Seth MacFarlane Will Teach You About the Universe

Seth MacFarlane, who has made a career of creating nuanced and thoughtful animated programs that broaden the horizons of viewers, is lending his expertise to the scientific community. He’s teaming up with Carl Sagan’s widow and astrophysicists Steven Soter and Neil deGrasse Tyson to create a sequel to the milestone science series Cosmos.

The new series, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, is “the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time,” according to the press release:

By exploring never-before-told stories of the heroic quest for knowledge, the series will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.

The thirteen-part series will debut on that bastion of scientific inquiry, FOX, beginning in 2013. Between this and his reboot of The Flintstones, there’s seemingly nothing that MacFarlane can’t do. Perhaps someday he’ll surprise everyone by actually doing something well.

(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore’s Flickr)