Recommended reading - 3 books by Carl Sagan

 

 

Cosmos

Published 1980.
 
ISBN-10: 9780345539434
ISBN-13: 978-0345539434
 
Description:
 
With a new Foreword by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
 

This visually stunning book with over 250 full-color illustrations, many of them never before published, is based on Carl Sagan’s thirteen-part television series. Told with Sagan’s remarkable ability to make scientific ideas both comprehensible and exciting, Cosmos is about science in its broadest human context, how science and civilization grew up together.

 

The book also explores spacecraft missions of discovery of the nearby planets, the research in the Library of ancient Alexandria, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the origin of life, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies and the origins of matter, suns and worlds.

 

Sagan retraces the fifteen billion years of cos-mic evolution that have transformed matter into life and consciousness, enabling the Cosmos to wonder about itself. He considers the latest findings on life elsewhere and how we might communicate with the beings of other worlds.

 

Cosmos is the story of our long journey of discovery and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science, including Democritus, Hypatia, Kepler, Newton, Huy-gens, Champollion, Lowell and Humason. Sagan looks at our planet from an extra-terrestrial vantage point and sees a blue jewel-like world, inhabited by a lifeform that is just beginning to discover its own unity and to venture into the vast ocean of space.

 

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Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Published 1994.
 
ISBN-10: 0345376595
ISBN-13: 978-0345376596
 
Description:
 
In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time.
 
Future generations will look back on our epoch as the time when the human race finally broke into a radically new frontier—space. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history of our launch into the cosmos and assesses the future that looms before us as we move out into our own solar system and on to distant galaxies beyond. The exploration and eventual settlement of other worlds is neither a fantasy nor luxury, insists Sagan, but rather a necessary condition for the survival of the human race.
 
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Contact

Published 1985.
 
A science-fiction novel.
 
ISBN-10: 0671004107
ISBN-13: 978-0671004101
 
Description:
 
In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history.
Who – or what – is out there?
In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe.
In Contact, he predicts its future – and our own.