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Read Carl Sagan’s Daughter on What Her Dad Taught Her About Life and Death

Pensive late-night reading material about Carl Sagan and life and death in an excellent piece by Sasha Sagan, his daughter, via The Cut .

As I veered into a kind of mini existential crisis, my parents comforted me without deviating from their scientific worldview. “You are alive right this second. That is an amazing thing,” they told me. When you consider the nearly infinite number of forks in the road that lead to any single person being born, they said, you must be grateful that you’re you at this very second. Think of the enormous number of potential alternate universes where, for example, your great-great-grandparents never meet and you never come to be. Moreover, you have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water, and love the warmth of the closest star. You’re connected to the generations through DNA — and, even farther back, to the universe, because every cell in your body was cooked in the hearts of stars.

The melancholy essay is framed by the story of a very big and relatively underpublicized solid that Seth MacFarlane did for Sagan’s family.

Incidentally, it must have been a bit of an ego blow for Sasha Sagan’s husband to get overshadowed in his own wedding announcement by his father-in-law.

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How Carl Sagan Described Death To His Young Daughter

A new essay from Sasha Sagan shows how a great popularizer of science answered his own kid's big questions.

By Francie Diep | Published Apr 15, 2014 7:30 PM EDT

When your dad is Carl Sagan, your first lessons on death aren’t sugar-coated. But they are nevertheless sweet and compassionate. That’s how Sasha Sagan , Carl’s daughter, describes them in a recent essay in New York magazine . Throughout his career, Carl worked as a science popularizer and as a professor of astronomy and critical thinking. He stayed true to his understanding of the world even in tough times—like when his little girl asked him if he would ever get to see his dead parents again:

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Later in the essay, Sasha describes how her father tried to impart upon her the wonder of being alive. “ We are star stuff , my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way,” she writes. It sounds like Sagan was a great teacher at home as well as at work.

Sadly, Sasha would soon have to apply Dad’s life/science lessons. Carl died when she was 14, leaving behind a legacy that’s only been organized recently, with the introduction of the new Cosmos show and the opening of an archive in Washington, D.C., for Carl’s papers.

Check out New York for the rest of the essay, including bits about Sasha’s parents’ relationship and some of the thinking that went into the new Cosmos series.

Like science, tech, and DIY projects?

Natural Wonders

When we were young, spontaneous, and not yet admitting to ourselves that we would one day marry, my husband and I moved to London. One year, we didn't go home for the holidays, forgoing expectations, instead hopping the Eurostar to Paris for sheer fun.

9/11 and Everything After: On Bearing Witness to History Through the Eyes of My Daughter

On September 11th, 2001 I was an 18-year-old NYU sophomore. I lived on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street in Manhattan in a pre-war building with a charming, but unstable roommate. I woke up that morning to the sound of dozens of fire trucks racing down Fifth Avenue, some carrying first responders who would not survive the day. But I didn’t know that yet. Maybe they did. They were only sirens to me then.

Hello, You Are Here

Whether you see them as cosmic coincidences or the unfolding of fate, a chain reaction of unlikely events led to you being here. Author Sasha Sagan —a consequence of the cosmos in and of herself, the daughter of acclaimed astronomer Carl Sagan—sheds light on what we know about how you got here and, more importantly, what we don’t know.

Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father

We lived in a sandy-colored stone house with an engraved winged serpent and solar disc above the door. It seemed like something straight out of ancient Sumeria, or Indiana Jones — but it was not, in either case, something you’d expect to find in upstate New York. It overlooked a deep gorge, and beyond that the city of Ithaca. At the turn of the last century it had been the headquarters for a secret society at Cornell called the Sphinx Head Tomb, but in the second half of the century some bedrooms and a kitchen were added and, by the 1980s, it had been converted into a private home where I lived with my wonderful mother and father.

I Think About This A Lot: One Line From The Simpsons

On Easter Sunday, 1999, the Simpsons aired an episode titled “Simpsons Bible Stories . ” The conceit of the episode is that Bart and his family fall asleep in church, and Reverend Lovejoy’s dry monotone sermon seeps into their dreams, making for a few reliably subversive interpretations of some of the Bible’s greatest hits. Homer and Marge are Adam and Eve. Ned Flanders is God. Bart is David to school bully Nelson’s Goliath — that sort of thing.

The Empty Space

Whenever a shift occurs in her life, even if it's something small—a restaurant goes out of business, a teacup shatters—my mother always says the same thing: "There is no refuge from change in the cosmos." Some changes are lightning fast. Others take a long time to fully reveal themselves. When a star dies, the darkness left by its absence ripples through the universe at the speed of light, which may seem impossibly fast—but over the great distances of space, even that isn't fast enough. The dead stars appear to shine, but in reality they're long gone.

