Tag Archives: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

COSMOS: my thoughts

Completed Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Thank you to host Neil deGrasse Tyson, composer Alan Silvestri, executive producer Seth MacFarlane, executive producer, writer, and director Ann Druyan, and of course the late, great Carl Sagan. Cosmos is a true masterpiece of knowledge and wonder. Spectacular, from top to bottom: live, on-location shoots; cinema-level CG animation; stylized traditional animation; an inspiring host in Dr. Tyson, who makes all of the science exciting and easily digestible; and a magical score imagined by Silvestri. Traveling through space and time on the modernized Ship of the Imagination across the past, present, and future is a wildly entertaining, visually breathtaking, and wholly educational experience. Personally I’ve always been fascinated by science; Cosmos has opened my eyes even wider to the enormous spectrum of knowledge out there today and the knowledge waiting to be discovered. How exactly does dark matter and dark energy work? Will alien life ever discover our Voyager spacecraft? What happened before the Big Bang? What lies beyond the Observable Universe? Equally as important, Cosmos reaches out and grips you about the concerning realities about how we are treating our planet and it envisions very different futures for us depending on the vital actions we take next. A “Cosmic Calendar,” introduced in the first episode of the 13-part series, visualizes and condenses our universe’s 13.8 billion year lifespan into a single, glanceable year; it might make you feel tiny in our vast universe (humanity occupies the last day in the last second of the entire calendar) but it provides such amazing insight into our existence, where we come from, and where we may be heading next. In sum, I highly recommend you carve out time in your lives to take an exciting journey into spacetime; it’s unlike anything else you’ve seen on TV before and you’ll come out of it awestruck, inspired, and most of all, with an expanded mind and a new passion to question everything around you.

Comic Con: Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey’ (teaser inside)

FOX is rebooting Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (a 13-part TV series that aired in 1980 on PBS) with Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Sagan’s original creative collaborators, namely writer/executive producer Ann Druyan and astronomer Steven Soter, along with executive producer Seth MacFarline (yes, of Family Guy fame) have teamed together to continue where Sagan left off.

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.

When asked why do a reboot, Sagan’s wife Ann Druyan explained, “Well, it’s a very big universe, and in the first series we covered a lot of territory. But there’s so much left. We have new stories that have yet to be told.” She promises it “is as accessible as the first one and contains information that’s at times arcane, that at other times is as less complicated. But it’s for everyone.”

Interested in exploring the mysteries of space? Then the 13-part docu-series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey–premiering in 2014 on FOX–is a can’t miss TV event. See how cool science can be in the teaser trailer posted after the break. Continue reading Comic Con: Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey’ (teaser inside)