Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

 Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014) is a science-themed, 13 episode television series which is a sequel to the 1980 series  Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. It was written by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, who also both helped Carl Sagan write the original 1980 Cosmos. It was presented by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.



First Episode: Standing Up in the Milky Way


 Standing Up in the Milky Way is the series introductory episode. It discusses the Earth's "cosmic address," Giordano Bruno, the "Cosmic Calendar", and it has an epilogue describing Tyson's experience when he first met Carl Sagan.


 * This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a  simple set of rules: (1)  Test  ideas by  experiment and  observation (2)  Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail (3) Follow the  evidence wherever it leads, and (4)  Question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours.


 * Many of us suspect that all of this - all the worlds,  stars,  galaxies and  clusters in our  observable universe - is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes; a  multiverse. Universe upon universe; worlds without end.


 * Stars . . . get so hot that the nuclei of the  atoms  fuse together deep within them to make the  oxygen we  breathe, the  carbon in our  muscles, the  calcium in our  bones, the  iron in our  blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars. You, me, everyone: we are made of star stuff.


 * Every person you've ever heard of lived somewhere in there [pointing]. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here in the last seconds of the  Cosmic Calendar.


 * Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity, and forward to the stars.

Second Episode: Some of the Things That Molecules Do


 Some of the Things That Molecules Do is about biology, primarily  evolution. It describes the use of artificial selection to create  dogs from  wolves, the  natural selection of  polar bears from brown bears, the  tree of life, the evolution of  eyes, the "Halls of Extinction",  tardigrades, the possibility of life on  Titan, and the  earliest life on Earth.


 * This is a story about you . . . and me . . . and your dog.


 * If life has a sanctuary, it's here in the nucleus, which contains our DNA - the ancient scripture of our  genetic code. And it's written in a language that all life can read.


 * The Theory of Evolution, like the  Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting  our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience.


 * That nameless corridor? That's for another day. (While standing near the as-yet-unnamed, sixth corridor in the "Halls of Extinction.")


 * [On] Titan,  Saturn's giant moon . . . the seas and the rain are made not of water but of methane and ethane. . . . [W]e can  imagine other kinds of life. There might be creatures that  inhale  hydrogen instead of  oxygen. And  exhale  methane instead of  carbon dioxide. They might use  acetylene instead of  sugar as  an energy source.


 * Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers.

Third Episode: When Knowledge Conquered Fear


 When Knowledge Conquered Fear is about the importance of mathematics in  science. It discusses the development of early astronomy from the human propensity for  pattern recognition,  comets as  omens,  Edmond Halley,  Robert Hooke and  Isaac Newton,  gravity, Newton's seminal book,  Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and Halley's Comet.


 * Does the fact that most of us know the names of mass murderers but never heard of Jan Oort say anything about us?


 * Newton's  Principia Mathematica set us free. . . . By finding the natural laws governing the comings and goings of comets, he decoupled the motions of the heavens from their  ancient connections to our fears.


 * Like Babe Ruth predicting where his next home run would land in the stands,  Halley stated flatly that  the comet would return at the end of 1758, from a particular part of the sky, following a specific path.


 * Newton's laws made it possible for Edmond Halley to see some 50 years into the future and predict the behavior of a single comet.


 * Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now our home galaxy - the  Milky Way - will  merge with our neighboring galaxy -  Andromeda. . . . Any life on the worlds of that far off future . . . would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show; a dance of a half a trillion stars, to music first heard on one little world, by a  man who had but  one true friend.

Fourth Episode: A Sky Full of Ghosts


 A Sky Full of Ghosts discusses two kinds of astronomical "ghosts:" first, very distant stars that have already died or transformed but whose light is still visible from Earth (used to illustrate "telescopes as time machines" and discussions between William Herschel and  John Herschel) and second,  black holes (used to illustrate concepts from the  theory of relativity).


 * Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts.


 * When [the light we see today] left the Pleiades, about 400 years ago,  Galileo was taking his first look through a  telescope.


 * In the observed universe, everyone gets to feel special . . . at  the center of the cosmic horizon. . . . It's what you get when you have a finite  speed of light in a universe that had a  beginning in time.


 * Nature commands, "Thou shalt not add my speed to the speed of light." . . . For reality to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit.


 * Black holes may very well be tunnels through the universe. [If you could somehow survive the ride on] this intergalactic subway system, you could travel to the farthest reaches of  spacetime, or you might arrive in someplace even more amazing. We might find ourselves in an altogether  different universe.

