Anderson
Astronomy
October 31, 2014
"Even today, there are moments when what I do seems to me like an improbable, if unusually pleasant dream: to be involved in the exploration of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; to try to duplicate the steps that led to the origin of life on an Earth very different from the one we know; to land instruments on Mars to search there for life; and perhaps to be engaged in a serious effort to communicate with other intelligent beings, if such there be, out there in the dark of the night sky", I said this in 1973, and it held up till the day I died. I was born on November 9th in 1934. If I could describe myself back then, I'd say I was a childhood science fiction addict. It was when …show more content…
This passion resulted in an abundance of awards including 22 honorary degrees for my work, medals from NASA for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the Nasa Apollo Achievement Award, the Public Welfare Medal (the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences), along with many others that I can't remember off the top of my head. When thinking about it now, I lived my life the way many wish they could live theirs: absolutely loving their job. One time I was invited to be a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. After that, I was invited back twenty-six times. We were both skeptics, and I was especially interested in popular misconceptions about science. Course this led to the two public symposia I organized on fringe-science topics. The first one I believe dealt with the reality of UFOs. The second one was about, and I could never forget, the work of Velikovsky, who was invited himself to speak under AAAS sponsorship (American Association for the Advancement of Science). Interesting to note, I was much better at science than I was with love. I had two failed marriages, one with Linda Salzman and the other with Lynn Margulis. I had children with both of them, Nick being the son of Linda, Dorion and Jeremy being the sons of Lynn. It wasn't until I met Ann Druyan that I felt I had gotten the emotion right. She was my colleague and later became my wife. We had two children, Sasha and Sam. It was with Annie that I created