I grew up watching LeVar Burton on TNG and Reading Raonbow, so saying his narration was nostalgic is a bit of an understatement.

Shortly after release, Cosmos became the best-selling science book ever published in the English language, [10] [11] [12] [13] and was the first science book to sell more than half a million copies.

The episode ends with speculation on alien intelligence and the information conveyed on the Voyager Golden Record. Cosmos Update shows new information about the odd, irregular surfaces of galaxies and the Milky Way perhaps being a barred spiral galaxy. Its profound and often moving messages are still as relevant and important as when they were first written- possibly even more so. The subtitle began to be used more frequently in the 2010s to differentiate it from the sequel series that followed.

The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until The Civil War (1990). Another sequel series from the same team (with Tyson again hosting), Cosmos: Possible Worlds, premiered on March 9, 2020, on National Geographic.

Voyager 2 – still active in 2016 – has just passed Pluto and left the conventional Solar system – not bad for 1975 technology. Just a few of the ideas explored in Cosmos include the history and mutual development of science and civilization, the nature of the Universe, human and robotic space exploration, the inner workings of the cell and the DNA that controls it, and the dangers and future implications of nuclear war. Clarke in a speech promoting an end to Cold War anti-ICBM spending, instead arguing that the anti-ICBM budget would be better spent on Mars exploration. One of Sagan's main purposes for both the book and the television series was to explain complex scientific ideas in a way that anyone interested in learning can understand.

So, if you are wanting in depth analysis on Pulsars, Black Holes, our Solar System etc then this is not a work that focuses greatly on those elements.I remember reading about Sagan talking of the future: sending a rover to mars for example which has been done since few years now. As the title of this review implies, this book should be read by all those who can read and are inhabitants of the known universe. His Peabody Award-winning public television series, Cosmos, has been seen by more than 500 million people in over sixty countries, and the accompanying book spent seventy weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. The unprecedented success of Cosmos ushered in a dramatic increase in visibility for science-themed literature. In making the move to commercial television, the hour-long episodes were edited to shorter lengths, and Sagan shot new epilogues for several episodes, in which he discussed new discoveries—and alternative viewpoints—that had arisen since the original broadcast.