Tyson photographed on location at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, The Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (Photo: MIller Mobley for Parade; Styling: Monica Cotto; Grooming: Lindsey Williams; Suit: Banana Republic; Shirt: Vince; Tie: Zazzle; Belt: Cole Haan)

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey premieres on Fox Sun 9/8c and National Geographic Mon 10/9c

“A Higgs boson goes into a church. …”

Neil deGrasse Tyson—America’s best-known astrophysicist, with more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter—is telling a joke to the team shooting his photo for the cover of Parade. Standing in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, he continues: “And the priest says, ‘We don’t allow Higgs bosons here.’ And the Higgs boson says, ‘But without me there is no mass.’ ” Bada bing!

He’s got another. “A photon walks into a bar and orders a drink,” Tyson begins, his resonant bass voice bubbling up from his 6-foot-2 frame. “The bartender says, ‘Do you want a double?’ And the photon says, ‘No, I’m traveling light.’ ” Bada boom!

Everyone laughs, without necessarily knowing that a photon is a tiny particle of light, or that the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” gives everything physical mass. Tyson’s delivery is so enticing, his playfulness so charming, it’s no wonder Jon Stewart repeatedly features him on The Daily Show. “It’s one thing to be a lauded astrophysicist,” Stewart says. “It’s another to possess a gift for comedic timing. You don’t normally get both, but that’s Neil.”

Dr. Tyson moonwalks and discusses Cosmos, Carl Sagan, and Pluto in this exclusive video:

At 55, Tyson is a science rock star whose passion for the laws of nature is matched by his engaging explanations of topics ranging from the mystery of dark matter to the absurdity of zombies. Starting March 9, he will become an even bigger cultural phenomenon as he hosts Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, a 13-part, prime-time series airing on both Fox (Sundays) and the National Geographic Channel (Mondays) that will, in Tyson’s words, help you “understand your relationship to other humans, to the rest of the tree of life on Earth, to the rest of the planets in the universe, and to the rest of the universe itself. I want it to get inside your skin. I want you to be so affected that the world looks completely different.”

Original 'Cosmos' host and Tyson's mentor Carl Sagan in the early ’80s. (Getty Images)

It has been 34 years since PBS aired the original Cosmos series, subtitled A Personal Journey and hosted by Carl Sagan, another popularizer of science (and frequent Parade contributor) and one of Tyson’s mentors. The 1980 Cosmos riveted some 750 million viewers in more than 175 countries and became an Emmy and Peabody award–winning megahit; its accompanying book occupied the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. Sagan regularly bantered on late-night TV with Johnny Carson, who donned a turtleneck sweater, a corduroy jacket, and a mop of a wig to lampoon the astronomer’s awe at the “billions and billions” of galaxies out there—a phrase never actually uttered by Sagan in the series, but one that became his signature nevertheless. When Sagan died in 1996 at 62, his legacy was as infinite as the show’s opening line: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

“We were going for something biblical,” says Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and, along with astronomer Steven Soter, cowriter. “Something epic, with a poetry that would catch people.” Now Druyan and Soter have written a new version of the series for today’s world. After years of “hostility towards science,” Druyan says, we “are beginning to look up at the stars and dream again.”

Tyson agrees we are enjoying a “space moment,” one that goes far beyond the buzz over recent discoveries about exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than our own sun) and rich tourists signing up for flights on rocket ships. “Artists have come to embrace science in ways I’ve never seen before,” he says. As evidence, Tyson points to the hit movie Gravity (which he liked but took to task for some inaccuracies on Twitter), the top-rated sitcom The Big Bang Theory (on which he has appeared), and the hit forensic drama CSI. “That’s how you know science has become mainstream. It’s with us and around us. That gives me great hope that Cosmos will land on hugely fertile ground, possibly transforming how we think about science as a driver of our future.”

Dr.Tyson has a vast collection of cosmic-themed ties. "Last I counted," he says, "it was rising through 100." (MIller Mobley for Parade)

Some elements of the original series have been retained: the Ship of the Imagination (transporting viewers through space and time) and the Cosmic Calendar (compressing 13.8 billion years into a single year-at-a-glance, where humans arrive only in the last few seconds). But the adventure has been updated with dazzling special effects, from the heart of an atom to the promise of deep space, including a look at a day on the beach on Venus, before that planet became an infernal cauldron. And heroic stories of scientific exploration are told using animation by a team selected by Seth MacFarlane, who created the Fox series Family Guy and American Dad!

