Fox | Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey trailer, sequel to Carl Sagan’s iconic 1980 PBS series

July 23, 2013

Full episodes are now available for viewing at this link: Fox | Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Entertainment Weekly | Fox has debuted the trailer for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a follow-up to Carl Sagan’s iconic 1980 PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Among sweeping shots of valleys and mountains are pictures of the solar system and the infinite blackness of areas of the universe. Part animation and part awe-inspiring real shots, the documentary series, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, will premiere spring 2014 and hopefully get people excited about science.

Fox | More than three decades after the debut of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Carl Sagan’s stunning and iconic exploration of the universe as revealed by science, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey sets off on a new voyage for the stars. Seth MacFarlane and Sagan’s original creative collaborators, writer and executive producer Ann Druyan and astronomer Steven Soter, have teamed to conceive a 13-part docu-series that will serve as a successor to the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning original series.

Hosted by renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the series will explore how we discovered the laws of nature and found our coordinates in space and time. It will bring to life never-before-told stories of the heroic quest for knowledge and transport viewers to new worlds and across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey will invent new modes of scientific storytelling to reveal the grandeur of the universe and re-invent celebrated elements of the legendary original series, including the Cosmic Calendar and the Ship of the Imagination. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.

Carl Sagan’s original series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was first broadcast in 1980, and has been enjoyed by more than 750 million people worldwide.


season 1 episodes:

episode 1 | “Standing up in the Milky Way”

Wikipedia | The show begins with a brief introduction recorded by United States President Barack Obama to describe the spirit of discovery the series aspires to give its viewers. Tyson takes a tour of our solar system with a Ship of Imagination, going through the known universe, and establishing the components of Earth’s “address” within the Virgo Supercluster. He then shares the story of Renaissance Italian Giordano Bruno’s vision of the universe. He then makes an exploration into the Cosmic Calendar, which dates back to the dawn of the Big Bang (similar to the presentation from episode 1 of the original series). Tyson gives a tribute to Carl Sagan, who hosted the first Cosmos series, for his contributions to the scientific community, and narrating how he came to know him.

episode 2 | “Some of the things that molecules do”

Wikipedia | The story begins with Tyson sitting at a campfire, and telling how the wolf changed through artificial selection, and selective breeding into dog breeds of today. In the Ship of Imagination, and explains natural selection with the process that helped to create the polar bears. Along the way he talks about DNA, genes and mutation. He goes to a forest and describes the tree of life, and the evolution of the eye. He then discusses extinction, by going to a monument called the Halls of Extinction, dedicated to the broken branches of the tree of life, and explaining the five great extinction events. He shows how some life has survived, and then focuses on the tardigrade. He discusses what other kinds of life could have evolved on other worlds. He then goes to Saturn’s moon Titan. He speculates about life and how it first began. He then returns to Earth and explaims abiogenesis and how life changed and evolved. The show ends with an animated sequence from the original series of life’s evolution from one cell to humans.

episode 3 | “When knowledge conquered fear”

episode 4 | “A sky full of ghosts”


related reading:
Entertainment Weekly | “Fox’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey trailer, get ready to feel really small”
Fox | Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
Wikipedia | Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
Wikipedia | Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey