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Aww, they look so sweet don't they? Well they only look harmless when you don't see them running up and down the monument with those roller-shoes on. A still picture can be oh-so deceptive.

Frankie14850 captured this and other Sagan shots. I think he got it right when he called this a Sagan shrine.

During the first informal Sagan Gathering in Ithaca (summer solstice), we ran into a lot of people who treated the Sagan Planet Walk monument rather poorly. It could be said that people who sit on the monument are being merely disrespectful. But if they happen to be wearing jeans whose back pockets have those metal rivets, then it can damage the monument by leaving scratches. We saw people standing on it, but unless they clear their rubber soles of stones caught in the treads, it can scratch the monument. One woman had three kids climbing all over the monument as a well-fed female officer pretended not to notice. A man in a green shirt had his 7-or-so year-old daughter's body right through the middle of the sun monument - literally through the hole at the peak, looking rather like a David Copperfield act. When parents were told that the monument was an educational memorial not a playground junglegym, they seemed very annoyed that anybody might indirectly question their permissive parenting. The man in the green shirt with the Copperfield trainee insisted that it was there for kids to climb on. I explained to him that it was a memorial and educational monument. He refused to accept that. I asked him to read the dedication on the monument. He wouldn't.

During a candle-lighting and some photography that night, some woman in high heels ran right up onto the monument and put her face through the hole (the sun) so she could be in the picture. Ignoring my natural instincts, we instead summoned up our inner-Sagans and redirected them to a short tour of the local planets, hoping they might have that "Pale Blue Dot" eureka moment. I explained how Carl profoundly helped end the cold war and how his work on Venus' climate gave us a leg-up on understanding global warming.

Somebody- Larry, Chris or Aaron quipped something about getting snipers for next year to guard the monument. This idea appealed to my dark sense of humor very much and remains perhaps my favorite moment of the gathering. In fact I ran with the idea the rest of the night. Hmmm... T-Shirts anyone?

Coincidentally, Ithaca's Frankie14850 had a caption on his Flickr page that sums up the monument situation well.

From jdmims2's photostream: 5 men in Tampa who agreed to spend time with middle school students at Carl Sagan Academy during the 2007-2008 school year.  Larry Sargent, Larry English, Donald Dowridge, Jason Mims, James Randolph.

In March of 2000, the Catholic church officially apologized to people like Kopernicus and Galileo. Now, a new amnesty program may have Richard Hoagland breathing a sigh of relief too. And he didn't even have to wait 400 years.

According the the Vatican, it's not only OK to think there's other life out there, but it's not at all incompatible with the original Christian church's teachings.

Hot Air posited this interesting question about extraterrestral brotherly love: Can the extraterrestrial really be my brother if he wants to (a) probe me, (b) enslave me to work in his crystal mines, and/or (c) serve me as an entree? I apologize for the Wikipedia link.

As it happens, the Vatican has long been interested in cosmology and maintains an observatory at the U. of Arizona in Tucson. I have a momento (a shirt from an ex-girlfriend) that marked the controversy. The Vatican wanted to contruct the observatory on Mt. Graham, which would have caused problems for the endangered Mt. Graham Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus grahamensis). Their endangered status came about as a result of tree-cutting.

Encyclopedia.com has a nice entry about the Vatican vs. the Mount Graham red squirrels here. There's also http://www.mountgraham.org

File under Carl Sagan in popular culture, found art, and subtle activism.

From SixHeadedGoblin's photostream, a touching and unexpected Carl sighting at an Olympia, Washington farmers market. You can see a higher-resolution version here. An ex-girlfriend had a similar idea regarding using such tags to remind people of the annual destruction of immature pine trees and wildlife habitat in the name of Christmas. Artificial Christmas trees last generations, and nobody's home gets chopped down.  I may upload that video one day.