In 1939 a four-year-old boy at the New York World's Fair watched a time capsule being buried for a civilization thousands of years away. That boy grew up to send humanity's own time capsules into interstellar space. This episode traces Carl Sagan's worldview from a Depression-era Brooklyn childhood shaped by an analytical mother and an empathetic father, through the library book that revealed stars are distant suns, to early admission to the University of Chicago at 16 and mentorship under Gerard Kuiper.

We cover his involvement in Project A119, the classified plan to detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon, his correct predictions of a 900-degree Venus, oceans under Europa, and organic lakes on Titan, the 1968 Harvard tenure denial and move to Cornell, the Pioneer plaques and Voyager Golden Record, the Pale Blue Dot photograph, Cosmos reachi ...