They’re collaborating on a new version premiering on the Fox Network on Sunday March 9. Now “Cosmos” is back, thanks largely to Seth MacFarlane, creator of TV’s “Family Guy” and a space buff since he was a kid, and Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow. Sagan was the most famous scientist in America-the face of science itself. He was the house astronomer, basically, on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” Then, in an astonishing burst of energy in his mid-40s, he co-created and hosted a 13-part PBS television series, “Cosmos.” It aired in the fall of 1980 and ultimately reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Among other things, he served as an astronomy professor at Cornell, wrote more than a dozen books, worked on NASA robotic missions, edited the scientific journal Icarus and somehow found time to park himself, repeatedly, arguably compulsively, in front of TV cameras. He led a feverish existence, with multiple careers tumbling over one another, as if he knew he wouldn’t live to an old age. He’s been gone now for nearly two decades, but people old enough to remember him will easily be able to summon his voice, his fondness for the word “billions” and his boyish enthusiasm for understanding the universe we’re so lucky to live in. No one has ever explained space, in all its bewildering glory, as well as Sagan did. We could even find others out there, the inhabitants of distant, highly advanced civilizations-the Old Ones, as Sagan might put it. Or perhaps we are here to stay, somehow finding a way to transcend our worst instincts and ancient hatreds, and eventually become a galactic species. Our presence may even be ephemeral-a flash of luminescence in a great dark ocean. It’s a universe that, as Sagan reminded us again and again, isn’t about us. We live in Carl Sagan’s universe–awesomely vast, deeply humbling.
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