Billions & Billions  (English, Paperback, Sagan Carl)

Billions and Billions is the last book written by popular scientist Carl Sagan, giving readers a look into his thoughts on global warming, the population explosion, extraterrestrial life, morality, and the abortion debate.

Summary of the Book

Carl Sagan's last book took a bird's eye view of the world, giving readers his thoughts on myriad topics. He begins with quantification, and how numbers hold sway in our large world. He ventures again into the realm of space and discusses how the universe has evolved and how it continues to grow to unimaginable proportions. The second part of his book discusses the environment, the hole in the ozone layer and conservation. He discusses how development has affected our world and how we continue to decay it through our actions. The last part of the book discusses moral issues such as abortion and death. He dwells on death long here, for he wrote on the wake of his struggle with myelodysplasia, the disease which finally took his life in December 1996. The epilogue of the book was penned by Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan. A seminal book, it gives readers one last chance to peer into the large man that Sagan was and try to understand his viewpoints on many topics.

About Carl Sagan

Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and author. He is best known for his popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain and Pale Blue Dot, and for narrating and co-writing the 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

Sagan graduated from the University of Chicago, and earned a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960. He taught for a while at Harvard, and moved on to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research has been pivotal in the search for extraterrestrial life, especially his experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. A celebrated scientist, Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the Joseph Priestley Award, the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal and Emmy awards for Outstanding Individual Achievement and Outstanding Informational Series.