The new season of Cosmos, which premieres tonight, demonstrates the remarkable stickiness of a great idea. In 1973 — years before there was Cosmos the book and Cosmos the original television series — Carl Sagan wrote a book called The Cosmic Connection. It mixed cutting-edge astronomical discoveries with informed speculation, philosophical ruminations on the scientific method, and elements of personal memoir.
It was a science book not quite like any that had been published before. Sagan subtitled it "An Extraterrestrial Perspective," and that is how it read. It was a deeply personal, quirky, passionate account told by someone whose mind had just returned from a journey far, far beyond Earth (billions and billions of miles away, you might say). I read it as a child and was captivated. I had a lot of good company. The Cosmic Connection was a hit, Sagan ended up as a semi-regular guest on The Tonight Show, and for many people he became the definitive public face of science.
The connection that began with that book remains unbroken. In 1980, The Cosmic Connection begat the Cosmos TV show on PBS, which has reportedly been seen by 500 million people around the world. Sagan died in 1996 but his voice returned in a 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, again co-created by Sagan's widow Ann Druyan and now hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I had some quibbles with the show's history, but enormous admiration for its message and its creativity.
Now Cosmos and the essence of Sagan are back for Cosmos: Possible Worlds, with Tyson once again piloting the show's signature "spaceship of the imagination."
