Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

I was excited to hear that a new Cosmos was in the works.  I remember the original Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan very fondly.  Astronomy was of a particular interest to me at the time and the show had a good mix of history to explain the science.  Cosmos taught me to appreciate a subject that I though was very dull (history) by using another subject that I thought was very interesting (science) and it ignited my imagination.  It also made astronomy and cosmology relevant and relatable to an ordinary person through a creative use of story telling and visuals.

The series was due for a reboot.  There have been many things learned and discovered since Sagan's days but I hoped that they could capture the story telling elements and special effects that made the original Cosmos so appealing and relatable to a public who's scientific literacy is in the toilet.  We, as a society, need programs like Cosmos badly.  But I also remember how excited I was when George Lucas finally decided to do the prequel episodes to Star Wars and then being disappointed when I saw them, so I looked forward to this reboot with a sense of excitement and nervousness.

The following are my impressions from the individual episodes.

Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way

Giordano Bruno was not a martyr for science!  I can deal with some creative license for the sake of making a point or for dramatic effect, but the story of Bruno is an oversimplification at best, botched research at worst.  Bruno was a superstitious mystic who made many extravagant claims about the divinity of Christ, the Holy Trinity and even the Holy Mother Mary's virginity that would get him excommunicated from the three major Christian religions of the day.

Bruno eagerly accepted the Copernican, heliocentric model of the universe the same way that a modern day, new age mystic gloms onto quantum mechanics, so that they can convince themselves and others that their insipid, postmodern philosophies have a scientific basis. Bruno advocated for the Copernican model for much the same reasons; it was a way to advance Bruno's mystic philosophies.

The Copernican Heliocentric Model of the Cosmos

It also didn't help that Bruno was a bit of a prick.  Cosmos depicts Bruno as some sort of persecuted genius but he was really a rude, caustic and argumentative person, and this made him lots of enemies.  The details of his trial seem sketchy, but it seemed obvious that the court that condemned him didn't have to look very hard to find something he was guilty of.

Galileo, hardly a warm friendly person himself that endorsed the Copernican model of the universe, somehow escaped Bruno's fate which I think is telling.  In the end, Galileo's harshest punishment was house arrest.  But then, Galileo didn't press spiritual and mystic issues as hard as Bruno did.  Sure, Bruno was eventually correct for endorsing the Copernican model, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The interesting thing is that some bishops and cardinals were originally receptive to Copernicus' model of the cosmos.  The Catholic church had an interest in predicting the celestial movements just as much as anybody.  The geocentric model of the universe in Ptolemy's Almagest, which was predicting motions in the heavens for over a thousand years, was getting long in the tooth and needed updating.  Copernicus' heliocentric model was a drastic conceptual shift, but didn't seem to raise serious opposition until critics of the Catholic church like Bruno and Galileo used it to try and advance their agendas.  With the Protestant Reformation still fresh in the Vatican's mind, opposing the Copernican model became a political maneuver.

The time of Galileo, Copernicus and Bruno was an interesting time in European history with many colorful characters and political intrigue.  I was discouraged after seeing Cosmos butcher the history in this fashion, especially after Neil DeGrasse Tyson paraphrased the scientific method as method of rational inquiry to open up the cosmos for all of us.  The episode ends with the cosmic calendar which was very cool but this series wasn't off to a good start.

GRADE: D

Episode 2: Some of the Things That Molecules Do

Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is a Christian sect in the United States that believes in a recent creation and a young Earth based on a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.  Consequently, they hate the theory of evolution and any other field of study that acknowledges the earth as much older.  So YEC's have led grassroots campaigns to try to influence public opinion that the theory of evolution is either discredited or controversial.  A recent debate between science communicator Bill Nye and YEC Ken Ham is just one part of the whole insanity that is the YEC movement.  The YEC has been at this for a long time and has contributed to a watering down of scientific education in this country.

Tyson debunks some of the YEC claims in this episode.  This may not seem apparent to the viewer, but those of us that have knowledge of the junk science peddled by the YEC know who Tyson is addressing. Frankly, I like this approach.  Mention politics or religion in scientific discussions and people will dig in and double down.  The approach Tyson used in Cosmos wouldn't seem to trigger this defensive reaction and perhaps allows people to open their minds to some new ideas.  In the episode he demonstrates that evolution is still happening as we speak despite claims by YEC that it isn't.  He illustrates this with stories of animal and plant domestication, in which humans actively selected for the traits and genes that get passed on, sometimes the result of chance encounters, which resulted in a symbiotic relationship that benefited both species.  Tyson illustrates that selection can also be done by nature when a chance mutation in bears turned some of them white and made them better adapted to hunting in an arctic environment while the brown bears did better in the forests, allowing them to diverge into two different species.  Using a tree, Tyson describes all life on earth as coming from the same heritage and that additional species just start branching off just like the polar bears did from their parent species.