Fifth Episode: Hiding in the Light


 Hiding in the Light is about electromagnetic radiation, primarily  visible light. It discusses the Warring States era Chinese philosopher  Mo Tzu, the  Islamic Golden Age Arabic scientist  Ibn Al-Hazen, the  electromagnetic spectrum,  Joseph von Fraunhofer, and spectroscopy.


 * The age and  size of the cosmos are written in  light. The  nature of beauty and the  substance of the stars, the  laws of space and time they were there all along, but we never saw them until we devised  a more powerful way of seeing.


 * In China, more than 2,000 years ago, a philosopher named  Mo Tzu is said to have observed that light could be made to paint a picture inside a locked treasure room. This was the description of  the first camera: the  camera obscura, the prototype of all  image-forming cameras (including the one that's bringing you  this picture).


 * [The scientific method is so] powerful that it has carried our  robotic emissaries to the edge of the solar system  and beyond. It has  doubled our lifespan, made the  lost worlds of the past come alive. Science has enabled us to  predict events in the distant future and to communicate with each other at the speed of light,  as I am with you, right at this moment.


 * Show me the spectrum of anything, whether  here on Earth or  from a distant star, and I'll tell you what it's made of.  Fraunhofer's lines are the atomic signatures of the  elements writ large across the cosmos. As with every other major revelation in the  history of science, it opened the way to newer and deeper mysteries.


 * You never know where the next genius will come from. How many of them do we leave in the rubble? The prince and  his kingdom were immeasurably enriched by that  act of kindness to  a poor orphan.


 * Confining our perception of nature to visible light is like listening to  music in only one  octave.

Sixth Episode: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still


 Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still scrutinizes the minuscule "universes" around us on the microscopic,  molecular,  atomic and  subatomic scales. The episode explores the microscopic life contained in a dewdrop (including a discussion of photosynthesis), the  neurochemistry of  aromas,  Thales, the  atomism of  Democritus, basic ideas from  nuclear physics,  neutrinos,  Wolfgang Pauli, and the early universe.


 * There are more atoms in your  eye than there are  stars in all the  galaxies in the  known universe.


 * The chloroplast is a  three billion year-old  solar energy collector. This sub-microscopic solar battery is what  drives all the  forests, and the  fields, and the  plankton of the seas,  and the animals,  including us.


 * Thales kindled a flame that still burns to this day:  the very idea of cosmos out of chaos,  a universe governed by the order of natural laws that we can actually figure out. This is  the epic adventure that began in the mind of Thales.


 * The nucleus is very small compared to  the rest of the  atom. If an atom were the size of this cathedral, its nucleus would be the size of that mote of dust.


 * [The Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detector] is a trap designed to catch  neutrinos only. Other particles, such as  cosmic rays . . . cannot get through all that rock above us. But  matter poses no obstacle to a neutrino. A neutrino could pass through a hundred  light years of  steel without even slowing down.

Seventh Episode: The Clean Room


 The Clean Room tells how the geochemist  Clair Patterson built an (essentially)  lead-free  cleanroom in order to ultimately determine the  age of the Earth, and then how he used knowledge from this research in  his subsequent campaign against the use of consumer products containing lead.


 * Are there any mementos from when the Earth was born,  objects that could possibly tell us its true age? I know a place where the unused bricks and mortar left over from the creation of our solar system can be found.  It lies between the orbits of  Jupiter and  Mars.


 * What better way to find the true age of the Earth than with the  uranium atom? If you knew what fraction of the uranium in a rock had  turned into  lead, you could  calculate how much time had passed since the rock was formed.


 * Now at last, Patterson was ready to tackle  the iron meteorite, to find the true  age of the Earth. [He discovered that the] world is four and a half billion years old. . . . His reward for this discovery?  A world of trouble.


 * [T]etraethyl lead could be marketed as an anti-knock additive to gasoline [but a]  half a cup of it on your skin could kill you. . . . What was needed was  a man of science to calm the public's fears and improve  lead's image. . . . This was one of the first times that  the authority of science was used to cloak  a threat to  public health and  the environment.


 * No matter where he searched on Earth, no matter how far he traveled back in time, the . . . naturally occurring [lead] levels in the air and water in the past were far lower. . . . Patterson fought the industry for [more than] 20 years before  lead was finally banned in US [gasoline and other] consumer products.


 * Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still  hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature will not be fooled.
 * About the quote: The above phrase, "nature will not be fooled," could be a nod by the creators of Cosmos: ASO toward Richard Feynman. Following the  Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 Feynman wrote,  "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Eighth Episode: Sisters of the Sun


 Sisters of the Sun is about stars, including the  Sun. It considers the ancient development of primitive astronomy, the  constellations,  Cecilia Payne and the Harvard Observatory Computers, variations among the  different kinds of stars, the Sun, and  stellar evolution.


 * For thousands of generations we watched  the stars as if our lives depended on it, because they did. . . . [O]ur ancestors noticed that  the motions of the stars across the nights of the year  foretold changes on Earth that threatened or enhanced our chances for survival.


 * [The Harvard Observatory Computers included]  Annie Jump Cannon, the leader of the team [who eventually] catalogued a quarter of a million stars, [and]  Henrietta Swan Leavitt [who]  discovered the law that astronomers still use more than a century later to measure the distances to the stars. . . . [Cannon provided classification data to  Cecilia Payne, whose]  "Stellar Atmospheres" is widely regarded as the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.


 * There are many kinds of stars. Some are bright like the Sun.  Some are dim.  The greatest stars are ten million times larger than  the smallest ones.  Some stars are old beyond imagining, more than ten billion years of age.  Others are being born right now.  When atoms fuse in the hearts of stars, they make  starlight.  Stars are born in litters, formed from the  gas and dust of  interstellar clouds.


 * [Currently] our Sun is poised in a  stable equilibrium between  gravity and  nuclear fire. . . . [F]our or five billion years from now . . .  it will become bloated [and] will envelop and devour the planets  Mercury and  Venus and possibly the  Earth. [Finally it will shrink] a hundredfold to the size of the Earth [and will be] a  white dwarf star.


 * The psychedelic death shrouds of ordinary stars are fleeting, lasting only tens of thousands of years. . . . The stars in a  binary star system . . . [like]  Sirius [and its companion]  white dwarf [will create numerous  novae as the system ages]. . . . A star about 15 times  as massive as the Sun - one like  Rigel - [will ignite] a more powerful nuclear reaction, a  supernova [which will result in a  pulsar]. . . . [F]or a star more than 30 times as massive as the Sun - a star like  Alnilam, in  Orion's  Belt - [its supernova will create] a  black hole. . . . [Finally, when a  supermassive star like  the largest in the Eta Carinae system]  goes, it won't become a mere nova or supernova. It will become something far more catastrophic - a  hypernova. And it could happen in our lifetime. . . .  Earth will be just fine. . . . But still, Eta Carinae in its death throes will . . . light up the night of the southern hemisphere with the  brightness of a second Moon.

Ninth Episode: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth


 The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth is about the Earth's palaeogeography. It analyzes Earth's geologic time scale, the  End-Permian  extinction event,  plate tectonics (including the  interior structure of the Earth and  continental drift), the End-Cretaceous extinction event, and the  evolutionary history of life.


 * [D]uring the Carboniferous Period, the  atmosphere had almost twice the  oxygen as today.  Insects could then grow much bigger and  still get enough oxygen in their bodies. That's why the  dragonflies here are as big as eagles and the  millipedes the size of alligators.


 * Two-thirds of the Earth lies beneath more than 1,000 feet of water. It's a vast and largely unexplored frontier. . . . This is the longest  submarine mountain range in the world, the  Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge. It wraps around our globe like the seam on a baseball. The past is another planet, but most of us don't really know  this one.


 * Few animals larger than a hundred pounds survived  the catastrophes of the late Cretaceous.  The dust cloud brought night and cold to the surface for months.  The dinosaurs  froze and starved to death. But there were  small creatures who  took shelter in the Earth. And when they emerged they found that the monsters who had hunted and terrorized them were gone. The Earth was becoming the Planet of the Mammals. And  the Earth continued its ceaseless changing.


 * The way the planets tug at each other, the way the skin of the Earth moves,  the way those motions affect climate and  the evolution of life and  intelligence -  they all combined to give us the means to turn  the mud of those river deltas into  the first civilizations.


