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Sagan was acquainted with the science fiction fandom through his friendship with Isaac Asimov, and he spoke at the Nebula Awards ceremony in 1969. [115] [116] Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own, the other being computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky. [117] Naturalism [ edit ]

Billionaire Hadden is now in residence on the MIR space station. We learn that he is dying of cancer. He tells Arroway that the U.S. government had contracted with his company to secretly build another second machine in Japan. He’s asked that Arroway be the one to go and take the trip. She’s flown to Japan and prepped for the journey. They send her with an array of recording devices. The machine begins to spin and fall. It is dropped into three rapidly spinning gimbaled rings, causing the pod to apparently travel through a series of wormholes. The novel presses the parallel between religion and science by having Arroway compose a clandestine written testimony. She gives it to her first disciple, Palmer, to accompany the oral tradition presumably being propagated. amazing piece of fictional mathematics: she finds a message hidden in the decimal expansion of the number pi. If you are going to read the book, Speaking about his activities in popularizing science, Sagan said that there were at least two reasons for scientists to share the purposes of science and its contemporary state. Simple self-interest was one: much of the funding for science came from the public, and the public therefore had the right to know how the money was being spent. If scientists increased public admiration for science, there was a good chance of having more public supporters. [93] The other reason was the excitement of communicating one's own excitement about science to others. [10] Sagan was not just one of America’s most well-known science communicators; he also longed for a reconciliation between science and religion. Given his novel’s religious sympathy, it is intensely strange that Sagan is sometimes imagined as a kind of proto-New Atheist.Soon after entering elementary school, Sagan began to express a strong inquisitiveness about nature. He 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: "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." [20] At about age six or seven, he and a close friend took trips to the American Museum of Natural History 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. He wrote, "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." [20] Ellie has many romantic relationships (i.e., sexual relationships with a lab assistant early in her career, and then with Kent the Russian Scientist later in her career; and sexual tension with Drummond and then to an even greater degree with Vagay), albeit not with Palmer Joss who is the one individual she does have a romantic relationship with in the movie. Arroway’s tale of the Machine ascending to the stars, Palmer says, was “foretold” in the story of Jacob’s ladder: “A ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” Sagan was among [ clarification needed] the first to hypothesize that Saturn's moon Titan might possess oceans of liquid compounds on its surface and that Jupiter's moon Europa might possess subsurface oceans of water. This would make Europa potentially habitable. [47] Europa's subsurface ocean of water was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft Galileo. The mystery of Titan's reddish haze was also solved with Sagan's help. The reddish haze was revealed to be due to complex organic molecules constantly raining down onto Titan's surface. [48]

Sagan's contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus. [4] [46] In the early 1960s no one knew for certain the basic conditions of Venus' surface, and Sagan listed the possibilities in a report later depicted for popularization in a Time Life book Planets. His own view was that Venus was dry and very hot as opposed to the balmy paradise others had imagined. He had investigated radio waves from Venus and concluded that there was a surface temperature of 500°C (900°F). As a visiting scientist to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he contributed to the first Mariner missions to Venus, working on the design and management of the project. Mariner 2 confirmed his conclusions on the surface conditions of Venus in 1962. Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about the conventional conceptualization of God as a sapient being. For example:

Like early followers of Jesus attesting to his resurrection and messiahship and speaking in tongues, Arroway and the rest of the Five will be deemed mad if they tell their tale. The official story becomes that the Message was real, but that the Machine did not work. Sagan incorporated Kip Thorne's study of wormhole space travel into the screenplay. [8] The characterization of Ellie Arroway was inspired by Jill Tarter, head of Project Phoenix of the SETI Institute; Jodie Foster researched the lead role by meeting her. [9] The name Ellie was short for Eleanor, which was taken from Eleanor Roosevelt whom both Sagan and Druyan adored; Arroway was selected based on both Voltaire's real name (Arouet), and that Ellie "was going to travel like an arrow through the cosmos", according to Druyan. [10] Tarter served as a consultant on the story, realistically portraying career struggles of women scientists from the 1950s to 1970s. The writers debated whether Arroway should have a baby at the film's end. [11] Although Guber was impressed with Sagan and Druyan's treatment, he hired various screenwriters to rewrite the script. New characters were added, one of them a Native American park ranger turned astronaut. [2] Guber suggested that Arroway have an estranged teenage son, whom he believed would add depth to the storyline. Guber said: [2]