Tyson debunks the "What good is half an eye?" argument advanced by YEC's by guiding us through eye evolution as it started out with a photosensitive patch of molecules on bacteria to the fully formed organs we would recognize today with fully differentiated tissues.  Even at the early stages of eye evolution it gave that organism a survival advantage since it was equipped with another way to sense and respond to its environment.  The salient point is that the eye didn't need to be fully developed, just functional.  Once its survival advantage was retained, other developments to it's structure could be improved through millions of generations.  Even now, Tyson mentions that our eyes aren't completely perfect, but it would be hard for us to function without them.

Tyson then begins to contemplate life elsewhere in the cosmos by considering Titan, a moon of Saturn.  Why he chose Titan instead of Mars or Jupiter's moon Callisto, I don't know.  Perhaps Titan is the only known body in the Solar System besides the Earth with liquid flowing on it's surface.  But this liquid is methane and other hydrocarbons and it's extremely cold.  Tyson speculates that maybe life could find acetylene as acceptable energy sources for life or there might be a heated vent somewhere deep in Titan's hydrocarbon lakes.

Sorry Tyson, but no.  Tyson and others often look to extremophiles as examples that life can exist in hostile places.  But the key point that such speculative ideas miss is that the life needs to evolve first.  You need water and a temperate environment.  That's why we're looking so hard for water on other worlds to begin with: it's a good solvent for nutrients and waste products to be exchanged.  Life also needs carbon-based compounds which Titan seems to have in abundance but they are hydrocarbons and are very nonpolar and weakly interacting with each other so it's not likely for structure to form unless these hydrocarbons can bond with other electronegative elements like oxygen and nitrogen.  Then you have molecules with polarity and varying electron density so that enzymes can form and work.

I feel Tyson is off the deep end with Titan, but overall, this was a solid episode.

Grade: B

Episode 3: When Knowledge Conquered Fear


Tyson uses the example of how comets were perceived and interpreted in ancient cultures to illustrate that our ability for pattern recognition is a double-edged sword. As much as this ability has increased our chances of survival by taking cues from nature, it has also led us to draw some wrong conclusions.  For a long time, we as a species didn't have a deep enough understanding of the universe to understand what comets really were and what we thought we knew about them was wrong.

Our transition from the Ptolomeic geocentric model to the Copernican heliocentric model was a good step in the right direction but it wasn't enough to understand comets, the model of our universe required further refinement to the Kepler model which depicted the orbits of the planets as ellipses instead of perfect circles.

The Kepler model showing elliptical orbits

Even then, nobody knew why the universe functioned this way, and it became a source of endless speculation in coffee houses until a renaissance man named Edmund Halley reached out to a recluse named Issac Newton.  Newton showed that the eliptical orbits of the planets were simply due to the planets' inertia and gravity from the sun, which lead to speculation that perhaps comets behaved the same way.  They did.    Edmund Halley's recognition that some historical records of comets were documenting the appearance of the same comet allowed Halley to predict when a particular comet would return again.  When the prediction turned out to be accurate the comet was named Hally's Comet in his honor and it demonstrated how the ability to make accurate predictions validates a scientific theory. Comets changed from something to be feared to simple ordinary objects in our universe. Now that the orbital period of the comet was known, an orbit can be calculated and our perception of the universe changed once again!  Such is the nature of science!

I think this episode may have redeemed the series from such a rough beginning.  It had some sound story telling.  Considering how most discussions of science history focus on Issac Newton during this time period, I found this story where Edmond Halley was cast as the hero as a refreshing change of perspective.  Robert Hooke is cast as the antagonist, but it should be noted that he was an accomplished intellectual in his own right.  He made some solid contributions to physics and his work with understanding springs allowed more accurate time pieces to be developed and allowed ships to navigate better at sea, kicking the Age of Exploration into high gear.  That's not a bad legacy.

Grade: A

Episode 4: A Sky Full of Ghosts

This episode continues the story arc that started in episode one and continued in episode three that deals with how our understanding of the universe has evolved through time.  Now that it's been known that objects found in our solar system obeyed the laws of physics such as gravity, it led one to wonder if the stars themselves obeyed these laws.  It turns out that they do when William Herschel discovered binary stars orbiting around their common center of gravity.  This particular finding by Hershel would set into motion all sorts of theories and discoveries about the nature of our universe, including the observation that the universe is expanding which led to the theory of the Big Bang and postulating the existance of stars that are so massive that light can't escape them -- another scientific prediction validated by the discovery of black holes.  It was probably an exciting time to be an astronomer that wouldn't be surpassed until the discovery of exoplanets decades later.

