If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to science fiction, fiction lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Home Downloads Free Downloads Contact pdf. Home Downloads Free Downloads Cosmos pdf. Read Online Download. Great book, Cosmos pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan. Contact by Carl Sagan. For the first time in human history we had landed two space vehicles on the surface of another world.
The results, described more fully in Chapter 5, were spectacular, the historical significance of the mission utterly apparent. And yet the general public was learning almost nothing of these great happenings.
The press was largely inattentive; television ignored the mission almost altogether. When it became clear that a definitive answer on whether there is life on Mars would not be forthcoming, interest dwindled still further. There was little tolerance for ambiguity. When we found the sky of Mars to be a kind of pinkish-yellow rather than the blue which had erroneously first been reported, the announcement was greeted by a chorus of good-natured boos from the assembled reporters — they wanted Mars to be, even in this respect, like the Earth.
They believed that their audiences would be progressively disinterested as Mars was revealed to be less and less like the Earth. And yet the Martian landscapes are staggering, the vistas breathtaking. I was positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics — the origin of life, the Earth, and the Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe.
And I was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications medium, television. My feelings were shared by B. We decided, gamely, to do something about the problem ourselves. Lee proposed that we form a production company devoted to the communication of science in an engaging and accessible way.
In the following months we were approached on a number of projects. Eventually, we jointly agreed to produce a thirteen-part television series oriented toward astronomy but with a very broad human perspective. It was to be aimed at popular audiences, to be visually and musically stunning, and to engage the heart as well as the mind. We talked with underwriters, hired an executive producer, and found ourselves embarked on a three-year project called Cosmos.
At this writing it has an estimated worldwide audience of million people, or 3 percent of the human population of the planet Earth. It is dedicated to the proposition that the public is far more intelligent than it has generally been given credit for; that the deepest scientific questions on the nature and origin of the world excite the interests and passions of enormous numbers of people. The present epoch is a major crossroads for our civilization and perhaps for our species.
Whatever road we take, our fate is indissolubly bound up with science. It is essential as a matter of simple survival for us to understand science. In addition, science is a delight; evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding — those who understand are more likely to survive.
The Cosmos television series and this book represent a hopeful experiment in communicating some of the ideas, methods and joys of science. The book and the television series evolved together. In some sense each is based on the other. But books and television series have somewhat different audiences and admit differing approaches.
One of the great virtues of a book is that it is possible for the reader to return repeatedly to obscure or difficult passages; this is only beginning to become possible, with the development of videotape and video-disc technology, for television. There is much more freedom for the author in choosing the range and depth of topics for a chapter in a book than for the procrustean fifty-eight minutes, thirty seconds of a noncommercial television program.
This book goes more deeply into many topics than does the television series. There are topics discussed in the book which are not treated in the television series and vice versa. But each episode of the television series follows fairly closely the corresponding chapter of this book; and I like to think that the pleasure of each will be enhanced by reference to the other. For clarity, I have in a number of cases introduced an idea more than once — the first time lightly, and with deeper passes on subsequent appearances.
0コメント