Bill Nye the Science Guy, POTUS and Neil deGrasse Tyson in a selfie taken at the White House. (I don't think Bill Nye appears in the series but I love this pic.)
"Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey," The 21st century successor to Carl Sagan's "Cosmos: A Personal Journey" is premiering 9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT on Fox and the National Geographic Channel.
If you do not have a television, like me, apparently we will have to watch it after it airs since this livestream link does not appear to be working.
Astrophysicist and author, Neil deGrasse Tyson will host and President Barack Obama will introduce the series, hoping that the "Cosmos" reboot will invite "a new generation to embrace the spirit of discovery and [inspire] viewers to explore new frontiers and imagine limitless possibilities for the future," according to the White House.
Cosmos is getting a massive push, premiering simultaneously on several Fox Network-owned channels, including FX, FXX, National Geographic Channel, Fox Sports 1, FXM, Fox Sports 2, Nat Geo Wild, Nat Geo Mundo and Fox Life. This is the first time Fox Networks Group has done a high-profile multi-network launch. Cosmos will be available on 220 networks in 181 countries.The original "Cosmos" was and is a big deal:
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as global presenter.[...] It covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe.Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan is a writer, director and an executive producer of the new "Cosmos.""Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane is an executive producer.The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until The Civil War (1990). It is still the most widely watched PBS series in the world. It won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 600 million people, according to the Science Channel.
Science geek Seth MacFarlane donates to Carl Sagan’s notes collectionHere is the trailer for the original "Cosmos."The astronomer’s papers — 798 boxes of documents meticulously saved since high school, including vast amounts of correspondence with other scientists and with ordinary people — are available for researchers under the name “Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive.” MacFarlane landed in the title because he donated the money that allowed the library to purchase the papers from Druyan (Sagan’s widow), reports our colleague Joel Achenbach.
MacFarlane said he’s concerned that science literacy is fading. A couple of decades ago, he says, TV programs focused on space and other scientific topics, but now they’re more likely to be about witches, vampire and angels: “It’s all become a bunch of fluff. That is a symptom of the bizarre fear of science that’s taken hold.”
Transcription:Here's the official trailer for the reboot, "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey":(Lots of whizzbang graphics--well, whizzbang for the era--and faces floating through pictures of space.)
Carl Sagan: The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.
The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature.
For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday but there's no support for this appealing idea.
We are one planet.
We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the human species?
Who speaks for earth?
Welcome to Cosmos; to an adventure that will take us across the known universe and back to its very beginnings.
More than 400 million people in over 60 countries have made this voyage of exploration about the origin, nature and fate of the universe and our place within it.
We are creatures of the cosmos and have always hungered to know our origins; to understand our connection with the universe.
It is the birthright of every child to encounter the cosmos anew in every culture and every age.
When this happens to us we experience a deep sense of wonder.
We are born to delight in the world. We are taught to distinguish our preconceptions from the truth.
Then new worlds are discovered as we decipher the mysteries of the cosmos.
Except for hydrogen and helium every atom in the Sun and the earth was synthesized in other stars.
We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into his own hands.
The discovery that there is order in the universe; that there are laws of nature is the foundation on which science builds today.
Every human generation has asked about the origin and fate of the cosmos. Ours is the first generation with a real chance of finding some of the answers.
We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready, at last, to set sail for the stars.
One way or another we are poised at the edge of forever.
(Sagan, seated on the edge of the ocean) Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return.
And we can.
Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff.
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Transcription:Gratuitous Carl Sagan quote, "Pale Blue Dot":Carl Sagan: The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.
Our contemplations of the cosmos stirs. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.
0:38
Neil deGrasse Tyson: It's time to get going again.(Followed by whizzbang graphics, CGI spaceships, vignettes of a toddler's first steps, animated deer and cavemen, explosions and more CGI spaceships.
There's very little talking on the new trailer and lots of whizzbang. What does that portend for the actual series? We'll just have to tune in and see.)
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in SpaceThe Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”