Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - First Season

Hello. My name is Ann Druyan.

When Carl Sagan, Steven Soter and I…

…wrote the Cosmos TV series in the late 1970s…

…a lot of things where different.

Back then, the U.S. and the Soviet Union…

…held the hole planet in their perpetual hostage crisis…

…called the Cold War.

The wealth and scientific ingenuity of our civilization…

…was being squandered on a runaway arms raise.

Then employed half the world scientists…

…and infested the world with 50.000 nuclear weapons.

So much has happened since then.

The Cold War is history…

…and science has made great strides.

We've completed the spacecraft recognizance of the Solar System…

…the preliminary mapping of the visible universe that surrounds us…

…and we've charted the universe within: the human genome.

When Cosmos was first broadcast there was no World Wide Web…

…it was a different world.

What a tribute to Carl Sagan…

…a scientist who took many a punch for daring to speculate…

…that even after 20 of the most eventful years in the history of science…

…Cosmos requires few revisions and indeed is rich in prophecy.

Cosmos is both the history of the scientific enterprise…

…and an attempt to convey the spiritual high…

…of its central revelation:

Our oneness with the universe.

Now, please, enjoy Cosmos, the proud saga of how…

…through the searching of 40.000 generations of our ancestors…

…we have come to discover our coordinates…

…in space and in time.

And how, through the awesomely powerful method of science…

…we have been able to reconstruct the sweep of cosmic evolution…

…and defined our own part in its great story.

The cosmos is all that is…

…or ever was or ever will be.

Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us.

There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice…

…a faint sensation, as if a distant memory…

…of falling from a great height.

We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.

The size and age of the cosmos…

…are beyond ordinary human understanding.

Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity…

…is our tiny planetary home, the Earth.

For the first time, we have the power to decide…

…the fate of our planet and ourselves.

This is a time of great danger.

But our species is young and curious and brave.

It shows much promise.

In the last few millennia, we've made…

…the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries…

…about the cosmos and our place within it.

I believe our future depends powerfully on…

…how well we understand this cosmos…

…in which we float like a mote of dust…

…in the morning sky.

We're about to begin a journey through the cosmos.

We'll encounter galaxies and suns and planets…

…life and consciousness…

…coming into being, evolving and perishing.

Worlds of ice and stars of diamond.

Atoms as massive as suns…

…and universes smaller than atoms.

But it's also a story of our own planet…

…and the plants and animals that share it with us.

And it's a story about us:

How we achieved our present understanding of the cosmos…

…how the cosmos has shaped our evolution and our culture…

…and what our fate may be.

We wish to pursue the truth, no matter where it leads.

But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both.

We will not be afraid to speculate.

But we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.

The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths…

…of exquisite interrelationships…

…of the awesome machinery of nature.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean.

On this shore, we have learned most of what we know.

Recently, we've waded a little way out…

…maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.

Some part of our being knows this is where we came from.

We long to return.

And we can.

Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

The journey for each of us begins here.

We're going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination…

…unfettered by ordinary limits on speed and size…

…drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies…

…it can take us anywhere in space and time.

Perfect as a snowflake…

…organic as a dandelion seed…

…it will carry us…

…to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts.

Come with me.

Before us is the cosmos on the grandest scale we know.

We are far from the shores of Earth…

…in the uncharted reaches of the cosmic ocean.

Strewn like sea froth on the waves of space…

…are innumerable faint tendrils of light.

Some of them containing hundreds…

…of billions of suns.

These are the galaxies…

…drifting endlessly in the great cosmic dark.

In our ship of the imagination…

…we are halfway to the edge of the known universe.

In this, the first of our cosmic voyages…

…we begin to explore the universe revealed by science.

Our course will eventually carry us to a far-off and exotic world.

But from the depths of space, we cannot detect even…

…the cluster of galaxies in which our Milky Way is embedded…

…much less the sun or the Earth.

We are in the realm of the galaxies…

…8 billion light years from home.

No matter where we travel, the patterns of nature are the same…

…as in the form of this spiral galaxy.

The same laws of physics apply everywhere…

…throughout the cosmos.

But we have just begun to understand these laws.

The universe is rich in mystery.

Near the center of a cluster of galaxies…

…there's sometimes a rogue, elliptical galaxy…

…made of a trillion suns…

…which devours its neighbors.

Perhaps this cyclone of stars…

…is what astronomers on Earth call a quasar.

Our ordinary measures of distance fail us…

…here in the realm of the galaxies.

We need a much larger unit: the light year.

It measures how far light travels in a year…

…nearly 10 trillion kilometers.

It measures not time, but enormous distances.

In the Hercules cluster…

…the individual galaxies are about 300,000 light years apart.

So light takes about 300,000 years…

…to go from one galaxy to another.

Like stars and planets and people…

…galaxies are born, live and die.

They may all experience a tumultuous adolescence.

During their first 100 million years, their cores may explode.

Seen in radio light, great jets of energy…

…pour out and echo across the cosmos.

Worlds near the core or along the jets would be incinerated.

I wonder how many planets and how many civilizations…

…might be destroyed.

In the Pegasus cluster, there's a ring galaxy…

…the wreckage left from the collision of two galaxies.

A splash in the cosmic pond.

Individual galaxies may explode and collide…

…and their constituent stars may blow up as well.

In this supernova explosion…

…a single star outshines the rest of its galaxy.

We are approaching what astronomers on Earth call…

…the Local Group.

Three million light years across, it contains some 20 galaxies.

It's a sparse and rather typical chain of islands…

…in the immense cosmic ocean.

We are now only 2 million light years from home.

On the maps of space, this galaxy is called M31…

…the great galaxy Andromeda.

It's a vast storm of stars and gas and dust.

As we pass over it…

…we see one of its small satellite galaxies.

Clusters of galaxies…

…and the stars of individual galaxies…

…are all held together by gravity.

Surrounding M31…

…are hundreds of globular star clusters.

We're approaching one of them.

Each cluster orbits the massive center of the galaxy.

Some contain up to a million separate stars.

Every globular cluster is like a swarm of bees…

…bound by gravity…

…every bee, a sun.

From Pegasus, our voyage has taken us…

…200 million light years to the Local Group…

…dominated by two great spiral galaxies.

Beyond M31 is another very similar galaxy.

Its spiral arms slowly turning…

…once every quarter billion years.

This is our own Milky Way…

…seen from the outside.

This is the home galaxy of the human species.

In the obscure backwaters of the Carina-Cygnus spiral arm…

…we humans have evolved to consciousness…

…and some measure of understanding.

This region of the Milky Way galaxy is now usually called the Local Arm…

…or the Orion Arm, but the spiral arm nomenclature remains rather fuzzy.

Concentrated in its brilliant core…

…and strewn along its spiral arms…

…are 400 billion suns.

It takes light 100,000 years to travel…

…from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Within this galaxy are stars and worlds…

…and, it may be, an enormous diversity of living things…

…and intelligent beings and space faring civilizations.

Scattered among the stars of the Milky Way…

…are supernova remnants…

…each one the remains of a colossal stellar explosion.