 * Congratulations. You're alive.  There's an unbroken thread that stretches across more than three billion years  that connects us to  the first life that ever touched this world. Think of how tough, resourceful and lucky all of our countless ancestors must have been to survive long enough to pass on  the message of life to  the next and  the next and  the next generation, hundreds of millions of times before it came to  us. . . . Each of us is a runner in the longest and most dangerous relay race there ever was, and at this moment, we hold the baton in our hands.

Tenth Episode: The Electric Boy


 The Electric Boy uses episodes from the life of Michael Faraday to illustrate concepts related to  electromagnetism, primarily  electricity. It shows how Faraday's discoveries came between those of Newton and  Einstein, how he began his scientific career working as an assistant for the  chemist  Humphry Davy, his invention of the  electric motor and the  generator, his discovery that  electricity,  magnetism and  light are  related, his perceptions related to  magnetic fields as  "lines of force" (followed by a discussion of  Earth's magnetic field), and the use of Faraday's experimental results by  James Clerk Maxwell in formulating  Maxwell's Equations (which in turn make modern  telecommunications possible).


 * I could be thousands of miles away, and yet, when you turn on whatever device is bringing my image and voice to you, I'm there. Instantaneously. How is that possible? . . . It all began in the mind of  one person. . . . This is the story of how we learned  to make electrons do our bidding.


 * This was the first motor converting electric current into continuous mechanical motion. Looks pretty feeble, right? But  that turning spindle is the beginning of a  revolution, one that dwarfs all the shots fired and bombs ever detonated in the sheer magnitude of its  effect on our civilization.


 * By age 40, [Michael Faraday] had invented the electric motor, the  transformer, the  generator; machines that would change everything about  the home,  the farm, the factory. Now, at 60 . . . plagued by memory loss and melancholy, he fearlessly probed deeper into the mysterious invisible forces. . . . Having discovered the unity of  electricity,  magnetism and  light, Faraday needed to know how this trinity of  natural forces  work together.


 * [W]hy does our planet have a magnetic field at all? . . .  Liquid iron, circulating around the solid part of the core as Earth rotates, acts like a wire carrying an electric current. And as Faraday showed us,  electric currents produce  magnetic fields. And that's a good thing. Our magnetic field protects us from the onslaught of  cosmic rays, which would be very damaging to our  biosphere.


 * [Faraday's] fellow scientists . . . needed to see his ideas expressed in the language of modern physics - precise equations. [Then]  James Clerk Maxwell . . .  translated Faraday's experimental observations on electromagnetic fields into equations [and helped transform]  human civilization from a patchwork of cities, towns and villages into an  intercommunicating  organism  linking us at  light speed  to each other and  to the cosmos.

Eleventh Episode: The Immortals


 The Immortals explores how continuous perpetuation of the "message of life" (the genetic information encoded in  DNA) gives a kind of immortality to living beings and their descendants. It describes the invention of writing,  the possibility that life arose independently on Earth or that  it may have been transported here (perhaps from Mars),  the search for  life outside of Earth's biosphere,  attempts to detect messages from intelligent non-Earth beings, the  collapse of ancient civilizations and the need to ensure the  continued viability of our own current global civilization.


 * [L]ife itself sends its own stories across billions of years. It's a message that every one of us carries inside, inscribed in all the cells of our bodies,  in a language that  all life on Earth can read. The  genetic code is written in an alphabet consisting of only  four letters. Each letter is a  molecule made of  atoms;  each word is three letters long.


 * The essential message of life has been copied and recopied for more than 3 billion years. But  where did that message come from? Nobody knows.  Perhaps it began in a shallow, sunlit pool, just like this. . . . Or  life could've started in the searing heat of a volcanic vent on the deep sea floor. Or is it possible that  life came to Earth as a hitchhiker?


 * We've encoded our stories in radio waves and beamed them into space . . . for over 70 years. [And  since] 1960, we've been listening for extraterrestrial radio signals  without hearing so much as a tolling bell. . . . For all we know,  we may have just missed an alien signal. [Or perhaps a civilization] even slightly  more advanced than ours may have already moved on to  some other mode of  communication.


 * Whether or not we ever make contact with intelligent alien life may depend on a critical question:  What is the life expectancy of a civilization? . . . Today, we have a single global civilization.  How long will it live? . . .  We're pumping greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere at a rate not seen on Earth for a million years. And  there's scientific consensus that we're destabilizing our climate.


