Special Guest Blogger: Carl Sagan

Since my departure from the physical realm, I’ve had a significant amount of time to contemplate the universe without the pesky distractions of gravity, atmospheric distortion, or the need to find a parking spot at Cornell.
One of my proudest achievements is the Voyager Golden Record as that was a lot of pressure, to create a Best of Earth compilation for an audience that might have twelve heads, communicate via pheromones or be a sentient cloud of hydrogen. We included greetings in 55 languages, the sounds of the Earth, music and our brainwaves.
I can’t help but wonder what if the aliens find it and their culture considers Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode to be a declaration of interstellar war?
In 1990, I convinced NASA to turn Voyager 1 around and take a photo of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. It looked like a tiny, lonely, slightly damp speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam so i called it the Pale Blue Dot.
I wanted to show that every King, every peasant, every corrupt politician, and every couple in love lived their entire lives on a mote of dust and confirm that in the grand scheme of things, us guys are really small.
We argue over borders, lines drawn in the dirt on a speck of dust but i hope that I helped a few of you look up from the only Planet we have and realise we are part of a much larger, much more interesting Universe. Or at least, that you stopped shouting at each other for five minutes to appreciate the view.
I did give the World the quote that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I spent my life debunking religion, astrology and alien abductions so if you’re looking for a sign, don’t look for it in a religious book, horoscopes or tea leaves, look for it in the star-stuff.
The calcium in your teeth and the iron in your blood were forged in the hearts of dying stars which is an extraordinary claim that actually has the evidence. You don’t need a reverend or ghost to tell you about the World, you just need a periodic table and a telescope.
I regret that some dolts are still arguing over whether the climate is changing (it is, and I told you so in the 80s—check the tapes) but i don’t regret the time spent staring into the dark and showing everyone that  in a universe of billions of trillions of stars and an infinite stretch of cold, empty space, you get to be a conscious being that can wonder why.
So, keep looking up. Keep demanding evidence. Keep being kind to one another on your little mote of dust. And for the love of all that is holy, if you ever find a Golden Record floating in space, don't judge me for the tractor sounds. We were doing our best.