Jon and I were still newlyweds the year we found ourselves in Washington, D.C., the week of my birthday. Somehow he'd secured a reservation at a restaurant we'd been fantasizing about for months, which served works of gastronomic art—mojito orbs, popcorn in liquid nitrogen. We knew the meal would be surreal. We didn't know the cab ride to the restaurant would be, too.

Death-Defying Boat Ride

The water had been calm when my husband, Jon, and I arrived, by rickety old boat, at the remote, rustic three-room hotel on a tiny island in the Rosario archipelago, off the Colombian coast. But days later, as we hopped aboard the same boat for the hour-long trip back to the mainland, things had changed. I soon spotted whitecaps in the near distance. When we reached them, the boat began to repeatedly rise and sharply drop. The drops were so violent, they lifted me inches off my seat. I felt my brain rattling in my skull. It was like riding an unbroken horse.

Moving Out of New York City

New York City is one of the great loves of my life. I grew up four and a half hours away, in Ithaca—but when, at 3 years old, I stayed with my parents in a Manhattan hotel, I looked up at them and said, "This is my home." Eventually, it was: I moved there at 17, when I enrolled at New York University. I felt a chest-swelling pride every day, as though I'd accomplished something just by breathing the city's smelly air and drinking its excellent tap water.

Sasha's interviews and essays have also appeared in print in Violet Book, Parents, and Wilderness, and online at Mashable.com , Amy Poehler's Smart Girls , and beyond.

The Empty Space: Sasha Sagan on Losing Her Father

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NEWSLETTERS

Sasha Sagan on her Father’s “Lessons of Immortality and Mortality”

Last April, Sasha Sagan, the daughter of the late Carl Sagan and Cosmos producer Ann Druyan, wrote a beautiful essay called “ Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan ” chronicling what her parents taught her about life and death and the kind of immortality that is congruent with reality.

One day when I was still very young, I asked my father about his parents. I knew my maternal grandparents intimately, but I wanted to know why I had never met his parents. “Because they died,” he said wistfully. “Will you ever see them again?” I asked. He considered his answer carefully. Finally, he said that there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason — and no evidence — to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn’t give in to the temptation. “Why?” Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority. He told me that anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny.

Sasha continues with the story of her father’s papers and memorabilia, “ keepsakes and manuscripts — the evidence of a great life lived by a great man and all it contained,” and their journey, ending at the Library of Congress, where, “ In the way couples sometimes renew their vows, we renewed our grief.”

And in that moment my father was both so alive in the minds of those who loved him and so painfully gone. The conundrum of mortality and immortality was crystallized for me in the Library of Congress that day, but it’s the same paradox of our small place in the enormous universe that my parents first taught me in the Sphinx Head Tomb.

As brilliant and influential as her father was, Sasha’s story is also our story: Lessons are taught; the pain of loss is suffered; the reality of death is accepted; the memories of those we love are honored and cherished, even through the sorrow.

What lessons were you taught by the people for whom you grieve?

What It's Like To Be The Child Of Famed Astrophysicist Carl Sagan

When your dad is Carl Sagan, your first lessons on death aren't sugar-coated. But they are nevertheless sweet and compassionate.

That's how Sasha Sagan , Carl's daughter, describes them in a recent essay in New York magazine . Throughout his career, Carl worked as a science popularizer and as a professor of astronomy and critical thinking.

He stayed true to his understanding of the world even in tough times — like when his little girl asked him if he would ever get to see his dead parents again:

He considered his answer carefully. Finally, he said that there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason — and no evidence — to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn't give in to the temptation.

Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don't question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority. He told me that anything that's truly real can stand up to scrutiny.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Later in the essay, Sasha describes how her father tried to impart upon her the wonder of being alive. "We are star stuff, my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way," she writes. It sounds like Sagan was a great teacher at home as well as at work.

Sadly, Sasha would soon have to apply Dad's life/science lessons. Carl died when she was 14, leaving behind a legacy that's only been organized recently, with the introduction of the new Cosmos show and the opening of an archive in Washington, D.C., for Carl's papers.

Check out New York for the rest of the essay, including bits about Sasha's parents' relationship and some of the thinking that went into the new Cosmos series.

[ New York ]

Weekly Picks

Sasha Sagan Shows The Meaning Of Life Is Everywhere We Look

'For Small Creatures Such as We,' the new memoir from Sasha Sagan, daughter of astronomer Carl Sagan and writer Ann Druyan, removes religion from the equation when it comes to the wonder and meaning of the life.

