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Star Stuff: An Exploratory Case Study of the Cosmos Television Franchise

Academic Citation for Cosmos: Possible Worlds

Druyan, A. (2020). Cosmos: Possible Worlds (Illustrated edition). National Geographic.

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Sagan’s Work on the Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager Space Probes You are now in the section of this project devoted to Carl Sagan's work on Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager space probes. This work on several of these space probes directly informed the creation of the original Cosmos series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The first probes we will be discussing here are Pioneer 10 and 11. The spacecraft launched on March 2nd, 1972, and April 5th, 1973, respectively. Their primary mission was to take close-up pictures of Jupiter and send them back to Earth. A journey that would ultimately conclude with them being the first human-made spacecraft to exit our solar system and enter deep space. Thus, Sagan was tasked with creating a golden plaque to be placed on the probes that would communicate their origins in the remote event that intelligent life elsewhere might pick them up. Here's a two-minute interview with Sagan from 1972 discussing the likelihood of life on Jupiter and the creation of the golden plaque.

Though the idea for the plaque was conceived of by Sagan, it was illustrated by his wife at the time Linda Saltzman Sagan, she would also work with Sagan on the Voyager space probes, which will be discussed later in this section. Between the Pioneer and Voyager missions, Sagan also worked on the Viking space probes that were sent to land on Mars and take the first ever photos of the Martian surface. The documentary, titled A New View of Mars, documents the current human understanding of Mars leading up to that mission. It discusses the legacy of human thinking about Mars, the earlier Mariner 9 mission to circumnavigate it, the possibility of life on the planet, and the plans for the Viking missions that were underway at that time. I have isolated nine minutes of this documentary. You can watch as much of it as you choose.