This episode introduces other scientists such as Michael Faraday and James Maxwell and how they contributed to our understanding of light that would lead to more discoveries of our universe including the Theory of Relativity.  And then.....nothing!  They introduce the thought process that Einstein used to come up with the Theory of Relativity but the episode then drops it like a hot potato.  Most people's understanding of Relativity is very poor and a show like Cosmos would have been a perfect opportunity to describe it in a little more detail.  It's not like the theory isn't relevant to out daily lives; our GPS couldn't work without it!

Tyson demolishes another YEC argument for a young earth by noting that we're able to observe and study objects millions of light years away.  If the earth were created recently there wouldn't have been enough time for that light to reach us, and therefore, these objects would be invisible to us.  The idea that the finite speed of light means that we're looking into the past often leads to the cliche that we could be looking at stars that no longer exist because the light is still traveling here, which I think is nonsense.  With our naked eye, we can see a couple thousand light years out at most.  Stars live on million-billion year time scales, so it's a pretty safe bet that whatever you see in the sky on a clear evening is still there.

William Hershel in the animated story sequence is voiced by Patrick Stewart, a voice that every trekkie would recognize instantly.  He shares some of his secrets that he's discovered with his young son John Hershel who would later use the lessons his father taught him about light to make some advances in photography.  The father and son couple is being trailed by a distant figure that turns out the be John Hershel as an older man remembering his times with his father when he was much younger.  This story creates a nice parallel that we are looking into a younger and younger universe the farther out we see, much like the older John Hershel is looking back into the past with his father when they were both younger.  Very good! Nevertheless, I find the episode a little unsatisfying because of the Relativity issue.

Grade: B+

Episode 5: Hiding in the Light

This episode dealt with the properties of light and how it was used to determine the compositions of stars by analyzing a stars absorption spectra and opened up a whole field of study known as spectroscopy.  This episode botches more history but not as badly as Giordano Bruno's story in episode one.  The historical retelling of Issac Newton's experiments with light hinted very strongly that if Newton had only decided to look at the spectra of light shining through a prism with a magnifying glass, then he would have discovered the dark absorption lines that would have given him a clue as to the sun's composition.

Um, no!  I actually did this before and saw nothing.  Even assuming Newton's prism and magnifying glass were good enough quality, the sun is actually a disk where different regions of the disk would wash out the dark lines.  You would need to let the sunlight pass through a very fine slit to isolate very small portions of the sun's disk to be able to see anything.  And even if Newton did this, he wouldn't even know what to make of what he saw because the chemical sciences hadn't been developed to a point that would tell him what the lines meant.  I'm scratching my head over this because Tyson is an astrophysicist.  He should know this!

The key breakthrough was made by Joseph von Fraunhofer who wondered why certain chemicals burned with different color flames.  As an apprentice glassmaker, he had a lot of experience with how impurities burned and also noticed that these impurities in gaseous form absorbed and emitted certain colors of light and began to wonder if this could work when analyzing the sun.  It did!

The dark absorption lines in the solar spectra

 I have to give a hat tip to this episode for introducing nonwestern intellectuals such as Chinese philospoher Mo Tsu and Islamic philosopher Al-Hazan.  Modern science and technology has such a Western flair to it that I think we forget that a lot of ideas that contributed to our scientific method and world view had origins in other cultures before there was arguably any such thing as Western civilization.

The historical retelling of the evolution of rational scientific thought illustrates how cultural forces can work to suppress scientific advances and lead to that civilization's decay. And serves as a cautionary tale that Cosmos utterly failed to explore.

Scientific inquiry as we would recognize it started in China until their Chinese rulers eventually decided that other cultures had nothing to teach them and actually harmed their "cultural purity".  Books were burned, libraries destroyed and trade routes with the West were closed.  This area of the world is only now trying to recapture the cultural intellectualism it once had.

Intellectual vitality soon migrated to the Middle East and the Islamic world which became prosperous by controlling trade routes between the east and west allowing for a rapid diffusion and development of ideas, including the sciences.  But then the Islamic world began to fossilize into an aristocratic theocracy determined to prevent certain ideas from undermining the practice of Islam and the authority of its leaders.  Whatever intellectual vitality was left was snuffed out when the Mongolians ravaged the area.  The Islamic world has yet to recover from this.

