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Let's Watch [Cosmos: A Personal Voyage]
The Ender
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Once upon a time, in an era some people used to call, 'The 1970s', there was a lot of demand for atomic weaponry. People wanted bazookas that could shoot fission rockets, cannons that could shoot fission shells, and not only long-range fission missiles or aircraft carried bombs, but the biggest possible bombs ever.
This great period of time, today often called, 'The Good 'Ol Days', saw a lot of technical innovation as a result of science & engineering osmosis out of the military sector - especially in the United States. A few persons, likely of the treasonous / communist sort, saw this golden age of booming industry and thought, "This seems grossly negligent & dangerous. Most of the public, and even most of the state, doesn't understand any of this technology or the processes that went into creating it, and how could we expect them to give it the respect it deserves when they don't even understand it?"
One of those upstarts was named Carl Sagan, and he wrote some crappy television series named Cosmos in an effort to try and 'educate' people.
...Uh. Are you sure it was just some crappy show?
As long as the definition of 'crappy' includes the best fucking documentary ever put on television, I stand by my statement.
If you didn't know, Cosmos is being rebooted sometime this year on Fox. It'll be narrated by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and co-written / co-produced by Ann Druyan (Sagan's widow, and co-creator of the original series) & Steven Soter (a colleague of Sagan, and another co-creator of the original series). I'm pretty excited by the news.
'Cosmos' sounds like some pretentious 70s shit. I have never even heard of--
...You haven't already watched this series at least 5 times? My above use of the word 'crappy' did not cause you to destroy your keyboard with bile?
That's the line. Go pop yourself some fucking popcorn with the microwave that nuclear science provided you with, sit your ass down and get ready for 13 episodes of the best fucking documentary ever put on television.
We start here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClPShKs9Kr0
Take notes. We'll be engaging in sophisticated commentary & critique here, and you don't want to be found lacking.
This great period of time, today often called, 'The Good 'Ol Days', saw a lot of technical innovation as a result of science & engineering osmosis out of the military sector - especially in the United States. A few persons, likely of the treasonous / communist sort, saw this golden age of booming industry and thought, "This seems grossly negligent & dangerous. Most of the public, and even most of the state, doesn't understand any of this technology or the processes that went into creating it, and how could we expect them to give it the respect it deserves when they don't even understand it?"
One of those upstarts was named Carl Sagan, and he wrote some crappy television series named Cosmos in an effort to try and 'educate' people.
...Uh. Are you sure it was just some crappy show?
As long as the definition of 'crappy' includes the best fucking documentary ever put on television, I stand by my statement.
If you didn't know, Cosmos is being rebooted sometime this year on Fox. It'll be narrated by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and co-written / co-produced by Ann Druyan (Sagan's widow, and co-creator of the original series) & Steven Soter (a colleague of Sagan, and another co-creator of the original series). I'm pretty excited by the news.
'Cosmos' sounds like some pretentious 70s shit. I have never even heard of--
...You haven't already watched this series at least 5 times? My above use of the word 'crappy' did not cause you to destroy your keyboard with bile?
That's the line. Go pop yourself some fucking popcorn with the microwave that nuclear science provided you with, sit your ass down and get ready for 13 episodes of the best fucking documentary ever put on television.
We start here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClPShKs9Kr0Take notes. We'll be engaging in sophisticated commentary & critique here, and you don't want to be found lacking.
Episode 1 is the weakest part of Cosmos, for me.
Astrophysics has come a long way since the documentary was aired, and a lot of what once must've seemed awesome in this part seems mundane to me now. The artistic impressions of pulsars & nebulae don't quite manage to capture the majesty of those things in the same way that Hubble has managed to.
The production values are still fantastic for a show put on PBS in 1979, though, even in this 'weak' segment.
Astrophysics has come a long way since the documentary was aired, and a lot of what once must've seemed awesome in this part seems mundane to me now. The artistic impressions of pulsars & nebulae don't quite manage to capture the majesty of those things in the same way that Hubble has managed to.
The production values are still fantastic for a show put on PBS in 1979, though, even in this 'weak' segment.
With Love and Courage
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So much so that I couldn't bring myself to watch the next. Does it stay as bad? If were going to go through the episodes together in the thread, I'll try to give it a shot.
I had the same problem. I like my documentaries filled with charts and old guys talking, instead of re-enactments and shots of Sagan traveling through space.
I found every one of his scenes on the beach, at ruins, or inside that house to be just fine. He could of done any of the space scenes from inside an observatory or planetarium. They didn't recreate a bullshit 'I,Claudius' style ancient setting when he talked about how we figured out the circumference of the planet.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yes, the sci fi inserts will be a constant fixture. The quality of them varies; as I said before, the first episode (in my opinion) is the weakest.
Episode 2
I find this episode engaging because it's so outdated, actually. Watching what they were onto in the early 80s as far as biology is concerned vs what we know now is stunning. Also, Sagan foreshadows the 'intelligent design' debate we're now trying to drag people through.
Don't take this as gospel:
but as far as I can tell the show doesn't say anything that is untrue, there are simply gaps in knowledge that Sagan mentions that have since been filled. For example, he talks about DNA in the episode Ender linked but doesn't go into the importance of RNA (which we learned a lot about in the 1980s).
We've also developed more sophisticated understanding of quasars and black holes since then.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
As others have mentioned, there are a few little mistakes, but they don't really detract--for instance, Sagan keeps presenting an artist's rendition of the Milky Way which depicts it as a grand design spiral, when we now know that it's actually a barred spiral. That's something we only just figured out, though, and it's really only a background detail. Most of the "errors" are minor stuff like that, since most of the documentary is about the principles, scale, and history of science.
Parts of it are corny, but I find myself not giving a fuck. It's a nice break from the cynicism and "irony" of modern TV.
It's not outdated, so much as much of what it calls "hypothesis" is way beyond that now. Things like dark matter, dark energy and dark flow that it barely touches on are serious theories now and important. It basically glosses over black holes because knowledge of them then was pretty thin compared to now.
It's still AWESOME, and nothing in it is wrong, but if you watch a lot of this stuff as a matter of course (which I do), it will feel dated. To someone who just knows dick all about the universe, it's still the best primer aside from reading Hawking's A Brief History.
Moments like that just add to the experience, for me. Little snapshots of how knowledge has advanced.
As someone who has a beyond basic street level knowledge of this stuff, it has glaring omissions (for obvious temporal reasons). Carl Sagan is still a boss of all bosses.
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