Sagan

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorCollege, Undergraduate February 2008

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The New Education There is a bed in Seattle which is nestled in North America on the spinning Earth led by the Sun around the Milky Way, a speck of cosmic dust floating in the Universe. On this bed Carl Sagan died of an obscure disease for which there is no cure. Carl Sagan is a celebrated writer and astronomer, but most remembered for his writings. Like Galileo he brought the beauty of science to the people. He is the writer of 'Cosmos', an award winning television mini-series that brought the wonders of astronomy into the home. His last and final work was a collection of his essays; Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death on the Brink of the Millennium. . Sagan wrote with a sense of awe, humility and reverence of nature. This book is an expression of Sagan's passions for the things around. The book is so varied in topic that it is difficult at times to find a unifying factor.

Nor does the book reach any sort of conclusion as to the direction of man and things around him. In this we can understand the true sadness of Sagan's death, he was a child who was overwhelmed by the beauty of the universe around him and had not the time needed to express all of it in words.

The book is split into three parts; "The Power and Beauty of Quantification", "What are the Conservatives Conserving?" and "Where Hearts and Minds Collide". In the first section Sagan begins by teaches the reader about large numbers and what innovations in the past allowed us to use them. Sagan moves slowly and tactfully building the readers understanding of these basic concepts of large numbers and exponents, then applies them to such problems as exponential growth of populations,