Born 1934 in Brooklyn to a working-class Jewish family. Chicago, Harvard, Cornell — he became the rare scientist who was also a public poet. He served as astronomy's bridge to the general mind for thirty years.
He helped NASA design the plaques on Pioneer 10 and 11 and chaired the committee that assembled the Voyager Golden Record — humanity's message to anyone who might find it. In 1980 his Cosmos PBS series reached 500 million viewers in sixty countries. In 1994 he wrote the Pale Blue Dot passage that is still the most widely shared cosmological prose in English.
He died of pneumonia in December 1996, aged 62, after two years with myelodysplasia. His last book, The Demon-Haunted World, is his warning to the century after him: science is a candle in the dark, and the dark is patient.