Five minutes with Ann Druyan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Not everyone has had the opportunity to enjoy every episode of the show Cosmos as it aired. The first season, in which Carl Sagan took everyone on a journey of the mind, aired in 1980. By comparison, the jump from Season Two (2014) to Season Three (2020) is fairly minor. Even with a gap that small, there will still be a lot of people tuning in to Cosmos: Possible Worlds and watching this show for the first time. The second season of this show brought in an extrordinary number of viewers, and with the diversification of tv consumption into streaming services over the last couple of years there are far more opportunities for people of every age to tune in live.

Knowing that, I really only had one question for the show’s inimitable host Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the incredible writer/director Ann Druyan. What do you hope kids who have never seen anything like this before take away from Cosmos: Possible Worlds?

Ann Druyan

When I was first trying to bring Cosmos back to television, and going from network to network, what I really wanted to do was bring back the family hour. I wanted people to be together, to be exposed to thrilling ideas and concepts. The beauty of nature. I wanted them all to bet together in the same place and watching together. These were these executives who sort of chortled at this impossible dream, and I felt tremendously vindicated in the second season when the global conversation showed families enjoying Cosmos together.

With this new season, I hope childred walk away understanding that science is real, that objective truth and facts are things that are important, and that it’s a worthwhile endeavor to ask “what if” and explore those answers using science.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I think the idea that science matters, that truth matters, objective truth matters. That science gets you to the onbjective truth, and that science may be our only hope to save us from the shortsighted decisions that we are all part of today.

I’m less worried about the next generation, because they tend to be a little more woke than the older generations. It’s really the older folks that need to be hit with this. I think younger people will embrace this, and it will empower them to do more of what they are already doing to ensure the world that they inherit from us, the world we’re borrowing from them, is something they’d be proud to say their parents were good caretakers of.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/cosmos-possible-worlds-one-question-ann-druyan-and-neil-degrasse-tyson