Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny—Growing Doubts

Although “cosmos” is a general term with several meanings, it has never been used for our solar system alone. There is a clear distinction between space within our solar system and the cosmos, which includes it but is synonymous with all of space. That was certainly the way Carl Sagan used this term in his book Cosmos and his TV series of the same name. By saying that “human beings are headed into the cosmos,” President Bush surely meant manned missions beyond our miniscule solar neighborhood. Yet the vastness of the cosmos that only begins far beyond our sun’s gravitational pull makes this impossible—not virtually impossible, but absolutely impossible.