Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014) is a science-themed, 13 episode television series which is a sequel to the 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. It was written by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, who also both helped Carl Sagan write the original 1980 Cosmos. It was presented by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

First Episode: Standing Up in the Milky Way

Standing Up in the Milky Way is the series introductory episode. It discusses the Earth's "cosmic address," Giordano Bruno, the "Cosmic Calendar", and it has an epilogue describing Tyson's experience when he first met Carl Sagan.

This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: (1) Test ideas by experiment and observation (2) Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail (3) Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and (4) Question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours.

Many of us suspect that all of this - all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe - is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes; a multiverse. Universe upon universe; worlds without end.

Stars . . . get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars. You, me, everyone: we are made of star stuff.

Every person you've ever heard of lived somewhere in there [pointing]. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar.

Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity, and forward to the stars.

Second Episode: Some of the Things That Molecules Do

Some of the Things That Molecules Do is about biology, primarily evolution. It describes the use of artificial selection to create dogs from wolves, the natural selection of polar bears from brown bears, the tree of life, the evolution of eyes, the "Halls of Extinction", tardigrades, the possibility of life on Titan, and the earliest life on Earth.

This is a story about you . . . and me . . . and your dog.

If life has a sanctuary, it's here in the nucleus, which contains our DNA - the ancient scripture of our genetic code. And it's written in a language that all life can read.

The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience.

That nameless corridor? That's for another day. (While standing near the as-yet-unnamed, sixth corridor in the "Halls of Extinction.")

[On] Titan, Saturn's giant moon . . . the seas and the rain are made not of water but of methane and ethane. . . . [W]e can imagine other kinds of life. There might be creatures that inhale hydrogen instead of oxygen. And exhale methane instead of carbon dioxide. They might use acetylene instead of sugar as an energy source.

Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers.

Third Episode: When Knowledge Conquered Fear

When Knowledge Conquered Fear is about the importance of mathematics in science. It discusses the development of early astronomy from the human propensity for pattern recognition, comets as omens, Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton, gravity, Newton's seminal book, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and Halley's Comet.

Does the fact that most of us know the names of mass murderers but never heard of Jan Oort say anything about us?

Newton's Principia Mathematica set us free. . . . By finding the natural laws governing the comings and goings of comets, he decoupled the motions of the heavens from their ancient connections to our fears.

Like Babe Ruth predicting where his next home run would land in the stands, Halley stated flatly that the comet would return at the end of 1758, from a particular part of the sky, following a specific path.

Newton's laws made it possible for Edmond Halley to see some 50 years into the future and predict the behavior of a single comet.

Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now our home galaxy - the Milky Way - will merge with our neighboring galaxy - Andromeda. . . . Any life on the worlds of that far off future . . . would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show; a dance of a half a trillion stars, to music first heard on one little world, by a man who had but one true friend.

Fourth Episode: A Sky Full of Ghosts

A Telescope - "By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead." (Episode 4).

A Sky Full of Ghosts discusses two kinds of astronomical "ghosts:" first, very distant stars that have already died or transformed but whose light is still visible from Earth (used to illustrate "telescopes as time machines" and discussions between William Herschel and John Herschel) and second, black holes (used to illustrate concepts from the theory of relativity).

Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts.

When [the light we see today] left the Pleiades, about 400 years ago, Galileo was taking his first look through a telescope.

In the observed universe, everyone gets to feel special . . . at the center of the cosmic horizon. . . . It's what you get when you have a finite speed of light in a universe that had a beginning in time.

Nature commands, "Thou shalt not add my speed to the speed of light." . . . For reality to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit.

Black holes may very well be tunnels through the universe. [If you could somehow survive the ride on] this intergalactic subway system, you could travel to the farthest reaches of spacetime, or you might arrive in someplace even more amazing. We might find ourselves in an altogether different universe.

