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A Letter to My Friend and Colleague, Carl Sagan, on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday November 9, 2014 Dear Carl, It's so lovely to be beaming this message to you on your 80th birthday. As you may be aware, the world hasn't changed much since you left. It's still a great mess. It's still looking like we may destroy our civilization after all. Political gridlock is as bad as anyone can remember, and there's no end yet in sight to the damage we are doing to our environment and our future. Regrettably, in the hallways where power congregates, they are still not listening to you.. But I gotta tell ya... Titan was even more wonderful than even you could have imagined. Seas of liquid hydrocarbons are strewn around the poles. Methane clouds that change seasonally float aloft. And a wide belt of miles and miles and thousands of miles of dunes encircle the globe. Who expected that?! So much like Earth and yet so not. And you wouldn't believe what we found on Enceladus! A hundred and one geysers gushing from the surface, laced with organic compounds and erupting from a deep salty sea. It just might be the very place you wished with all your might we could find. Someday, hopefully soon, we may know if...well...you know. Fingers crossed. And now we're on the eve of exploring the Kuiper Belt, starting w/ a most historic rendezvous with Pluto, and in only a few days we'll be landing on a comet. We've made great strides in our efforts to know how and where we are. I know all this would have made you smile and would have given you great hope. Just wish you were still here to cheer us on. Oh, and didn't Annie do a great job with Cosmos II? You would have been so proud. Well, wherever you are right now, undoubtedly out there somewhere in the cosmos, having a blast, the happiest of Happy Birthdays to you! We miss you. Your friend and colleague, Carolyn PS. Sending along some pictures from happy days ... at Voyager's encounter with Neptune in 1989, and your 60th birthday party twenty years ago. How time flies.

Listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson makes the case for accurate science reporting on the latest episode of his podcast, Star Talk

The Pale Blue Dot This photo comes from the Voyager 1 spacecraft and was taken on February 14th, 1990. This image is of Earth, 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometres) distant, showing up as a tiny dot. The following monologue is from Carl Sagan, an American astronomer who was also an author, co-author, or editor of over 20 books. He also published over 600 scientific papers and articles. “That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." -The Earth Story team

The last two episodes of Cosmos were glorious and actually made me look at myself differently. Being more scientist than historian, I never knew of Cecilia Payne. And now I discover she, too, said this: "The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience… " So true, Cecilia. So true. And I never knew of Marie Tharp, either. It's telling that I was educated in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech, had certainly heard in reverent tones the story of Alfred Wegener, but had never even heard the name of Tharp. Many grateful thanks to Ann Druyan, Steve Soter, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the Cosmos crew for bringing to light the stories of these women greats of astronomical and geological history. And to my fellow female scientists, I hope you now see yourselves differently, too. You and I are part of a fine & noble lineage. Walk tall and proud forevermore.