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Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

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Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is 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. 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.

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. Despite being shown again on the Science channel, the total amount of time for the original 13 episodes (780 minutes) was reduced 25% to 585 minutes (45 minutes per episode) in order to make room for commercials.

Episodes

Episode 1: "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean"

Episode 2: "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue"

Episode 3: "The Harmony of the Worlds"

Episode 4: "Heaven and Hell"

Episode 5: "Blues for a Red Planet"

Episode 6: "Travellers' Tales"

Episode 7: "The Backbone of Night"

  • 1. Opening
  • 2. What are the Stars?

  • 3. Brooklyn Schoolroom

    • Teaching children about the cosmos (1)
  • 4. Mythology of Stars

    • The realization that stars are suns; the Milky Way mythology of the !Kung bushmen and ancient Greeks.
  • 5. Ancient Greek Scientists

  • 6. Science Blossoms

  • 7. Democritus

  • 8. Pythagoras

  • 9. Plato and the Others

  • 10. Distance to Stars

    • Christiaan Huygens
  • 11. Evidence of Other Planets

    • Teaching children about the cosmos (2)
  • 12. End Credits

Episode 8: "Journeys in Space and Time"

Episode 9: "The Lives of the Stars"

Episode 10: "The Edge of Forever"

Episode 11: "The Persistence of Memory"

Episode 12: "Encyclopaedia Galactica"

Episode 13: "Who Speaks for Earth?"

  • 1. Opening
  • 2. Tlingit and Aztec Indians

  • 3. Who Speaks for Earth?

    • Sagan's vision (told as a dream) of traveling to a far distant world, only to return to find that the human race had long since been destroyed by nuclear warfare
  • 4. Nuclear War and Balance of Terror

  • 5. Alexandrian Library

  • 6. Hypatia

  • 7. Big Bang and the Stuff of Life

    • The beginning of the universe and good endeavors of our civilization
  • 8. Evolution of Life
  • 9. Star Stuff
  • 10. What Humans Have Done
  • 11. We Speak for Earth

    • Sagan's plea to cherish life and continue our journey to the cosmos
  • 12. Cosmos Update 10 years later

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.

Episode name spelling discrepancies

There are differences in episode names and spellings for Episode 6, 8 and 12 depending on the type of media. (see table below)

Episode # Opening sequence DVD menu printed on DVD printed on box Cosmos books
Ep. 6 Traveller's Tales Traveler's Tales Traveller's Tales Traveller's Tales Traveler's Tales
Ep. 8 Journeys in Space and Time Travels in Space and Time Travels in Space and Time Travels in Space and Time Travels in Space and Time
Ep. 12 Encyclopaedia Galactica Encyclopaedia Galactica Encyclopedia Galactica Encyclopedia Galactica Encyclopaedia Galactica

Quotes

Episode 1: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean

For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.

53 min 15s

The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after.

56 min 20 sec

We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

57 min 0 sec

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

Episode 2: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue

55 min 6 sec

Physics and chemistry permits such life forms. Art presents them with a certain reality but nature is not obliged to follow our speculations."..."Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. There is no predictive theory of biology, just as there is no predictive theory of history. The reason is the same: both subjects are still too complicated for us.

Episode 4: Heaven and Hell

35 min 59 sec

"I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus."

"Why not?"

"Because it’s covered with a dense layer of clouds."

"Well, what are clouds made of?"

"Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore the surface must be wet."

"If the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp. If there’s a swamp, there are ferns, if there are ferns maybe there are even dinosaurs."

"Observation: You couldn’t see a thing."

"Conclusion: Dinosaurs."

Episode 5: Blues for a Red Planet

11 min 41 sec

He believed the planet was inhabited by an older and wiser race perhaps very different from us. He believed that the seasonal changes in the dark areas were due to the growth and decay of vegetation. He believed that the planet was Earth-like. All in all, he believed too much.

Episode 7: The Backbone of Night

0 min 40 sec

The sky calls to us; if we do not destroy ourselves we will one day venture to the stars.

37 min 45 sec

So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational".

38 min 10 sec

Instead of wanting everyone to share and know of their discoveries the Pythagoreans suppressed the square root of two and the dodecahedron. The outside world was not to know. The Pythagoreans had discovered, in the mathematical underpinnings of nature, one of the two most powerful scientific tools, the other of course is experiment, but instead of using their insight to advance the collective voyage of human discovery they made of it little more than the hocus pocus of a mystery cult. Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans.

40 min 35 sec

But why had science lost its way in the first place, what appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order. The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy, you could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves. Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.

Episode 11: The Persistence of Memory

37 min 25 sec

It might be more efficient if all civic systems were periodically replaced from top to bottom. But, as in the brain, everything has to work during the renovation. So the city mostly adds new parts while the old parts continue, more or less, to function...

Or consider Third Avenue. In the 17th century you made your way uptown on foot or on horseback. A little later, there were coaches – the horses prancing, the coachmen cracking their whips. And then these were replaced by horse-drawn trolleys, clanging along fixed tracks on this avenue. Then electrical technology developed and a great elevated railway line was constructed called the Third Avenue El, which dominated the street until 1954, when it was utterly demolished. Anyway, the El was then replaced by buses and taxicabs, which still are the main forms of public transportation on Third Avenue. Now as gasoline becomes a rare commodity, the combustion engine will be replaced by something else. Maybe public transportation on Third Avenue in the 21st century will be by, I don’t know, pneumatic tubes or electric cars. Every step in the evolution of Third Avenue’s transport has been conservative following a route first laid down in the 17th century. But the brain is still more conservative than the city. If this were the brain, we might have horse-drawn trolleys and the El and buses all operating simultaneously, redundantly, competitively.

