Return to the Cosmos

This week brought the first episode of “Cosmos” featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of a very small number of celebrity astrophysicists in the world today. Now, I'm a huge nerd, so I’ve been looking forward to this series since I first read it was in production. I was in the earliest of my teen years when I saw Carl Sagan’s original version, some of it broadcast on PBS and some in my ninth grade science class (it didn’t occur to me until years later that showing “Cosmos” in class was a great way for my science teacher to steer around writing lesson plans). Watching the series in ninth grade would have put me right in the time gap between “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,” and my young Star Wars-addled mind would have attached itself to anything related to outer space that was even semi-interesting. But Carl Sagan’s version of “Cosmos” was far beyond interesting, so perhaps you can imagine the excitement I felt when I learned the National Geographic channel was going to rebroadcast the entire original series in preparation for launching the new version. My weekend binge was set.

As fun as it was to revisit the original, so many things about it seemed dated, far beyond the back-of-the-classroom film projector look much of it had: references to the Viking landers on the surface of Mars, along with so many assumptions about Mars made back then that have either been proven or disproven since; the inclusion of Pluto as a planet; the idea of analog sound recordings being sent on the Voyager probe. Planetary photos transmitted back to Earth from Voyager were represented as a high point in technological imagery for the time, though such images were in their infancy when compared to the visual majesty routinely captured by the Hubble telescope. Hearing references made to the World Trade Center coming from a time before the terrorists who attacked it had likely been born only magnified the tragedy of its destruction.

The more episodes I watched, the more of my original fascination came back to life. Even decades later “Cosmos” was more than able to blow my mind, and did in many notable ways:

1 -- Carl Sagan’s description of what the Library of Alexandria must have been like made me wish I had studied the Humanities with more depth so I could’ve had a greater appreciation of its place in history.
2 -- He used a “cosmic calendar” as a metaphor for the period of time between the Big Bang and modern days, and pointed out how everything that has occurred in human history would have taken place in the final seconds of December 31.
3 -- There was a first person to discover tangible proof of the existence of air. Seriously. Think on that for a bit.
4 -- Saga told a story of a variety of crab in Japanese waters that fishermen will throw back since their shells look like the faces of Samurai warriors, and described how this action over time spawned an evolutionary change.
5 -- Someone had been the first person to realize the infinite nature of the universe. I remember reflecting on that more than once as a child, overwhelming myself into occasional sleepless nights as I tried to grasp how it was possible.
6 -- Toward the end of one episode as he told about the eventual death of our sun, Sagan said, “Some five billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth.” Imagining that was beyond me.
7 -- I remembered one scene that briefly focused on some variety of wild grass growing on a Grecian mountainside, and for a moment I was able to see its existence possessing the same elegance and complexity as a massive star more than 100 million miles away.

After getting through most of the original series, I was more than primed for the reboot. Everything about it was flashier, focusing as much on entertainment value as raw science. I was already a fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, so when I first heard he was going to be the new host I couldn’t think of a better successor. He himself highlighted this fact at the end of the first episode, telling about a time back when he was seventeen years old and had been invited to meet and spend the day with Carl Sagan. He showed how Sagan had signed a book for him with the inscription, “To a future astronomer.” It gave me chills, and just cemented my opinion there could not be a better caretaker for the mission of using the media to keep scientific curiosity alive.

All of that heavy thinking in such a concentrated amount of time left me wondering about the nature of things. What is the purpose of life? To travel and discover and experience, or to play whatever small role we’re responsible for in the evolution and existence of life, or simply to be? “Cosmos” highlighted so many monuments and ideas that have outlived their creators by centuries. I think some form of happiness in life and the attainment of knowledge are worthy goals, but I also think many people would hope to leave behind some proof they were here and did something with their lives to make them worthwhile.

But if the atoms that make up the iron in my bloodstream today are predestined to someday fuel a distant star, maybe the idea of any kind of legacy that extends beyond the short-term (cosmically speaking) is just a special kind of hubris. Maybe I’d be better off eating some potato chips and playing a few rounds of Candy Crush on the iPad instead, and leave the serious thinking to the astrophysicists of the world.