35 years of Cosmos

This year we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the launch of Cosmos, book written by astrophysicist Carl Sagan. In 1980 the book was released at the same time that the series, of the same name, was being taken to all American homes through television.

On television, the program carried a subtitle called Cosmos – A Personal Voyage (Cosmos – A Personal Journey, in free translation). At that time, the program was produced through a partnership of the American Public Television Channel (PBS) and the BBC.

In addition to the book mentioned above, Carl Sagan wrote other successful books. Contact, launched in 1985, celebrates 30 years of launch and The Demon-Haunted World, already has 20 years of success. One of the most famous passages in the book Cosmos, and when History talks about the opportunity he had to coordinate the operation of taking a picture of the earth, with the probe Travel, which was more than 6 billion kilometers from Earth, on February 14, 1990. The photo became known as “the pale blue dot” (pale blue dot, In english).

A série Cosmos original, from the 80s, had 13 episodes of 60 minutes each where Carl Sagan talked about the history of the universe, the planet Earth and all the science we know. In the 90s, it was relaunched with some reservations. An example is that in the original series, when History talks about the dinosaurs, he says that we don't know why they disappeared, because it was only in the 80's that evidence emerged that strengthened the thesis about the meteor that would have fallen in Central America. This gives a sense of how, in the field of science, fact-finding evolves over time.

Last year the American network FOX, in partnership with Seth MacFarlane and Carl's ex-wife, Ann Druyan, produced an updated series along the same lines, which he called Cosmos – A Space Odyssey and in Brazil it received the name of Cosmos – A Space Time Odyssey. Carl Sagan died in 1996, and therefore, in this new version, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Certainly, 35 years from now what Tyson narrates in this adventure will be outdated and hopefully another team will produce something updated for the next generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFF2ECZ8m1A

If you haven't read these books or watched these series yet, you don't know what you're missing. These are among the best materials on how science works that have ever been made.

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