Cosmos - With Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Thread starter Greylock Crescent
- Start date
"The cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be." -- Carl Sagan
If you think that Cosmos is just a series about astronomy, then you must never have seen the original. It's more a series about humanity, about science as an expression of human creativity, a habit of human thought, and a journey to discover our nature and our place in the universe. The original series devoted its second episode to, well, pretty much the same range of biological topics that this episode devoted itself to, allowing for changes in scientific knowledge in the past 35 years. Episode 9 was also largely about biology, specifically the biology and evolution of intelligent brains, covering a lot of the same ground Sagan covered in his book The Dragons of Eden. The final episode was mainly about the threat of nuclear war and the question of whether humanity would survive. And along the way it covered such topics as the library of Alexandria, Leeuwenhoek's microscope and the discovery of microbes, the abortive scientific revolution of the Ancient Greeks, the creation myths of various cultures, the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, etc. It was -- and is -- a series about what science means to human beings.
Then why not call the show "Science" instead of "Cosmos"?
"Fairly early in its development, the third planet got covered in a self-replicating organic goo, which continued to evolve more complicated organisms, though ones whose total mass was much less than the goo itself. Meanwhile, on Neptune, wind speeds routinely reached supersonic velocities despite the very small amount of solar energy being pumped into the planet's atmosphere."
The goo is weird, but not nearly as significant as the slow breakdown of potassium-40 into argon - except to self-centered organisms who think their unusual molecular arrangement makes them special. "The goo later produced narcissism, and in the next episode of 'Cosmos" we're going to focus on Kim Kardashian and Lindsey Lohan."
It's as bad as Sagan giving any airtime to the ridiculous Drake Equation, which if extended can allow you to exactly calculate the number of intelligent beings in the universe who watch inter-racial midget porn and prefer Hellman's to Miracle Whip - because it's science.
The show also erred on Giordano Bruno, who was executed for preaching against the divinity of Jesus, denying transubstantiation, saying that the Virgin Mary was a slut, promoting heretical religious texts, believing in reincarnation, believing that human souls could migrate into animals, and supporting the Egyptian god Thoth, among other things. But he was a martyr for science, bacause as science later showed, human souls can become trapped inside animals, as sometimes happens with werewolves and other demonic creatures, and Thoth was indeed a powerful Go'auld system lord.
Oh wait... Bruno is a horrible example of a scientist, much less an oppressed one, but Catholics are all in service of the anti-Christ, so it's okay to make up shit about them.
"Fairly early in its development, the third planet got covered in a self-replicating organic goo, which continued to evolve more complicated organisms, though ones whose total mass was much less than the goo itself. Meanwhile, on Neptune, wind speeds routinely reached supersonic velocities despite the very small amount of solar energy being pumped into the planet's atmosphere."
The goo is weird, but not nearly as significant as the slow breakdown of potassium-40 into argon - except to self-centered organisms who think their unusual molecular arrangement makes them special. "The goo later produced narcissism, and in the next episode of 'Cosmos" we're going to focus on Kim Kardashian and Lindsey Lohan."
It's as bad as Sagan giving any airtime to the ridiculous Drake Equation, which if extended can allow you to exactly calculate the number of intelligent beings in the universe who watch inter-racial midget porn and prefer Hellman's to Miracle Whip - because it's science.
The show also erred on Giordano Bruno, who was executed for preaching against the divinity of Jesus, denying transubstantiation, saying that the Virgin Mary was a slut, promoting heretical religious texts, believing in reincarnation, believing that human souls could migrate into animals, and supporting the Egyptian god Thoth, among other things. But he was a martyr for science, bacause as science later showed, human souls can become trapped inside animals, as sometimes happens with werewolves and other demonic creatures, and Thoth was indeed a powerful Go'auld system lord.
Oh wait... Bruno is a horrible example of a scientist, much less an oppressed one, but Catholics are all in service of the anti-Christ, so it's okay to make up shit about them.
I'm starting to realize that the new series follows pretty much the same (or very similar) pattern as the original, but uses different examples. For instance, the TV listings for next week talks about Newton and Halley, as opposed to Kepler and Brahe, as they were the astronomers profiled in "Harmony of the Worlds."
Maybe the current producers didn't think the story about the Heike crabs (and the attendant historical material) would have been interesting enough for modern audiences.
You have evidently missed those three important words: We are starstuff.
All life on this planet - humans included - is made of atoms recycled from stars that died billions of years ago.
Stars don't just blow up and the remnants do nothing at all. Some of those remnants of dead stars come together and form new ones - and some of those have planets. Some of those planets may have life. The mechanism that drives the changes that life goes through is evolution.