Episode 12: Encyclopedia Galactica

0 min 45 sec

In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilisations far older and more advanced than ours.

1 min 10 sec

What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and sceptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

7 min 25 sec

For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilisation every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence.
(Back reference to UFO abduction claims)

55 min 40 sec

Text Quote

Extract of entry in fictional 'Encyclopaedia Galactica' for Earth

Technology: exponentiating / fossil fuels / nuclear weapons / organized warfare / environmental pollution.

Probability of survival (per 100 yr): 40%.

Episode 13: Who Speaks for Earth?

55min 20 sec

Cosmos Update 1990.

Carl Sagan's final piece to camera for the series.

The greatest thrill for me in reliving this adventure has been, not just that we have completed the preliminary reconnaissance with spacecraft of the entire solar system and not just that we've discovered astonishing structures in the realm of galaxies, but especially that some of Cosmos's boldest dreams about this world are coming closer to reality.

Since this series maiden voyage the impossible has come to pass, mighty walls that maintained insuperable ideological differences have come tumbling down, deadly enemies have embraced and begun to work together. The imperative to cherish the earth and protect the global environment that sustains all of us has become widely accepted and we've begun, finally, the process of reducing the obscene number of weapons of mass destruction, perhaps we have, after all, decided to choose life.

But we still have light years to go to ensure that choice. Even after the summits and the ceremonies and the treaties there are still some 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and it would require the detonation of only a tiny fraction of them to produce a nuclear winter; the predicted global climatic catastrophe that would result from the smoke and the dust lifted into the atmosphere by burning cities and petroleum facilities.

The world scientific community has begun to sound the alarm about the grave dangers posed by depleting the protective ozone shield and by greenhouse warming, and again we're taking some mitigating steps but again those steps are too small and too slow.The discovery that such a thing as nuclear winter was really possible evolved out of the studies of Martian dust storms, the surface of Mars, fried by ultraviolet light is also a reminder of why it's important to keep our ozone layer intact. The runaway greenhouse effect on Venus is a valuable reminder, that we must take the increasing greenhouse effect on Earth seriously.

Important lessons about our climate have come from spacecraft missions to the planets. By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself I think this fact, more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and at the same time one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.

Our science and our technology have posed us a profound question. Will we learn to use these tools with wisdom and foresight before it's too late, will we see our species safely through this difficult passage so that our children and grandchildren will continue the great journey of discovery still deeper into the mysteries of the Cosmos?

That same rocket and nuclear and computer technology that sends our ships past the farthest known planet can also be used to destroy our global civilization.

Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil, it is as if there were a God who said to us - I set before you two ways; you can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the Stars. It's up to you.

Music of Cosmos

Some of the music from the television series was compiled on CD:

  • Disc 1:
  • Heaven & Hell, part 1 — Vangelis — 1975
  • The Year 1905 — Dmitri Shostakovich — 1957
  • Alpha — Vangelis — 1976
  • Cranes in their Nest — Goro Yamaguchi
  • Clarinet Concerto A major — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — 1791
  • The Pachelbel Canon — Johann Pachelbel — 1680
  • Metamorphosis — Jeffrey Boydstun — 19xx
  • The Sea named Solaris (BWV 639) — Johann Sebastian Bach/Tomita — 1714
  • Partita for Violin solo no. 3 in E — Johann Sebastian Bach — 1726
  • The Four Seasons:Spring — Antonio Vivaldi — 1725
  • Sonata D-Dur für Trompete, Oboe und Basso Continuo — Gottfried Finger — 169x
  • Concerto for Mandolin in C major — Antonio Vivaldi — 1725
  • The Tale of Tsar Saltan — Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — 1899
  • Legacy — Larry Fast — 1975
  • Russian Easter Festival Overture — Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — 1888

    • Disc 2:
  • Pulstar — Vangelis — 1976
  • Vishnu symphony no. 19, opus 217 — Alan Hovhaness — 1966
  • Melancholy Blues — Louis Armstrong — 1923
  • Aquarius — Galt MacDermot — 1968
  • Beauborg, part 2 — Vangelis — 1978
  • The Planets: Mars — Gustav Holst — 1915
  • Alien Images 1 — Jeff Boydstun
  • Fly...Night Bird — Roy Buchanan — 1974
  • Entends-tu les Chiens aboyer? — Vangelis - 1977
  • Le sacre du printemps — Igor Stravinsky — 1913
  • Prayer of St. Gregory — Alan Hovhaness — 1946
  • Bulgarian Shepherds Song — anonymous
  • Comet 16 — Vangelis — 1986 (only the special edition of Cosmos)

    • Cosmos, a special edition

    The 1986, special edition of Cosmos is distinctive in many ways. It featured new narration by and filmed segments with Sagan, including content from Sagan's book Comet and discussion of his theory of nuclear winter (none of which was used in subsequent television or home video releases.) The series is much shorter than the original, running four and a half hours. It premiered as one marathon program on the TBS network and has been repeated as 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. "Comet 16" is the only one of the total 21 cues that has officially been released. Some of the new music also appears in the 2000 remastered DVD release.

    External links



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