Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934. He was the son of an Ukrainian textile worker and an Hungarian mother. His parents were poor people who emigrated from Ukraine to escape from poverty.
Books were the key to Sagan’s future. When he was seven years old, he read his first scientific book about stars en became immediately addicted to science. He started going to the library more and more to gratify his curiosity. He fell in love with the books of Wells and Verne and decided that he would like to become scientist.
When he reached the age of seventeen, he gained a grant for the Chicago University and finished his study in astrophysics in 1960.
After his study he got a job at the NASA. Afterwards, he became researcher at Berkeley University, assistant professor Genetics at Stanford, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, and finally, at the end of the sixties of the twentieth century, he became Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University, and he kept that job until he died in 1996.
Sagan has always wanted to tell the man in the street about science. He wrote lots of articles and books, i.e. Broca’s Brain, Contact and The Dragons of Eden, of which the last one got him the Pulitzer Prize. In 1980 he produced the successful television series Cosmos, in thirteen parts, which popularized science even more. Cosmos has even been broadcasted in the Netherlands. The book of the same name has been a bestseller for over seventy weeks.
Sagan was awarded in 1994 with NASA’s Public Welfare Medal, its highest decoration. He died of pneumonia on 20 December 1996.

He wrote many books and essays, which are not always even easy to understand, as he did not only write for ordinary people, but also for people who were scientist themselves. An example of his easier to understand essays is Can we know the Universe? Reflections on a grain of salt, wherein he promotes science in a way that it becomes attractive to all kinds of people. For example, he asks the following questions: “Why shouldn’t we be able to have intermediate rotational positions? Why can’t we travel faster than the speed of light?” This kind of ‘popular’ questions made his work accessible for a wide public. Sentences like “We have always been explorers. It is part of our nature”, from his 1987 essay Dreams are maps: Exploration and Human Purpose, were meant to appeal to normal people, to draw their attention at science. Not all people liked his efforts, David Menton wrote in his article Carl Sagan: Prophet of Scientism the following opinion: “What has often emerged in his popular writings and television appearances, however, is only a tissue of empirical science covering a great bulk of unprovable speculation liberally laced with Sagan’s own philosophical and religious views of life.” Other opponents of Sagan’s theories were angry about a scientific paper he wrote in 1983, that said that a nuclear war would culminate in a nuclear winter. They meant that Sagan overstated the case.
In general, Sagan’s theories were widely accepted and praised, by everyone from scientists to ordinary people.