Therefore, they devoted a lot of time to explaining evolution, and natural/artificial selection. It's critical to understanding how we got from primordial goo to where we are today.
Why are you even watching this, then? It seems like you're not getting much out of it.
A
Amaris
Guest
Agreed. The show is called Cosmos because that's where we live. It makes up everything around us, and in us. It is a part of us. It's like the force, only without the ability to levitate objects (damn).
Really? One element breaking down into another is more significant than an organic goo evolving over billions of years into an incredible variety of life forms on Earth?
I have a feeling most scientists would probably strongly disagree with that. And "narcissism" has nothing to do with it.
We're made of starstuff, but we're certainly not very much of it. The combined mass of all life in the solar system would form a spherical body only 10 kilometers in diameter. That would make us the same size as Erriapus, the 28th moon of Saturn that was only discovered in 2000, and 1 km smaller than 107 Camilla, an asteroid "moon" that is orbiting a more noteworthy asteroid. So one of the amazing things about the cosmos, even our own solar system, is the awe at how tiny we are.
The reason I bring up Giordano Bruno is that now millions of people will be holding him up as an example of a martyred scientist without once looking into what he really stood for. He believed the universe was constant and unchanging, filled with aether (because a void was impossible), and that mathematics was a useless tool to understand it compared to the profound power of mystic revelation. So students, ditch the advanced math classes and drop LSD!
The reason almost none of you had heard about Bruno is because there's no way to get any coherent lesson from his story, other than that a group of religious scholars executed someone who was even nuttier than they were, after giving him every opportunity to defend himself. I suppose you could hold Bruno up as proof that the Catholic Church was suppressing the truth of reincarnation and that human souls can inhabit beasts, or something like that, but what does that get you? The Cardinal that had him executed was a better scientist than Bruno was (and indeed has a US liberal arts university named after him). In a series as high-profile as Cosmos, that's just shoddy research that will produce more misunderstanding and inaccurate perceptions than it cures, for no point at all. The medieval professors who were wedded to the dogmatic belief in Aristotle's teachings caused far more retardation of scientific advancement than the Catholic Church, and Aristotle certainly wasn't a Christian, he was a scientist. Much of the history of medieval science consists of various experiments, proofs, and arguments showing that Aristotle was flat wrong about a great many things, and trying to get academics to pay attention to the detailed refutations instead of relying on consensus.
The reason I bring up Giordano Bruno is that now millions of people will be holding him up as an example of a martyred scientist without once looking into what he really stood for. He believed the universe was constant and unchanging, filled with aether (because a void was impossible), and that mathematics was a useless tool to understand it compared to the profound power of mystic revelation. So students, ditch the advanced math classes and drop LSD!
The reason almost none of you had heard about Bruno is because there's no way to get any coherent lesson from his story, other than that a group of religious scholars executed someone who was even nuttier than they were, after giving him every opportunity to defend himself. I suppose you could hold Bruno up as proof that the Catholic Church was suppressing the truth of reincarnation and that human souls can inhabit beasts, or something like that, but what does that get you? The Cardinal that had him executed was a better scientist than Bruno was (and indeed has a US liberal arts university named after him). In a series as high-profile as Cosmos, that's just shoddy research that will produce more misunderstanding and inaccurate perceptions than it cures, for no point at all. The medieval professors who were wedded to the dogmatic belief in Aristotle's teachings caused far more retardation of scientific advancement than the Catholic Church, and Aristotle certainly wasn't a Christian, he was a scientist. Much of the history of medieval science consists of various experiments, proofs, and arguments showing that Aristotle was flat wrong about a great many things, and trying to get academics to pay attention to the detailed refutations instead of relying on consensus.
Without that breakdown, Earth's core wouldn't stay hot enough to support an active carbon cycle (volcanism and plate tectonics), and any life that had evolved here would've become extremely rare or died out entirely as all the carbon got locked up in inaccessible sedimentary deposits. Even the deep ocean vents would've shut down (lack of heat). The magnetic field would've probably stopped (as it did on Mars) and our atmosphere would've been stripped away by the solar wind. So without the potassium-argon breakdown, life here would be irrelevant because it wouldn't exist, at least not above the level of bacteria, and there probably wouldn't be very many of those. The Earth would appear as lifeless as Mars. So that potassium is really, really important.
Ironically, one of the biggest scientific mis-educators is Star Trek itself. The way they treat DNA and evolution makes Young Earth Creationism seem like a reasoned alternative.
"Mom, people can de-evolve into giant spiders!"
"No they can't, dear."
"But it's science!"
"*sigh*"
"I'm going to evolve into an energy being when I grow up!"