-Minute Listen

December 4, 2019

Sasha Sagan learned a lot about life and the universe as the daughter of astronomer Carl Sagan and writer Ann Druyan. Her new memoir, For Small Creatures Such as We , shares what she gleaned from them about finding the wonder and beauty of the world beyond the filter of religion. Listen in as she talks with editor Kat Johnson about what it meant to revisit her beliefs in this way.

Note: Text has been edited and may not match audio exactly.

KJ: Hi there. I'm Audible editor Kat Johnson, and today I have the pleasure of talking to Sasha Sagan, who is the author of the new memoir, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in our Unlikely World . The audiobook serves as a guide for creating meaningful rituals beyond the framework of religious tradition. And reflects on Sasha's own life as the daughter of the late astronomer Carl Sagan and the writer and producer Ann Druyan. Welcome, Sasha.

SS: Thank you so much.

KJ: Your memoir is such a unique combination of memoir and world history and science and guidebook. How did the idea come about and how did it evolve along the way?

SS: I think part of it was this idea that deep down beneath all of our celebrations and all of our rituals and traditions around the world, there was this kernel of a natural phenomenon. The more I started reading about holidays and rituals around the world, the more I realized that the changing of the seasons, birth, coming of age, death -- these are natural events, scientific things that we can study that we are all really honoring in our own ways across time and throughout history. And I think growing up in a household where science was such a source of not just information, but wonder and beauty and joy, those two things sort of came together really naturally.

And then I don't know, with the memoir stuff, I don't feel like I sat down to be like, "Hmm, what can I share? What can I think of that goes with this?" It just sort of flowed naturally together. And I think what was really useful once these three components were sort of decided. I decided and, working with my editor on these three components, what was really helpful was then it was like, "okay, for each chapter, each example, we're going to try to include all the elements."

KJ: Got it. And I really love the title. I think it's great. Can you tell us a little about where it came from? If Contact fans don't already recognize?

It's so scary to be tiny beings that live for the blink of an eye on an out-of-the-way planet, but we have each other and that makes it all okay.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. So, it's called For Small Creatures Such as We and the rest of the quote is "for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." And that's a line from Contact , which was the only work of fiction that my dad ever published, later turned into a movie that came out just months after he passed away. And as I write in the book, my parents collaborated on everything, and that line, that sentence is actually something that my mom wrote. They wrote together a lot and they created a lot of different things together. Television, books, essays, and I always saw them working together and this sentence, the single sort of idea, so perfectly crystallized for me the family ethos and the idea that we don't know what's out there in the whole wide universe. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. There's so much we can't predict. It's so scary to be tiny beings that live for the blink of an eye on an out-of-the-way planet, but we have each other and that makes it all okay.

KJ: I love that. And I love that you call it a family ethos because it seems like you share so much of your approach and your worldview with your parents, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.

KJ: And so, what do you think have, I mean in briefly, I guess, what do you think their most important influences have been on you and is there anywhere that you do diverge?

SS: It's such a good question. I don't think philosophically I diverged at all. I mean, of course, I have had conflicts with my parents and disagreements and all those normal things. But in terms of the philosophy, I feel so lucky and I talk in the book about how I've never had occasion to rebel because they always welcomed any and all questioning. Of course, growing up you question what your parents teach you. But I've really come to just feel like what I can do is just honor what they taught me in so much of it is that science is an error-correcting mechanism. It's not a set of facts to be memorized. It's a way to understand the world and the universe more deeply.

And what we believe today may be disproved tomorrow and that's okay. It's great, actually, because it means we're moving forward. Facts get maligned as cold and hard and we have this idea that things that are provable are not stirringly beautiful and don't give us that joy and that thrill. And my parents really found a way to get the things that so often get associated with spirituality in the provable information that we have evidence for. And that for me is one of the most special things that I got from them.

KJ: That's amazing. And I want to follow up on that, but before we get too deep into the content of your memoir, I want to talk to you about the audio elements because this is Audible and it's so much a part of the experience for us. What was it like to narrate your own work? How did that go? Did you have any trepidation about it? Did you always know that you wanted to do it and tell us about the process?

SS: Well, I have, first of all, I should say that I am a huge, huge Audible consumer and I love, love, love listening to audiobooks. In the book I write about how a bunch of my parents' work was released on audiobook around the time that I was pregnant with my daughter and I consumed all of these books of theirs that I had sort of been leaving in my future. You know, I lost my dad when I was 14 and I had this idea that if I didn't read all his work I could still look forward to a part of him. And there's still a number of books of his and my parents' books that I hadn't read, but I had this really, really meaningful creative time where I was listening to their books and some of them, there are a few chapters that my dad had recorded in, must've been in the 1990s, that were used in these audiobooks.