Fifth Episode: Hiding in the Light

Hiding in the Light is about electromagnetic radiation, primarily visible light. It discusses the Warring States era Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu, the Islamic Golden Age Arabic scientist Ibn Al-Hazen, the electromagnetic spectrum, Joseph von Fraunhofer, and spectroscopy.

The age and size of the cosmos are written in light. The nature of beauty and the substance of the stars, the laws of space and time they were there all along, but we never saw them until we devised a more powerful way of seeing.

In China, more than 2,000 years ago, a philosopher named Mo Tzu is said to have observed that light could be made to paint a picture inside a locked treasure room. This was the description of the first camera: the camera obscura, the prototype of all image-forming cameras (including the one that's bringing you this picture).

[The scientific method is so] powerful that it has carried our robotic emissaries to the edge of the solar system and beyond. It has doubled our lifespan, made the lost worlds of the past come alive. Science has enabled us to predict events in the distant future and to communicate with each other at the speed of light, as I am with you, right at this moment.

Show me the spectrum of anything, whether here on Earth or from a distant star, and I'll tell you what it's made of. Fraunhofer's lines are the atomic signatures of the elements writ large across the cosmos. As with every other major revelation in the history of science, it opened the way to newer and deeper mysteries.

You never know where the next genius will come from. How many of them do we leave in the rubble? The prince and his kingdom were immeasurably enriched by that act of kindness to a poor orphan.

Confining our perception of nature to visible light is like listening to music in only one octave.

Sixth Episode: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still

Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still scrutinizes the minuscule "universes" around us on the microscopic, molecular, atomic and subatomic scales. The episode explores the microscopic life contained in a dewdrop (including a discussion of photosynthesis), the neurochemistry of aromas, Thales, the atomism of Democritus, basic ideas from nuclear physics, neutrinos, Wolfgang Pauli, and the early universe.

There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies in the known universe.

The chloroplast is a three billion year-old solar energy collector. This sub-microscopic solar battery is what drives all the forests, and the fields, and the plankton of the seas, and the animals, including us.

Thales kindled a flame that still burns to this day: the very idea of cosmos out of chaos, a universe governed by the order of natural laws that we can actually figure out. This is the epic adventure that began in the mind of Thales.

The nucleus is very small compared to the rest of the atom. If an atom were the size of this cathedral, its nucleus would be the size of that mote of dust.

[The Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detector] is a trap designed to catch neutrinos only. Other particles, such as cosmic rays . . . cannot get through all that rock above us. But matter poses no obstacle to a neutrino. A neutrino could pass through a hundred light years of steel without even slowing down.

Seventh Episode: The Clean Room

The Clean Room tells how the geochemist Clair Patterson built an (essentially) lead-free cleanroom in order to ultimately determine the age of the Earth, and then how he used knowledge from this research in his subsequent campaign against the use of consumer products containing lead.

Are there any mementos from when the Earth was born, objects that could possibly tell us its true age? I know a place where the unused bricks and mortar left over from the creation of our solar system can be found. It lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars.

What better way to find the true age of the Earth than with the uranium atom? If you knew what fraction of the uranium in a rock had turned into lead, you could calculate how much time had passed since the rock was formed.

Now at last, Patterson was ready to tackle the iron meteorite, to find the true age of the Earth. [He discovered that the] world is four and a half billion years old. . . . His reward for this discovery? A world of trouble.

[T]etraethyl lead could be marketed as an anti-knock additive to gasoline [but a] half a cup of it on your skin could kill you. . . . What was needed was a man of science to calm the public's fears and improve lead's image. . . . This was one of the first times that the authority of science was used to cloak a threat to public health and the environment.

No matter where he searched on Earth, no matter how far he traveled back in time, the . . . naturally occurring [lead] levels in the air and water in the past were far lower. . . . Patterson fought the industry for [more than] 20 years before lead was finally banned in US [gasoline and other] consumer products.

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature will not be fooled.

