As you embark on this voyage you’ll be joining nearly a billion other of your fellow earthlings in the great adventure of becoming a way for the cosmos to know itself and the next link in the generations of searchers. For Andrew in the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie reflections on carl sagan’s cosmos by me, Neil DeGrasse, Tyson, not everyone who successfully impacts the hearts and minds of one generation will carry That currency of influence into the generations that follow the continued success of cosmos, carl sagan’s magnum opus, argues strongly for carl’s affability and intelligence. But it also reveals a hidden hunger in us all to learn about our place in the universe and embrace it. Why does that matters? Intellectually, culturally and emotionally, these properties distinguish the work of carl sagan and his collaborators from all other efforts to communicate science.

Most good books in the genre teach you what to know in the author’s field of expertise, what’s hot, what’s interesting in clear and simple language, but rarely is that information shaped into knowledge and even more rarely is that knowledge shaped into wonder the foundation of a cosmos Perspective on the world, dare i assert that cosmos wielded this power in ways that profoundly influenced how we would observe, interpret and conduct our lives? One of the least noted facts about cosmos, but perhaps its most significant gift to human culture is how it repeatedly cross-pollinated traditional sciences, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology when taken separately. Each of these fields is noble and time-honored, but when taken together when cosmos wove them into a tapestry of insight on our place in the universe, their juxtaposition became potent and indelible cosmos was early, if not first, in this endeavor in the decades that followed its publication. We would see the rise of hybrid fields of study such as astrobiology astroparticle physics, astrochemistry planetary geology, some still donning their hyphens, but the publication and best-selling success of cosmos accomplished much more than this. The book’s treatment of scientific topics was persistently blended with other traditional fields of study such as history, anthropology, art and philosophy, to reveal for the first time how and why readers should embrace all the ways that science matters in our culture at the time there was nothing Fresher more uplifting or more empowering than the themes and messages of cosmos, perhaps for the first time in any medium, the person teaching you, science, carl sagan, cared about the tangled mental roadways that can rob a person of rational thought.

His motif was to speak with you not lecture at you with that level of pedagogical comfort. Millions of people around the world invited his television image into their living rooms and his printed words into their reading chairs. When cosmos first arrived in 1980, the arms race of the cold war was fading, but nonetheless continued to hold hostage the world’s nations, with a nuclear arsenal of destructive powers derived from the minds of physicists. But exploration was not without hope. Nasa had already landed viking on mars, seven years after we walked on the moon and the twin voyager space probes continued their flyby tour of the jovian planets on their way out of the solar system.

Altogether, all headline news, but much more, was to come. The space shuttle had not yet flown the international space station existed only on paper. The hubble space telescope was 11 years from launch the first exoplanets worlds, orbiting suns other than our own were 15 years from detection. The world wide web was still a decade from becoming a household utility democratizing access to cosmic discoveries and dozens more space missions would launch and arrive at their respective destinations in a field that moves as rapidly as astrophysics. One would think it impossible to write a timeless tract on it, but within cosmos, you’re never focused on the bleeding edge of science that comes and goes you’re instead treated to what the

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