So, I really feel a deep connection with the idea of listening to work. And so, when it first came up I was still writing the book at the time and was like, "Oh, the audiobook." I [thought], "Well, I'm not an actress. Whoever they decide should narrate it is great. Far be it for me to insist." And then as I was finishing the book and I [thought], "Hmm, there's a lot in here about falling in love with my husband, giving birth to my daughter, and losing my dad" and would I feel weird if someone else was reading this? And as I was finishing the book, I was like, I would really like to read it myself. I was very grateful that I got that opportunity.

Of course, I was nervous because the way my own voice sounds in my head is so different than when you hear yourself on the answering machine. And I was like, "Oh dear. Which one is how it's going to sound to everyone else?" But the experience of recording it was so much more emotional than I expected because, and not even at the parts that were really personal, but there were all these historical events that I refer to that I, in the moment of reading them out loud, I felt this element of emotion attached to them that I don't know if I had even felt when I was writing it. So, it was a very powerful experience for me and I'm just really grateful to the director and the technician for being patient with me while I took breaks to just quickly wipe away a couple of tears, but it was so much more emotional than I would've guessed.

KJ: Wow. That's incredible. And so interesting that because your book is very emotional and there's certainly lots of sad and beautiful memories that you have of your father and other people that you've lost. And it's, it's kind of interesting that you had emotion talking about these like historical and different examples of things that happen in other cultures. That's really interesting. So, you felt like it sort of changed your perspective with your work a little bit it sounds like.

...I'm secular, but the grandeur of the universe and our place in it is a source of a lot of the things that people have traditionally gotten from religion.

SS: Yeah. And just like, you know, these events, it's so easy when we talk about history to sort of not see the people involved as human beings and it's just like these battles or invasions that sort of happened in the abstract and there was something about reading it out loud that made me think. Just the way that I talk about my dad and as you mentioned, other people I've lost in the book, made me realize that these were people who, someone else thought and felt the same way about. And I don't know, for some reason that really struck me in my little recording booth.

KJ: Yeah. Wow, that's really cool. So, getting back to sort of the content of the book, I'm curious. How do you describe yourself spiritually? I know there's a lot of different ways.

KJ: I don't know if that's important for you to label, but I'm curious what you typically would say.

SS: Well, I would say I'm secular because agnostic has this sort of connotation that you don't care. And I really care. I spend all my time thinking about this and writing about this and reading about this question of where we are. But atheism has a connotation of militants. And for me, my perspective is for me to say I don't believe in something is not to say I know for sure that it doesn't exist, but rather that I withhold belief without evidence and so I would say I'm secular, but that the grandeur of the universe and our place in it is a source of a lot of the things that people have traditionally gotten from religion.

KJ: Right. And I noticed in the book you use words like "sacred" and "holy" to describe the sort of like natural phenomena. Why do you think that this sort of sense of awe is missing from most people's understanding of the natural world and science?

SS: It's such a good question. Yes, those words that come from religion or spirituality like "holiness" and something being "sacred" or even "magical" comes from the magi. All these religious connotations, but I think they apply here. Sometimes I think it's a matter of delivery. Sometimes I think that the way we teach science in school, the way that children sort of get discouraged from the endless why, why, why questions that are the scientific exploration that sort of tends to take some of the beauty and joy out of it. And I just think one of the things that my parents gave the world beautifully was this idea that those things are as, if not more, worthy of awe.

And as you know, any other mythology or lore or traditions that we have around the world and they... Reality really is so astonishing when we sort of take a step back from it and it's like when you know something all your life, like I don't know that like the day and night are a product of the earth's movement around the sun, you know, it's so ordinary. But when you see a sunset and it's so breathtaking and you think this is a product of an astronomical event it's sort of a way to connect back to the power of it and how special it is.

KJ: Absolutely. And you talk a lot about rituals as well and part of this is kind of a guidebook to creating our own rituals. Why do you think this sort of ancient framework is so important for humans and especially when it comes to raising children? And how did you kind of come up with these rituals?

SS: Well, I think it's like when you peel back the specifics and you realize that so often we're celebrating the same things at the same time of year. You know, so many holidays fall around the winter solstice, around the spring equinox, and they're so thematically connected even if there is a specific story that is explaining it in each culture. The idea of, for example in springtime, rebirth, renewal, coming back to life of everything. It comes so naturally to us. And I really believe that before any of us had any cultural or religious identity, the earliest people, we were all doing the same thing. We were all looking up at the night sky. We were all trying to understand and mark the changing the changes on earth because that was central to our survival.

