“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” – Carl Sagan
Cosmos: A Personal
Voyage is the standard to which all scientific television programming is
held. In 1980, Carl Sagan took audiences
on a thirteen week journey through the story of everything. The result was one of the finest television
documentaries ever made, joining a pantheon including David Attenborough’s Life on Earth and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. But that was 34 years ago.
In 1980, the majority of today’s television audience (myself included) hadn’t been born yet. The Space Shuttle program had not yet resulted in a space flight. The Hubble Space Telescope did not exist. The Voyager probes had not made it to Saturn, or the outer planets. The Venera 13 probe had not yet landed on Venus, so no color photographs of its surface existed. The concepts of dark matter and dark energy had not even been thought of at that time. The scientific discoveries of the last generation have made the universe so much grander and more mysterious that was thought at the time of the original Cosmos. Hell, the idea that three decades later the entirety of human knowledge could be accessed from a pocket-sized device was unthinkable.
The computers of the time were so much less powerful than
today. The above screenshot is what
computer graphics looked like in 1980.
The original Cosmos utilized
stunning paintings and artwork along with special camera techniques to simulate
the journey of the spaceship of the imagination. In 2014, a team with sufficient time and
sufficient talent can use computer animation to produce absolutely anything
imaginable on screen. And it is because
of these things that it is the perfect time to update Cosmos.
Cosmos: A Spacetime
Odyssey looks absolutely stunning.
The love that was put into this program is palpable before Neil deGrasse
Tyson has finished his opening monologue.
If there is any modern scientist fit to take Carl Sagan’s place as the
helmsman for the series, Neil deGrasse Tyson is the man to do it. I’ve seen him on television since I started
watching Nova years before I was old
enough to fully comprehend much of what the show was tackling. His presence as a scientist in popular culture
is rivaled only by a certain Bill Nye, but NdGT has more physicist cred, so
he’s got that going for him. It also
allowed for a touching moment at the end of this episode where Tyson opens up
an old datebook of Sagan’s and points out a memo regarding a meeting between
Sagan and a 17-year old Neil deGrasse Tyson.
This first episode of the series, “Standing Up in the Milky
Way”, also features an examination of the scale of human existence in terms of
both space and time. The spaceship of
the imagination travels to the end of the observable universe to show just how
much space there is. The show gives a
sense of time scales using the metaphor borrowed from the original Cosmos in which the entire history of
the universe condensed into one calendar year.
At that scale, all of human history fits into the last few seconds of
the last minute of the last day of the year.
Even like that it’s almost incomprehensible to the human mind how short
we’ve been here. And even more amazing
that modern science began and developed into space travel and the information
age in the last second of that year.
The episode also features a prolonged animated sequence
about the story of one Giordano Bruno, a
philosopher who wrote about an infinite universe before the discoveries Galileo
and Newton shook up the scientific dogma of the church in Europe at the time. This sequence is one that didn’t quite work
for me, as I felt it took up too much of the episode and the animation was
rather dull and ugly, especially in context of the rest of the show’s stunning
CG work. There are problems with doing
historical recreations, and not using realistic CG avoided the uncanny valley
gracefully. Live-action re-enactments
would have been better, but that may have been too expensive. The writing was also unnecessarily blunt and
ham-fisted when presenting Bruno’s struggles against the religious
establishment, which does not feel like something Sagan would have done. But, it was one of the few moments in the
show thus far where I learned something new, so that was nice.
I’m a very fickle man, and one of the ways that this
manifests is that I get very annoyed and pessimistic about hype. In the buildup to Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, I held a couple of reservations about
the series. Namely FOX. As far as I am
concerned, Cosmos belongs on public
broadcasting. I have to acknowledge,
that it wouldn’t have gotten the funding and outreach it deserved on PBS. But the commercials breaks were off-putting
and had a tendency to break the flow of the episode. I’ll just have to bear with it and hope that
the DVD cut fixes that and maybe adds some extra content (please?). I also had reservations about Seth
McFarlane’s involvement in the project, but he clearly loves the show just as
much as NdGT does, and none of the off-color content I was half-expecting found
its way into the show.
One scientific problem I was quick to notice and absolutely
can’t go without mentioning was the portrayal of the solar system’s asteroid
belt. The asteroid belt looks nothing
like it does in this show, where its appearance seems more inspired by The Empire Strikes Back than by actual
astronomy. The total mass of rock in the
asteroid belt is somewhere in the range of 1021 kilograms, which is
similar to the mass of Earth’s moon. The
problem is that the planar area encompassed by the asteroid belt is about 1018
square kilometers. This
corresponds to about 1000 kg of rock per square kilometer, which, assuming the
average asteroid has a density somewhere in-between iron and silicon dioxide
(quartz), works out to one fifth of a cubic meter of asteroid per square
kilometer. Basically the equivalent of a
handful of marbles in a football field.
And most of the particles are quite a bit smaller than that. Hardly the labyrinth of massive rocks we saw
in the episode. (Incidentally, if you
like having science fiction ruined for you, pick up a copy of Philip Plait’s
excellent Bad Astronomy. Or go
read his blog at http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html)
When it’s all said and done, I enjoyed this episode and have
high hopes for the rest of the series.
Despite my couple of complaints, I think it retains the sense of wonder
and optimism of the original, and is very accessible without becoming overly
pedestrian or modifying the truth to make it more interesting. It’s a worthy successor to the original,
although I would say that so far it’s not quite as good as the original. If you didn’t see it last night, I heartily
recommend watching a rerun or catching it on Hulu. If you want to see the original, well, it’s
not on any major streaming service currently, but you can find the DVD set
(which is updated somewhat from the original release) or use your google-fu to
find it elsewhere online…
Well, that's all I have for now. See you next time.
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