PERSON
Carl Sagan
The astronomer who built the most durable toolkit for living in a world of manufactured unreality—combining ruthless skepticism with unembarrassed wonder and leaving, in The Demon-Haunted World, what now reads less like prophecy than like a description of the present, dictated thirty years in advance.
Carl Sagan died in 1996, years before anyone could ask a machine to write a sonnet or fake a photograph, and yet he wrote the field manual for the world we now inhabit. His central project was not a body of astronomical discoveries but a practice of discernment: the disciplined, evidence-driven, doubt-saturated way of thinking he called science, which he believed any person could learn and every democratic society depended upon. In
The Demon-Haunted World, published the year of his death, he warned of a civilization in which “critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That sentence was written about tabloids and television. Transpose it into the age of
synthetic media and algorithmic feeds, and it reads less like prophecy than like a description of the present. The mechanism he feared—the erosion