About the quote: The above phrase, "nature will not be fooled," could be a nod by the creators of Cosmos: ASO toward Richard Feynman. Following the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 Feynman wrote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Eighth Episode: Sisters of the Sun

Sisters of the Sun is about stars, including the Sun. It considers the ancient development of primitive astronomy, the constellations, Cecilia Payne and the Harvard Observatory Computers, variations among the different kinds of stars, the Sun, and stellar evolution.

For thousands of generations we watched the stars as if our lives depended on it, because they did. . . . [O]ur ancestors noticed that the motions of the stars across the nights of the year foretold changes on Earth that threatened or enhanced our chances for survival.

[The Harvard Observatory Computers included] Annie Jump Cannon, the leader of the team [who eventually] catalogued a quarter of a million stars, [and] Henrietta Swan Leavitt [who] discovered the law that astronomers still use more than a century later to measure the distances to the stars. . . . [Cannon provided classification data to Cecilia Payne, whose] "Stellar Atmospheres" is widely regarded as the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.

There are many kinds of stars. Some are bright like the Sun. Some are dim. The greatest stars are ten million times larger than the smallest ones. Some stars are old beyond imagining, more than ten billion years of age. Others are being born right now. When atoms fuse in the hearts of stars, they make starlight. Stars are born in litters, formed from the gas and dust of interstellar clouds.

[Currently] our Sun is poised in a stable equilibrium between gravity and nuclear fire. . . . [F]our or five billion years from now . . . it will become bloated [and] will envelop and devour the planets Mercury and Venus and possibly the Earth. [Finally it will shrink] a hundredfold to the size of the Earth [and will be] a white dwarf star.

The psychedelic death shrouds of ordinary stars are fleeting, lasting only tens of thousands of years. . . . The stars in a binary star system . . . [like] Sirius [and its companion] white dwarf [will create numerous novae as the system ages]. . . . A star about 15 times as massive as the Sun - one like Rigel - [will ignite] a more powerful nuclear reaction, a supernova [which will result in a pulsar]. . . . [F]or a star more than 30 times as massive as the Sun - a star like Alnilam, in Orion's Belt - [its supernova will create] a black hole. . . . [Finally, when a supermassive star like the largest in the Eta Carinae system] goes, it won't become a mere nova or supernova. It will become something far more catastrophic - a hypernova. And it could happen in our lifetime. . . . Earth will be just fine. . . . But still, Eta Carinae in its death throes will . . . light up the night of the southern hemisphere with the brightness of a second Moon.

Ninth Episode: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth

The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth is about the Earth's palaeogeography. It analyzes Earth's geologic time scale, the End-Permian extinction event, plate tectonics (including the interior structure of the Earth and continental drift), the End-Cretaceous extinction event, and the evolutionary history of life.

[D]uring the Carboniferous Period, the atmosphere had almost twice the oxygen as today. Insects could then grow much bigger and still get enough oxygen in their bodies. That's why the dragonflies here are as big as eagles and the millipedes the size of alligators.

Two-thirds of the Earth lies beneath more than 1,000 feet of water. It's a vast and largely unexplored frontier. . . . This is the longest submarine mountain range in the world, the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge. It wraps around our globe like the seam on a baseball. The past is another planet, but most of us don't really know this one.

Few animals larger than a hundred pounds survived the catastrophes of the late Cretaceous. The dust cloud brought night and cold to the surface for months. The dinosaurs froze and starved to death. But there were small creatures who took shelter in the Earth. And when they emerged they found that the monsters who had hunted and terrorized them were gone. The Earth was becoming the Planet of the Mammals. And the Earth continued its ceaseless changing.

The way the planets tug at each other, the way the skin of the Earth moves, the way those motions affect climate and the evolution of life and intelligence - they all combined to give us the means to turn the mud of those river deltas into the first civilizations.

Congratulations. You're alive. There's an unbroken thread that stretches across more than three billion years that connects us to the first life that ever touched this world. Think of how tough, resourceful and lucky all of our countless ancestors must have been to survive long enough to pass on the message of life to the next and the next and the next generation, hundreds of millions of times before it came to us. . . . Each of us is a runner in the longest and most dangerous relay race there ever was, and at this moment, we hold the baton in our hands.

