Cosmos

Meet the man who stumbled on a hole in the reality of quantum mechanics and the still-unfolding technology that made it possible.

The mysterious untold story of the scientist who figured out how to go the Moon while fighting for his life in a WWI trench. He wrote a letter to fifty years in the future. It made the Apollo Mission possible. And the saga of the twenty-year long odyssey of a robotic explorer ordered to commit suicide on another world.

A revelation of the hidden underground network that is a collaboration of four kingdoms of life, and a true first contact story between humans and beings who communicate in a symbolic language and have maintained a representative democracy for many tens of millions of years.

A child lies on the rug of a tenement dreaming of interstellar adventures. At the dawn of the space age, a young Carl Sagan's career is forged in the clash of his mentors, two scientific titans. Sagan goes on realize his childhood dreams, to carry their research forward and communicate its significance to the whole world.

A voyage of discovery through the evolution of consciousness with stops in ancient Greece, a visit to the largest life form on Earth, into the poignant dream of an abandoned orphan that opened the way to our understanding of the architecture of thought and beyond to a vision of a galactic network of thought.

In the first half of the 20th century pioneering geneticist Nikolai Vavilov traveled 5 continents assembling a treasury of the worlds seeds. He dreamed that science could be the means to end hunger. His refusal to tell a scientific lie cost him his life. The heroism of his colleagues and its direct impact on your life is one of the most stirring stories in the history of science.

A new vision of genesis at the bottom of the blood red sea of the infant Earth. And the story of the man who found the first clues to life's beginning in a green jewel. As he searched for life's origin, he risked his own, daring to toy with his Nazi tormentors.

There is no refuge from change in the cosmos. There will come a time in the life of the Sun when Earth will no longer be a home for us. The story of our ancestors who rose to a comparable challenge and a long-term vision of our future on other worlds.

An adventure spanning billions of years into the evolution of life and consciousness. A visit to a 100,000-year-old laboratory. The story of the change in life-style that radically altered human existence and the life of the heretic who found god in the book of nature, opening our way to the stars.

The Ship of the Imagination embarks on a journey through space and time to grasp how the autobiography of the Earth is written in its atoms, its oceans, its continents and all living things. Later, American geologist Marie Tharp creates the first true map of Earth’s ocean floor, and discovers microscopic life that exists deep beneath the ocean.

Discover the remarkable story of Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne, two incredible women who challenged conventional wisdom and uncovered the real-life story of the stars. Cannon led a group of female astronomers in the early 20th century to catalogue the spectral characters of stars, and two decades later, young British beauty Payne joined forces with Cannon to analyze the data and uncover the chemical compositions of the stars. Later, travel on the Ship of the Imagination to explore the lives and deaths of stars.

To determine the true age of the Earth, geochemist Clair Patterson developed the uranium-lead dating method to make an unprecedented discovery – calculating Earth's age of 4.5 billion years. But Patterson's groundbreaking discoveries were just beginning. Patterson made it his mission to draw public attention to the detrimental effects of lead in the environment and dedicated his career to fighting against the petroleum and chemical industry, eventually achieving public health's biggest victory of the 20th century.

The Ship of the Imagination ventures on an epic voyage to the bottom of a dewdrop to explore the universe on the smallest scale and observe exotic life forms invisible to the naked eye. Then, host Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the neural network in our brains which determine our sense of smell and memory, and later, he travels deep beneath the surface of the Earth to discover the most mysterious particle we know.

The Ship of the Imagination travels back in time to reveal 11th century Europe and North Africa during the golden age of Islam, when brilliant physicist Ibn al-Haytham discovered the scientific method and first understood how we see, and how light travels. Later, William Herschel discovers the infrared and the signature hidden in the light of every star, eventually unlocking one of the keys to the cosmos.

An exploration of how light, time and gravity combine to distort our perceptions of the universe. We eavesdrop on a series of walks along a beach on summer nights in the year 1809. William Herschel, whose many discoveries include the insight that telescopes are time machines, tells bedtime stories to his young son, John, who will grow up to make some rather profound discoveries of his own.

There was a time, not so long ago, when natural events could only be understood as gestures of divine displeasure. We will witness the moment that all changed; but first, the Ship of the Imagination is in the brooding, frigid realm of the Oort Cloud, where a trillion comets wait. Our Ship takes us on a hair-raising ride, chasing a single comet through its million-year plunge towards the Sun.

Host Neil deGrasse Tyson is on a voyage to explore the relatedness of all living things and the possible evolution of life in the cosmos. Go on a journey to discover how artificial selection turned the wolf into canine breeds and how natural selection sculpted the complex human eye. Later, Tyson visits the grand Hall of Extinction, a monument to all the broken branches on the tree of life. Retrace the story of life on Earth and the unbroken thread that stretches from the first one-celled organisms to human life.

The Ship of the Imagination, unfettered by ordinary limits on speed and size, drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies, can take us anywhere in space and time. It has been idling for more than three decades, and yet it has never been overtaken. Its global legacy remains vibrant. Now, it's time once again to set sail for the stars.