The intellectual torch passed to the West where it spawned The Enlightenment and an intellectual vigor that would endure and travel to the developing colonies of the Western Hemisphere and the New World where it remains to this day.  But will history repeat itself?  Will the the West turn away from scientific insights like China and the Islamic world did?

Well, the generation that flocked to theaters to see Star Wars also decided that manned Apollo moon missions were too risky and expensive to sustain and canceled them, and now a significant part of the population thinks it was all a hoax while they believe that the government is suppressing the truth about UFOs. Popular movements are speaking out in opposition to public health triumphs such as vaccination and fluoridation.  Vitalism, a discredited notion that molecules from living things are imbued with an "elan vital", has made a resurgence in the organic food movement.  Religious grass roots movements have compelled text book manufacturers to water down any references to evolution.  We haven't been able to build a nuclear power plant in the US for decades because our environmentalism has fossilized into an intolerable religion.  Europeans and Australians are raiding field trials with weed trimmers and rakes to destroy genetically modified crops.  Our young generation would rather study business and finance instead of the sciences, and that's assuming they go to college at all. And our whole society is awash with postmodernist philosophies that do nothing to advance our analytical and empirical knowledge while advancing baseless ideologies. So....yea....it can diffinately happen here in the West!  Place your wagers.

So this episode blew a great opportunity to enlighten the public about our current relationship with science and gets more history wrong.  Bummer.

Grade: C-

Episode 6: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still

At this point, I'm beginning to suspect that the producers and writers of this series either didn't bother to consult with a professional chemist, or if they did, ignored him and this episode proves it.  Which is a shame, because the appeal of Cosmos is the synthesis of knowledge from various scientific fields and history into a interesting and cohesive narrative.  But the field of chemistry is getting shafted and I'm a little miffed.

Tyson's spaceship of the imagination explores the universe of the very small.  First a raindrop, then a cell, then a chloroplast, and then a crude animation that doesn't explain anything about how carbon dioxide and water are converted to sugars.  I'm a chemist and even that segment leaves me confused.  Most scientifically literate people know about chloroplasts but it's a black box as far as they're concerned and the animation won't improve their understanding of what goes on in a chloroplast in the slightest.

Tyson drops in an interesting tidbit about the existence of a plant with pollen sitting so deep in the flower that Darwin predicted that there must be an insect that has a super long tongue that is able to reach the pollen for fertilization to occur.  Otherwise, how can the plant reproduce?  Such an insect was later discovered illustrating the predictive nature of Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Okay, sure.  Personally, I like Archaeopteryx a little better.  Darwin predicted that birds and reptiles must be distantly related in Origin of the Species.  A couple of years later, a fossil was discovered of an animal that had features shared by both reptiles and birds named Archaeopteryx.  It was an early example of a transition fossil and an example of a prediction being made by a theory that ended up being confirmed.  Plus, it refutes another YEC claim that evolution can't be true because such transition species haven't been found.  In fact there are about a dozen such species that have been found by my last count.  This YEC claim is simply wrong.

a fossil of Archaeopteryx

Tyson then starts talking about atoms and the outdated model that they are mostly empty space with a dense nucleus and electrons whizzing around in orbits--the Bohr model.  Except that electrons are wave particles, and as waves, they occupy most of the space in the atom.  In schools we teach the Bohr model as a heuristic device to help students understand covalent bonding and other such basic concepts but in this episode, it doesn't do anything to help the viewer understand anything.  

Like episode 5, episode 6 misses the mark on a lot of levels.  I was thinking that the series might have redeemed itself after episode one, but now I fear that Cosmos is looking subpar about halfway through. 

Grade: C

Episode 7: The Clean Room

The YEC claim of a recent creation is partly based upon Archbishop Ussher's attempt to determine the age of the Earth by using the bible.  Not only did Ussher come up with an age, but also an exact time of creation. Even at the time, I think this is stretching credibility a little by thinking you can deduce a precise time from ancient texts, but Tyson dismisses this by saying the everyone considered the bible authoritative, apparently not realizing that this was after the Protestant Reformation.  But I'm sure Tyson has heard of Galileo who lived around the same time.  So to say that everyone considered the bible authoritative is shockingly inaccurate.

But I must say that this episode has some great visuals!  The animation of the birth of the Earth followed by an exploded view of rock layers of the Grand Canyon was simply spectacular.