And from there all sorts of rituals have grown and all sorts of holidays and celebrations and not just the cyclical changes on earth, but the changes over the course of a life: birth, coming of age, death. These are biological events and we all have ways of honoring them and marking them and I think there's such a vast array of versions of this, but we're all sort of doing the same thing. And if you're devoutly religious than you have a way to process these changes and I don't think my role is to convince anyone otherwise, but if you're sort of secular or you don't believe or part of it sort of works for you and part of it doesn't, we still need to have weddings and funerals. And we still need to do something to cheer us up when the nights are really long and cold. Belief is not a requirement to mark time and to feel close with people you love.

KJ: Absolutely. Did you have any special family rituals that you shared growing up?

SS: Yes. Well, I mean I talk about in the book a little bit about blossom day and like so, in the spring, talking about springtime rituals, where I grew up in a secular Jewish home and we still have some of the Jewish traditions even though we sort of re-purpose to reflect more of our worldview. But we had a secular Passover Seder and even though we weren't Christian my mother and I would decorate Easter eggs and it was just cause it's about so much of a reflection of the natural world and it didn't seem really theistic at all, especially to me as a child.

And egg dyeing is actually, astonishingly, a widespread tradition around the world, but the other thing that we have that my mother created for me was this holiday called blossom day, which was when the dogwood tree that we could see from our dining room would bloom. We would have a tea party and it was like, you know, it removed any lore or mythology from the event, but it was so special. And it was just the idea that like spring is here, the days are getting longer, it's going to get warm soon, the light is returning, and that in and of itself things are blossoming. That in and of itself was worthy of celebration. It didn't necessarily require anything else.

KJ: I love that. I love blossom day. That's amazing. I want to try something like that with my kids. What do you make of how the younger generation is fascinated by astrology and there's always a lot of what other people would say [is] "pseudoscience" around. Do you think people are looking for other outlets for spirituality? Do you think that there are areas where people are looking outside religion?

SS: Yes. Yes, for sure. And it's funny because it's astrology, in particular. Yes, I definitely think it's something that you find in the younger generation, but even in the 1980s when...I mean, there's of episode of Cosmos, my parents' show, where they talk about how every magazine has a column on astrology, but so few have anything about astronomy. But I think that a lot of that stuff like astrology, in particular, is really deep. Let me say, I don't think that it's scientific and I do not think that the month that you're born dictates who you are as a person, but I think the reason people like it and the reason it is so popular is because people want to feel connected to the universe. They want to feel a sense of our place as an individual in the great wide vastness.

And sometimes people get that from religion and if they started to part ways with traditional religion this kind of stuff sort of fills that gap sometimes. And I just think there's a third way. You know, millions of years of evolution made it possible for us to consume food and grow and when you make a little meal for your child and they eat it and they grow, this is a function of how life on earth is possible and all the different roads it could have gone a different way. But here we are, the creatures we are right now and I think there's so much in that, that really can give you a sense of the beauty and importance of the universe in your life that doesn't necessarily, you know, I'll put it this way, that can be supported by evidence.

The idea that we live on a planet where we can breathe. We've evolved to this point and we breathe the air and we feel the sunlight from our nearest star and, you know, every day we are part of these huge ecosystems on earth and the astronomical system, the solar system that we live on, and it affects us and we feel can feel joy and pleasure from it. I don't know. I think that there's a lot in science that can give us that sense and maybe be a third way between religion on some of the stuff that's sort of popular like astronomy. So, like astrology.

KJ: Yeah, I think that's a good answer. So, your parents' work is constantly finding new interpretations. Would you venture a guess as to what your dad might think about how the world has changed and where things are going?

SS: I think in terms of how the world has changed, I'll put it this way, besides teaching astronomy and space sciences at Cornell, he also taught on undergraduate class on critical thinking. And I think so much of his message and what he loved about science and the pursuit of science was this idea that if something can't stand up to scrutiny, if it can't be questioned, then it cannot hold. And that only the things that can be supported by evidence and can withstand critical thinking and questioning are what's really true. I think he was really worried that we were moving in a direction, specifically as a country, where our skills to discern reality from fiction were eroding.

And I don't know. I think he would be very concerned about the state of the country right now as I think many, many people are. But paradoxically, I also think that maybe if he was here still, and we got to hear his perspective, maybe things would be a little bit better because he had so much to say. I read in the book about his and my mom together. They wrote an essay called Real Patriots Ask Questions and I would really encourage everyone to read that essay.

