FOREWORD

Ann Druyan

I once stood on the shores of the cosmic ocean with Carl Sagan.

Thirty-five years ago we shivered in the sunshine on the wind-whipped Monterey cliffs of northern California’s Pacific coast with our co-writer, astronomer Steven Soter, and a small television crew. It was a struggle to wrangle the wildly flapping two-foot-long galley pages of this book while trying to keep hold of the cardboard cue cards that Steve and I had prepared for Carl for the television show. (The book and its original 1980 companion television series were created simultaneously in a three-year-long frenzy, although each contains passages and sequences not found in the other.) The pages of script and manuscript were one of a kind back in those relatively low-tech days. With every gust coming off the light-dazzled waves, the pages threatened to take flight and blow out to sea like the dandelion puffballs Carl kept releasing to the cosmos.

The scenes we wrote and shot that day became the opening of the show and the first words of the book: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

We were consciously going for a biblical cadence, words that would scope out the ambitious territorial range of our explorations in space and time. Beginning the saga of 40,000 generations of searchers on one tiny world trying to find their bearings in the cosmos required nothing less than an epic flourish.

It became the “Welcome aboard” to a personal voyage on the ship of the imagination, one that nearly a billion people have taken, and still take, in great numbers, in virtually every language spoken on our “pale blue dot.” Ever since the fall of 1980, in both its manifestations, Cosmos has carried multitudes to the outermost reaches of our understanding of the universe, to places unimaginably small and incomprehensibly vast.

Some religious fundamentalists found that first line offensive. To them it was a shot across their bow that Carl was out to steal their thunder. They were on to something. As with everything Carl wrote, the science of Cosmos is solid, with big red rhetorical flags warning the reader when the author ventures into the speculative. (And thirty-five years later, how astonishingly prophetic have been most of Carl’s conjectures on everything from climate change on Earth, the ambiguities of the Viking lander’s findings on Mars, to his dreams of what might await us on Saturn’s moon, Titan.) But Carl didn’t stop there.

The universe revealed by the relentless error-correcting mechanism of science was to him infinitely preferable to the untested assumptions of traditional belief. For Carl, the “spiritual” had to be rooted in natural reality. He cherished those ideas about the cosmos that remained after the most rigorous experiment and observation. Scientific insight made him feel something, a soaring sensation, a recognition that he could only compare to falling in love. And as he used to say: “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”

This is the big, wide-open, welcoming embrace of Cosmos , as far from the clock-watching slow-death tedium of too many a science class as Titan is from Earth. It’s about being unafraid to take the findings of science to heart .

Cosmos is for many that first encounter with the universe that you thought was foreclosed to you because you couldn’t do the math, or you live in a place where there are no scientists to invite you in. Carl wanted everyone to come on this voyage; to experience the power of the scientific perspective and the wonders it reveals. His secret was to recapture the person he was before he understood the concept and then retrace his own thought steps toward comprehension. It worked. He inspired legions to study, teach, and do science.

The U.S. Library of Congress has recently designated Cosmos one of the eighty-eight books “that shaped America.” It’s a roster that includes such earth-shaking works as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , Herman Melville’s Moby Dick , Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road . They’re listed in chronological order and the very first one, published in 1751 (decades before the concept of a constitutional government by, for, and of the people, crystallized), is also a science book. It’s by another who believed that democracy requires an informed public of responsible decision-makers. The list begins with Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity . That book and this one are passionate acts of citizenship by two scientists who wanted science to belong to all of us.

This spring I returned for the first time to the shores of the cosmic ocean. I was there with another television crew to shoot the opening scenes of the new Cosmos series. Our host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, is one of the many scientists whose young lives were touched by Carl. I am happy to report that the terrain is as unspoiled, gorgeous, and inspiring as it was the first time.

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it’s not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That’s the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered.

Welcome aboard. It’s time, once again, to set sail for the stars.

A NN D RUYAN served as creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message and was Carl Sagan’s co-writer on Cosmos , as well as co-creator of the motion picture Contact and many other works. She is an executive producer and writer of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey , the television sequel coming in 2014 on Fox. Ms. Druyan was married to Dr. Sagan until his death. The asteroids named after them are in perpetual wedding-ring orbit around the Sun.