Tenth Episode: The Electric Boy

The Electric Boy uses episodes from the life of Michael Faraday to illustrate concepts related to electromagnetism, primarily electricity. It shows how Faraday's discoveries came between those of Newton and Einstein, how he began his scientific career working as an assistant for the chemist Humphry Davy, his invention of the electric motor and the generator, his discovery that electricity, magnetism and light are related, his perceptions related to magnetic fields as "lines of force" (followed by a discussion of Earth's magnetic field), and the use of Faraday's experimental results by James Clerk Maxwell in formulating Maxwell's Equations (which in turn make modern telecommunications possible).

I could be thousands of miles away, and yet, when you turn on whatever device is bringing my image and voice to you, I'm there. Instantaneously. How is that possible? . . . It all began in the mind of one person. . . . This is the story of how we learned to make electrons do our bidding.

This was the first motor converting electric current into continuous mechanical motion. Looks pretty feeble, right? But that turning spindle is the beginning of a revolution, one that dwarfs all the shots fired and bombs ever detonated in the sheer magnitude of its effect on our civilization.

By age 40, [Michael Faraday] had invented the electric motor, the transformer, the generator; machines that would change everything about the home, the farm, the factory. Now, at 60 . . . plagued by memory loss and melancholy, he fearlessly probed deeper into the mysterious invisible forces. . . . Having discovered the unity of electricity, magnetism and light, Faraday needed to know how this trinity of natural forces work together.

[W]hy does our planet have a magnetic field at all? . . . Liquid iron, circulating around the solid part of the core as Earth rotates, acts like a wire carrying an electric current. And as Faraday showed us, electric currents produce magnetic fields. And that's a good thing. Our magnetic field protects us from the onslaught of cosmic rays, which would be very damaging to our biosphere.

[Faraday's] fellow scientists . . . needed to see his ideas expressed in the language of modern physics - precise equations. [Then] James Clerk Maxwell . . . translated Faraday's experimental observations on electromagnetic fields into equations [and helped transform] human civilization from a patchwork of cities, towns and villages into an intercommunicating organism linking us at light speed to each other and to the cosmos.

Eleventh Episode: The Immortals

The Immortals explores how continuous perpetuation of the "message of life" (the genetic information encoded in DNA) gives a kind of immortality to living beings and their descendants. It describes the invention of writing, the possibility that life arose independently on Earth or that it may have been transported here (perhaps from Mars), the search for life outside of Earth's biosphere, attempts to detect messages from intelligent non-Earth beings, the collapse of ancient civilizations and the need to ensure the continued viability of our own current global civilization.

[L]ife itself sends its own stories across billions of years. It's a message that every one of us carries inside, inscribed in all the cells of our bodies, in a language that all life on Earth can read. The genetic code is written in an alphabet consisting of only four letters. Each letter is a molecule made of atoms; each word is three letters long.

The essential message of life has been copied and recopied for more than 3 billion years. But where did that message come from? Nobody knows. Perhaps it began in a shallow, sunlit pool, just like this. . . . Or life could've started in the searing heat of a volcanic vent on the deep sea floor. Or is it possible that life came to Earth as a hitchhiker?

We've encoded our stories in radio waves and beamed them into space . . . for over 70 years. [And since] 1960, we've been listening for extraterrestrial radio signals without hearing so much as a tolling bell. . . . For all we know, we may have just missed an alien signal. [Or perhaps a civilization] even slightly more advanced than ours may have already moved on to some other mode of communication.

Whether or not we ever make contact with intelligent alien life may depend on a critical question: What is the life expectancy of a civilization? . . . Today, we have a single global civilization. How long will it live? . . . We're pumping greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere at a rate not seen on Earth for a million years. And there's scientific consensus that we're destabilizing our climate.

