"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage (without which) we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along."  -Carl Sagan (1987)

One of my heroes is Carl Sagan. After a two year battle with bone marrow cancer, Dr. Sagan died at age 62. Such was his influence on my generation. that as a kid I remember Cosmos coming on PBS for the first time. I stayed up late, and watched every episode. At night I dreamed of going to the places that his starship of the imagination went: off to distant places, light years away. Sagan was the first popularizer of science to reach the mainstream. He did not want to be an enigmatic laboratory professor, but to be understood. The spirit of Carl Sagan lives on in the recent movie adapted from his book, Contact.

As the movie Contact begins, we are in a comfortable orbit around the Earth until we begin to be pulled back through our solar system and then beyond our galaxy, listening all the while to the history of technology being reported to the rest of the universe as television and radio transmissions going out in all directions. Yet, the transmissions stop and yield to the silence of space.

In what is a most intense beginning to the movie, the audience finds itself in a position of fighting the uncomfortable silence. During this long silence we are asked to consider what the implications are: how concerned we all are with our place in the neighborhood; how concerned we all are with our bank accounts; how concerned we all are with living day to day. We are left with the grim realization that the lives of us all are of no concern to the universe.

The issue we are left to tackle is finding our place in a universe that does not know we are even here: a question of faith, or the word the movie never mentions, hope. To the extent that these word are even distinguishable, the theme of Contact is set. We are all so full of faith and hope, but for what? Most of us have little idea. We are presented with Ellie, played by Jodie Foster, who is so alone in the world: both her mother and father died before she was 10 years old.

In his latest book, The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan mentions Carl Jung and includes some of Jung's work on UFO's. Sagan's message for us is the same as it has always been. He asked us in Pale Blue Dot if we should be spending so much money on missions to the stars when we have homeless, disease, famine, political corruption here on Earth. "Or is this a reason for going?" he asked. He warned us of Nuclear Winter during the Cold War. He noted the decay of civilization through new philosophies such as deconstructionism. Just as Jung once warned that the psyche of man in hanging from a thin thread called consciousness, so Sagan called science a candle in the dark.

Sagan called Jung a sensible pioneering psychoanalyst, in his most recent book. Also, Sagan explains how Jung saw the phenomenon of UFO's as a projection of the unconscious mind. There is also a reference to Jung's 1902 doctoral dissertation about the "young Swiss woman who was agitated to discover, sitting across from her on the train, a "star-dweller" from Mars."

Sagan's dream was to go to the stars. He believed it was humanities inescapable destiny to leave the Earth and travel light years away. Thus, leaving us with a new mythology, one that our culture so desperately needs. The image to fill this archetype was first glimpsed when the Apollo astronauts snapped the first picture of our planet from the surface of the moon.

However, even though our destiny may be to escape the gravity of our home world, Sagan warns that a much different, much darker destiny may await us, as well. This destiny is one of nuclear holocaust: when we all give up and decide to blow the candle out. Again, this message echoes the words of Jung.

We have lost a truly great scientist and a visionary. He was a dreamer and a hero. Sagan may be gone, but his work, like Jung's, lives on for some young kid in first grade to accidentally flip on a PBS program that may change his life: lead him from MTV to science, from sitcoms to psychology, from high school to college, from the Earth to the Stars...