Carl Sagan: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia
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During [[World War II]], Sagan's parents worried about the fate of their European relatives, but he was generally unaware of the details of the ongoing war. He wrote, "Sure, we had relatives who were caught up in the [[The Holocaust|Holocaust]]. [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]] was not a popular fellow in our household... but on the other hand, I was fairly insulated from the horrors of the war." His sister, Carol, said that their mother "above all wanted to protect Carl... she had an extraordinarily difficult time dealing with World War II and the Holocaust."{{Sfn|Davidson|1999|p=15}} Sagan's book ''[[The Demon-Haunted World]]'' (1996) included his memories of this conflicted period, when his family dealt with the realities of the war in Europe, but tried to prevent it from undermining his optimistic spirit.<ref name="Spangenburg" />
Soon after entering elementary school, Sagan began to express his strong inquisitiveness about nature. He recalled taking his first trips to the public library alone, at age five, when his mother got him a library card. He wanted to learn what stars were, since none of his friends or their parents could give him a clear answer: "I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars [...] and the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star, but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light. The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me."{{Sfn|Davidson|1999|p=18}} When he was about six or seven, he and a close friend took trips to the [[American Museum of Natural History|American Museum of Natural History,]], in [[Manhattan]]. While there, they visited the [[Hayden Planetarium]] and walked around exhibits of space objects, such as [[meteorite]]s, as well as displays of dinosaur skeletons and naturalistic scenes with animals. As Sagan later wrote, "I was transfixed by the dioramas—lifelike representations of animals and their habitats all over the world. Penguins on the dimly lit Antarctic ice [...] a family of gorillas, the male beating his chest [...] an American [[grizzly bear]] standing on his hind legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring me right in the eye."{{Sfn|Davidson|1999|p=18}}
Sagan's parents nurtured his growing interest in science, buying him chemistry sets and reading matter. But his fascination with outer space emerged as his primary focus, especially after he had read science fiction by such writers as [[H. G. Wells]] and [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]], stirring his curiosity about the possibility of life on [[Life on Mars|Mars]] and other planet[[Life on Mars|s]] .<ref name="sagan19780528" /> According to biographer Ray Spangenburg, Sagan's efforts in his early years to understand the mysteries of the planets became a "driving force in his life, a continual spark to his intellect, and a quest that would never be forgotten."<ref name="Spangenburg" /> In 1947, Sagan discovered the magazine ''[[Astounding Science Fiction]]'', which introduced him to more [[hard science fiction]] speculations than those in the Burroughs novels.<ref name="sagan19780528">{{Cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/28/archives/growing-up-with.html |title=Growing up with Science Fiction |last=Sagan |first=Carl |date=May 28, 1978 |work=The New York Times |access-date=December 12, 2018 |page=SM7 |language=en-US |issn=0362-4331 |archive-date=December 11, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181211180058/https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/28/archives/growing-up-with.html |url-status=live}}</ref> That same year, [[mass hysteria]] developed about the possibility that extraterrestrial visitors had arrived in [[flying saucer]]s, and the young Sagan joined in the speculation that the flying "discs" people reported seeing in the sky might be alien spaceships.<ref name="anb.org">{{Cite encyclopedia |first=Keay |last=Davidson |title=Sagan, Carl (1934–1996), space scientist, author, science popularizer, TV personality, and antinuclear weapons activist |url=https://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1302612 |encyclopedia=American National Biography |publisher=Oxford University Press |date=2000 |doi=10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1302612 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210514010502/https://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1302612 |archive-date=May 14, 2021 |url-status=live |isbn=978-0-19-860669-7 |access-date=June 23, 2021}}</ref>