Cosmos By Carl Sagan - Why Every Human Must Have This?!

If these days, teen television shows revolving around the lives of the rich, the popular, and the elite are what have been invading popular culture and thought, the late seventies was faced with a rather different situation. During the late 70’s, one of the most influential and most widely supported TV shows was adapted from a novel. Cosmos, a novel written by world-renowned scientist Carl Sagan, was simultaneously published and adapted into a TV series.

The book became a sort of bible for the half-a-billion people in the world who had already seen the TV series by the time of its debunking in the mid-90’s after Carl Sagan’s death. Still, after many years, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos continue to reign among the most popular science books to ever be published in the English language. Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “a cleverly written, imaginatively illustrated summary of geological, anthropological, biological, historical and astronomical ruminations about our universe,” there is a distinct magic in Sagan’s scientific presentation of theories and research in Cosmos, easily making it a captivating and educational read.

One exceptional thing about Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is that it is a science book which could also be enjoyed and understood by ordinary people. While most of  published material about the universe, the creation of life, and  cosmic studies focus too much on the technicalities that could only be fully understood by legitimate scientists and geeks, Cosmos plays on its strength of illustration, multi-interdisciplinary explanations that are simple in explanation, but are deep in meaning. Cosmos also gives us a wider range of fields that are interconnected with questions about life and living. Its research on astronomy, on the composition and analysis of other planets and extraterrestrial possibilities, and geological formations offers readers new discoveries each and every time they read the book over.

What’s more fascinating is that the book is arranged and written like how it would exactly play in a TV series, and so it is easy to follow the structure and get into the scheme of the book. The book starts with a breeze through the universe—its general composition and the functions of each body. It also zooms in from a general view of the universe to the small part where we live in—Planet Earth. Thus, we are faced with the question on whether our existence is as significant when we look at our world’s size in the grand scheme of things. The book also asks the unending question on how the universe and everything in it came to be, and whether there is a great possibility that somewhere in the vast expanse of the universe where we have yet to discover, there is also life similar to us.

While the answers to such questions have yet to be known, journeying through the possibilities presented by scientific research and speculations is still an enjoyable educational experience. With the use of objective analysis, personal speculations, and scientific theories, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos will guide you throughout your journey of rediscovering the universe and life in it. Sagan, with Cosmos, helps us human beings do our responsibility to seek for answers about the world we live in.