Carl Sagan is being “blog-a-thoned” and the result is a tribute he’d doubtless appreciate – because it is not only built around the sort of media he imagined in Cosmos twenty plus years ago, but also because it isn’t filled with the kind of UFO nonsense that plagued him every time he gave a speech.
Sagan arguably created the space (no pun intended) in which public intellectuals came to function as part of PBS, and suffered mightily for it among astronomers despite his considerable publication record and research. He was a showman, but as a showman he was also a great teacher and reached millions with what I think (and this is where I admit he’s a hero of mine) was the single most important and coherent (as opposed to the manic “Connections” series) introduction to the relationship between human social and political life and the cosmos.
[hat tip: Greg Dahlman]
Labels: public intellectuals, science blogs