A lot of people have held that title before, acting as evangelists for science and discovery. Ben Franklin. . Our buddy George Washington Carver. Stephen Jay Gould. Carl Sagan. Tyson's the latest standard-bearer, and two weeks he presided over an hourlong meditation on the birth and scope of the universe that was being broadcast on several networks at once.
"[The Big Bang] is as far back as we can see in time," he intoned, on Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. He paused for effect. "For now."
Cosmos is an update of the beloved science 1980 PBS series of the same name hosted by Sagan. The new edition is full of allusions to the old one "We are made of starstuff," Tyson says in the first episode, repeating one of Sagan's most famous lines. A lot has been made of the fact that decades ago, Sagan — once the "It" Nerd himself — tried unsuccessfully to recruit the teenaged Tyson to Cornell University.