This episode features Clair Patterson who was assigned the apparently simple task of measuring the amount of lead in zircon crystals.  The results would be used to determine the age of the Earth because lead was a known decay product of heavier elements such as uranium and measuring the amount that had accumulated in the crystal would allow an age of the Earth to be calculated (radiometric dating).

The decay chain of a uranium isotope to lead

Patterson eagerly accepted but quickly found that he was getting inconsistent results.  He determined that lead contamination from the environment was effecting his results and painstakenly built a clean room to improve the accuracy of his measurements.  What follows is a nice montage of names of scientists being recited that contributed to the atomic theory that made Patterson's mass spectrometer that he used to measure the lead possible.  Science constantly improves by building on itself with new contributions over the generations and I think that scene illustrates this nicely.

A schematic of a mass spectrometer

Patterson gets good enough results to calculate the Earth to be about 4.5 billion years old, but his experience with the lead contamination begs the question of where it was coming from.  After systematic investigations at sea and in the arctic, he concludes that the lead must be coming from the manufacturing industry, particularly tetra ethyl lead which was used as a fuel additive.  The oil industry was not amused and tries to discredit Patterson with science of its own. 

The YEC's would probably hate this episode.  It drives a final nail into the coffin for them to know that an absolute age of the Earth can be measured and it is millions of times older than Ussher or YEC's claim it is.  Ussher wasn't even close.  Stick a fork in the YEC, they're done!  Of course they will try and discredit the radiometric dating technology that was used by Patterson and others just like the oil industry tried to discredit Patterson's research on lead, and that is the salient point in the episode.  People can try and use science for unscrupulous means to manufacture doubt within the minds of the public about well established ideas in science or try to present falsehoods with the appearance of them validated by science.  But I would also add, that it's not just government, corporate or religious interests that have abused science in this matter.  Charities, NGO's and ordinary people can use it to advance their ideologies.  YEC's have done it,  the antivax movement has done it, the antiGMO crowd has done it.  Question everything!

The history is a little dicey but there were enough redeeming moments and gives fair treatment about how the sciences can be used and abused which is a very important lesson to take note of in today's day and age.

Grade: B

Episode 8: Sisters of the Sun

An interesting episode that gives a nod to women's contributions to astronomy.  By this time in history, spectroscopy has matured in the field of astronomy.  Edward Pickering was accumulating vast amounts data on the spectra stars and it was up to Henrietta Leavitt and her team of women to catalog them by developing a novel system that is still in use by astronomers to this day.  But it doesn't stop there.  The data accumulated allowed Cecelia Payne to conclude that stars are composed of mostly hydrogen and helium and also that the stars temperature can be determined from its spectra.  This conclusion was in conflict with the prevailing theory of the time and in a crisis of confidence Payne caves in and waters down her conclusions.  It wasn't until some years later that astronomers realized Payne was right and credited her with the discovery.  Why?  Because the data said that Payne was right!  A position that has evidence in support of it should be rigorously defended, even if it's unpopular.  That's the moral of that story.

Unfortunately, for this episode, the historical digression is very brief and wraps up pretty quickly.  Most of the historical stories in Cosmos tend to weave through an entire episode with certain themes being carried over into other episodes, but not this time. This episode seems to lavish praise on the women's contributions to a fault because when Tyson explains the life cycles of stars and how certain types of stars will die, he makes no mention of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that ended up being derived from the same data that was being used to catalog the different stars by Henrietta Leavitt and her team.  It seems that introducing the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram would be a given, but it seems to have been excluded because two men came up with it.

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram

The clever thing is that the title is a double entendre.  Sisters of the Sun refers to not only the women's contributions to understanding stars, but the idea that groups of stars are related to ours by being formed from the same cloud of gas and dust that was seeded with elements from other stars that have died, making us all related and descended from stars in a way.  How significant do you feel now?

Grade: B-

Episode 9: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth.

We tend to think of life on Earth as members of a precariously balanced ecosystem that has only been recently upset by man's intervention, but this isn't true at all.  In this episode Tyson illustrates that the Earth itself was a very different place in the geologic past and the evolution of it's features have done much to influence the evolution of life itself, even leading to a series of mass extinctions before man even appeared.

Tyson visits the Halls of Extinction, a metaphorical creation that was introduced way back in episode 2, but he spends more time taking us through the mass extinctions throughout Earth's history while strongly implicating climate change being the primary factor in the mass extinction during the Permian age, also known as The Great Dying.   The extinction event that killed the dinosaurs gets a lot of press, but the extinction event of the Permian age 100 million years or so before that was even worse.  Within a couple of million years (an instant in geologic time) 90% of the Earth's species went extinct. Tyson strongly hints that climate change was responsible for the great dying.  It's possible but this theory isn't widely accepted.  Tyson points to an unlabeled hall and asks if we will be the ones who fill this one with extinct species?  Rhetorical.