KJ: Great. In the memoir, you talk about how people are so bad at tolerating ambiguity and-

KJ: I think you refer to it there. It's so interesting. But I also just wanted to ask, what do people ask you the most about your dad and what do you wish they asked instead?

SS: Oh, this is such an interesting question. Well, I'm really open to whatever people want to ask me. I don't feel like it's for me to say what they should ask instead. But one of the questions I get a lot is "Did he believe in aliens?" And talk about a tolerance for ambiguity. I mean my dad was really, really curious about extraterrestrials and if there's life out there in the universe besides us, and again, it really touches back to sort of all this same philosophical thread that belief requires evidence. And he would say, I don't know because I don't have any evidence either way.

And people would say, "yeah, but what is your gut feeling?" And he would say, "well, I don't", I mean I'm paraphrasing, "but I don't use my gut to make these decisions, to answer these questions. I use my brain." And I think that there's something, again, about tolerating ambiguity that he just didn't know if there were extraterrestrials and we still don't know and he didn't get to find out, which I'm sure was really a huge, huge disappointment, but he would rather have real evidence to answer a question than go with what his hopes were. He'd rather really know than just believe for the sake of belief.

KJ: Right, right. And I love how in the book you compare babies to aliens.

SS: Yes. Yes. Which he had sort of compared fetuses to aliens and that is the connection that he had drawn at some point also. But I think that there's just something about this idea that they arrive and everything's different forever and we don't know what they want and they're tiny and they have big eyes and they don't speak our language. And it's like since we have never met any aliens, we've created this idea of what they're like and I think it's more about us and our relationship to our children than it's about what's actually out there in the universe.

KJ: That's so interesting. Yeah. We don't need them to come. We have these tiny little tyrants that change our whole world.

SS: Yes, exactly that lord over us.

KJ: Exactly.

SS: Yeah, exactly.

KJ: Oh, well Sasha, it's such a lovely experience chatting with you and I think your memoir is going to find a lot of fans because there's really nothing else like it out there and I think it's just a great tribute to your dad and to your mom and we're really excited about it.

SS: Thank you so much. I am so delighted I got to do this. I can't tell you what a huge fan I am of your service. I use Audible every day. I really do.

KJ: That is great to hear. That's awesome.

2019's Featured Interviews

Sasha Sagan, daughter of Carl Sagan, to release book that draws on widely-read essay

This combination of photos released by G.P. Putnam’s Sons shows a cover image for the book, "For Small Creatures Such As We: Finding Wonder And Meaning In Our Unlikely World," and a portrait of author Sasha Sagan. G.P. Putnam’s Sons announced Thursday that Sagan’s book is coming out in October. She will share memories of her father, Carl Sagan, the famed astronomer, and explore her beliefs in the prevalence of science and the natural world. (G.P. Putnam’s Sons via AP)

Sasha Sagan, daughter of the late Carl Sagan, is working on a book her publisher is calling "part memoir, part guidebook and part social history."

G.P. Putnam's Sons announced Thursday that Sagan's "For Small Creatures Such As We: Finding Wonder and Meaning in Our Unlikely World," is coming out in October.

She will share memories of her father, the famed astronomer, and explore her beliefs in the prevalence of science and the natural world. She will also write about how she and her husband created "new, secular rituals" when they became parents.

Sasha Sagan is a writer, filmmaker and producer. Her book is drawn from a widely read essay, "Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan," that she wrote for New York Magazine in 2014.

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Sasha Sagan Dives into Science, Space and Spirituality in New Book

"People are born and people die. We've all got to get through it one way or another."

Sasha Sagan's new book "For Small Creatures Such as We" (G.P Putnam's Sons, 2019).

In her new book, Sasha Sagan defines a place for family and spirituality in science, space and nature.

" For Small Creatures Such as We (opens in new tab) " (G.P Putnam's Sons, 2019), Sagan's new book pays homage to her late father, the astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan (opens in new tab) (whose famous quote from "Contact" inspired the title of the book), and her mother, "Cosmos" co-writer Ann Druyan, while finding traditions and inspiration in the natural world.

After becoming a mother, Sagan, who is nonreligious but who has a Jewish background and a husband with a Christian background, realized the importance of having rituals with her own family. But, being secular, she didn't want to draw on religion to inform their family traditions. Instead, as she explores in the book, Sagan looks to the beauty and "magic" of nature, on our planet and out in the cosmos, to inspire ritual and togetherness in her home.

