Cosmos Teaser Drops Some Science On The World Series
This article is more than 2 years old
We love science here at GFR, and we love people who can inspire passion about science in others nearly as much. The late Carl Sagan was one of the very best people ever when it came to that latter feat, and his series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage inspired a sense of wonder about our marvelous universe in people of all ages. It’s been over 30 years since the series first aired, but now it’s rising from the ashes as Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, set to air on Fox next year. Hoping to get the series some high-profile exposure, Fox premiered a 30-second teaser in the midst of the World Series last night. You can check it out above.
The new Cosmos will be hosted by the closest we’ve got to a Sagan successor these days, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who makes the news pretty regularly for things like fact-checking Gravity on Twitter, telling The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart that the globe on their set was rotating the wrong way, and passionately defending NASA to the doofuses who make up our Congress. The 13-episode new Cosmosseries will premiere on an unspecified date in 2014 and, hopefully, inspire a whole new generation of future scientists.
If deGrasse Tyson’s involvement makes perfect sense, the show has an unlikely champion in Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. Whether you like his brand of comedy or not, the dude deserves major props for using the clout his cartoon success has granted him to help a passion project like Cosmos get traction in today’s often-brutal TV landscape. Without a powerful backer like MacFarlane, the odds of something like Cosmos getting a network greenlight these days seem vanishingly slim. (Also worthy of note is that MacFarlane helped the Library of Congress acquire many of Sagan’s papers. He’s a mensch as far as I’m concerned.)
Goodness knows, in today’s frequently anti-intellectual, anti-science landscape, our culture is in dire need of anything that can make science accessible and interesting to people who might not otherwise show an interest. Help us, Cosmos, you’re our only hope.
The Cosmos teaser is actually a shorter version of the epic trailer that premiered at Comic-Con last summer. You should totally watch that one right now.
