“Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s 1980s television documentary series, “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” is, so far, one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring shows I’ve ever watched. (Seriously, watching it I was more excited and moved than this little girl.) Jetting around in Tyson’s “Ship of the Imagination” — “free from the shackles of space and time” — “Cosmos” explores the origins of the universe and life itself, explained in a way that is both comprehensible and absolutely mind-blowing, alongside visuals that stun. As Tyson has said, “The universe is in us … Many people look up at the sky and they feel small. But I feel big. Because my atoms came from those stars.” Click on for just 15 of the most profound quotes from “Cosmos” first two episodes and then actually watch them in full on Hulu. You won’t regret it.
“This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adherent to a simple set of rules. Test ideas by experiments and observations. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours.”
“To make this journey, we’ll need imagination, but imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.”
“Our entire universe emerged from a point smaller than a single atom. Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire, launching the expansion of the universe and giving birth to all the energy and all the matter we know today. I know that sounds crazy, but there’s strong observational evidence to support the Big Bang theory. And it includes the amount of helium in the cosmos and the glow of radio waves left over from the explosion.”
“The Earth took one hell of a beating in its first billion years, fragments of orbiting debris collided and coalesced, until they snowballed to form our Moon.”
“The Moon is a souvenir of that violent epoch. If you stood on the surface of that long ago Earth, the Moon would have looked a hundred times brighter. It was ten times closer back then, locked in a much more intimate gravitational embrace.”
“Beyond that horizon lie parts of the universe that are too far away. There hasn’t been enough time in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe for their light to have reached us.”
“Nobody knows how life got started. Most of the evidence from that time was destroyed by impact and erosion. Science works on the frontier of knowledge and ignorance. We’re not afraid to admit what we don’t know. There’s no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers. Maybe someone watching this, will be the first to solve the mystery of how life on Earth began.”
“Some claim evolution is just a theory. As if it were merely an opinion. The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science. In my view, it’s also a soaring spiritual experience.”
“There are many millions of living species of animals and plants, most of them still unknown to science. Think of that — we have yet to make contact with most of the forms of terrestrial life.”
“The tenacity of life is mind-boggling. We keep finding it where no one thought it could be.”
“Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.”
“Every breed of dog you’ve ever seen was sculpted by human hands.”
“Stars die and reborn […] They get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All was cooked in the fiery hearts of long vanished stars. … The cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
“There are as many atoms in each molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. This is true for dogs, and bears, and every living thing. We are, each of us, a little universe.”
“Science reveals that all life on Earth is one.”
“Every person you’ve ever heard of lies right in there. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, every thing in the history books happened here in the last 14 seconds of the cosmic calendar.”
Original by Amelia McDonell-Parry
