Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

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Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is the name of a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as global presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers and David Oyster, Richard Wells, Tom Weidlinger, and others. It covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe. The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until 1990's The Civil War, and is still the most widely watched PBS series in the world.^[1] It won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 600 million people, according to the Science Channel. A book to accompany the series was also published.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Episodes 2.1 Episode 1: "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" 2.2 Episode 2: "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue" 2.3 Episode 3: "The Harmony of the Worlds" 2.4 Episode 4: "Heaven and Hell" 2.5 Episode 5: "Blues for a Red Planet" 2.6 Episode 6: "Travelers' Tales" 2.7 Episode 7: "The Backbone of Night" 2.8 Episode 8: "Journeys in Space and Time" 2.9 Episode 9: "The Lives of the Stars" 2.10 Episode 10: "The Edge of Forever" 2.11 Episode 11: "The Persistence of Memory" 2.12 Episode 12: "Encyclopedia Galactica" 2.13 Episode 13: "Who Speaks for Earth?" 2.14 Episode 14 3 Cosmos, a special edition 4 External links

[edit] Overview

Cosmos was produced in 1978 and 1979 by Los Angeles PBS affiliate KCET on a roughly $6.3 million budget, with over $2 million additionally allocated to promotion. KCET later alleged that the station eventually went $3 million into debt as a result, though there is dispute on the details of exactly what happened. 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 — a co-producer of Cosmos — 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. The soundtrack counted with pieces of music provided by Greek composer Vangelis such as Alpha, Pulstar, and Heaven and Hell Part 1 (the last movement serving as the signature theme music for the show, and is directly referenced by the title of episode 4). Throughout the 13 hours of the series it used many tracks from several 1970s albums such as Albedo 0.39, Spiral, Ignacio, Beaubourg and China. The worldwide success of the documentary series also put Vangelis' music in the homes and to the attention of a global audience.

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 straightforward treatment of astrology as a pseudoscience and his equally straightforward description of biological evolution.

Turner Home Entertainment purchased Cosmos from series producer KCET in 1989. In making the move to commercial television, the hour-long episodes were edited down to shorter lengths, and Sagan shot new epilogues for several episodes in which he discussed new discoveries (and alternate viewpoints) that had arisen since the original broadcast. Additionally, a 14th episode was added which consisted of an interview between Sagan and Ted Turner, and this "new" version of the series was eventually released as a VHS box set.

Cosmos had long been unavailable after its initial release because of copyright issues with the included music, but was released in 2000 on Region 0 NTSC DVD which includes subtitles in seven languages, remastered 5.1 sound, as well as an alternate music and sound effects track. In 2005 The Science Channel rebroadcast the series for its 25th anniversary with updated computer graphics, film footage, and digital sound.

[edit] Episodes

[edit] Episode 1: "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean"

• Light-years, galaxies, stars, planets, where we are located (the Local Group)
• Eratosthenes and the circumference of Earth
• The modern-day city of Alexandria in Egypt
  • The ancient Library of Alexandria
• The Cosmic Calendar: from the beginning of the universe to the arrival of humans

[edit] Episode 2: "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue"

• The story of the Heike and artificial selection of crabs resembling samurai warriors
• Evolution through natural selection
• The development of life on the Cosmic Calendar, and the Cambrian explosion
• Animated evolution, from microbes to man
• Common biochemistry of terrestrial organisms, journey into the cell nucleus
• DNA and its functions in growth, replication and repair; mutations
• Creation of the molecules of life in the laboratory; the Miller-Urey experiment
• Speculation about life in Jupiter's clouds

[edit] Episode 3: "The Harmony of the Worlds"

• Astronomy vs. astrology
• Constellations and ancient astronomy
• Ptolemy and the geocentric world view
• Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe
• Kepler's laws

[edit] Episode 4: "Heaven and Hell"

• The Tunguska event, the composition and origin of comets
• Asteroids and impact craters
• The controversial theories of Immanuel Velikovsky
• The planet Venus in fiction and fact
• Venus as an example of the greenhouse effect
• Human impact on the global environment

[edit] Episode 5: "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
  • The work of Sagan's friend, Wolf V. Vishniac
• The possibility of terraforming and colonizing Mars

