BLOG FOUR NO PHOTOS INSIDE

BLOG FOUR NO PHOTO

"The time capsule thrilled Carl", writes Davidson. As an adult, Sagan and his colleagues would create similar time capsules—capsules that would be sent out into the galaxy; these were the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record précis, all of which were spinoffs of Sagan's memories of the World's Fair.^[9]:15

During World War II Sagan's family worried about the fate of their European relatives. Sagan, however, was generally unaware of the details of the ongoing war. He wrote, "Sure, we had relatives who were caught up in the Holocaust. Hitler was not a popular fellow in our household... But on the other hand, I was fairly insulated from the horrors of the war." His sister, Carol, said that their mother "above all wanted to protect Carl... She had an extraordinarily difficult time dealing with World War II and the Holocaust."^[9]:15 Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World (1996) included his memories of this conflicted period, when his family dealt with the realities of the war in Europe but tried to prevent it from undermining his optimistic spirit.^[10]

Inquisitiveness about nature[edit]

Soon after entering elementary school he began to express a strong inquisitiveness about nature. Sagan recalled taking his first trips to the public library alone, at the age of five, when his mother got him a library card. He wanted to learn what stars were, since none of his friends or their parents could give him a clear answer:^[9]:18

I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars; ... And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light ... The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

At about age six or seven, he and a close friend took trips to the American Museum of Natural History across the East River in Manhattan. While there, they went to the Hayden Planetarium and walked around the museum's exhibits of space objects, such as meteorites, and displays of dinosaurs and animals in natural settings. Sagan writes about those visits:^[9]:18

I was transfixed by the dioramas—lifelike representations of animals and their habitats all over the world. Penguins on the dimly lit Antarctic ice; ... a family of gorillas, the male beating his chest, ... an American grizzly bear standing on his hind legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring me right in the eye.

His parents helped nurture his growing interest in science by buying him chemistry sets and reading materials. His interest in space, however, was his primary focus, especially after reading science fiction stories by writers such as H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, which stirred his imagination about life on other planets such as Mars. According to biographer Ray Spangenburg, these early years as Sagan tried to understand the mysteries of the planets became a "driving force in his life, a continual spark to his intellect, and a quest that would never be forgotten".^[10]

In 1947 he discovered Astounding Science Fiction magazine, which introduced him to more hard science fiction speculations than those in Burroughs's novels.^[11] That same year inaugurated the "flying saucer" mass hysteria with the young Carl suspecting that the "discs" might be alien spaceships.^[12]

High-school years[edit]

Sagan had lived in Bensonhurst, where he went to David A. Boody Junior High School. He had his bar mitzvah in Bensonhurst when he turned 13.^[9]:23 The following year, 1948, his family moved to the nearby town of Rahway, New Jersey, for his father's work, where Sagan then entered Rahway High School. He graduated in 1951.^[9]:23 Rahway was an older industrial town, and the Sagans were among its few Jewish families.^[9]:23