Sasha Sagan, on the 25th anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan: "My father did not believe in life beyond death, but it seems that he is still with us"

• Science Word of Cosmos: portrait of the Universe 30 years after the great selfie of Earth

Carl Sagan

never saw the film adaptation of

.

Just seven months before the premiere, the astronomer and science communicator died of pneumonia on December 20, 1996, now 25 years ago.

Shortly before,

(New York, 1982) asked his father if he would ever meet his grandparents again, as the astrophysicist

in fiction.

"He answered that he would like nothing more, but since there was no evidence to support the idea of ​​an afterlife, he could not give in to temptation," the television writer and producer told EL MUNDO.

Sasha insisted with the stubbornness of a 14-year-old girl, and kept asking her why.

"He then spoke to me of the dangers of believing in things that only we want to be true, of self-deception in the face of critical questioning of authority and the search for truth as the only source of knowledge." Then he explained that, thanks to DNA, every cell in his body would always remain connected to all the people who had preceded it, and even to the universe itself. "We are going to die and there are good reasons to feel lucky about it," he told me.

These and other reflections are collected in

(GP Putnam's Sons), a fascinating and unusual essay on

. "I wrote this book so that I could answer the questions that I asked my parents when I was little."

The title of the volume borrows from

closing statement

: "He dedicated his entire life to studying the universe, but never noticed its simplest message: little creatures like us can only endure immensity through love." Sasha Sagan says that, as a result of motherhood (she has a 4-year-old daughter and will give birth to a child in February), she began to resignify some social phenomena (related to birth and death, but also to special events, such as birthdays and weddings) in search of a non-religious significance.

"It may seem contradictory, but it is not," asserts the writer, who

.

"If you put the magnifying glass on these celebrations, you realize that everything leads to the same origin: the need to understand questions about biology and astronomy that mark our existential calendar."

Since her father passed away,

.

He also retrieves from the shelf some books highlighted by his father and prepares a chocolate pudding, the favorite dessert of the astrophysicist and Pulitzer Prize winner, according to a recipe that has survived several generations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Carl Sagan and his daughter Sasha.FAMILY FILE

“

.

Which, in scientific terms, is equivalent to a distant star that illuminates us despite being turned off a long time ago.

Would his father have subscribed to this exegesis, between philosophical and spiritual, of his scientific legacy?

"He would have liked to know that his daughter hasn't stopped asking herself questions."

And he adds: «I learned to speak Spanish with my nanny,

, a Peruvian woman with strong religious convictions.

To give you an idea of ​​what my father was like, some weekends he himself would drive us to church.

Back home, he didn't get in the way of his childhood disquisitions about Noah's Ark or a heaven inhabited by angels.

«I considered that religion, as a source of hope, had an indisputable cultural value and that this type of experience would allow me to understand the world better.

.

Sasha Sagan.PHOTO: KATHERINE PEKALA

Nor was Sasha Sagan forced to enroll in a science degree to meet the expectations of the environment. She studied literature at

and has since earned her living as a writer, contributor to numerous publications, and television producer. "Actually," he admits, "I think I have followed more in my mother's footsteps," the writer

, one of the creators and scriptwriters of the series

, an unusual case in the history of popular science for which Carl Sagan it had an 8 million dollar budget and the

special effects team

.

In Chapter 12 (

), Sagan overturned some of the findings of the SETI Project on the existence of extraterrestrial life which, according to the famous Drake equation, suggests the possibility of a large number of interplanetary civilizations.

"I don't know if we're alone or just far away," concedes Sasha, who in a sequence from

(2020) plays her father's mother (who appears in a tender baby cameo).

"But something tells me that the curiosity to unravel the mysteries of the universe is today clothed with a certain catastrophism, as if this world no longer had a solution and we needed to inhabit other planets before the collapse."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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