Excerpt: Read from Sasha Sagan's 'For Small Creatures Such As We'! (opens in new tab) Related: Carl Sagan: Astronomy Icon's Legacy in Pictures (Gallery)

"People are born and people die. We've all got to get through it one way or another," Sagan said to Space.com. "Maybe it's OK to say that this feeling that historically has been associated with a religious experience is the same sort of feeling that we so often feel when we get [things] like the image of the black hole."

Sagan expertly weaves science and nature into the fabric of humanness and ritual in this book. She highlights not only how one might go about forming secular traditions around space and science, but also how individuals and families can rekindle wonderment at not only the natural world but also the incredible scientific and technical achievements of our own species. To Space.com, she noted a number of specific examples of real-world advancements that could create feelings of awe, including "the success of the solar sail."

"Those of us who don't believe, we still have to have weddings, we still have to have funerals, we still have to mark time, we still want to celebrate," Sagan said. "I sort of started thinking about how would I create this framework for a child who would be growing up in a secular home," she added. In her book, Sagan explores how one might create rituals and traditions "guided by the principles and the values that my parents instilled in me — the idea that there is that wonder, that spine tingling thrill in that which can be supported by evidence."

"I think the more that I learned about rituals from cultures around the world and throughout time, the more clear it became that so much of what were really celebrating and have always celebrated are natural phenomena," Sagan said. "If you sort of peel back some of the specifics of time and place … we're all coming from a place of trying to understand the rhythms of life on this planet and trying to understand how to grapple with life in a universe where there is constant change."

"I think that it's the idea that, across the world and throughout time, human beings have been celebrating natural phenomena, scientific phenomena for eons and that if we can sort of refocus our view, the provable scientific events, the parts of life that totally require no faith are still stirring and meaningful and worthy of awe and celebration," she added.

This book guides readers through the ways to find their own sense of secular spirituality, if you could call it that, and the ways to create rituals and traditions with nature and science as sources of inspiration. The book also serves partially as a social history of ritual and as a memoir of her life, being inspired by Sagan's viral essay in The Cut entitled "Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan." "For people who are space enthusiasts and [fans of] my parents work (opens in new tab) … this is a celebration of that too," Sagan said.

So, whether you are looking for a guide to finding new traditions, or if you are simply looking to be re-inspired by the world around you, this book is sure to be a good fit.

You can find Sagan's book "For Small Creatures Such as We" online now here (opens in new tab) .

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected]

Chelsea “Foxanne” Gohd joined Space.com in 2018 and is now a Senior Writer, writing about everything from climate change to planetary science and human spaceflight in both articles and on-camera in videos. With a degree in Public Health and biological sciences, Chelsea has written and worked for institutions including the American Museum of Natural History, Scientific American, Discover Magazine Blog, Astronomy Magazine and Live Science. When not writing, editing or filming something space-y, Chelsea "Foxanne" Gohd is writing music and performing as Foxanne, even launching a song to space in 2021 with Inspiration4. You can follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd and @foxannemusic .

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Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan

My father, the astronomer Carl Sagan , taught space sciences and critical thinking at Cornell. By that time, he had become well known and frequently appeared on television, where he inspired millions with his contagious curiosity about the universe. But inside the Sphinx Head Tomb, he and my mother, Ann Druyan, wrote books, essays, and screenplays together, working to popularize a philosophy of the scientific method in place of the superstition, mysticism, and blind faith that they felt was threatening to dominate the culture. They were deeply in love — and now, as an adult, I can see that their professional collaborations were another expression of their union, another kind of lovemaking. One such project was the 13-part PBS series Cosmos , which my parents co-wrote and my dad hosted in 1980 — a new incarnation of which my mother has just reintroduced on Sunday nights on Fox.

After days at elementary school, I came home to immersive tutorials on skeptical thought and secular history lessons of the universe, one dinner table conversation at a time. My parents would patiently entertain an endless series of “why?” questions, never meeting a single one with a “because I said so” or “that’s just how it is.” Each query was met with a thoughtful, and honest, response — even the ones for which there are no answers. One day when I was still very young, I asked my father about his parents. I knew my maternal grandparents intimately, but I wanted to know why I had never met his parents. “Because they died,” he said wistfully. “Will you ever see them again?” I asked. He considered his answer carefully. Finally, he said that there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason — and no evidence — to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn’t give in to the temptation. “Why?” Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority. He told me that anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny. As far as I can remember, this is the first time I began to understand the permanence of death. As I veered into a kind of mini existential crisis, my parents comforted me without deviating from their scientific worldview. “You are alive right this second. That is an amazing thing,” they told me. When you consider the nearly infinite number of forks in the road that lead to any single person being born, they said, you must be grateful that you’re you at this very second. Think of the enormous number of potential alternate universes where, for example, your great-great-grandparents never meet and you never come to be. Moreover, you have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water, and love the warmth of the closest star. You’re connected to the generations through DNA — and, even farther back, to the universe, because every cell in your body was cooked in the hearts of stars. We are star stuff , my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way.

