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"Billions and billions"

After Cosmos aired, Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions", although he never actually used the phrase in the Cosmos series. He rather used the term "billions upon billions."

Richard Feynman, a precursor to Sagan, used the phrase "billions and billions" many times in his " red books." However, Sagan's frequent use of the word billions and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions with a 'b ' ", in order to distinguish the word from "millions") made him a favorite target of comic performers, including Johnny Carson, Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers, Bronson Pinchot, Penn Jillette, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa satirized the line in the song "Be in My Video", noting as well "atomic light." Sagan took this all in good humor, and his final book was titled Billions and Billions, which opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of this catchphrase, observing that Carson was an amateur astronomer and that Carson's comic caricature often included real science.

As a humorous tribute to Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a sagan has been defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to a very large number of anything.