Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - Definition and Overview

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was the name of a thirteen part television series produced by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan which was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980. It won an Emmy and a Peabody award and has been since broadcast in 60 countries and seen by more than 500 million people, according to the NASA Office of Space Science.

The show's format is based on previous BBC documentaries such as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man and David Attenborough's Life on Earth. (The BBC repaid the compliment by screening the series, but episodes were cut to fit 50-minute slots and shown late at night.) However, unlike those series, which were shot entirely on film, Cosmos used videotape for interior scenes and special effects with film being used for exteriors.

The series is notable for its groundbreaking use of special effects, which allowed Sagan to apparently walk through environments that were actually models rather than full-sized sets.

Sagan's historical description of Hypatia of Alexandria and the burning of the Library of Alexandria has been criticized by historians who interpret the sources on Hypatia's life and the end of the library differently and who believe that Sagan should have made clear that there is a scholarly controversy on this issue. Other parts of Cosmos were controversial among the general public, though hardly among scientists, such as Sagan's straight-forward treatment of astrology as a pseudoscience and his equally straight-forward description of biological evolution.

Cosmos had long been unavailable after its initial release because of copyright issues with the included music[1] (http://bluepoint.egenet.net/sagan/music.html), but was released in 2000 on Region 0 NTSC DVD which includes subtitles in seven international languages. When the series was released on home video in North America in the late 1980s, a 14th episode was added which consisted of an interview between Sagan and Ted Turner. In 1990, for the 10th anniversary of the series, Sagan videotaped new epilogues for each episode in which he discussed new discoveries (and alternate viewpoints) that had arisen since the original broadcast.

The thirteen parts are:

I: The Shores Of the Cosmic Ocean

• Light years, galaxies, stars, planets: numbers and distances, where we are located (the Local Group)
• Eratosthenes and the circumference of Earth
• The Library of Alexandria
• The Cosmic Calendar: from the beginning of the universe to the "arrival" of humans

II: One Voice In the Cosmic Fugue

• Evolution through natural selection, from microbes to man
• Speculation about life in Jupiter's clouds
• Creation of the "molecules of life" in a laboratory experiment
• The development of life on the Cosmic Calendar, and the Cambrian Explosion

III: The Harmony Of the Worlds

• Astronomy vs. Astrology
• Ptolemy and the geocentric world view
• Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe
• Kepler's laws

IV: Heaven and Hell

• The Tunguska event, the composition and origin of comets
• Asteroids and impact craters
• The planet Venus in fiction and fact
• Venus as an example of the greenhouse effect

V: Blues For A Red Planet

• H. G. Wells and The War of the Worlds
• Percival Lowell's false vision of "canals" on Mars
• Robert Goddard and early rocket-building
• The Viking probes and their search for life on Mars

VI: Travellers' Tales

• The Netherlands in the 17th century
• The life and work of Christian Huygens and his contemporaries
• The Voyager probes (first images of Jupiter and its moons)

VII: The Backbone of Night

• The realization that stars are suns
• The Milky Way and its history in culture
• The Ionian philosophers: Anaximander, Democritus, Pythagoras, Aristarchus, Empedocles, Thales
• Teaching children about the cosmos

VIII: Travels In Space and Time

• Constellations and how they change over time
• The speed of light and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity
  • Time dilation, red-shift, blue-shift
• Leonardo da Vinci's designs and designs for spaceships that could travel near light speed
• Time travel and its hypothetical effects on human history
• The origins of the solar system and possible other worlds; the history of life (some redundancy with episode II)

IX: The Lives Of the Stars

• Powers of ten, the googol and the googolplex, infinity
• Atoms (electrons, protons, neutrons)
  • The periodic table of elements
• The creation of different atomic nuclei in stars
• The lifecycle of stars; white dwarves, neutron stars, black holes,
• The end of the Sun and of Earth, supernovae, red giants, pulsars
• Radioactivity and cosmic rays
• Gravity and its effects; gravity as the curvature of space-time, the wormhole hypothesis

X: The Edge Of Forever

• The origins of the universe, the Big Bang hypothesis
• Types of galaxies, galaxy collisions, quasars
• The Doppler effect, life and work of Milton Humason
• The four-dimensional universe
• God vs. an infinite universe; myths of creation, esp. Hindu cosmology
• Contracting and re-expanding vs. ever-expanding universe
• The Very Large Array in New Mexico, dark matter, the multiverse hypothesis

XI: The Persistence Of Memory

• Bits, the basic units of information
• The diversity of life in the oceans
• Whales and their songs
  • The disturbance of the whale communications network by humans
  • Whale hunting
• The DNA and the brain as libraries
• The structure of the human brain: brain stem, Paul McLean's Triune Brain Model: reptile brain, limbic system, cerebral cortex
• The frontal lobes as critical in long term planing
• Neurons and connections between them, the two brain hemispheres, the corpus callosum
• The evolution of cities and the history of libraries, books and writing
• The development of computers and satellites, the potential for global collective intelligence
• Intelligence on other worlds and the Voyager Golden Record

XII: Encyclopedia Galactica

XIII: Who Speaks For Earth? Carl Sagan also wrote a book called Cosmos (1980), which is similarly structured and contains most of the information from the series, and some information not found in it. This book is still in print as of 2002.

The sequel to Cosmos is Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994).