But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in
fact constructed, as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed. It's a critical moment in the history of the world."
1 November 9, 1934. Sagan was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, N.Y. where his Russian-immigrant father was a cutter who rose to foreman in the garment industry. "It was during the Depression, and we were kind of poor. When I was very little, the basic thing for me was stars. When I was five years old, I could see them at whatever time bedtime was in winter, and they just didn't seem to belong in Brooklyn. The sun and the moon seemed perfectly right for Brooklyn, but the stars were different. I had the sense of something interesting, distant, strange about them. I asked people what the stars were, and I mostly got answers like 'They're lights in the sky, kid.' I could tell they were lights in the sky; that wasn't what I meant. After I got my first library card, I made a big expedition to the public-library branch on Eighty-sixth Street in Brooklyn.
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