History Series / Cosmos

* LibraryOfBabel: The virtual reproduction of the library at Alexandria, whose loss Sagan mourns as "self-inflicted radical brain surgery" for civilization as a whole.

* OneWorldOrder: Played with. While Carl Sagan points out the folly of radical, fanatical nationalism compared to loyalty to the species, planet and cosmos, there's never really any call to a unified world government. Instead, he hopes for the world to cooperate better while acknowledging the diversity of humanity in its myriad cultures, nations and communities.

The full series is [[http://www.hulu.com/cosmos available on Hulu]]. And on [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClPShKs9Kr0 Youtube]] (for those who cannot access Hulu's services, like Canada for instance).

-->''If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.''

** "The Lives of the Stars" begins by showing an apple pie being made- in a dramatic manner reminiscent of ''AlsoSprachZarathustra''.

* WhenDimensionsCollide: As part of an explanation of how we can try to [[YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm visualise a 4-dimensional being]] Sagan brings to life the 2-Dimensional 'Flatland' on a tabletop and imagines it being [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0 visited by an object]] from our (3D) dimension.

** This was also acknowledged in the afterword of the new version of the final episode, "Who speaks for Earth", showing images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands and the abolition of the Apartheid in South Africa, mentioning how "walls have fallen down and irreconcilable ideologies have embraced", and taking it as a good omen for the future.

** This was also acknowledged in the afterword of the new version of the final episode, "Who speaks for Earth", showing images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands and abolition of the Apartheid in South Africa, mentioning how walls have fallen down and irreconcilable ideologies have embraced, and taking it as a good omen for the future.

* TheGreatPoliticsMessUp: In an earlier version of the "Blues for a Red Planet" episode, there was an afterword exploring the possibility of the U.S. and the Soviet Union teaming up to explore and colonize Mars, ending with a shot of the U.S. and Soviet flags in front of a Martian landscape.

* LiesToChildren: Carl resorts to analogies to explain extremely abstract concepts like gravity, infinity and extra dimensions. To his credit, he immediately explains why the analogies are imperfect.

* EruditeStoner: Sagan was an enthusiastic marijuana smoker and makes a reference to it in Episode 9, when describing the restoration of gravity upon removing it and its effects on tea and people in ''AliceInWonderland'': "I've been to a couple of parties like that myself!"

* HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure: The combined explosive yield of all bombs dropped during WorldWarII was about 1 megaton of TNT. As one episode pointed out, this is the warhead yield of a ''single'' hydrogen bomb. If the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a full-scale nuclear exchange, it would be like "A World War II every second, for the length of a lazy afternoon."

The full series is [[http://www.hulu.com/cosmos available on Hulu]].

** In the "nuclear winter nightmare" segment, Sagan flies back to Earth after being away exploring space only to find radio silence because everyone is dead.

* HumansThroughAlienEyes: In "Who Speaks for Earth?" during the AfterTheEnd scenario Sagan wonders what would the Encyclopedia Galactica would have to say about humans, and in the first episode he muses:

* JidaiGeki: A recreation of the era when it's explored how the artificial selection of crabs happenend due to a random resemblance to a fallen samurai.

---> The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the cortex becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns.

* PlantAliens: The civilization who are self-described as "We Who Survived" in the Encyclopaedia Galactica are mobile autotrophs who implement Selenium, Bromine and Chlorine in their biology (along with the ubiquitous CHON elements of course), and engage in arithmetic poetry. Ironically, [[spoiler: they ended up self-destructing. Just before we did]].

* SpaceWhale: Not exactly, but it mentions that golden record on the Voyager probe also has recordings of the songs of the whales on Earth.

--> ''"The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day, venture, to the stars. A still more glorious dawn awaits - not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise. A morning filled with 400 billion suns - the rising of the Milky Way."''

** At the time of his death, he and his wife, Ann, were planning a new miniseries, Cosmos For Kids.
* TheWorldIsJustAwesome: Sagan was fond of pointing out just how majestic and grandiose the natural world is compared to the ability of our imaginations to understand it. In one part, he describes big numbers and then points out how far from infinity and eternity they are.

* {{Defictionalization}}: The Mars rovers which Sagan spoke of in Episode 5, ''"Blues for a Red Planet"'' were defictionalized 23 years later with the highly successful [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover Spirit and Opportunity]] rovers, and the soon-to-be-launched [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover Curiosity]] rover. Also, the spacecraft Cassini did eventually reach Saturn and is exploring the system to this day, and its Huygens lander did successfully reach and photograph the surface of Titan, as Sagan had hoped.
* EruditeStoner: Sagan was an entusiasthic marijuana smoker and makes a reference to it in Episode 9, when describing the restoration of gravity upon removing it and its effects on tea and people in AliceInWonderland: "I've been to a couple of parties like that myself!"

* TheGreatPoliticsMessUp: In an earlier version of the "Blues for a Red Planet" episode, there was an afterword exploring the possibility of the U. S. and the Soviet Union teaming up to explore and colonize Mars, it ended with a shot the U. S. and Soviet flags in front of a martian landscape.

--> '''Sagan''': In fact, if we slowly increase our speed to the speed of light, we can tranverse our entire galaxy in 56 years. But we'd come back to find the earth burnt to a cinder and the sun long dead.

* BeamMeUpScotty: Sagan says "billions" with a strong "B" many times on this show, but he never utters the phrase "Billions and billions." That came from an affectionate parody of Sagan done by Johnny Carson on TheTonightShow. WordOfGod has it that he found it annoying at first but got over it. And he whole reason he said billions with a strong B was to emphasize that it wasn't millions but three whole orders of magnitude greater. He lampshaded and did say the phrase years later in the prologue of his last book, mostly just to be able to say he actually said it. "So just for the record, Billions and Billions" He made it an AscendedMeme, when named the book ''Billions and Billions: [[LongTitle Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium]]''

Currently, a remake/update is in the works with Neil Degrasse Tyson as host, Sagan's widow as a producer, and... SethMacFarlane as executive producer.

* BeamMeUpScotty: Sagan says "billions" with a strong "B" many times on this show, but he never utters the phrase "Billions and billions." That came from an affectionate parody of Sagan done by Johnny Carson on TheTonightShow. WordOfGod has it that he found it annoying at first but got over it. And he whole reason he said billions with a strong B was to emphasize that it wasn't millions but three whole orders of magnitude greater. He reportedly did say the phrase years later, mostly just to be able to say he actually said it. Something like "Billions and Billions, there, I said it."

* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotAwesome: Books, as explained in Episode 11, "The Persistence of Memory," let us ''transcend time and death''.
--> ''"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.''
--> "''Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds there ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contributions to the collective knowledge of the human species.''"
** A bit earlier in the book, he quotes Charles Sherrington, who makes the act of ''waking up'' into something of cosmic importance.
---> The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the cortex becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns.
** "The Lives of the Stars" begins by showing an apple pie being made- in a dramatic manner reminiscent of ''AlsoSprachZarathustra''.
* WhatMightHaveBeen: Sagan briefly speculates on what might have happened if the spirit of scientific inquiry found in ancient Greece and Rome had persisted.

* BeyondTheImpossible: Sagan was fond of pointing out just how majestic and grandiose the natural world is compared to the ability of our imaginations to understand it. In one part, he describes big numbers and then points out how far from infinity and eternity they are.