[edit] Episode 6: "Travelers' Tales"

• The Netherlands in the 17th century
• The persecution of Galileo Galilei and his compeers by the Roman Catholic Church for their views on heliocentrism
• The life and work of father Constantijn and particularly son Christiaan Huygens and his contemporaries
• The Voyager probes (first images of Jupiter and its moons)
• Saturn and its system of moons, including Titan

[edit] Episode 7: "The Backbone of Night"

• Sagan's childhood in Brooklyn, New York
• The realization that stars are suns
• The Milky Way and its history in culture; the mythology of the !Kung bushmen
• The history of ancient Ionia
  • Anaximander's use of a stick to tell time and season
  • The tyrant Polycrates
• The Ionian philosophers: Thales, Theodorus, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Aristarchus
• Teaching children about the cosmos
• Plato, Aristotle and The Pythagoreans as suppressors of knowledge, advocates of slavery and of epistemic secrecy.

[edit] Episode 8: "Journeys in Space and Time"

• Constellations and how they change over time
• The speed of light and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity
  • Time dilation, redshift, 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

[edit] Episode 9: "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 dwarfs, 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 spacetime, the wormhole hypothesis

[edit] Episode 10: "The Edge of Forever"

• The origins of the universe, the Big Bang theory
• Types of galaxies, galactic collisions, quasars
• The Doppler effect, life and work of Milton L. Humason
• The four-dimensional and closed universe
• An infinite universe vs. a god; 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

[edit] Episode 11: "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
• DNA and the brain as libraries
• The structure of the human brain: brain stem, Paul McLean's Triune Brain Model: reptilian brain, limbic system, cerebral cortex
• The frontal lobes as critical in long term planning
• 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

[edit] Episode 12: "Encyclopedia Galactica"

• Betty and Barney Hill abduction and UFOs
• Jean-François Champollion's translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs
• The chance of technical civilizations existing elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy; the Drake equation
• Our way of communicating with extraterrestrials (SETI)
• A look at a hypothetical encyclopedia consisting of other worlds in the galaxy

[edit] Episode 13: "Who Speaks for Earth?"

• The Tlingit and the voyage and encounters of La Pérouse
• The destruction brought by the Spanish conquistadores
• Sagan's vision (told as a dream) in which our world was destroyed by nuclear warfare
• The balance of terror on the Earth today
• The destruction of the Library of Alexandria and murder of Hypatia
• The beginning of the universe and good endeavors of our civilization
• Sagan's plea to cherish life and continue our journey to the cosmos

[edit] Episode 14

Some versions of the series including the first North American home video release included a specially made 14th episode, which consisted of an hour-long interview between Sagan and Ted Turner, in which the two discussed the series and new discoveries in the years since its first broadcast. This unique episode was not included in the DVD release.

[edit] Cosmos, a special edition

The 1986 special edition of Cosmos is distinctive in many ways. First of all, the series is much shorter than the original broadcast, consisting of only six episodes each about 45 minutes in length:

1. Other Worlds part 1
2. Other Worlds part 2
3. Children of the Stars part 1
4. Children of the Stars part 2
5. Message from the Sky part 1
6. Message from the Sky part 2

Visually, the series uses several of the historic sequences and animations from the original series, but interweaved are also new computer animated sequences and additional scenes with host Carl Sagan. As known today, the special edition version was at least broadcast in the United States, Japan, Germany, and Australia.

This version of Cosmos contains a mix of music used in the original series, together with a unique score by Vangelis, composed specially for this series. This score in some sources is also referred to as "Comet", with "Comet 16" acting as the title and ending theme of each episode. Only one of the total 21 cues of this score has officially been released, "Comet 16." Some of the new music also appears in the 2000 remastered DVD release.

[edit] External links

• The music of Cosmos: a look at the music of Vangelis Papathanassiou
• A complete list of the Cosmos soundtrack music, based on the original cue sheets
• Cosmos promo on Google Video
• 25th Anniversary Rebroadcast of Cosmos on The Science Channel
• Cosmos 25th Anniversary Edition PopMatters Television Review, Bill Gibron, PopMatters, 20 October 2005
• Cosmos at the Internet Movie Database