Cosmos and Carl Sagan's Legacy

Over the weekend I decided to rewatch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, in addition to the fascinating, but depressing, movies about war that I’ve been harping about recently. Sagan is one of my personal heroes and television show Cosmos was one of the formative viewing experiences of my youth. I remember hearing people imitate his voice on ‘billions and billions’ or seeing him on Johnny Carson with my grandmother.

So last night I sat down on my couch and watched the first episode of Cosmos, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.” I was astonished, it is even better than I remember. The DVD edition was released in 2000 and it looks much better than the VHS version I watched last decade. The music, the writing, the concepts, the visuals are some of the best documentary filmmaking that has ever been done.

I think the biggest lesson and some of the most powerful images and metaphors from the series are attempts to explain the scale of the cosmos. Take the idea of the cosmic calendar. Sagan asks the viewer to compress 15 billion years of history into a single year and then to focus on the very tiny sliver of time at the end of the year when humans first arise. The first show concludes thus:

Down here the first humans made their debut around 10:30 pm on December 31st and with the passing of every cosmic minute, each minute 30,000 years long, we began the arduous journey towards understanding where we live and who we are.

11:46 only 14 minutes ago, humans have tamed fire.

11:59:20, the evening of last day of the cosmic year, the eleventh hour, the 59th minute, the 20th second, the domestication of plants and animals begins, an application of the human talent for making tools.

11:59:35, settled agricultural communities evolve into the first cities. We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

In the vast ocean of time which this calendar represents, all our memories are confined to this small square. Every person we’ve ever heard of lived somewhere in there, all those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books, happens here in the last 10 seconds of the cosmic calendar.

We on earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice, we can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us or we can squander our 15 billion year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

I listen to it and my mind is blown. The last sentences summarize the best aspects of a humanist vision of our lives on Earth. It’s up to us.

Here’s an appreciation of Carl that includes a great quote on facing death. Richard Feynman said something similar. An article on restoring Cosmos for DVD release. Even with all our technology archival issues never cease, as the whole Library of Alexandria episode demonstrates.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuJ3Tjj40P8]

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Todd Suomela
Associate Director for Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship Department

My interests include digital scholarship, citizen science, leadership, and communications.

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