46 ASTRONOMY • APRIL 2020
Cosmos would be a new season, that
Cosmos would be produced, but that it
would be on Fox, which was such an irony.
Of course, when Carl was alive and we
were writing together, we didn’t write for
the scientific publications. Well, he did
plenty, but we wrote for Parade magazine,
which was a Sunday supplement that
reached 70 million people. We wrote
about climate change. We wrote a piece
called “The Warming of the World.”
This is going back to the ’90s and
’80s. It’s kind of dismal, actually, to
think of how long scientists have been
warning about the greenhouse effect of
the building-up of carbon dioxide and
methane in the atmosphere.
But anyway, the would-be producers
said no, and then Seth brought us to
Peter. He had missed the first run of the
original series and was kind enough to
say he would watch the DVD. He
watched it with his kids, who were horri-
fied that they were gonna be forced to
look at what was then something like a
30-year-old science documentary.
But the thing that really turned Peter
around was that his kids, after some
chuckles at the beginning about Carl’s
sideburns or whatever, they became
obsessed with the show. They would call
him at work and say, “Daddy, when are
you going to come home? Can we watch
another Cosmos?” That immediately per-
suaded him that it was time to do it.
I was thinking he was going to ask for
a pilot. He said, “No. I’m ordering 13
from you.” I said, “Don’t you want apilot?” He pointed to the DVD and he
said, “No. That’s your pilot. You’re the
only person on Earth who knows how to
do this, so go do it.” He gave me absolute
and complete creative freedom, and it
was a tremendous joy to do it.
Besides Seth being our champion to
Fox, the other thing that he did was he
brought me together with Brannon Braga,
who had a distinguished career in doing
dramatic television — Star Trek and other
series — very successfully. Brannon
proved to be the absolute perfect collabo-
rator for the second season of Cosmos,
and now this third season of Cosmos.
So yeah, I have many stories that I
want to tell, and I have a vision of what
Cosmos, I think, really is.Astronomy: In the second season overall,
in 2014, the show had wandered consider-
ably far from just astronomy. We heard
about mechanics, chemistry, electromag-
netism, and other subjects. Was that a big
part of the show, not just to teach about
scientific topics, but to teach people how
to think scientifically?Druyan: Yes, it was. That was the inten-
tion. But also, we are a story-driven spe-
cies. I fell in love with Michael Faraday a
long time ago and I really wanted to tell
his story because he embodies, for me,
just a perfect subject in Cosmos. First of
all, his rise from obscurity, from poverty,
from a dysfunctional family, from great
hardship, and then the story of Humphry
Davy, Faraday’s mentor at first, and the
All About Eve kind of quality of that
relationship.
In a book, I had read that Humphry
Davy gave Faraday an assignment to do a
chemical experiment that he knew would
blow up in his face. Well, I thought,
“Wow. That’s a great story.”
The idea that he had decided to do
something to possibly kill his protégé
was just so exciting — but, of course,
when we did the research we found out
there was no truth to the story, or, per-
haps, just the tiniest alloy of some kind
of reality. It was clear that he did resent
Faraday.
Anyway, I love Faraday because, first
of all, he was so modest. He was, in a
way, probably more responsible for the
Industrial Revolution in the modern
world than any single person. He couldn’tHost Neil deGrasse
Tyson enters the
Palace of Life, an
imaginary place of
ancient towers hidden
by the mists of time
and enshrouded in
myth. Here, he moves
into its largest, most
ancient realm, to walk
among the life at the
bottom of the sea.In a distant future,
when our species
has ventured to
other planetary
systems, our
descendants will
revere the
wonders of a
world that is only
a memory.