After the Viking mission, Sagan was tasked to help create the most elaborate message to intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos yet. That being the golden record that was placed on the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. The team he assembled included his wife, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Ann Druyan. Sagan and Druyan would fall in love while working on the project and Sagan would later divorce Salzman and marry Druyan in 1981. The record contains several messages that an alien civilization with an understanding of science may likely understand. One notable example that I would like to draw your attention to is the measurements of human brainwaves located in the bottom left corner. Those are Druyan’s brainwaves. She discusses the experience of having them recorded in a section of the Cosmos: Possible Worlds companion book, which I have quoted below.
In 1977, I recorded my own brain waves for a message to any beings in the Milky Way galaxy who might happen upon one of two derelict spacecraft at any time in the next five billion years. It came about when Carl Sagan asked me to be the creative director for an interstellar message of unprecedented complexity to be affixed to the side of NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The Voyagers would undertake the first reconnaissance mission of the outer solar system before wandering through the galaxy for the next several billion years. One part of what came to be called the “golden record” consisted of music representing many human cultures, including Delta blues, Peruvian panpipes, Javanese gamelan, a Navajo night chant, Senegalese percussion, Japanese shakuhachi, a Georgian men’s chorus, and much more. Another section of the record was devoted to different kinds of sounds: a newborn’s first cry and her mother ’s soothing murmurs, the roar of an F-111 flyby, a cricket song, a kiss, and greetings in 59 different human languages and one whale language. We had no idea who would ever hear this recording or what it would mean to them, but we knew it was a sacred undertaking. Nothing we had built would ever travel so far and last so long. In 1977, with the Cold War raging, we looked upon our task as building an ark of human culture. Carl and I fell in love that same spring while we were making the golden record. We had known each other for three years as platonic friends and coworkers, each committed to another person. In that other life I had asked Carl if it would be possible for our imagined extraterrestrials to decipher the signals from a recording of a meditation that registered my EEG, EKG, and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Carl replied, “Billions of years is a long time, Annie. Go do it.” The recording session at a New York hospital fell only two days after we had blurted out our feelings to each other in a long-distance phone call and decided to marry. My thought itinerary for the meditation included a broad narrative of the multibillion-year history of our planet. Toward the end of the hour, I permitted myself a personal exploration of the love that I had discovered only hours before. My fresh joy at finding my heart’s true home will endure on those records longer than Earth itself (Druyan, 2020, p. 163-164).
Voyager 2 was the first of these space probes to launch on August 20th, 1977. Voyager 1 would follow on September 5th. A book was co-authored by everyone on the Golden Record team recounting their experiences working on the project. It was titled Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record and it was released the following year in 1978. Here are seven minutes of a documentary from 1982 discussing Voyager 2’s first photos of Saturn's rings. It also showcases the television studio that had been set up to interview scientists daily throughout the project. After you’re done with the documentary, you can use the blue button below to continue to the section on Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and Sagan’s Antinuclear war activism. You can also select a different section that you are interested in by returning to the Launch Point or using the drop-down menu at the top of your screen.
Ann Druyan's Work After Sagan's Death You are now situated in the section of this project devoted to Ann Druyan’s work after Carl Sagan’s death. Despite Sagan’s optimism about his two-year battle with myelodysplastic syndrome, the weakening of his immune system brought on by chemotherapy therapy led to his death from pneumonia on December 20th, 1996. Below is an article announcing his death on CNN’s website.
Sagan’s reflections on his battle with the disease are chronicled in the final chapter of his last book, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. The book, which was released in 1997, served as a collection of essays that ended with an epilogue from Druyan. The epilogue described their final moments together and her subsequent grief after his loss. Some of what she said was further recounted in a passage from the 2020 Cosmos: Possible Worlds companion book. I've added the quotation from the pages here.
Carl made me want to be the best human being I could be. Every loving thing that one of us did made the other want to go higher. My writing, which had been precious and agonizing, became liberated from my often crippling self-consciousness. I no longer strived to impress. I only wanted to communicate, to connect with the reader. And from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage onward, my work became a daily love offering to Carl. When we wrote together, I would watch him read my day’s output. Sometimes he would burst out laughing, or gesture as if tipping his hat to me, and my heart would soar. I know he felt the same way about my joy in his work. … We had 20 years until his death made me a permanent exile from that world we discovered together. I was suicidal. But our children were still young and as their mother I had no choice but to live. So I carried what I learned with Carl inside me and have done my best to keep his flame burning. I rededicated my life to continuing the work we had done together (Druyan, 2020, p.354-355).
Less than a year after Sagan’s death, the film adaptation of his novel, Contact, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, was released on July 11th, 1997. The book was originally conceived as a film by Druyan and Sagan in the early 1980s. They co-wrote the screenplay together, and Sagan presented a lecture on the science behind the story to the film crew. The movie’s portrayal of a nonviolent alien encounter founded on realistic scientific concepts divided critics and audiences alike. I have included a two-minute trailer for the film below, which you are welcome to check out.
Druyan’s renewed dedication to Sagan’s legacy began with the founding of Cosmos Studios in 2000. One of the first projects by this new production company was, called OneCosmos. OneCosmos is a multimedia project that attempts to bring science communication into the ‘.com’ era. For this project, Druyan partnered with an eccentric Silicon Valley entrepreneur named, Joe Firmage. In 1990, Joe Firmage left the $2 billion company he co-founded because of concerns about his belief in a government conspiracy to hide UFOs. It’s hard to ascertain how the OneCosmos website worked from what little remains on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. However, I was able to find a rather eerie final blog post on March 2nd, 2001, by Firmage after the project folded in less than a year. The post begins with Firmage reminiscing about the first time he entered the OneCosmos office and racially profiled an African American pedestrian from his window. His assessment of the man’s inadequate lifestyle, income, and intelligence is then used as a segue to discuss his short-lived hopes of educating the public. The post concludes by discussing how problems acquiring investors, due in part to Firmage’s controversial beliefs about UFOs, led to the project’s demise. The full post is available for you to read below at your discretion.
After OneCosmos, Cosmos Studios would go on to work on two other major projects. The first was a documentary titled, The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. This documentary follows an expedition to discover a new species of dinosaurs by a team of paleontologists. The documentary was narrated by Matthew McConaughey and premiered on October 8th, 2002, through the A&E network. It was also accompanied by the release of a companion book. You can view the first two minutes of the documentary below.
After the Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt was released, the other major project Cosmos Studios worked on was an attempt at private space exploration. They planned to launch their own spacecraft in collaboration with an organization co-founded by Sagan in 1980 called, the Planetary Society. The ship would utilize solar sailing technology to gain propulsion from the rays emitted by the sun. However, it failed to reach orbit after takeoff. This ship was called, Cosmos 1, and a host of multimedia projects were planned around it. One such project was an interactive web page that was created using the now discontinued Adobe Flash platform. The page serves as a comprehensive overview of the project’s objectives. Users could select a topic by clicking on any of the ship’s eight solar sails. There is also an interactive timeline at the bottom to learn about all the scientific advancements over the decades that made the mission possible. The only way to currently view this page is to use a Flash emulator. I have gone through the process of emulating the page and capturing it for you to view below as an unlisted YouTube video. You can pause the video to read the text of any parts you are interested in. What you see in the video is every part of the page that is still viewable. All links to other pages and the interactive timeline at the bottom do not work properly in this version. If you would like to browse the project yourself, you will need to download your own Flash emulator and go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine link in the video’s description.
Following the loss of the Cosmos 1 spacecraft, Druyan continued to make media appearances throughout the latter part of the 2000s. The bulk of the appearances was spent promoting renditions of her earlier collaborations with Sagan. For example, here’s a minute-long promotional video she did for a Science Channel marathon of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. This concludes the section of this project devoted to the work of Druyan after Sagan’s death. If you would like to continue to the section on a new Cosmos series with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth MacFarlane, you can click the blue button at the bottom of the screen. You can also explore whichever sections you are most interested in by returning to the Launch Point or using the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.