Ann is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its sequel series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, as well as the book of the same name. She directed episodes of both series. In the late 1970s Ann became the Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project which produced the golden discs affixed to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft. She also published a novel, A Famous Broken Heart and later co-wrote several best selling non-fiction books with Sagan.
Ann seems to have a sentiocentric moral scope, at least in concept. It’s not clear whether she is vegetarian, vegan or neither. Ann has a non-religious, scientific, naturalistic worldview.
In the book “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, co-authored with Carl Sagan, they wrote: “Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”
Here, she writes: “It is precisely in the absence of reciprocity, as in our mercy towards the helpless [including non-human animals], that we may be most sure that any given moral act is unalloyed by self-interest.”