Carl Sagan

"Fascinating . . . memorable . . . revealing . . . perhaps the best of Carl Sagan's books."--The Washington Post Book World (front page review) In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time. Future generations will look back on our epoch as the time when the human race finally broke into a radically new frontier--space. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history of our launch into the cosmos and assesses the future that looms before us as we move out into our own solar system and on to distant galaxies beyond. The exploration and eventual settlement of other worlds is neither a fantasy nor luxury, insists Sagan, but rather a necessary condition for the survival of the human race. "Takes readers far beyond Cosmos . . . Sagan sees humanity's future in the stars."--Chicago Tribune

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries." A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday... It's a delight." THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Cold and the Dark is the record of the Conference on the Long-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War, held in Washington, D. C., on October 31 to November 1, 1983. The conference involved over 200 scientists from many nations and drew together the best available scientific information. Its central finding was the phenomenon of nuclear winter: a much more profound and long-lasting devastation of the earth and atmosphere than had been believed possible before. In the two principal papers, Carl Sagan presents the atmospheric and climatic consequences of nuclear war and Paul Ehrlich summarizes its biological implications. Also included is the text of the “Moscow Link” —a dialogue between Soviet and American scientists on nuclear winter—and the technical papers providing the scientific evidence for the book’s conclusions.

* The story of cosmic evolution, science and civilisation

The extragalactic universe, the immense world of a billion galaxies lying beyond out own, is the subject of this book. Our Sun is but a tiny star among a hundred billion other in our Galaxy, the Milky Way, which appears as a luminous veil trailing across the clear night sky. Beyond the Milky Way we will soar into space amid galaxies, clusters of galaxies, radio galaxies and quasars of enormous energy, out to the cosmological horizon which arrests our flight like an intangible barrier. Why do galaxies seem to fly from us? Is space so strongly curved that by going straight ahead we come up behind ourselves? Did it all begin with an enormous explosion, the famous Big Bang, which decided our fate in the first quarter of an hour? These are the questions which this rigourous and enthusiastic scientist tries to answer with complete honesty and non-technical clarity.