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We all (hopefully) know that Carl Sagan was an accomplished astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and an all-around deep thinker:

enter image description here

But he couldn't possibly have just sat around all day cogitating about giant black holes and vast clouds of interstellar gas, right?

What do you think was on his mind at this moment?

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The very deep, philosophical thought on Carl's mind is

In space, no-one can hear you fart.

So I guess it turns out he did just sit around cogitating giant black holes and vast clouds of interstellar gas, hur hur.

As Phylyp said, the answer is a GIF with 8 frames.

Frame 8 is not the answer; it indicates we should keep looking.

So instead if we take a look at frame 7 we see...

A very faint QR code.

Which looks like this (separate spoiler block because formatting is being weird).

QR code

Adjusting that to make it easier to scan, we get this:

QR code

Scanning that gives us the answer.

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    $\begingroup$ No mention of the puzzle's Title in your answer, huh? :( $\endgroup$ – Chowzen Feb 16 '18 at 17:38
  • $\begingroup$ @Chowzen there are only so many puns I expect in one puzzle - at first I didn't even notice the interstellar gas ;-) $\endgroup$ – Joe Feb 16 '18 at 17:45
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The image is a GIF image, more specifically, it is

An animated GIF with 8 frames, of which the last one is:
enter image description here

This is a quote attributed to Carl Sagan:
- “We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”


Note: The first 6 frames are the same picture of Sagan himself, the 7th frame is just the star field shown behind the quote, and the 8th is the image shown above.

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    $\begingroup$ Ooooh! I knew someone would take the bait, sorry it was you, @Phylyp! :) Your answer would somewhat contradict the essence of what Carl was saying in the quotation, no? $\endgroup$ – Chowzen Feb 16 '18 at 15:53
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    $\begingroup$ It should be noted that the answer is not retrievable from the picture posted in this answer... please refer to my original picture. $\endgroup$ – Chowzen Feb 16 '18 at 15:54
  • $\begingroup$ Ha ha, nice one. Though the absence of a steganography tag is partly why I didn't look further (the other reason was I thought I had it). $\endgroup$ – Phylyp Feb 16 '18 at 16:39
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the edit, the stenography tag didn't occur to me. $\endgroup$ – Chowzen Feb 16 '18 at 16:43

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