Star Trek

Carl Sagan was the poet of exobiology, a theorist whose faith in the possibility of alien life inspired a generation of young researchers, a leading figure in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and a liberal political conscience whose vision of a nuclear winter helped defuse the Cold War. Sagan was also a disloyal friend, a cynical careerist and a security risk, an abusive husband and absent father, a scientist who eschewed experiment, an educator who avoided students, a goofy pothead, a smug, self-important, smarty-pants pencil-neck geek, the Sister Wendy of astronomy. This double take on Sagan comes from two new biographies of the charismatic Cornell University astronomer. Keay Davidson in “Carl Sagan: A Life” and William Poundstone in “Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos” make clear in their provocative, sometimes painful biographies that Sagan, who died in 1996 at age 62, was a troubling, paradoxical figure. In a way unique to his generation of scientists, Sagan stood at the confluence of science and popular entertainment: He was more the rightful heir to Mr. Wizard, perhaps, than to any of the historic astronomers he so admired, such as Christiaan Huygens, the versatile 17th century Dutch mathematician and physicist who discovered Titan, improved the optics of telescopes and formulated several important theories of the behavior of light. It is a measure of Sagan’s lingering celebrity that two major biographies should have appeared so quickly upon his death, for Sagan’s was a life that unfolded against a backdrop of large themes: the relations between men and women of ambition in science, the alchemy of reputation and, perhaps most important, the philosophical and spiritual disappointment attendant on humanity’s failure to discover any life beyond Earth. Davidson, an award-winning science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written an absorbing portrait of this Pied Piper of planetary science. Davidson thoroughly explores Sagan’s science, wrestles with his politics and plumbs his personal passions with a telling instinct for the revealing underside of a life lived so publicly. In his turn, Poundstone, a Los Angeles-based science writer, has written a crisp, sober-minded and well-organized assessment of a complicated life that left its imprint not only on the practice of planetary science but on the way in which scientists of all stripes today attempt to present their own stories to the world. Davidson’s book is Robert Lee Hotz is a Times science writer. richer; Poundstone’s is easier to follow. However well they detail Sagan’s life on Earth, Davidson and Poundstone pay only lip service to the larger questions posed by Sagan’s efforts to bridge the two cultures of science and literature or to translate between a technical elite and the general public. The progress of science has always depended on the ability of its popularizers to forcefully articulate its findings. Just as Darwin had his Huxley to argue the case for evolution, so physics today has Stephen Hawking; linguistics has Stephen Pinker; anthropology has Jared Diamond; psychology has Oliver Sacks; and neuroscience has Antonio Damasio. All are scientists who, like Sagan, write for a general audience. But unlike Sagan, they do not stray so far from their own fields of expertise or so deeply into fiction. From these two biographies, we may learn more than we care to about Sagan’s failed marriages and his feuds, but much less than we should about his place in a century that more than any other owes its character to the achievements of science. This is, after all, a time when science test scores are considered a measure of national vigor. To be sure, it simply may be too soon for any biographer to understand Sagan’s ultimate place in the constellation of scientific figures in the 20th century. History may conclude that Sagan belongs more in the company of well-intentioned enthusiasts like Percival Lowell, who founded the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1894. The scion of a gifted academic and literary family, Lowell studied Mars intensively for 15 years, convinced that its random striations were evidence of canals constructed by intelligent beings and that its dark patches contained evidence of vegetation. Lowell was almost completely wrong in his scientific conclusions, but nonetheless his three popular books, “Mars,” “Mars and Its Canals” and “Mars As the Abode of Life,” generated enormous enthusiasm for the study of the planets, an enthusiasm that helped shape the sensibilities of a young Carl Sagan. Certainly, if Einstein is the Man of the Century--as anointed by Time magazine--Sagan, in his trademark turtleneck sweater and corduroy sport coat, was the man of the early 1970s, a time when the possibilities for space exploration seemed almost infinite. The euphoria of the moon landings lingered; Johnny Carson ruled late-night television; and science had yet to harness itself to Wall Street. As an astronomer, Sagan was among that first generation of planetary explorers able to extend their reach to the fringes of the solar system with robotic sensors and imaging probes. He helped design experiments on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo space missions. As a theoretician, Sagan found key pieces of several planetary puzzles. For example, he correctly attributed Venus’ high temperature to a massive greenhouse effect. He also was among those who showed that the intricate carbon-based chemicals that could be the precursors of living things are common in the cosmos. Displaying an almost religious faith in the existence of alien life, he searched in vain for evidence of it. He predicted there would be polar bear-like creatures on the surface of Mars and aerial jellyfish in the atmosphere of Jupiter. His theories were debunked by the data returned from the space probes he so assiduously publicized on NASA’s behalf. As the solar system itself proved remarkably inhospitable to life, Sagan simply shifted the focus of his hopes to more distant star systems. This was more a measure of his unconventional romance with the idea of alien life than soundly based science. If Sagan was no more than one of many competent planetary scientists working in a golden age of solar system exploration, there would be little reason for biographers to subject his life to such scrutiny. But Sagan also was a media figure who lifted himself above the scientific herd by force of personality. He was the first mass communicator of science in the first age of mass communication. In its essence, his work as a popularizer of science was an act of ego--a subjective filtering of the scientific experience for