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Cosmos: Possible Worlds
Cosmos: Possible Worlds
Futurama, the 1939 World’s Fair’s city of 1960, presaged tiered modern
highways and garden-topped skyscrapers.
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COSMOS:POSSIBLEWORLDS
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Prologue
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COSMOS:POSSIBLEWORLDS
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The most respected mind on the planet opens the 1939 New
York World’s Fair with a challenge to science.
amplifiers, those attending heard not much more than the words
that began his speech: “If science, like art, is to perform its mis-
sion truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only super-
ficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of
the people.”
This always has been and always will be, the dream of Cosmos.
When I stumbled upon Einstein’s rarely quoted words of that night
during some random late-night wandering on YouTube, I found
the credo for 40 years of my life’s work. Einstein was urging us to
tear down the walls around science that have excluded and intim-
idated so many of us—to translate scientific insights from the
technical jargon of its priesthood into the spoken language shared
by usall, so thatwemay taketheseinsights to heartandbechanged
by a personal encounter with the wonders they reveal.
Carl Sagan and I fell in love in 1977 during our collaboration on
NASA’sVoyagerinterstellarmessage.Carlwasbythattimeacelebrated
astrophysicist, communicator, and a principal investigator on the
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COSMOS:POSSIBLEWORLDS
NASA’s 1977 Voyagers 1 and 2 carry a complex interstellar message deep into the Milky
Way galaxy and five billion years into the future. The etchings on the cover are scientific
hieroglyphs indicating our cosmic address and instructions for playing the record.
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Prologue
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Prologue
And so it was with a fair degree of fear that I set out with Steve,
a dozen years after Carl’s death, to undertake another 13 hours of
the series, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey. My waking nightmare
throughout the six years it took to write and produce was that my
personal limitations would reflect poorly on Carl, whom I love and
admire infinitely.
This, my third series of voyages on the Ship of the Imagination,
marks my 40th year of writing Cosmos. The Ship and the Cosmic
Calendarare not theonlyartifactsfrompreviousflights. Sometropes,
anecdotes, and teaching tools, in my view, have unrivaled explana-
tory power, and so I bring them along on this journey, too. Inevitably,
there will be some repetitions and overlap from concepts Carl and I
expressed previously, but they are now more urgent than before.
I am blessed once again to have brilliant collaborators, and I
am still worried about not measuring up. Despite this, the times
impel me forward.
We all feel the chill our present casts on our future. Some part
of us knows that we must awaken to action or doom our children
to dangers and hardships we ourselves have never had to face.
How do we rouse ourselves and keep from sleepwalking into a
climate or a nuclear catastrophe that may not be reversed before
it has destroyed our civilization and countless other species? How
do we learn to value those things we cannot live without—air,
water, the sustaining fabric of life on Earth, the future—more than
we prize money and short-term convenience? Nothing less than
a global spiritual awakening can transform us into who we must
become.
Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence, to that
soaring experience of the oneness of being fully alive. The scientific
approach to nature and my understanding of love are the same:
Love asks us to get beyond the infantile projections of our personal
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COSMOS:POSSIBLEWORLDS
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Prologue
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