Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey Season 1 quotes

The essential message of life has been copied and recopied for more than 3 billion years. But where did that message come from? Nobody knows. Perhaps it began in a shallow, sunlit pool, just like this. . . . Or life could've started in the searing heat of a volcanic vent on the deep sea floor. Or is it possible that life came to Earth as a hitchhiker?

We've encoded our stories in radio waves and beamed them into space . . . for over 70 years. [And since] 1960, we've been listening for extraterrestrial radio signals without hearing so much as a tolling bell. . . . For all we know, we may have just missed an alien signal. [Or perhaps a civilization] even slightly more advanced than ours may have already moved on to some other mode of communication.

Whether or not we ever make contact with intelligent alien life may depend on a critical question: What is the life expectancy of a civilization? . . . Today, we have a single global civilization. How long will it live? . . . We're pumping greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere at a rate not seen on Earth for a million years. And there's scientific consensus that we're destabilizing our climate.

The next golden age of human achievement begins here and now: New Year's Day of the next cosmic year. In the first tenth of a second, we take the vision of the Pale Blue Dot to heart, and learn how to share this tiny world with each other . . . as the effects of climate change reverse and diminish. A fifth of a second into this future people will stop dying from the effects of poverty. The planet is now a completely self-sustaining, intercommunicating organism.

Why is Venus scorching hot? It's because . . . the flow of energy is blocked by a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. . . . Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect.

By burning coal, oil and gas, our civilization is exhaling carbon dioxide much faster than Earth can absorb it. So, CO2 is building up in the atmosphere. The planet is heating up.

Keep your eye on the man, not the dog. (Comparing the gradual curve of Tyson's path along a beach to climate and the erratic path of a dog Tyson is holding on a leash to weather.)

More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere.

We looked back on our way to the Moon and saw "one world, indivisible, and kind of small. . . . This . . . was the unexpected gift of Apollo."

There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale to push the cosmos apart. . . . We call it "dark energy," but that name, like "dark matter," is merely a code word for our ignorance. It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.

The difference between seeing nothing but a pebble and reading the history of the cosmos inscribed inside it is science. (Discussing a slow-growing manganese nodule from the ocean floor which shows that a star near the Earth went supernova within the last two million years or so.)

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we've ever known. (Recording of Carl Sagan's voice over a re-imagining of the "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth taken by Voyager 1.)

How did we escape from the prison [of ignorance]? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart. (1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. Think for yourself. Question yourself. (2) Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. (3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong! Get over it. (4) Follow the evidence, wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all: (5) Remember, you could be wrong.