My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever — because it’s not forever — being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful. If we lived forever it would not be so amazing. When I was 7, we moved to another, larger house five minutes away in preparation for my brother, Sam. The Sphinx Head Tomb was left empty for a little while before my parents began the process of renovating it. They wanted a space to write and read and collaborate in peace. The remodeling was a long process, as it always is, but when the beautiful new incarnation was done, it didn’t get much use. Soon after, my father started looking pale and feeling a little weak. A checkup led to a blood test, which came with the news that he had a rare blood disease. We moved to Seattle, so he could be treated by the best doctors. Remission, relapse, bone marrow transplant; relapse, bone marrow transplant number two, remission; relapse, bone marrow transplant number three. And then just at the winter solstice of 1996, he was gone. I was 14 years old. The Sphinx Head Tomb was left unused, slowly filling up with my father’s papers, handwritten notes, photographs, to-do lists, birthday cards, childhood drawings, and report cards. Thousands of individual items, boxed away in 18-foot-high filing cabinets. My mother searched for a home for these keepsakes and manuscripts — the evidence of a great life lived by a great man — but no university or institution was willing to give them the preservative care and prominence she felt they deserved. As the months turned into years, she devoted herself to carrying on my father’s legacy, somehow continuing their union and collaboration after his death. When my mother had the idea to do a new, updated version of Cosmos , she embarked on four years of pitches and meetings and maybes. Then she met Seth McFarlane , creator of Family Guy , who was a great fan of my dad’s work. And soon, in no small part thanks to Seth, a new Cosmos was underway. With my mother at the helm and the charming Neil deGrasse Tyson as host, tens of millions more people are now being exposed to the grandeur of science and my dad’s form of joyful skepticism. But there is something else Seth did for my father’s legacy that has been significantly less tweeted about: He made it possible for all the contents of the Sphinx Head Tomb — all the essays on nuclear winter, the papers on the climate of Venus, the scraps of ideas, a boyhood drawing of a flyer for an imagined interstellar mission — to be preserved in the Library of Congress. It’s an enormous honor that makes me feel that my father has, in death, achieved a kind of immortality — albeit a tiny, human, earthly immortality. But that’s the only kind a person can hope to achieve. Someday our civilization will crumble. The Library of Congress will be ruins, someone else’s Library of Alexandria. In the biggest sense, our species will eventually die out, or transform into something else, that will not revere what we revere. And then, a few billion years later, when the sun meets its own end, all life on Earth will die with it. Growing up, I had learned all the reasons why real immortality is impossible from my father, yet I could not help but imagine 23rd or 24th century schoolchildren looking at my dad’s penmanship under glass and feel his life was really extended in some tangible way. On the brisk, gray day this past November, during the week that would have been his 79th birthday, my family, our friends, and many of my father’s colleagues and former students gathered in Washington D.C. to celebrate the new Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive . But when I entered the massive cathedral to the history of the country, I was overcome not with a sense of immortality but its antithesis. In front of the famous original copies of the Gutenberg Bible and the Gettysburg Address it hit me: This was not a monument to eternal life but a mausoleum. In the way couples sometimes renew their vows, we renewed our grief. And in that moment my father was both so alive in the minds of those who loved him and so painfully gone. The conundrum of mortality and immortality was crystallized for me in the Library of Congress that day, but it’s the same paradox of our small place in the enormous universe that my parents first taught me in the Sphinx Head Tomb.

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IMAGES

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VIDEO

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Carl Sagan's daughter on mortality
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Last April, Sasha Sagan, the daughter of the late Carl Sagan and Cosmos producer Ann Druyan, wrote a beautiful essay called “Lessons of
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Sasha Sagan, daughter of Carl Sagan, to release book
Sasha Sagan is a writer, filmmaker and producer. Her book is drawn from a widely read essay, "Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My
Sasha Sagan Dives into Science, Space and Spirituality in New Book
Sasha Sagan, daughter of astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, ... being inspired by Sagan's viral essay in The Cut entitled
Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan
But inside the Sphinx Head Tomb, he and my mother, Ann Druyan, wrote books, essays, and screenplays together, working to popularize a philosophy