Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death and the Memorial Blog-a-Thon I mentioned the other day is now underway. (See Joel Schlosberg’s big meta-post for links to participating blogs. Not surprisingly, John Scalzi has a tribute worthy of your time, as does Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy and Lou Friedman of The Planetary Society, which Sagan co-founded.)

Personally, I’ve had a difficult time trying to decide what to write for this event. I’ve enjoyed many of Carl Sagan’s books and certainly I’m a fan of his television series Cosmos. I looked up to him as An Authority on Things and remember being very excited when my parents would roust me out of bed so I could see him chatting with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. However, I wouldn’t exactly call him a hero of mine, at least not in the sense that the aforementioned Scalzi does. I’ll admit to being something of a nerd when I was a kid (still am!), but I never had any illusions about or even ambitions toward becoming an astronomer or scientist. I knew that sort of thing wasn’t in the cards for me; even when I still thought it might be possible for me to become an astronaut, I always pictured myself more as a pilot or a blue-collar kind of spaceman than the ones who would be conducting research.

I just liked Carl Sagan as a media personality, his persona and his style. A lot of jokes have been made about his signature “billions and billions” catchphrase (in my own repetoire of bad celebrity impressions, that one is right up there with Shatner’s herky-jerky delivery of, well, everything…), but those three little words sum up so much of his appeal, don’t they? He always spoke of such vast things that were so far beyond humans in terms of size or distance, and yet he made them seem completely non-intimidating, as if he had no doubt whatsoever that even we ordinary, non-astronomer types could and would understand them. His confidence in the intelligence and curiosity of his viewers and readers was inspiring. Moreover, he conveyed such enthusiasm for the subjects he addressed that you couldn’t help getting infected by it and swept along wherever Sagan wanted to take you. He always generated a sense of wonder in me when he spoke, and I liked that about him most of all.

Now, when you’re a kid, wonder comes pretty easily. Every new experience or fact learned carries a certain degree of it, just because our experiences are so limited that everything amazes us. I believe we get jaded as we get older, in large part, because our range of experiences grows to a point where we’re able to make connections and see similarities between so many things that very few experiences come across as true novelties anymore. You end up saying things like, “yes, that sunset was beautiful, but I remember one a few years ago that was really something…”

Carl Sagan, however, seemed to never lose that child-like ability to see the genuine magic and beauty that underlies everything, whether it be the achievements and technology of the human species, or the physical laws that define the formation of galaxies. And he had the ability to share his own feelings of wonder with others. I felt them when I saw him on Carson as a kid; I still feel them today as a grown man when I watch my old recordings of Cosmos.

In fact, when I think of Cosmos, there are usually three segments from the show that immediately come to mind, all moments that got my younger self thinking about possibilities, which is really what wonder is all about:

1. There was a lengthy scene in which Carl pilots his “Ship of the Imagination” — a brilliant, special-effects-driven storytelling device that enabled him to visit any location throughout the universe — down the Valles Marineris, the “Martian Grand Canyon” that would stretch from L.A. to New York here on Earth. What a ride that would be!
2. Still aboard the “SotI,” Carl taps into a hypothetical Enyclopedia Galactica, a databank containing the sum of all recorded knowledge. I’d love to have access to that thing, if only for an hour or two. (We’ve kind of got that now with the Internet, but I don’t think the Cosmos version contained all the porn…)
3. And finally, not a segment of the show so much as a brief throwaway idea, in which Carl speculates that if the Roman Empire had not fallen and the knowledge at the Library of Alexandria been destroyed or scattered, then it’s entirely possible that human beings may have launched starships out into the galaxy by now. His description of great, outward-bound vessels with Greek lettering on their sides made me jealous for an Earth that has never existed.

I don’t think I’ve seen a science-based television series since Cosmos that has invoked the same emotional and intellectual responses, and I know we don’t have a popular scientist today who connects with ordinary people the way Carl Sagan did. Each year of his absence only it makes it more obvious how very unique he was. Someday, a human being will pilot a craft down the Valles Marineris or captain a starship out beyond the termination shock of our home system, and when they do, I hope they will still be human enough to feel what Carl Sagan or his fans would have felt at such an experience. Sheer, joyful wonder…