From "The Writer's Almanac"

[ambitious_wench]

Source: The Writer's Almanac
Qoute: "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." --Carl Sagan
Comment: I find it ironic on a cosmic level that the same day of the year gave us both Carl Sagan and Kristallnacht.

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when German Nazis coordinated a nationwide attack on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The attack was inspired by the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris. When Hitler heard the news, he got the idea to stage a mass uprising in response. He and Joseph Goebbels contacted storm troopers around the country, and told them to attack Jewish buildings but to make the attacks look like spontaneous demonstrations. The police were told not to interfere with the demonstrators, but instead to arrest the Jewish victims. Fire fighters were told only to put out fires in any adjacent Aryan properties. Everyone cooperated.

In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Many of the attackers were neighbors of the victims. The Nazis confiscated any compensation claims that insurance companies paid to Jews. They also imposed a huge collective fine on the Jewish community for having supposedly incited the violence. The event was used to justify barring Jews from schools and most public places, and forcing them to adhere to new curfews. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps.

The event was called Kristallnacht, which means, "Night of Broken Glass." It's generally considered the official beginning of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis had killed people secretly and individually. After Kristallnacht, the Nazis felt free to persecute the Jews openly, because they knew no one would stop them.

It's the birthday of the astronomer Carl Sagan, born in Brooklyn, New York (1934). He said, "I wanted to be a scientist from the moment I first caught on that stars are mighty suns, [and] it dawned on me how staggeringly far away they must be to appear to us as mere points of light." He spent many nights of his childhood in a field, situating himself so he couldn't see any buildings, trees, or anything else but stars. He graduated from high school and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago when he was only sixteen.

He became a professor of astronomy at Cornell University. At a time when most other astronomers were focusing on distant stars, other galaxies, and the history of the Universe, Sagan focused his research on the planets in our own solar system. He was particularly interested in the possibility that there might be life beyond the planet earth.

Because he had done extensive research on nearby planets, NASA hired him as an advisor for a mission to send remote controlled spacecrafts to Venus. Sagan said, "It was just a dream come true. We were actually going to go to the planets!"

In preparation for the mission, Sagan was shocked to learn that there would be no cameras on the robotic spacecrafts, called Mariner I and Mariner II. The other scientists thought cameras would be a waste of valuable space and equipment. They wanted to measure things like temperature and magnetism. Sagan couldn't believe they would give up the chance to see an alien planet up close. He said, "Cameras are important precisely because they could answer questions we are too stupid to ask."

Sagan lost the argument that time, but he won over NASA eventually. The Mariners were the last exploratory spacecraft ever launched by NASA without cameras. He contributed to the Viking, Voyager, and Galileo planetary exploration missions, and his insistence on the use of cameras helped us get the first close up photographs of the outer planets and their moons. Sagan understood that in order to get the public to care about science, to give tax dollars to science, he would have to appeal to the public's sense of wonder.

He was one of the first scientists to appear on the Johnny Carson show, and he became a regular guest, appearing twenty-five times. He created the TV show Cosmos, which attracted an audience of over half a billion people in sixty countries, the most popular scientific television program ever produced. His book based on the series spent seventy weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Dragons of Eden (1977) about the evolution of human intelligence, and he was also the author of the best-selling novel Contact (1985) which was made into a movie. He even had an asteroid named after him.

Carl Sagan said, "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."

And, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."