If Carl was a poet, Neil is an orator. Here's a great example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o
Sure I'd love to have Carl back to do Cosmos II as well, but unfortunately that isn't possible.
I hope that the sequel also targets a sophisticated audience: those of us that loved the original when we were kids and have continued evolving our brains for decades.
This is great for children. But as an adult who already knows 95% of what he's talking about it comes across as a bit grating.
Carl Sagan could tell you what you already knew, and you'd still be happy to hear it, because he'd just remind you how awesome this stuff you already know actually is.
You know information is never truly destroyed. Bringing Dr. Sagan back will probably remain too difficult for a couple generations, but, eventually, we'll figure that one out.
And I can imagine the look on his face.
But, like I said, it's a problem to be solved by our smarter successors, not for us.
However, note my use of the term "god-like". Anything capable of doing this is so close to being a god that it makes very little difference from our point of view. There's also the theory that our universe is a simulation run by such an entity - the argument is something like "if it is possible to run a simulation of the universe, it is statistically far more likely that we're in such a simulation." Sort of makes sense, if you have the right mind-set or tilt your head and squint.
Information is always destroyed, and the universe uniformly has less net information now than it did a second ago; that's the second law of thermodynamics.