You're absolutely right - that was Carl's original idea. Are you taking that approach in the new season, or will we see some of the cutting-edge discoveries that have come about in recent years?
COSMOS A SPACETIME ODYSSEY TRANSCRIPT SERIES
And yet, the show has always had a timeless quality about it we can still watch the original 1980 series today. We never do that knowingly.Ĭosmos is a show largely about astronomy and astrophysics, which are both fields constantly being updated with new discoveries. But I don't think we ever cut corners on the rigors of the science and the data. I think it works on many different levels, and it's not afraid of the visual beauty and the feeling. And I think that's the reason "Cosmos" remains so special to people. Now, obviously, when you're doing the science you have to be dispassionate, but once you've figured something out, that doesn't mean the rest of us can't really feel. And I think one of the great tragedies of my own education … was that the science was denuded of all the passion and the feeling. We need to know these stories to understand the meaning of the work. It can't just be "So-and-so did this really good scientific thing." It has to also be her life story. And because I am looking for stories that are lives that are motivated by an idea in science that turns out to be valid and changes the world for all of us even though we don't know it. Because you have to really educate yourself, or I do, because my ignorance is vast. It takes that long for me to figure out what stories I want to tell. The previous season of "Cosmos" premiered in 2014 why such a long delay between seasons? That's the seed at the heart of "Cosmos."Īnn Druyan with her late husband, astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, in 1984. And human dignity matters so much that you're willing to stand up to one of the scariest and most heartless people who ever lived. It's a world in which it matters so much what's true. Because to me, it's the opposite of the nightmare that we're living right now. I can't wait to tell the world this story. And so, I'm really thrilled that we're going to be doing that this season. And I realized that if I ever got the chance, I was going to tell the story of this person and their colleagues, who were heroic on a scale that I don't even understand. But I found his notes in the margin, in his tiny Brooklyn-public-schools scrawl. had worked together on all these books and shows and everything - we were together 24/7, but he and I had never discussed this one little book.
I was kind of really depressed and heartbroken, and I was going through our library and I found this very thin volume, which was about the life of a scientist. One of them is someone who just after Carl died. I kind of want to keep those close to the vest, because in my research, I was really surprised to discover some of these people.
Who are some of these scientists whose stories you'll be telling? And so, we hope to tell those stories to inspire a whole new generation of kids to want to do those things. And yet, in each case, they were willing to give it all - to die even - in the service of science, of just adding another brick in the wall of our understanding of the universe. I can say this with such authority because I've talked to some of the great historians of science who had never even heard of these people. They are new in the sense that they have truly never been told before. And I think it's wrong to expect them to do the hard work that it takes to know a complicated subject deeply if we don't give them a reason, to become a mathematician, a scientist, an engineer, a technician.Īnd that's one of the reasons why I'm particularly excited about the new stories. It's really remarkable, and yet, our kids don't feel that, I don't think. We're now developing new strategies to be able to assess whether or not life is present on these worlds at the interstellar distances that are involved. As dismal and hopeless as things may seem to all of us, there is something extraordinary happening, which is that in only the last 10 years we've discovered thousands of new planets around other. In one of the episodes, we go to other worlds, because this is the golden age of discovery of other worlds.