Dear Dr. Sagan

Dr. Sagan, I feel I should tell you this, years after your death, that you were singularly one of the biggest influences in my life.  This only comes up now, inconveniently postmortem on your part, because I am reviewing Cosmos, and in some ways, it reads as an archaeology of my mind, my views on things, my understanding of the world.  I am a big-picture thinker, so much so that I frequently wonder if I have a mental illness that I cannot name, a sort of anti-aspergers syndrome.  I do not care about punctuation.  Details, such as exact dates and even exact years, matter little to me.  I love people, especially the kind of people who notice spiderwebs, and though it is true that I might rather spend a day at the library than go to a party, the reverse might be true as well, depending upon the attendees.  It is much more relevant to me that every single attendee of the party is a eutherian mammal, even the cats and dogs that occasionally line the periphery of such events, and that reptilian guests to parties are restricted to circus and fetish folk, most often, and they make difficult party guests in any event, spending most of the event tied in pillow cases.  Your picture was, evidently, very large as well, given that you were the first man to consider pointing the camera of a spacecraft, at the edge of interstellar space, back at the Earth, to look for the intelligent life we knew to be there....a sort of ultimate perspective.

    You, on the other hand, were such a careful thinker, that decades after the fact, it is difficult to find scientific innacuracies in Cosoms, for the reason that, when it was called for, you always identified your hypothetical scenarios, your speculation, and the tentative conclusions of the science of the time, for exactly what they were.

     When I first viewed those episodes, so long ago that it was another lifetime, neurologically in the sense that by now, my dendrites have rebuilt themselves countless times, and in a very real aspect, I am not the same person I was back then.  You pissed me off when you spoke of nuclear war.  You pissed me off for the same reason that, what is now arguably my favorite movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still, pissed me off as well.  From the Hollywood, Clatu taught me that interstellar war is futile, pointless, and if there was anything to conquer, it would put a stop to our machinations before they started.  As it turns out from my later discoveries, impossible.  It would take so many resources to send a single paratrooper to Alpha Centauri, that we could build and rebuild every single thing we sought to conquer, on a lonely orb like Callisto, cheaper, and faster.  Advancing technology only helps the Callisto side of the equation.  Your line of argument concerning nuclear war was equally shattering to my world view at the time.  The fact of the matter is that the threat of nuclear armageddon, every second of the day, the drain of resources to build such devices, the time and expertise wasted perfecting them, was an almost-inconceivable folly....perhaps a product of our own evolution...but folly still.  You were right, of course, and though there are still ten thousand or more nuclear weapons on the planet, the Russians are shipping plutonium here for use in our reactors...nuclear armageddon has been replaced by nuclear proliferation among the small fry, the nation states so bent on preserving their power structures that they must blackmail the rest of the world into propping them up by providing a foil, a common enemy.  Ironic that the space race was brought about by the cold war, the moon race necessitated by it, but the manned exploration of space has been crippled by the debts we ran up in the process.  You straightened me out on where I stand as a human.  I am no longer a nationalist.

  You validated my nascent athiesm.  You were right that we do  not need god to explain our place in the universe, or our own existence here as well, and that, if we are courageous, we must ask "Who Created God?", and if we cannot answer this question, we might come to question his existence as well.  You taught me that the last librarian of Alexandria was killed by a Christian mob, but strangely, I missed your message that it was the librarian's own elitism that allowed that to happen.  It was this last point that, decades later, you made to me the other night.  I could stand to contemplate it.  

  Here I am, decades later, spending my life transmitting the findings of the academic heirarchs, a choice made of my own free will, though pushed by the necessity of earning a living, and my own failures navigating the political world of research science.  I speak to the masses who will listen, like you, but without the cool TV sets, the stodgy brown suit, the carnation, and with hundreds of viewers rather than millions.

  Your often-parodied goofiness, a notion I bought into at the time as well, is now easy to recognize as passion, pure and unadulterated.  I look at my own strengths as a lecturer, and it is passion of the same ilk, thought perhaps I flatter myself by making the comparison, which stands as a counterweight to my lack of punctuation.  I suppose, I am goofy too, in my own way.  Passion and curiosity can be taken that way, I suppose.