As a boundless admirer of the late and great Carl Sagan, I was thrilled to attend a special event at the Library of Congress celebrating their historic acquisition of his personal papers — 1,705 archival boxes of materials, to be precise — thanks to support from Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s charitable foundation.

Sagan was our civilization’s greatest yenta to the marriage of skepticism and wonder. As Bill “Science Guy” Nye so eloquently put it at the event, “Carl Sagan emboldened us to know our place among the stars, our place in space.” More than that, however, he empowered us to know our place within ourselves — to be our highest selves, to inhabit the stardust of our own ephemeral human lives with the greatest possible eternal light. This enduring aspect of his legacy was most powerfully captured by two exceptional people who share a very different kind of closeness with Sagan: Neil deGrasse Tyson — modern-day cosmic sage, science champion, masterful communicator, unrelenting genius, perhaps our generation’s closest thing to Sagan himself — and Ann Druyan, the love of Sagan’s life and his longtime creative collaborator, who hosted the Library of Congress event and whose own papers are also included in the archive.

Druyan adds to Sagan’s own meditation on the meaning of life with an anecdote that captures the essence of his ethos, and his greatest gift to us:

Referencing the 1997 movie Rebecca, titled after a character who had died before the plot begins, Tyson, with his signature mesmerism of expression, captures Sagan’s undying legacy:

Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be — we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.

Thank you for everything, Carl.