The Collective Debt Owed to Stanislav Petrov by Humanity Carl Sagan Foremost Among Them
In the original series of Cosmos Carl Sagan alludes to the possibility of space exploration provided the fact we don’t commit species suicide through the utterly pointless and absurd self destruction of nuclear war. Not long after the original broadcast in the early eighties this catastrophe almost came to pass. On September 26th 1983 an early missile detection system malfunctioned, alerting a false positive that the United States had launched a barrage of atomic weapons. Lieutenant Colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces Stanislav Petrov refrained from retaliation, saving humanity in the process. This painting is a portrayal of Sagan’s gratitude, in addition to my own.