the lay public, often regarding areas in which he was not especially well-versed. In the scientific culture of credit, Sagan’s ability to so eloquently articulate the work of others often rankled his peers. In every sense, planetary exploration is a performance art. Each space expedition is an evolving drama conducted in the world’s view, with reputations hinging on success or failure. In this arena, Sagan was a flamboyant ringmaster, highlighting the possibilities of discovery, heightening the drama, directing the spotlight of public attention and explicating the scientific results as they arrived to a rapt lay audience. In that role, Sagan was the spiritual father of a generation of talking heads who populate the formulaic science series of public television. As an impresario of science, moreover, Sagan crafted the first interstellar infographic: a coded greeting from Earth that is flying into space aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. In the same spirit, he conceived a phonograph recording of the sounds of Earth that also is on its way to the stars aboard two Voyager probes. He also helped found the world’s largest society of space exploration enthusiasts. Indeed, so in tune was Sagan with the mass marketing of science that he conceived the forerunner of the contemporary PBS and Discovery channel mall stores. What became his life’s most public work began as a late-night digression about astronomy on “The Tonight Show” in 1973. A New York magazine critic called Sagan’s discourse “one of the great reckless solos of late-night television.” It was the first of 26 appearances on the Carson show, in which Sagan’s ability to articulate his passion for science and his easily parodied speech patterns quickly made him a household figure. His literary meditation on intelligence, “The Dragons of Eden,” sold some 1.2 million copies and won a 1978 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. His KCET television series “Cosmos,” which first aired in 1980, was seen by an estimated 500 million people. The text that accompanied the series is considered the best-selling science book ever published in the English language. His novel “Contact” was made into a movie released in 1997. For all of this, his wallet and his ego were well-rewarded. Between royalties, book advances and speaking fees, he became a wealthy man. He also savored a privilege normally accorded only to Nobel laureates and starlets: People hung on his every over-enunciated word. His success as a popularizer hinged on his perceived stature as a scientist, and there his public reputation was at odds with the more informed judgment of his peers. Despite his impressive intellectual breadth, he was unexpectedly shallow as a scientist, his biographers suggest. To be sure, no one ever questioned Sagan’s technical acumen or his flair for scientific discourse. Sagan, however, appeared to lack the discipline for careful experiments or the sustained focus that is at the heart of scientific accomplishment. No single scientific question seemed to hold his attention long enough. He devoted more energy to scolding the unenlightened than to advancing the frontier of knowledge. He was, in the view of even those who liked him best, a man who liked the grand, arm-waving ideas of science far more than its messy, thankless bench work. In a telling example of Sagan’s lack of scientific discipline, Davidson relates an incident in which Sagan promised Princeton University astronomers that he would develop a critical infrared instrument for them that could be used to detect any organic molecules on Mars. The idea was arresting, but he failed to build the apparatus, leaving colleagues at the University of California to bail him out. His failure to follow through “made him unpopular with his associates,” recalls University of Chicago astronomer Peter Vandervoort. Twice, at other crucial junctures in his career, Sagan was judged wanting on his scientific merits. The first occurred when Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard in 1967, in part because his most prominent scientific mentor wrote to Sagan’s tenure committee to denounce his scholarship and research. “What is telling, though, is this: hardly anyone lifted a finger to keep him,” Davidson notes. The second came decades later: In 1992, when Sagan’s fame was at its apogee, the National Academy of Sciences denied him membership, excluding him from the senior council of the scientific establishment. Sagan’s first wife, biologist Lynn Margulis, had earned entry to the academy years earlier. The academy’s rejection is often spoken of as an act of spite because he was so envied--or disdained--for his fame. Based on the evidence of these two biographies, however, it may be rather that the National Academy had delivered an exquisitely honed judgment on Sagan’s proper place in the scientific pantheon. His most notable achievements simply were not scientific ones. (In 1994, the academy gave Sagan its Public Welfare Medal for his work as an educator--an honor reserved solely for nonmembers--in what is often characterized as an apology for the earlier snub.) Both biographers suggest that when Sagan’s intellectual and political passions were most engaged, he displayed a disconcerting willingness to twist his experimental results to fit his preconceived notions. In his search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, Sagan certainly was reluctant to confront the implications of negative results, playing with the numbers to buttress a deeply held belief in the possibility of alien intelligence in the universe. And in his technical publications on the climatic and atmospheric effects of a superpower nuclear exchange, critics charged, Sagan vastly overstated the scientific data to advance the case for nuclear disarmament. Indeed, Sagan and his collaborators eventually scaled back their technical projections to make them more accurate, downsizing the doomsday effects that could be expected. Even so, during the Gulf War, he continued to overstate the environmental dangers of military action. Today, we inhabit the universe that Sagan anticipated: Astronomers in recent months have discovered some 28 planets around stars other than our sun, giving credence to his belief that there may be billions of planets in the Milky Way alone. Our own solar system is alive with the fragile, robotic avatars of our curiosity. In the end, Davidson and Poundstone leave us with a portrait of a magnetic personality who was more seer than scientist, hungry for attention and anxious to showcase the wonders of the universe. Sagan was a barker in the solemn carnival of the cosmos. Not even Davidson is sure how long he will be remembered. *