| PROLOGUE |

I was a child in a time of hope. I wanted to be a scientist from

my earliest school days. The crystallizing moment came
when I first caught on that the stars are mighty suns, when it
first dawned on me how staggeringly far away they must be
to appear as mere points of light in the sky. I’m not sure
I even knew the meaning of the word “science” then, but
I wanted somehow to immerse myself in all that grandeur.
I was gripped by the splendor of the Universe, transfixed
by the prospect of understanding how things really work,
of helping to uncover deep mysteries, of exploring new
worlds—maybe even literally. It has been my good fortune to
have had that dream in part fulfilled. For me,
the romance of science remains as appealing and new as it
was on that day, more than half a century ago, when
I was shown the wonders of the 1939 World’s Fair.
—CARL SAGAN,
THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

A contemporary poster highlights the Trylon and Perisphere, iconic symbols

of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
O
n a rainy night in Queens, the future became a place,
one you could visit. A downpour at sunset in Flushing
Meadows couldn’t discourage the 200,000 people who
had gathered there for the opening ceremony of the 1939 New York
World’s Fair, whose theme was the “World of Tomorrow.” Before
it closed in the fall of 1940, 45 million visitors would travel to this
art deco land of promises.
One of them was a five-year-old boy whose parents were so
poor that they had brought their own brown-bag lunch. The
20 cents for a dish of chocolate ice cream topped with fluffy
whipped cream was out of their reach, as were the blue and orange
Bakelite flashlights and key rings that the boy craved. The apple
from home would have to do for dessert. Despite his tantrums, the
child came away empty- handed—but with the coordinates for
his life trajectory set. At the playground in the Hall of Electrical
Living, he was allowed to operate an infrared musical light beam,
which enchanted him. He had fallen in love with the place called
the future, and grasped that the only way to get there was science.
Dreams are maps.
The aspirations of this possible world were as egalitarian as
they were scientific. In fact, one of its model communities was

Futurama, the 1939 World’s Fair’s city of 1960, presaged tiered modern
highways and garden-topped skyscrapers.

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 COSMOS:POSSIBLEWORLDS

known as “Democracity.” There were no slums—but there was a

television set, a word processor, and a robot. It was there, for the
first time, people saw these things that would change their lives.
But on this last night of April, they had come to hear the greatest
scientific genius since Isaac Newton saya few words. Albert Einstein
was the opening act for a dramatic production number that would
choreograph forces of nature as if they were the synchronized swim-
mers in the water ballet at the fair’s Aquacade. Einstein was to give
brief opening remarks and flip the switch that would illuminate the
fair. The spectacle promised to be the largest flash of man-made
light in technical history, visible for a radius of 40 miles. A wow—
but not as mind-blowing as the source of this sudden, unprece-
dented brilliance.
Across the East River in Manhattan, Professor W. H. Barton, Jr.,
of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural
History was calibrating instruments that would grab mysterious
thunderbolts from unknown parts of the universe and turn them
into light, seizing power from the cosmos just as Prometheus stole
fire from the gods.
A few decades earlier, a scientist named Victor Hess had discov-
ered that the universe was reaching out totouch our world many times
a day. Streaks of radiation in the form of charged particles were strik-
ing Earth. A single proton could contain the energy of a baseball
pitchedat 60 milesanhour. Theycametobecalledcosmicrays. Three
oversize Geiger counters were installed at the Hayden Planetarium to
capture 10 cosmic rays for the momentous opening of the World’s Fair.
Once ensnared by the Geiger counters, their energy was to be
magnified through vacuum tubes and then transmitted across a
network of wires to Queens, where Einstein and the crowd were
waiting. The cosmic rays would supply the energy that would turn
night into day, flooding with blinding light a new world made pos-
sible by science.
But first, it fell to Einstein to explain cosmic rays to the public.
He was instructed to keep it to 700 words at most. Initially he

