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The Planetary Society Weblog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Cosmos Returning to Television on 25th Anniversary

Weblog Archive

Amir Alexander has posted a story about Carl Sagan's landmark Cosmos television series being aired again on cable in this, its 25th anniversary year. I've set up my DVR to record it and see what it looks like, 25 years later. I wasn't very old when Cosmos came on TV (OK, I was 5), so my memories of it are extremely vague. I do remember watching it with my Dad, and him commenting on a weird scene where Sagan was walking around in an imaginary library of the brain. Though I don't remember the details of individual episodes, Sagan certainly made a lasting impression on me, like the other scientists I enjoyed watching on TV at the time -- David Attenborough, Jacques Cousteau, and Philip Morrison, for instance. It took me a long time to clue in to the fact that what I had liked about them was not necessarily that they were scientists, but that they explained the world in ways that made sense and also made the world wonderful.