As Tyson noted, the Earth was a very different place back then and it was true.  All the Earth's land mass was clustered together as a single supercontinent named Pangea.  This most certainly would have effected ocean currents, climate and species distribution and their environmental niches.  So we'll have to be careful about drawing parallels between the Permian and our current age.  According to the episode, the appearance of lignin, a protein that structurally reinforced cellulose fibers allowed the appearance of trees and forests that rapidly enriched the atmosphere with up to 40% oxygen.  But microbes couldn't digest the lignin yet so the trees would die and form carbon rich coal that would later be ignited by volcanic eruptions spewing carbon dioxide, sulfates and particulates into the atmosphere raising all sorts of havoc.

Pangea during the Permian age

The only problem I see is that, while the microbes didn't have the capability to digest the lignin when it first appeared, they have been digesting cellulose for millions of years already so I think the amount of coal present during this time has been overestimated and a lot of it won't end up burning unless it's exposed on the surface.  

A theory I consider more likely is that the concentration of oxygen reached a tipping point where forest fires can burn out of control, even from a lightning strike or a small meteor impact. I think the 40% concentration that Tyson refers to is more than enough.  Throw in a probable dry spell and...BOOM...mass die-offs as the worlds forests get converted to ash and the life that was heavily dependent on the enriched oxygen also die-off as it gets consumed by fire.  Every resident of the Western US knows the chaos of trying to cope with fires burning down a mere few hundred acres of forest every year, and I say "cope" because they are impossible to extinguish.  Firefighters can only hope to contain them while they burn themselves out.  Now imagine the atmospheric oxygen concentration that is double what we have now and nobody around to contain the fires. Throw in a light breeze to fan the flames and spread the embers around the super continent of Pangea...That was the Permian age!

The Permian extinction may have happened the way I described but I don't know for certain, but I do get a little perturbed at the recent tendency of some paleogeologists reading carbon dioxide induced climate change into everything they are finding in the fossil record without a lot of solid evidence.  This episode clearly illustrates that climate change can have a variety of factors as Tyson even illustrated when the formation of the Isthmus of Panama shut down particular ocean currents causing a cooling spell.

There's a lot of good moments about how the theory of continental drift (currently known as plate tectonics) was first developed and confirmed and there's an uplifting message about how we can overcome our current ecological predicaments to live long enough as a species to see the Earth as a different planet in the future, but I think Tyson lays it on pretty thick while in the Halls of Extinction.

Grade: C+

Episode 10: The Electric Boy

Everything in modern society that you take for granted is because of one man.  And if you were to ask 1,000 people, not one person may know his name.  His name is Michael Faraday.  His name has been dropped in previous episodes as if Cosmos wanted to foreshadow his story in this episode.  He was a brilliant and gifted individual, but since he was born into poverty and struggled in school, most people wouldn't have suspected of what he was capable of.

This episode is a pretty straight forward retelling of the life of Michael Faraday starting from his humble beginnings, to his job as a book binder, to his job as an apprentice of English chemist Humphry Davy who was very accomplished in his day who eventually felt threatened by Faraday and was determined to keep him in the shadows until his death.  This happens sometimes.  A scientist like Davy makes solid contributions to his field and ends up resting on his laurels and makes it difficult for younger researchers like Faraday to add their knowledge and insight.  Fortunately, we do not live forever and eventually such ideas do get advanced.

Faraday was the man who demonstrated that the principles of electricity, magnetism and light were rooted in one unifying principle.  Faraday's work with electricity launched a whole new revolution that would result in the globalized world we have today where everything and everybody is interconnected and exchange information at an unprecedented level.  This alone would be a legacy any man would be proud of, but he was also an educator that would inspire generations of young students with a series of Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution in London which became a tradition that would carry on to this day.

A very solid episode and the ending montage of his legacy is one of the most moving sequences in the whole series.  Excellent! 

Grade: A+

Episode 11: The Immortals 

Tyson describes a narrative on how our technological pursuits are often motivated by our own desire for immortality by describing how the development of writing in ancient times allowed for a sense of immortality by allowing stories and messages from a person's life to be passed on long after they have died.  Tyson makes the obvious connection between how writing and DNA transmits the accumulated information of previous generations to future generations and wonders how we can achieve immortality in the future.

