Monday, May 21, 2007

Cosmos

*Cue Vangelis music*
I'm still not sure if it was fortuitous or ruinous to my life that I missed the original run of Cosmos in 1980 when it ran on PBS. Considering how wrapped up in the subject matter of the show I was at the time, I do wonder how and why I missed it (if the answer was as simple as "it was on at the same time as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," then I deserve to be dragged before a tribunal). One thing is for certain, though: I get the feeling from seeing it now that if I had made the time to watch it then, I might have ventured down a completely different career path and wound up in a very different place than I am now for better or worse.

Like anyone else, I went through a lot of "interest phases" in childhood: times when I was utterly locked in fascination over one subject or another for an indeterminate period before wandering across another field of study (by accident or design) to focus upon for another few months and so on. Amongst these countless flirtations over those years, the two biggest (read: longest-lasting) escapes for my imagination during those years were the fields of paleontology and astronomy.

Oh, I wish I had a way to reacquire some of those Eisenhower-era reference tomes that I would check out continually from the Southfield Public Library during that stretch, if only to compare just how much previously-accepted knowledge has changed (if not completely upended as is almost certainly the case with the old dinosaur books I'd pore over for hours) from the time they were written! To illustrate, I grew up in a time when all of the available books on paleontology envisioned dinosaurs as sluggish, thuggish, cold-blooded reptiles, some of which were so enormous that they were forced to spend most of their lives in the shallows of lakes and rivers to keep from crushing themselves under their own mass. With regards to astronomy, this was also the time when there was no Hubble Space Telescope, Pluto had no moon (and was itself still considered a planet), Saturn was the only planet with rings, and we had never seen close-up pictures of any planets beyond the "inner solar system" (Mercury, Venus, Mars and our own). The last few decades have added much to our knowledge since then, and in quite a few cases old theories have been rewritten, revised, or just thrown out the window based on what we've learned and seen.

One thing that's clear to me now is that it was the unimaginable scale of these subjects that had seized my imagination. Pretty much everything that had to do with the study of paleontology is centered on time and deduction: how we could dig up fossilized skeletal remains of beings separated from our modern world by vast, unimaginable oceans of ages and infer (correctly or not) what kind of beasts these were or what kind of world they inhabited. If that was too much to handle, few kids could deny the romance of envisioning the beasts themselves: I've spent many an afternoon imagining what it must have been like to come across a titanic Brachiosaurus feasting on greens from its swampy home, or perhaps watching a huge horse-like Indricotherium wandering the forests of the Miocene epoch, lunching idly on the leaves of trees.

With astronomy, everything got exponentially bigger and time was doubled up with physical distances so great that they left your mind spinning wheels helplessly in an attempt to grasp just how huge everything is. The sheer unimaginable scale of the universe is something that still stirs me deeply on the rare occasions when I am somewhere that allows you to actually see it: I remember very clearly looking up at the skies, nearly breathless with wonder as I lay on my back in a windswept campground clearing on the shores of Lake Superior and looked straight up at the glowing Milky Way stretching all the way across a night sky totally unspoiled by city lights. What I was seeing in that sky looked limitless (the light I was seeing from the center of the Milky Way had taken 30,000 years to travel to my little spot on the road), but even that endless sprawl of suns, gas and time was only a literal drop in a bucket, a single grid of reference in itself in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

I'd always had a pretty healthy respect for Carl Sagan, dating back to when I was given a copy of the hardcover edition of Cosmos one Christmas probably just after the series had aired. I have to admit that I didn't make a huge effort to read the book cover to cover as my head was in the fantastical clouds as far as literature was concerned (at that time, I had moved beyond science into science fiction, where those pesky laws of physics that wouldn't let you go anywhere beyond this solar system didn't apply), but I'd derived much enjoyment from the pictures and paintings of exotic alien worlds and beautiful galaxies lying randomly about the great expanse. It wasn't until I'd read his novel Contact (not to mention a truly transformative experience reading The Cold And The Dark around tenth grade or so), that Sagan had begin to reach a position of some prominence with me, though by early 1986, music had consumed my interest so completely that there was probably very little that the good Doctor could do to pry me away from the more seductive charms of Eurowave at that point (save for getting me a ride on the next space shuttle, perhaps). Thus, on the days when Mr. Thompson would play back part of an episode during Astronomy class, I was almost certainly tuned out to whatever was on my Walkman that morning instead of bothering to listen to the guy in the red turtleneck shirt and tweed jacket on the TV screen halfway across the planetarium from me. My loss.

Watching Cosmos now, however, has been nothing short of a revelation: what an incredibly entertaining, enlightening and ultimately moving presentation this is. We then are shown the entire history of the universe in the framework of a twelve month calendar; we visit the great lost Library of Alexandria, and experience what it would be like to travel near the speed of light on a bicycle path in Italy. We also visit the planets of Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and Mars up close, discuss the likelihood of God, the possibility of our own self-destruction in our "technological adolescence" and travel to the farthest imaginable reaches of space and time in our "Spaceship of the Imagination." While only occasionally showing its age through its live-action production values (or the aforementioned clothing style then preferred by its host), Cosmos holds up remarkably well nearly three decades from its first airing. What few gaps or revisions that are necessary to the show are supplied afterward as a few moments are taken after nearly every episode that update us on new innovations or discoveries in the episodes subject matter current to the mid-1990s.

As the sole host and narrator of Cosmos, Sagan is a faultless guide through this thirteen hour tour of discovery and curiosity that takes us from the picturesque shores of modern Earth back to the time of the "Big Bang" itself. Engaging, enthusiastic, playfully sardonic, and completely unafraid to wax poetic while illustrating his obvious affection for the subject, Sagan's personality is as infectious as the flu and powers the entire presentation. Perhaps most valuably, he possesses the ability to make the audience understand the often mind-boggling ideas and concepts that drive the modern study of the universe. Thus, Cosmos serves as a wonderfully fitting and lasting tribute to the man and drives home just how great our loss was when he died in 1996.

The master at work

2 comments:

Inverarity said...

I've fallen hard into astronomy again, hard. I don't think I ever made a real study of it before (I was more interested in general cosmology than seeing particular objects), but I'm reading loads of books now, memorizing star charts, and have some equipment.

But, uh, Mr. Bug... how would one contact you by email? Mine's arr dot p period [bloggerusername] at-symbol gmail.com, if you wouldn't mind dropping me a line.

Inverarity said...

Er, that "arr" was phonetic for a single character, I mean.