Now I think I'll got eat a banana to replenish the hundred potassium-40 atoms that turn into argon atoms every second - right inside me. I'm radioactive!
Then those "millions of people" weren't paying attention when Tyson said, literally, "Bruno was no scientist." Tyson further explained that Bruno's claims were not scientific because they couldn't (at the time) be tested, "His vision of the Cosmos was a lucky guess because he had no evidence to support it."
Bruno's story wasn't selected to provide an example of a scientist, but rather to illustrate the dangers of a society that is afraid and insecure enough to have its beliefs challenged. The counterpoint to that is Tyson's assertion that science requires a fundamental skepticism of its own tenets, and a willingness to adjust conclusions based on new evidence ("follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything"), demonstrating that it, and not the ideological paranoia of Bruno's time, is the true path to an enlightened civilization.
You didn't read the Sagan quote, did you? The cosmos is everything, including us. It's not something separate from us, it's something we belong to. As Sagan put it, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." The show is about our relationship to the cosmos, our place in it, the perspective it gives us about ourselves.
Again, you're entirely missing the point. Nobody's ever claimed that the Drake Equation is a method for actually calculating the number of radio-emitting civilizations. It's a metaphor, a teaching tool for discussing the various factors that could influence those results. It's not about giving an answer, it's about framing the question.
That's a totally inept comparison. Anyone who mistakes a work of fiction for an educational text has only themselves to blame for their misguided conclusions. Hell, even children know the difference between fiction and reality -- only adults seem to have a problem with it, perhaps because our capacity for make-believe gets rusty once we have real-world responsibilities to worry about (well, those of us who don't engage in make-believe for a living). True, science fiction can be informative about real science, but it's hardly an obligation. Star Trek has never claimed to be a textbook. It's entirely honest about being a work of fiction and entertainment -- unlike creationism, a fiction whose proponents attempt to pass it off as truth.
By itself, there is nothing that is "very much of it" when it comes to the size of the Universe. Even the largest known star is very small in comparison to the whole of everything.
I first learned about Giordano Bruno when I saw Original Cosmos. Since then I've done my own reading.
As for Aristotle not being Christian, it would be a pretty neat trick if he had been... considering he came along nearly 4 centuries earlier.
As some people keep saying in the Trek forum (for a different reason), Star Trek is not a documentary. I deplore some of the incredibly dumb misuses of science done in that show just for the sake of what the writers thought was a good story. But I honestly do not see what Star Trek has to do with Cosmos (unless you want to count Wil Wheaton and Neil deGrasse Tyson appearing on the same discussion panels).Ironically, one of the biggest scientific mis-educators is Star Trek itself. The way they treat DNA and evolution makes Young Earth Creationism seem like a reasoned alternative.
"Mom, people can de-evolve into giant spiders!"
"No they can't, dear."
"But it's science!"
"*sigh*"
"I'm going to evolve into an energy being when I grow up!"
Now I think I'll got eat a banana to replenish the hundred potassium-40 atoms that turn into argon atoms every second - right inside me. I'm radioactive!
A
Amaris
Guest
Hell, before last week, I didn't even know about Giordano Bruno, but I wasn't surprised by the actions of the church, at the time.
You kind of illustrate my point about why Bruno is a bad example to use. Logically, wouldn't it teach you the importance of pointing out that the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) was a pedophile rapist? Do you think Tyson will fly to Saudi Arabia and do just that?
That's the kind of thing that got Bruno burned, being in a highly religious society and spouting that Jesus wasn't divine and the Virgin Mary wasn't a virgin, that transubstantiation is a lie, yet maintaining a belief in magic and other mystic nonsense. Bruno's worldview is what Carl Sagan would've characterized as a demon haunted world, and his fate doesn't offer any more moral lessons about science than would the execution of pagans who insisted on human sacrifice to the sun god.
At some point in the 19th or 20th centuries, somebody tried to characterize Bruno's unfortunate story as another example of the Catholic Church suppressing science, because that was the narrative of the day, and somebody on the Cosmos writing staff obviously bought into it. The uptake is that if you believe in Bruno, you should hold that mystic revelation is just as valid at creating understanding as mathematical analysis and experiment, and that spirits haunt us, and after you die you could come back as a beaver.
That kind of sloppy storyline is what you often get when you let journalists and Hollywood writers try to explain science. They either miss the point, completely misunderstand it, or see a point that isn't there, and whooosh, a zombie narrative emerges. Given that, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they completely avoid any implication that evolution could have given humans a whole bunch of hard-wired innate behaviors and instincts, because the writers likely hold to the view that mental evolution stopped shortly after conscious thought started, and that all people are really exactly the same when you get down to it.