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 Prologue

refused. Impossible, he thought. Cosmic rays were a mystery to

Einstein and his contemporaries, and to the scientific community
when I began writing this book. But such is the relentless probing
of science that, as I was completing the final draft of this book,
cosmic rays were revealed to be from distant galaxies, generated
by some of the most violent processes in the universe.
Einstein thought that 700 words couldn’t possibly be enough
to explain the complexity of this mysterious phenomenon. But
above all, he was a true believer in the scientist’s duty to commu-
nicate with the public. And so he agreed to give the talk.
Imagine that last night of April 1939, an evening more freighted
with cinematic foreshadowing than many a movie. The world was
mere months away from the German invasion of Poland, the start of
the Second World War, the most catastrophic global bloodletting in
human history. A five-year-old Carl Sagan couldn’t have a fancy
dessert and the World’s Fair souvenirs he coveted because his parents
and the rest of humanity still hadn’t crawled out of the impoverish-
ment of the worst economic depression that ever was. In Germany,
where hyperinflation in the 1930s meant a wheelbarrow wasrequired
to carry enough paper money to purchase a loaf of bread, the des-
perate population turned to a demagogue. And yet, on a planet that
was about to murder 60 million of its own, and to impose unimag-
inable suffering on tens of millions more, a world with some of the
dimmest prospects in human history, people came together in mas-
sive numbers to celebrate, even worship . . . the future.
As the sun was setting, Einstein stepped up to the microphone.
He had just turned 60 the month before and had already enjoyed
decades of the rarest form of iconic celebrity, a renown based on his
discoveries of new physical realities on the grandest possible scale.
For 2,400 years, since the time of the Greek genius Democritus,
scientists had theorized about the existence of invisible units of
matter called “atoms,” but no one had been able to demonstrate
that they were real. When Einstein was 25, he provided the first
definitive evidence for atoms, and their collectives, molecules. He

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 COSMOS:POSSIBLEWORLDS

even measured their sizes. He challenged the dominant wave the-

ory of light and proposed that light traveled as packets of particles
called photons. He provided the foundation for quantum mechan-
ics. He expanded classical physics by discovering the energy inher-
ent in particles at rest.
And he realized that gravity bends light. The formula he devised
to express this idea is the equation that we both already know
because it is the most famous scientific/mathematical statement
of all. He took Newton’s law of universal gravitation to a new level
when he understood it as a property of spacetime. This was the
gateway to modern astrophysics and to exploring the darkest places
of the universe, where light is imprisoned by gravity.
Einstein began to speak. Those who stood there in the rain that
night to hear him were only a fraction of those in the United States
and around the planet who listened to the event on radio. He told
the crowd about Victor Hess, the Austrian physicist who had dis-
covered cosmic rays by making a series of perilous high-altitude
hot-air balloon trips between 1911 and 1913. Einstein used up some
of his meager 700-word allotment to remind the world of Hess’s
status as an immigrant, “who incidentally, like so many others has
recently had to seek refuge in this hospitable country.” He went on
to explain what scientists knew about the cosmic rays, and con-
cluded by speculating that they could provide the key to the “inner-
most structure of matter.”
An announcer’s voice boomed across the Queens night: “We will
now call on these interplanetary messengers to reveal the World of
Tomorrow; the first ray that we will catch is still five million miles
away, traveling toward us at the rate of 186,000 miles per second.” A
roll call began as each cosmic ray arrived and registered on one of the
Geiger counters. But when they got to the 10th and Einstein flicked
the switch, it was simply too much for the wiring system; some of the
lights blew. Still, it was magnificent. The way to the future was open.
The next day, the New York Times reported that due to the
heaviness of Einstein’s accent and the dueling acoustics of the

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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.

Voyagers’ planned mission of exploration. We had already collabo-

ratedonatelevisionproject.Itwasneverproduced,butthatexperience
of thinking together moved Carl to ask me to be the creative director
of the message that would become known as the golden record.
It was Carl’s vision that once Voyager 1 completed its epochal
reconnaissance of what was then thought of as the outer solar sys-
tem, and sent back its final image of Neptune, it should turn its
camera homeward to document our world. For years, he mounted
a one-man campaign within NASA and was met with strenuous
objections. What possible scientific value could such a picture have?
But Carl was convinced of the potentially transformative impact of
that image. He would not take no for an answer. By the time Voyager
1 was high above the plane of our solar system, NASA gave in. The
family album photos of the worlds of our solar system were taken,
including one of an Earth so small, you had to strain to find it.
The “pale blue dot” image and Carl’s prose meditation on it have
been beloved the world over ever since. It exemplifies just the kind
of breakthrough that I think of as a fulfillment of Einstein’s hope for