Tyson speculates about our future, particularly how we as a race will continue and achieve our own sense of immortality by venturing into the rest of our Solar System and beyond before our Sun begins to die making Earth uninhabitable.  Tyson optimistically speculates that once we find solutions to overcome the threats to our existence such as climate change or nuclear anhilation, venturing to the stars should be a piece of cake.  I agree 100% .  Solving such monumental problems tends to result in new knowledge and technologies being deployed.  Mastering and reducing our impacts on our climate and ecosystems would most certainly allow us to construct ecosystems of our own inside of self contained structures in space or on other planets which would better our chances of continuing as a species, even if our sun dies making the Earth uninhabitable.

Tyson alludes to another way of achieving a sense of immortality by telling the story of how the Nakhla meteorite in 1911 was shown to originate from Mars.  It would suggest that life can form elsewhere in the cosmos and be sent to another planet like Earth through a series of fortuitous impacts and intercepts.  Some forms of microbial life have been shown to withstand the hostile environments of outer space and perhaps they can survive reentry into a planet's atmosphere while hitchhiking on a meteor. Perhaps this mechanism could work within a star system, but transfering life between star systems by meteor seems to be a stretch.  But if this can really happen, then life should be abundant in the galaxy and the genetic material of such life should be surprisingly uniform among multiple star systems and their planets.

Our destiny as a species and what challenges we face are important themes to discuss in a series like Cosmos, I just wish we had more knowledge of how life began on Earth.  Otherwise, the whole question about life besides our own being present in the universe is open to a lot of speculation.  I, for one, tend to think life is quite rare and have written about it before, but I would be happy to be proven wrong about it!

Grade: B

Episode 12: The World Set Free

Arg!  This episode continues the climate change theme introduced in episode 9 and elaborates on it, but not very well.  It's not because I don't believe the global temperature is rising and the climate is changing.  I do.  But how Cosmos presents the evidence and how we determined that the global temperature of Earth is rising will lead to a fatally flawed discussion among the public.

The good news is that Tyson treats a lot of arguments advanced by people who deny that global warming is occurring (denialists) much like he addressed the YEC arguments against evolution so hopefully people's minds will be open to the arguments without any political context. He also tries to illustrate the difference between weather and climate by walking a dog along the beach who is wandering around aimlessly on its leash (weather) while Tyson walks in a predetermined path (climate).   "Keep your eye on the man, not the dog", he says.  Brilliant!  He also effectively describes how feedback mechanisms work and how small changes in atmospheric CO2 can lead to large changes in climate and the environment.

Now the bad news: Tyson started the episode by describing the harsh environment of Venus and its runaway greenhouse effect because of the rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere raising its temperature causing the water on its surface to evaporate and raise the temperature even more and notes that Venus did this all by itself without human's intervention while Earth, having similar amounts of carbon can keep a lot of it sequestered in it's biosphere, oceans and minerals such as limestone.  

And then he drops it!  He no longer mentions the role of water at all and its effect on the climate and global temperature.  And this is where climate change denialists are going to see the problem with any argument or explanation put forth by the scientific community.  You must address the water cycle, why?  Because it contributes to over 90% of heat retained in Earth's atmosphere and the denialists know it!  They will see any argument that doesn't include the role of water as being fatally flawed. Nor does Tyson address The Pause-- the apparent halting or plateau in trends of global surface temperatures for the past 15 years.

So naturally, the goal is to reduce the amount of CO2 we are dumping in the atmosphere, but Tyson focuses on solar and wind power as if they are the only solutions which is incredibly narrow in vision.  In the historical digressions he talks about how oil and coal have repeatedly delayed or sidelined advancements in solar power made by others.  This is simply another way of saying that solar power is too expensive to produce. There's no conspiracy like a lot of people tend to imply.  Fossil fuels have an advantage of being produced and delivered economically and reliably.  That's how we've become dependent on them.  In fact, something like solar power is barely feasible now.  As somebody who has looked into implementing solar power for my own home on a number of occaissions, the photovoltaics are simply too expensive and they also have the disadvantage of only working when the sun is shining.  Batteries can work to mediate this issue somewhat by storing a surplus to be used during nighttime and overcast days, but this adds to cost and the use of some potentially harmful chemicals or minerals to make the batteries that may be in short supply.

And how much land are we willing to devote to solar and wind farms while our global population increases exponentially?  What about nuclear power?  Geothermal power?  Ethanol?  Biodeisel?  Focusing on solar or wind power exclusively like Tyson does seems very narrow in vision at best, socially irresponsible at worst.