MacFarlane, 40, is also a Cosmos executive producer, a science enthusiast who, after meeting Tyson through the Science & Entertainment Exchange (a program to foster better scientific content in storytelling), invited him to lunch and asked how he might support Tyson’s work. “I said, ‘I’m at a point in my career where I have some disposable income,’ ” MacFarlane recalls, “ ‘and I’d like to spend it on something worthwhile.’ ” MacFarlane says he’s brought none of Family Guy’s visual style or edgy humor to the science show. Rather, he brought the series to Fox, positioning it for a far broader audience than at the cable channels the Cosmos team had been pitching.

“This would be a level of exposure for science that has never been reached before,” Tyson says, thrilled with prime time on a commercial network. “And that, for me, is the most important fact about this rendering of Cosmos.”

Druyan passed Sagan’s torch to Tyson, honoring a relationship begun in the mid-’70s, when Sagan generously showed the then high school student around his Cornell lab. Tyson chose to attend Harvard instead but absorbed the message. “He has both the scientific cred and the passion to communicate,” Druyan says of Tyson. “That same indefatigable desire Carl had to connect with the person who interrupts his dinner in a restaurant, or to get off the elevator with someone in order to finish explaining something.”

The budding scientist puts together his first telescope at age 12 with his father, Cyril, in 1970. (Courtesy of Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Tyson developed his love of science as the second of three children of a middle-class family from the Bronx; his father, a civil rights champion, served in various social services agencies, and his stay-at-home mom later went back to earn her degree in gerontology. They were his anchors, “my moral role models for how to think about others in a world where there’s not enough of that going on,” says Tyson, sitting in his comfortably cluttered museum office filled with rocket models, cosmology-adorned pillows, and two reproductions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. His parents also gave him his first telescope after a transformative childhood trip to the Hayden Planetarium, which he now runs. “Initially I thought it was a hoax,” he says of the space show he saw that day. “The sky over the Bronx just didn’t have that many stars.” That vision gave him purpose, a bold dream for a young black man at the time.

“I was an aspiring astrophysicist and that’s how I defined myself, not by my skin color,” Tyson says. But others did, in ways sadly familiar to many young African-American males. “People didn’t treat me as someone with science ambitions,” he says. “They treated me as someone they thought was going to mug them, or who was a shoplifter. I’d be in a department store and the security would follow me. Taxis wouldn’t stop for me. And I was just glad I had something to think about other than how society was treating me.” In school, he adds, “teachers would say, ‘You should join this or that team,’ not the physics club. My fuel tank had been stoked since I was 9, but it took some energy to overcome the resistance. I wondered if there was a lost generation of people who succumbed because their fuel tanks were a little smaller than mine.”

Tyson’s own powerful drive propelled him through graduate school at Columbia University, then to a research position at Princeton. He has held his current job, as Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, since 1996, and home is Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Alice Young, a mathematical physicist now retired from Bloomberg Financial Markets, and his two children, Miranda, 17, and Travis, 13.

The new 'Cosmos' series keeps some original concepts like the Ship of the Imagination, with new digital effects. (Courtesy of FOX)

But Tyson sees himself as a citizen of the entire universe, and he believes knowledge about science and space can help protect what Sagan called “the pale blue dot” of Earth. “Cosmos is not only about updating you on what science is but also conveying why it matters—especially in the 21st century, when issues related to science are fundamental to political issues,” Tyson says. “There are political hot potatoes that could be settled or informed if we became more scientifically literate.”

Not that Tyson—or anyone—has all the answers to the mysteries of the universe. For example, are there little green men out there? “No astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life,” he says, smiling. “I think we’re not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another planet.” And he wants proof. “Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a live one!”

Tyson’s exuberance and ready wit inspire Giuseppe Lombardo, the 11-year-old son of Parade’s photography director, who has been excused from school to meet one of his heroes. Playing off the size of a gigabyte (1,024 megabytes), he asks, “Have you heard of the band 1020 Megabytes?” “No,” says Tyson, curious. “Of course you haven’t,” Giuseppe says. “They haven’t got any gigs yet!”

Tyson laughs long and hard, well aware that it’s a good sign for the cosmos when kids are telling jokes about science, too.

Lynn Sherr’s new book, Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space, will be published in spring 2014.

Get more from Dr. Tyson—on not trying to fill Carl Sagan’s shoes, and why “you will never find scientists leading armies into battle”—here.

Read some of Carl Sagan’s classic stories for Parade here.