Celebrating famous Jews from Ukraine: Carl Sagan

Today, the “Voyager golden record” with 115 records of sounds and sights of the Earth and the Pioneer’s plaques picturing people and the coordinates of the Earth in relation to the Sun and 14 nearest pulsars are already at a distance of about 22 billion kilometers from the Earth.

Launched in the 1970s, the Voyager and Pioneer probes continue their journey in outer space, moving away from the Earth at a speed of 17 km/s, and someday the messages of the people of the Earth that they carry like a bottle with a note thrown into the ocean may fall into the hands of representatives of other civilizations. Carl Sagan, who prepared those messages, has always believed that intelligent life exists also beyond the Earth.

Sagan developed the idea of establishing contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations on the basis of a childhood memory of visiting the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. The four-year-old Carl, his father – an immigrant from Kamianets-Podilskyi and his mother – a granddaughter of immigrants from the village of Sasovo, Lviv region, witnessed then the laying of a time capsule made by Westinghouse for the people who will live in the seventh millennium. The objects placed in the capsule should describe the descendants the life of the people in the first half of the twentieth century.

However, the addressees may not see those capsules, if the harmful influence of man himself on the Earth does not stop, as Carl Sagan has repeatedly warned about.

Sagan is considered one of the founders and main popularizer of the SETI project for the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. He was also among the pioneers of the environment protection movement that has become relevant today.

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