Special thanks go to Peter Yang, Hattie, Cool-fool, luckysummer, reality85, philipzo, happyhelen, jiaohua3966, liudreams, Andrew1258, Charming, starcream, monica_zp1 for their contributions and participations.
Hello, my name is Ann Druyan. When Carl Sagan, Steven Soter and I wrote the Cosmos television series in the late 1970s, a lot of things were different. Back then, the United States and the Soviet Union held the whole planet in a perpetual hostage crisis called the Cold War. The wealth and scientific ingenuity of our civilization was being squandered on a runaway arms race. They employed more than half the world scientists and infested the earth with 50, 000 nuclear weapons.
So much has happened since then. The Cold War is history and science has made great strides. We've completed the spacecraft reconnaissance of the solar system, the preliminary mapping of the visible universe that surrounds us. And we've charted the universe within: the Human genome. When Cosmos was first broadcast, there was no World Wide Web, and, it was a different world. What a tribute to Carl Sagan, a scientist who took many a punch for daring to speculate, that even after 20 of the most eventful years in the history of science, Cosmos requires few revisions and indeed is rich in prophecy.
Cosmos is both the history of the scientific enterprise and an attempt to convey the soaring spiritual high of its central revelation, our oneness with the universe. Now please enjoy Cosmos: The proud saga of HOW, through the searching of 40, 000 generations of our ancestors we have come to discover our coordinates in space and in time. And how, through the awesomely powerful method of science, we have been able to reconstruct the sweep of cosmic evolution and to find our own part in its great story.
The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distinct memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.
squander v.浪費
runaway adj. 失去控制的
infest vt. (害蟲、盜賊等)大批出沒; 侵擾 寄生于...上
reconnaissance n.偵察, 搜索, 勘測
genome n.[生]基因組,染色體組
punch n.力量
prophecy n.預言, 預言能力
oneness n.統(tǒng)一,一致
coordinates n.坐標
contemplation n.沉思
tingle vi.造成麻刺的感覺, 興奮