Carl Sagan

person · earth

The planetary scientist and science communicator who chaired the committee that assembled the Golden Record and who argued, over several years and against resistance from within the project, that Voyager 1 should turn its cameras back towards the inner solar system before they were shut down. The scientific return from such an image was acknowledged to be near zero — that was the objection — and Sagan's case was explicitly not a scientific one. He also worked on the plaques carried by Pioneer 10 and 11, and later wrote the 1994 book that took its title from the resulting photograph. He died in 1996.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.