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 Prologue

science. We have gotten clever enough to dispatch a spacecraft four

billion miles away and command it tosend us back an image of Earth.
Seeing our world as a single pixel in the immense darkness is in itself
astatement about our true circumstances in the cosmos, and one that
everysinglehumancangraspinstantly.Noadvanceddegreerequired.
In that photo, the inner meaning of four centuries of astronomical
research is suddenly available to all of us at a glance. It is scientific
data and art equally, because it has the power to reach into our souls
and alter our consciousness. It is like a great book or movie, or any
major work of art. It can pierce our denial and allow us to feel some-
thing of reality—even a reality that some of us have long resisted.
A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of
all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is
a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist,
thepolluter—to anyonewho does notputaboveall otherthings the
protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast
cold darkness. There is no running away from the inner meaning
of this scientific achievement.
We didn’t know that particular Einstein quote when Carl and I
began writing the original Cosmos in 1980 with astronomer Steven
Soter. We just felt a kind of evangelical urgency to share the awe-
some powerof science, to convey thespiritualupliftof theuniverse
it reveals, and to amplify the alarms that Carl, Steve, and other
scientists were sounding about our impact on the planet. Cosmos
gave voice to those forebodings, but it was also suffused with hope,
with a sense of human self-esteem derived, in part, from our suc-
cesses in finding our way in the universe, and from the courage of
those scientists who dared to uncover and express forbidden truths.
The original award-winning Cosmos television series and book
of 1980 was embraced by hundreds of millions of people around
our world. According to the Library of Congress, it is one of only
“88 books that shaped America,” included in the same category as
Common Sense, The Federalist, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, Invisi-
ble Man, and Silent Spring.

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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

Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan in 1980, during the production of

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage in Los Angeles

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 COSMOS:POSSIBLEWORLDS

hopes and fears, to embrace theother’s reality. This kind of unflinch-

ing love never stops daring to go deeper, to reach higher.
This is precisely the way that science loves nature. This lack of
a final destination, an absolute truth, is what makes science such
a worthy methodology for sacred searching. It is a never ending
lesson in humility. The vastness of the universe—and love, the
thing that makes the vastness bearable—is out of reach to the arro-
gant. This cosmos only fully admits those who listen carefully for
the inner voice reminding us to remember we might be wrong.
What’s real must matter more to us than what we wish to believe.
But how do we tell the difference?
I know a way to part the curtains of darkness that prevent us
from having a complete experience of nature. Here it is, the basic
rules of the road for science: Test ideas by experiment and obser-
vation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that
fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything,
including authority. Do these things and the cosmos is yours.
If the series of pilgrimages toward understanding our actual
circumstances in the universe, the origin of life, and the laws of
nature are not spiritual quests, then I don’t know what could be.
I am not a scientist, just a hunter-gatherer of stories. The ones
I treasure most are those about the searchers who have helped us
find our way in the great dark ocean, and the islands of light they
left to us.
Here are stories of searchers who dared to venture into the
bottomless ocean of the cosmos. Let’s travel together to the worlds
they discovered—the lost worlds, the worlds that still flourish, and
the worlds yet to come.
In the pages that follow, I want to tell you the story about the
unknown genius who sent a letter 50 years into the future that
guided the successful Apollo mission to the moon. And another
about the scientist who made contact with an ancient life-form
which, like us, uses symbolic language to communicate. These
beings who reflexively make mathematical calculations informed

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 Prologue

by physics and astronomy live a commitment to a consensual

democracy that puts ours to shame.
I want to take you to the worlds that science has made it possible
for us to imagine, bring back to life, and even visit: one where it rains
diamonds, and the ancient city at the bottom of the sea where life
on Earth may have begun. I want you to witness what is perhaps the
most intimate stellar relationship in the cosmos, two stars locked in
perpetual embrace, joined bya bridge of fire eight million miles long.
Let’s eavesdrop together on the hidden worldwide terrestrial
network that is an ancient collaboration among the kingdoms of
life. I want to tell you about the little-known scientist who provided
the key to a long-lost world. This same man also exposed a logical
hole in reality more than 200 years ago, one that still remains unex-
plained, despite Einstein’s best efforts.
Most heart-wrenching to me is the passion of the man who
chose a slow horrible death at the hands of one of the most terrify-
ing murderers in history. He might have saved himself by telling a
scientific lie. But he just couldn’t. His disciples willingly followed
him into martyrdom to protect what must have been nothing more
than an abstraction to them—the generations to come. Us.
Which brings us to the possible world that excites me the
most—the future we can still have on this one. The misuse of sci-
ence endangers our civilization, but science also has redemptive
powers. It can cleanse a planetary atmosphere overburdened with
carbon dioxide. It can set life free to neutralize the toxins that we
have scattered so carelessly. In a society that aspires to become a
democracy, a conscious and motivated public can will this possible
world into existence.
These are stories that make me more optimistic about our
future. Through them I have come to feel more intensely the
romance of science and thewonder of being alive right now, at these
particular coordinates in spacetime, less alone, more at home, here
in the cosmos.
—ANN DRUYAN

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