Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record

A respected planetary scientist best known for outside the field for his popularizations of astronomy, Carl Sagan was born in New York City and educated at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in 1960 and has several early scholarly achievements. One was the experimental demonstration of the synthesis of the energy-carrying molecule ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in primitive-earth experiments. Another was the proposal that the greenhouse effect explained the high temperature of the surface of Venus. More recently, Sagan was one of the driving forces behind the mission of the U.S. satellite Viking to the surface of Mars. He also has been part of a team that investigated the effects of nuclear war on the earth's climate - the "nuclear winter" scenario. Sagan's role in developing the "Cosmos" series, one of the most successful series of any kind to be broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System, and his book The Dragons of Eden (1977) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978.