There’s Giordano Bruno, for example, a contemporary of Galileo’s who was burned at the stake, in part because he insisted the universe is full of habitable planets.

( MORE: Caught on Camera: Supernova Spits Out Pulsar) But the people we profile are ones who have been overlooked.” “We talk about the normal cast of characters,” says Tyson. The new version puts an especially big emphasis on storytelling, using a graphic-novel style of animation to introduce viewers to some of the most important scientists you’ve probably never heard of. Sagan, along with his wife, Ann Druyan and their collaborator, astrophysicist Steven Soter, also helped viewers gain a perspective on humanity’s place in the universe, in both space and time-something Tyson does as well. What made the original series so compelling wasn’t the science alone, however.

If you want to experience the greatest hits of 21 st century science, this is the place. Carl Sagan couldn’t tell us about dark energy, or the discovery of exoplanets, or the sequencing of the human genome or string theory or the discovery of the Higgs boson because they hadn’t happened yet. One crucial difference between the old and the new, of course, is that the science has come a long way in three decades. I talk about chemistry, biology, evolution, physics-it’s all there.” “When you’re drinking in the entire universe, you realize that the boundaries we create are a little artificial.

“One of the hallmarks of the original series,” says Tyson, “is that Carl drew no lines between sciences that are traditionally separated.” The same goes this time around. I have myself down perfectly.”ĭespite the name, Cosmos is about far more than astronomy. It’s a re-imagining of the 1980’s series that made the original Sagan famous. This coming Sunday, he debuts on Fox and the National Geographic Channel as the host of the 13-part Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, co-produced by Fox and National Geographic. And now, Tyson is actually turning into Sagan-albeit a hipper, less geeky version. Tyson is so well known, in fact, that he’s routinely compared with Carl Sagan, the great astronomer-communicator of the previous generation. He attracts crowds wherever he goes: tickets for a talk he’ll be giving in Toronto later this month reportedly sold out in well under a minute. He has 1.67 million followers on Twitter. He hosted NOVA Science Now on PBS for half a decade. His day job as director of New York’s spectacular Hayden Planetarium made him prominent enough, but he’s parlayed that position into frequent appearances on the Colbert Report, the Daily Show, Real Time with Bill Maher and plenty of other high-profile programs. Follow can’t be many people left who doubt that Neil deGrasse Tyson is science’s greatest celebrity.

Neil degrasse tyson and carl sagan