Launch Point
The project looks at over 60 years of history by documenting the space exploration missions and science communication initiatives surrounding the 40 years between the first and latest entries in the Cosmos series. So, why should you care about the Cosmos television franchise? The original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by astrophysicist Carl Sagan in 1980, was one of the most successful educational documentaries in the history of American Public Broadcasting. It originally aired on PBS and was the channel’s most watched television series, drawing in roughly 750 million viewers worldwide throughout the 1980s. The two new seasons of the show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson are titled Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and Cosmos: Possible Worlds. They were released in 2014 and 2020 on Fox and National Geographic. In 2014, the first run of A Spacetime Odyssey broadcasts was watched by 135 million people in 125 countries alone. That made it National Geographic's biggest show ever at that time. The release of Possible Worlds in 2020 expanded this audience to reach 172 countries.
There is a rich history of scientific research and media production surrounding these three seasons of Cosmos with Sagan and Tyson. This project will guide you through that history and introduce you to a cast of other interesting real-life characters along the way. There are two major public figures discussed in this project that I would like to draw your attention to, Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane. Druyan is Sagan’s widow and co-author of the original Cosmos. She has continued writing, producing, and directing some of the episodes in the new seasons after his death. MacFarlane is best known as the creator of the mature animated television comedies Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show. He pitched the new Cosmos series to Fox and produced both new seasons, making this revival of the show possible as a result.
These documentaries converge at the crossroads of science, spirituality, and politics. They ask us to reflect on what the findings of cosmology can tell us about our own lives and imagine what humanity’s future in space might look like. The study I have conducted here touches upon many facets of human experience. It is definitely worth your time as a result.
Before you get started, I would like to give you a brief introduction to the structure of the project. The project is divided into eight parts displayed at the bottom of this page. These include six sections covering different eras of historical research, a short essay titled "Who Owns (the) Cosmos? An Epilogue, Prologue, and Intermission", and a 30-page academic companion paper that I have written about my experience creating the project. As the subtitle for my "Who Owns (the) Cosmos" essay suggests, this project has a nonlinear structure. The six historical sections are placed in chronological order, but you can view any of these parts at the beginning, middle, or end of your experience. You can also leave and come back to this project at any time. The historical sections of the project contain videos that can be up to an hour long, but I have clipped them down to be much shorter. The video’s progress bar will still show the full hour, but don’t worry, I have used Scalar’s annotation feature to make it start and stop at the time I have specified.
I encourage you to follow your interests and impulses while exploring the project. If you’re becoming bored, do not hesitate to skim through it or move on to something completely different. There is no correct way to experience this case study of the Cosmos franchise. So, please feel free to play around and have fun!
