When Neil deGrasse Tyson isn’t busy reading hate mail from third graders for saying Pluto isn’t a planet, he’ll be hosting Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, the sequel to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The original series, aired on public television in 1980, is the most successful American public television series of all time with an audience of over 700 million viewers like you. The 13 episodes of the new series will be produced by Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) and the collaborators from the original series, Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter.
Cosmos will air on Fox in primetime, something pretty unprecedented these days for a science documentary series on commercial American television. (The original series aired on PBS.) Fox will air Cosmos: A Personal Voyage in 2013 […]. National Geographic Channel, which will co-produce Cosmos, will air a same-night encore of the episodes following their broadcast on Fox. [Deadline]
In other news, Tyson said some awesome things on Bill Maher last Friday (first video below) during a discussion about NASA’s budget cuts. He mentioned how the $850 billion TARP bailout is larger than all spending on NASA over the past 50 years, for example (I bring this up every chance I get and sometimes just shout it at strangers). Also below is a video of Tyson talking about the first time he met Carl Sagan, and we also have a Family Guy clip of what we can look forward to if MacFarlane decides to take this sequel into redneck territory.