Where has all the critical thinking gone?

He "calculated" how many planets would contain life by making up numbers. I remember watching that show on TV and wondering how he got away with that.

planets existed with life that he used a bit of mumbo jumbo on his show using too much supposing.

so resulting in people thinking he was presenting fact. I knew his numbers were made up based on what he said on the show and how he said it, but I never heard him clarify that which means it was falsely presented. I watched all his shows when originally aired and used to complain to my uncle, a university professor of Chemistry and Astronomy.

He put theoretical numbers of how many suns would have planets, we did not have the technology at the time to know for certain to detect planets. His numbers were actually probably lower than what we now know.

But it is over 40 years since I watched it.

And it's not a matter of voting by scientists that determine the facts. That's why the Big Bang is referred to as a theory (unless it has been proven to be true since I last checked).

As to intelligent life, we still have only one planet to use as a reference and you can't make calculations as to how many other planets also have intelligent life based on a count of one. Even now.

It is true that if speculation is based on math, extending even down to the crude back of the envelop level, it's generally more worthy of pursuit than if it merely springs from, say, wishful thinking, but without imagination there is no science.

I was never a giant Carl Sagan fan, but I do note that as a result of his advocacy for space exploration, particularly the useful kind involving robotic probes, we are collecting real data about the frequency of planetary systems, extending even down to some, if limited, information about their chemistry.

I often speculate that the origins of life are astrophysical since radiation/matter interactions possibly explain chemical asymmetry. This is certainly not provable or disprovable with current technology, but I think it a worthy speculation, and I believe it does at least involve science.

He stated it was just an educated guess not fact.

is reducing a scientist's entire body of work to what you saw on that show.

That TV show was watered down so that people with little understanding of current scientific understanding could digest it in hour long segments once a week. Also, it was the understanding of what we knew 50 years ago, so we've moved on considerably.

It was slightly dated when it ran, and PBS has repeated it far beyond it's "best by" date, which is why there is so much criticism of Sagan, especially by the young.

It was what it was, opening minds to possibilities when it was fresh and new, both naive and shopworn in current context.

Hence I bookmarked it.