Cosmos returns to visit “Possible Worlds”
Cosmos: Possible Worlds premiered on March 9, 2020, on National Geographic, a follow-up to the 2014 television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, both hosted by astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
The original series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, was presented by Carl Sagan on PBS in 1980.
The tone of the series has been described as optimistic. DeGrasse Tyson said the series is “a very hopeful vision of what we can do if we’re enlightened enough.”
Episode 1: “Ladder to the Stars” is an adventure spanning billions of years into the evolution of life and consciousness. It includes a visit to a 100,000-year-old laboratory, the story of the change in life-style that radically altered human existence, and the life of the heretic who found god in the book of nature, opening our way to the stars.
Episode 2 “The Fleeting Grace of the Habitable Zone” Explains how there will come a time in the life of the Sun when Earth will no longer be a home for us, and tells the story of our ancestors who rose to a comparable challenge and a long-term vision of our future on other worlds.
Episode 3 “Lost City of Life” Shows us a new vision of genesis at the bottom of the blood red sea of the infant Earth and tells the story of the man who found the first clues to life’s beginning in a green jewel. As he searched for life’s origin, he risked his own, daring to toy with his Nazi tormentors.
Episode 4 “Vavilov” In the first half of the 20th century pioneering geneticist Nikolai Vavilov traveled 5 continents assembling a treasury of the worlds seeds. He dreamed that science could be the means to end hunger. His refusal to tell a scientific lie cost him his life. The heroism of his colleagues and its direct impact on your life is one of the most stirring stories in the history of science.
Episode 5 “The Cosmic Connectome” takes a voyage of discovery through the evolution of consciousness with stops in ancient Greece, a visit to the largest life form on Earth, into the poignant dream of an abandoned orphan that opened the way to our understanding of the architecture of thought and beyond to a vision of a galactic network of thought.
Episode 6 “The Man of a Trillion Worlds” At the dawn of the space age, a young Carl Sagan’s career is forged in the clash of his mentors, two scientific titans. Sagan goes on realize his childhood dreams, to carry their research forward and communicate its significance to the whole world.
Episode 7 “The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth.” A revelation of the hidden underground network that is a collaboration of four kingdoms of life, and a true first contact story between humans and beings who communicate in a symbolic language and have maintained a representative democracy for many tens of millions of years.
Episode 8 “The Sacrifice of Cassini” tells the mysterious untold story of the scientist who figured out how to go the Moon while fighting for his life in a WWI trench, and the saga of the twenty-year long odyssey of a robotic explorer ordered to commit suicide on another world.
Episode 9: In the counterintuitive realm of quantum mechanics, light can be two contradictory things, an an unseen observer can alter the nature of reality. In “Magic Without Lies” we meet the man who stumbled on this hole in reality and the still- unfolding technological revolution that it made possible.
Episode 10: “A Tale of Two Atoms” tells how a deadly embrace between science and state altered the fate of the world, and a gripping cautionary tale of others who grew used to living in the shadow of grave danger until it killed them all except one.
Episode 11: From the birth of the devil in ancient Persia where a beloved family dog becomes a seething beast to a searing story of saintliness among macaque monkeys, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” takes us on an exploration of human potential for change that concludes with the story of how one of history’s greatest monsters was transformed into one of its shining lights.
Episode 12: “Coming of Age in the Anthropocene” What kind of world can a child born in 2020 expect to grow up in? And when did our slide into planet-wide environmental destruction begin? We see the possible world that awaits our baby girl into her 20s: one darkened by our refusal to face the real and mounting challenges we face but concluding with a message of hope.
Episode 13: “Seven Wonders of the New World” takes us to the dazzling Pavilions of the 2039 NY World’s Fair, where problems we currently think intractable have been plausibly solved through public commitment and scientific imagination.