The next golden age of human achievement begins here and now: New Year's Day of the next cosmic year. In the first tenth of a second, we take the vision of the Pale Blue Dot to heart, and learn how to share this tiny world with each other . . . as the effects of climate change reverse and diminish. A fifth of a second into this future people will stop dying from the effects of poverty. The planet is now a completely self-sustaining, intercommunicating organism.

Twelfth Episode: The World Set Free

The World Set Free is about global warming caused by humans. It examines the current greenhouse effect on Venus, storage of most carbon on Earth as a mineral, how human burning of fossil fuels is increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and is thus heating up the Earth's biosphere, and renewable energy as a solution to ameliorate the effects of global warming.

Why is Venus scorching hot? It's because . . . the flow of energy is blocked by a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. . . . Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect.

By burning coal, oil and gas, our civilization is exhaling carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can absorb it. So, CO₂ is building up in the atmosphere. The planet is heating up.

It's a pretty tight case. Our fingerprints are all over this one.

Keep your eye on the man, not the dog. (Comparing the gradual curve of Tyson's path along a beach to climate and the erratic path of a dog Tyson is holding on a leash to weather.)

More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere.

We looked back on our way to the Moon and saw "one world, indivisible, and kind of small. . . . This . . . was the unexpected gift of Apollo."

Thirteenth Episode: Unafraid of the Dark

Unafraid of the Dark is the series recapitulation. It discusses the Voyager probes, dark matter, dark energy, and the use of science and reason to illuminate the path away from ignorance.

[M]ore than two millennia ago, in the city of Alexandria . . . [t]he Ptolemys [built] the greatest library on Earth. . . . The total work product of the awakening of ancient civilization was kept here. . . . And all of it, all of this is but a tiny fraction of the information that you have at your fingertips at this very moment [in] our own electronic Library of Alexandria.

There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale to push the cosmos apart. . . . We call it "dark energy," but that name, like "dark matter," is merely a code word for our ignorance. It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.

The difference between seeing nothing but a pebble and reading the history of the cosmos inscribed inside it is science. (Discussing a slow-growing manganese nodule from the ocean floor which shows that a star near the Earth went supernova within the last two million years or so.)

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. 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. (Recording of Carl Sagan's voice over a re-imagining of the "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth taken by Voyager 1.)

How did we escape from the prison [of ignorance]? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart. (1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. Think for yourself. Question yourself. (2) Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. (3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong! Get over it. (4) Follow the evidence, wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all: (5) Remember, you could be wrong.

Quotes about Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Open your eyes, and open your imagination. The next great discovery could be yours. - U.S. President Barack Obama, introducing the series premiere.

What Cosmos has, at its heart, is hope. It's about the future we could have if we get our act together. - Ann Druyan, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos, as well as an executive producer and director for the 2014 Cosmos.

Civilization {should know} how to preserve itself. That's a good measure of intelligence, isn't it? Seeing what you're doing that's bad, and fixing that problem. - Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, series presenter / host.

The important thing is not to suppress ideas. Freedom of thought is the life blood of science. That’s why {Giordano} Bruno’s story is important. - Astrophysicist Steven Soter, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos.

We've reached a point in time where we've gotten a little lax with our enthusiasm about science and our thirst for knowledge. . . . I hope that this Cosmos can instigate a reawakening of the same enthusiasm for science that the original Cosmos brought. - Seth MacFarlane, series executive producer.

My greatest hope for this new Cosmos is that it has the same impact on someone, somewhere that the original had on me. Because it inspired in me a great interest in science, and in my case, science fiction. - Brannon Braga, series executive producer.

External links

Wikipedia

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Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Seth MacFarlane
Television	Animated TV series	Family Guy (1999–2003, 2005–present) · American Dad! (2005–present) · The Cleveland Show (2009–13)
	Live‑action TV series	Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014)
	Television hosting	Saturday Night Live (2012)
Films	Ted (2012) · A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) · Ted 2 (2015)
See also	The Life of Larry and Larry & Steve