Grade: C-

Episode 13: Unafraid of the Dark

The title of this episode refers to the apparent existence of dark matter and dark energy that is are also cast as metaphors that represent the undiscovered mysteries that science must still discover.  The episode reminds us that we don't know everything and that there are still many questions about the cosmos that need answering.  If there weren't then we wouldn't be scientists.  I say "we" because, as Tyson points out, science belongs to all of us. It impacts every single citizen of humanity. We just need to use it wisely, reserve judgement and follow the evidence wherever it leads bearing in mind that some cherished ideas and beliefs might be wrong and we'll just have to get over it and continue our investigations.

Tyson draws some parallels between the Library of Alexandria and our current repository of information, the internet.  Science belongs to all of us and for the first time in history, the combined knowledge of our universe is at our fingertips.  Therefore, there is no excuse for not being properly informed about the scientific issues discussed in the media and political circles. None. ZIP!  Anybody living in proximity to a cell phone tower or public library has access to this information.  I swear that the prevalence of antiintellectualism that I find online and in real life is mind-boggling to me.

This episode encapsulates the spirit of Cosmos more than any other and represents what the whole point of this series is in case anybody has forgotten.  Tyson describes the two Voyager spacecraft as two tickets at an attempt at contact with alien species using the truly universal language of science and mathematics.  It is likely that any such alien species may not retrieve it until long after we're gone.  But maybe not.  A monologue from the late Carl Sagan (from the original Cosmos) seems to push us forward as he talks about our hopes, dreams and nightmares on the "pale blue dot".  It's was a strong finish after such a weak beginning.

Grade: A

Conclusions

Taking into account the grades for all the episodes, the overall grade for the series would be a B- which is pretty good.  It seems that the series had lost points do to some sketchy historical research and a failure to capitalize on a couple of opportunities to confront the tide of antiintellectualism directly.  Episodes 5 and 6 in particular blew some great opportunities to elaborate on how cultural forces can dumb down a population and cause an intellectual decline and serve as a cautionary tale for Western civilization if we're not careful.  The series also suffers from the slapdash effort to deal with the global warming and climate change issue and neglected to elaborate on such an important scientific concept like relativity. Cosmos did a much better job on the evolution segments which makes the contrast with climate change a much more stark comparison.

Nevertheless, Cosmos has some great high points.  When Knowledge Conquered Fear (Episode 3), A Sky Full of Ghosts (Episode 4) and The Electric Boy (Episode 10) were the high points of the series.  In fact, I've seen The Electric Boy several times and it moves me every time.  The series also ends very strongly with Unafraid of the Dark (Episode 13).  Some of the episodes have such a tenuous connection to the theme of Cosmos that one might be forgiven if he forgot what the point of a them was, but Unafraid of the Dark highlights the point nicely.

The series has many tributes and montages to the late Carl Sagan.  Overall, I'd say Neil deGrasse Tyson did a good job of carrying on the tradition of Sagan.  I look forward to seeing him as leading the next generation of science communicators.  He does seem to be wedded to the persecuted genius caricature in this series a little too much.  Which is odd because the only person featured in Cosmos who may have come close to being persecuted was Clair Patterson and he got off pretty light as far as persecuted geniuses go.  Nikolai Vavilov, on the other hand would, truly be an example of a persecuted genius in modern times.  Google him.
It might be worth reminding people that skepticism isn't persecution.  It's pretty much a staple in evaluating scientific claims and it often means that you need more evidence.  Some ideas will have a hard time getting accepted at first, but they eventually will when there's enough evidence so go find some.  Michael Faraday had to cope with memory loss and depression but this didn't stop him.  Henrietta Leavitt was deaf and she still coped.  What's your excuse?

The themes that really make the series for me is the sense of optimism that Tyson tries to convey when discussing our current problems while refering to great questions of the past and how great minds overcame them, which is the salient lesson of this series.  People seem to think that science is this black box where ivory tower elitists reach a consensus arbitrarily.  Cosmos shows that this isn't the case at all.  The historical segments show pretty succinctly that observations were made, tests designed, data collected, predictions made and later confirmed.  This is how our knowledge and understanding improves.  Scientific laws aren't arbitrary things.  And if technology can be designed based on these scientific principles (refer to The Electric Boy) then we have a pretty good chance of being right!

So where's your evidence?  YEC's, where's your evidence that the Earth is only 10,000 years old?  Antivaxers, where's your evidence that vaccines cause autism?  AntiGMO, where's your evidence that GMO's are harmful to people and damaging to the environment?  Climate change denialists, where's your evidence that the Earth isn't warming?  It's not true just because you believe it. Question everything!