The recent premiere of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey has brought renewed attention to Carl Sagan’s masterpiece, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. But Sagan’s show almost had a different name.

In this note from 1978, we get to see Sagan’s brainstorming for the show’s title. Apparently, he considered the titles Man In The Cosmos and, more enigmatically, There. But the note also shows the final choice: Cosmos (with some subtitle). He notes that the new titles “have the advantage of simplicity.” It was that simplicity containing complexity that defined the series as a whole.

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