alien ambassador tells Ellie that "You are an interesting species. An interesting mix. You are capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares."
Because we are. When we right out material reality, when we "fix" the preconditions that inspire the cruelty of our species, I think we will see far more beautiful dreams than horrible nightmares. But the beautiful dreams still occur despite the nightmarish conditions of life. My ambition in life is to be some small part in the balancing of that imbalance.
He is good, he was a USSR/communist friendly lib that didn't fully understand how anti-lib/capitalist he would need to be to make an inclusive spacefaring civilization that could ascend beyond race and nationality a reality.
He's good. Sadly, the person that is carrying on his legacy of popularizing the science of the cosmos, and the host of the new iteration of the Cosmos show, is Neil DeGrasse Tyson. And he is definitely Not Good.
Somebody once gave me shit for saying that young Carl Sagan was a cutie pie.
https://youtu.be/vZXJ-Qx-pbw
You can see the careful way he uses his words even at the young age of 27. You can see the passion. It's very endearing. Cute nerd shit.
Kinda late but this is the perfect excuse to post an old internet classic, A glorious dawn- Carl Sagan