 * The next golden age of human achievement begins here and now:  New Year's Day of  the next cosmic year. In the first tenth of a second, we take the vision of the  Pale Blue Dot to heart, and learn how to  share this tiny world with each other . . . as the effects of  climate change reverse and diminish. A fifth of a second into this future people will stop dying from the effects of  poverty. The planet is now a completely  self-sustaining,  intercommunicating  organism.

Twelfth Episode: The World Set Free


 The World Set Free is about global warming  caused by humans. It examines the current greenhouse effect on  Venus, storage of most  carbon on Earth as a  mineral, how human burning of  fossil fuels is increasing concentrations of  atmospheric  carbon dioxide and is thus heating up the Earth's  biosphere, and  renewable energy as a solution to ameliorate the  effects of global warming.


 * Why is Venus scorching hot? It's because . . . the flow of energy is blocked by  a dense atmosphere of  carbon dioxide. . . . Venus is in the grip of a  runaway  greenhouse effect.


 * By burning coal,  oil and  gas,  our civilization is exhaling  carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can  absorb it. So,  CO2 is building up in the atmosphere.  The planet is heating up.


 * It's a pretty tight case. Our fingerprints are all over this one.


 * Keep your eye on the man, not the dog. (Comparing the gradual curve of Tyson's path along a beach to climate and the erratic path of a dog Tyson is holding on a leash to  weather.)


 * More solar energy falls  on Earth in one hour than all the  energy our  civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could  harness a tiny fraction of the available  solar and  wind power, we could supply all  our energy needs forever, and without  adding any carbon to the atmosphere.


 * We looked back on our way to the Moon and  saw "one world, indivisible, and kind of small. . . . This . . . was the unexpected gift of  Apollo."

Thirteenth Episode: Unafraid of the Dark


 Unafraid of the Dark is the series recapitulation. It discusses the Voyager probes,  dark matter,  dark energy, and the use of  science and  reason to illuminate the path away from  ignorance.


 * [M]ore than two millennia ago, in the city of Alexandria . . . [t]he  Ptolemys [built]  the greatest library on Earth. . . . The total work product of  the awakening of ancient civilization was kept here. . . . And all of it, all of this is but a tiny fraction of  the information that  you have at your fingertips at this very moment [in]  our own electronic Library of Alexandria.


 * There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on  the grandest scale to  push the cosmos apart. . . .  We call it  "dark energy," but that name, like  "dark matter," is merely a code word for our  ignorance. It's okay not to  know all the answers.  It's better to admit our ignorance than to  believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to  know everything closes the door to  finding out what's really there.


 * The difference between seeing nothing but a pebble and reading the history of the cosmos inscribed inside it is science. (Discussing a slow-growing  manganese nodule from the ocean floor which shows that a star near the Earth went  supernova within the last two million years or so.)


 * There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we've ever known. (Recording of Carl Sagan's voice over a re-imagining of  the "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth taken by  Voyager 1.)


 * How did we escape from the prison [of ignorance]? It was the work of generations of  searchers who took five  simple rules to heart. (1)  Question authority. No  idea is  true  just because someone says so, including  me.  Think for yourself.  Question yourself. (2) Don't  believe anything  just because you want to.  Believing something doesn't make it so. (3)  Test ideas by the  evidence gained from  observation and  experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong!  Get over it. (4)  Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.  If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all: (5) Remember,  you could be wrong.

Quotes about Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

 * Open your eyes, and open your imagination. The next great discovery could be yours. - U.S. President Barack Obama, introducing the series premiere.


 * What Cosmos has, at its heart, is hope. It's about the future we could have if we get our act together. - Ann Druyan, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos, as well as an executive producer and director for the 2014 Cosmos.


 * Civilization {should know} how to preserve itself. That's a good measure of intelligence, isn't it? Seeing what you're doing that's bad, and fixing that problem. - Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, series presenter / host.


 * The important thing is not to suppress ideas. Freedom of thought is the life blood of science. That’s why {Giordano} Bruno’s story is important. - Astrophysicist Steven Soter, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos.


 * We've reached a point in time where we've gotten a little lax with our enthusiasm about science and our thirst for knowledge. . . . I hope that this Cosmos can instigate a reawakening of the same enthusiasm for science that the original Cosmos brought. - Seth MacFarlane, series executive producer.


 * My greatest hope for this new Cosmos is that it has the same impact on someone, somewhere that the original had on me. Because it inspired in me a great interest in science, and in my case, science fiction. -  Brannon Braga, series executive producer.