The point of the Bruno example was to show that it was dangerous just to have different ideas about the world back then-- whether they were supported by any actual scientific evidence or not.
You can ridicule some of the other crazy things Bruno believed in, but the fact he was executed for those beliefs still tells you all you need to know about the world he lived in.
You can ridicule some of the other crazy things Bruno believed in, but the fact he was executed for those beliefs still tells you all you need to know about the world he lived in.
But how did it ever get touted as "scientific"? It expresses an unknown quantity as the product of a bunch of other unknown quantities in the same way any caveman would estimate the number of woolly mammoths by saying
Number_of_mammoths = size_of_earth (unknown) * percent_of_Earth_that_is_land_area (unknown) * land_area_inhabited_by_Mammoths (unknown) * average_size_of_mammoth_herd (unknown) * average_herd_density_in_mammoth_areas (unknown).
It works equally well with angels.
Num_angels_dancing_on_pin_heads =
area_of_pin_head (measured) *
percentage_of_open_dance_space_around_each_angel (unknown) *
size_of_an_average_angel (unknown) *
number_of_pin_heads_in_current_use (unknown) *
percentage of pin heads currently vertical enough to support dancing angels (unknown) *
percentage of danceable pin heads being used by dancing angels (unknown) *
percentage of danceable pin head space that angels typically use in a dance (unknown)
There. I've framed the question better, and now we can all get a better grasp of how to approach the scientific question of angels dancing on pin heads. Now that we have this powerful equation, nothing can stop us from finding the answer!
It doesn't tell me a darn thing. Back then you were far more likely to be executed for believing that the other claimant should inherit the throne, or for being caught wearing the wrong uniform during a conflict, or living in the wrong castle, or being a member of the wrong warring family, or living in a city that some warlord wanted to raze.
Bruno had a long trial in which he defended himself and his philosophy, having grossly questioned Jesus, Mary, and many of the beliefs of the Catholic Church, beliefs which he'd attempted to undermine by spreading banned religious books. If, instead of airing claims about Jesus, he'd directly disputed the parentage and right to rule of anyone sitting on any throne in Europe, they wouldn't have bothered with a trial, they'd have just killed him as soon as they caught him.
So the great moral lesson is probably that you should make sure you don't live in the wrong castle, and the older brother should obviously be the one sitting on the throne, and be sure to wear the red uniform when you're out running around in a pike formation. Also, don't deal in black magic, and don't tell people they might die and come back as a hedgehog.
Obviously we haven't learned anything since, since quite a few professors have actively called for criminal prosecutions for anyone who expresses any doubt about the hell-fire and damnation of global warming that's about to descend upon us and wipe out human civilization. Even NASA Goddard recently published a report saying that industrial civilization would collapse within 20 years because the elites are consuming too many resources, and that only massive income redistribution and curbs on population and can prevent imminent catastrophe. I figure we get rid of the greedy Jews first, and then have NASA come up with better technologies for liquidating useless eaters. It's science.
Will this do?
A little too photon torpedo. Although the origininal looked a bit like a sea urchin.
Forwards' starwisp might have been more apt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starwisp
It is okay that they kept the 40 second animation--but was hoping that would be freshened up a bit.
For arguments with anti-nukes, I prefer the term cosmic fallout, since the reason atomic bombs didn't runaway to the point of blowing up the whole planet is because we are already worked over coals, as it were.
Evolution as with dogs is unassailable--that is why he and the crew used it--it shows more diversity than a few lousy finches. The variation is very broad--and the segue into the trees was nice too
Nice concept--but my only nitpick is that they showed dino bones in the Permian extinction! Augh!
The dense asteroid belt I can take--when a big one breaks up it is going to be dense right there for a bit. We show planets on textbooks really close together (out of scale) for clarity. Besides, textbooks are expensive enough as it is.
But dino cadavers in the Permian? Oh well, the overall point was made. Besides, Neil was in front of a greenscreen the whole time or he would have caught it.
I don't understand your reference to "anti-nukes." My point was in response to a post that questioned having biology and evolution in a program about the Universe.
I thought I was seeing things at first... then figured, "Okay, somebody goofed." This is one error that will definitely be noticed and commented on. But shouldn't they have caught it in post-production?Nice concept--but my only nitpick is that they showed dino bones in the Permian extinction! Augh!
The dense asteroid belt I can take--when a big one breaks up it is going to be dense right there for a bit. We show planets on textbooks really close together (out of scale) for clarity. Besides, textbooks are expensive enough as it is.
But dino cadavers in the Permian? Oh well, the overall point was made. Besides, Neil was in front of a greenscreen the whole time or he would have caught it.
