Carl Sagan's Cosmos, See Why You are the Universe Regarding Itself

I received Cosmos as a gift a couple of months ago in the boxed set of DVDs edition. Time constraints being upon me as they are, it has taken me this long to watch them all. Thirteen one hour episodes to this documentary series, so a lot to take in and process!

This series represents the personal reflections of the Carl Sagan and two of his close friends and fellow scientists on the state of the art of our exploration of the cosmos. Or, at least, the state of that art at the time that the series was produced in the late seventies. Things have moved along quite a bit since then in some fields. But I digress.

The presenter Carl Sagan is in fact now actually arguably best known indeed for this very series. Sagan died in 1996, but prior to Cosmos he was a professional scientist working for NASA, and after it he went on to write the novel Contact, which went on to become a successful motion picture. Sagan was intimately involved in the planning and execution of the Voyager missions that provided some of the best images of the outer planets of our solar system that we have to this day. He was the author of seminal papers on the astronomy of a number of the inner planets.

If I were to try to sum up the goal of this series in a nutshell it would be that it attempts to illustrate the history of mans exploration of the heavens and the invisible microscopic world from prehistory to the present day. In addition to merely presenting that history, Sagan also lays out as the presenter the facts and science behind the explorations and shows the manner in which each discovery deepened our understanding of our universe.

Each individual documentary in the series takes a particular theme, roughly approximating a chronology of gathering understanding from ignorance to the present across the course of the series. Throughout the series Sagan uses the device of a “ship of the imagination” to take us on a virtual tour of the heavens, from the heart of suns to the edges of the galaxy and beyond, showing us the birth and death of stars, and many other otherwise impossible observations.

Here is a summary of some of the major topics of the episodes:

The history of knowledge and the evolution of the library.
The theory of Darwinian evolution.
The life and times of Kepler.
The possibility of life on Mars.
The life and death of stars.
The story of the Voyager missions.
The theory of relativity.
The big bang.
Extraterrestrial civilizations.

Each episodes is made up of re-enactment scenes of famous or important moments in the history of science, CGI- assisted illustrations of the nature of the universe as we know it, Sagan himself, talking us through all of the above, and long sweeping visages of the heavens to lose ourselves in.

It is for me Carl Sagan himself who is the key attraction of this documentary series. Sagan had a true passion for science, believing it to be the perfect medium for exploring the mysteries of existence. Combine with this a sensitive but resolute personality and you get a very charismatic host. I must also observe, I have never before encountered anyone whose facial expressions swept across their faces prior to the utterance to which they relate. Sagan does this routinely. Watch him, you’ll see what I mean, it is very engaging.

Sagan interjected into this series some concepts which for the general public, would generally be considered to be pretty far out. For example, Sagan presents the argument that since we are all made of materials coalesced from this universe, there is more to our looking around than just one person regarding the universe in which they find themselves. In actuality, it is equally applicable to state that when you look up at the heavens, that you are a part of the consciousness of the universe, and it is regarding itself.

The sheer size of this series pretty much guarantees a lot of education. You may already be the kind of person who enjoys knowledge for its own sake, but as I understand the history of it, this documentary series took by surprise a lot of people who had not previously known that they were going to enjoy documentaries quite this much. Perhaps you might be such a person.

It has to be observed that this DVD set is not cheap. I also note that Cosmos is currently playing on the Science Channel. I would have to say you should watch a few of the shows on the tube before dishing out your dollars for this, just to be sure it is something you will enjoy.

As I mentioned earlier, since this series is quite old science has moved along in some areas. At the end of many of the episodes is an addendum that Sagan recorded some ten years later. This gives updates. Even this addendum is now a decade old, and some subjects such as black holes have made leaps and bounds in our understanding of them. Such is science. As I am sure Sagan would have agreed, just because some discoveries are not the newest ones, it doesn’t mean they lack elegance or art.