He is one of humanity's greatest single losses. The world needs Carl Sagan more than ever, we need him SO MUCH right now.

We desperately need someone or something to show us the irrelevance of problems such as human conflict, magical thinking and lack of thinking that are all our own creation and to which we are presumably still bound by instinct. In fact, humanity (or what ever name our evolutionary descendants choose for themselves), our civilization needs a visionary like Sagan at any given time, since there is quite possibly a very limited window in time for any planetary society like our own to conquer the boundaries of their solar system and become a space-faring, space-dwelling civilization which can actually endure long enough to evolve until we become the truly benevolent guardians of knowledge and life, that we could be, at the very least in our own corner of space; a lofty goal that I am nevertheless certain awaits us at the apex of our potential development. As far as I am concerned that is the only option toward which we should be reaching, provided we do not want to accept the alternative that "in the long term, we're all (probably) dead" and don't just (figuratively) collectively lie down to die.