As I said at the beginning of Grasse Tyson , "from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the dawn of time to the distant future. "
There was also - apparently - an infinite number of commercial interruptions . You can watch the episode in its entirety below , no ads , thankfully. Seeing it on TV last night was disappointing because those commercial breaks - sometimes just a couple of minutes apart - making a wish for free PBS version of the original commercial with Cosmos Sagan.
And I was not the only one feeling these feelings :
( Yes , I saw the program , keeping an eye on what the Twitterverse had to say about it. )
But the series airing on the Fox network and its affiliates channels ( I saw it on the National Geographic Channel ) was calculated by the series ' producer Seth MacFarlane to show the number and movement science to a population that would otherwise not exposed science to this "popular" level . And of course, the science and the scientific method is the main attraction of this series:
" This adventure is made possible by generations of seekers who strictly adhere to a general set of rules: the ideas of the proof of experimentation and observation ... follow the evidence where it leads and question everything," Tyson said.
With a combination of real images from telescopes and spacecraft images , most interesting to me and surprisingly watchable computer generated animations was the " cosmic calendar . " Those who have seen the original series Sagan recalled his version of the cosmic calendar as a way conceptualize the age of the universe , compression 13.9 billion years to one year. Calendar striking Tyson also showed how January 1 marked the Big Bang and December 31 would be this - making each day represents about 40 million years . At this rate , the entire recorded history of mankind only occupies only the last 14 seconds of the year.
But, as Tyson said , science has provided unparalleled discoveries during that short time : " The scientific method is so powerful that in just four centuries has brought us out of ' Galileo first look through a telescope for our place in the Universe. "
When I heard they were going to be animated sequences of historical events ( the original series used representations of players ) I was disappointed , but the animations in this series premiere surprised me by being very attractive .
They told the story of Giordano Bruno , the Italian monk of the 16th century astronomer turned. He had a theory that there were other planets with other life forms like ours. In his 1584 book " On the Infinite Universe and Worlds," Bruno wrote: " ... there is a single general space , a single vast immensity which we call free vacuum in it innumerable globes like this in which we live and grow . declare that this space is infinite ... in it are countless worlds of the same nature as ours. "
This was controversial for its time, but even in a society dominated by the Church, was no reason to be declared a heretic . But later Bruno continued his argument to its logical conclusion : if there is an infinite number of worlds, and if some worlds are sentient beings created by God , then why not these planets also have to be saved by God ? The notion other Jesuses was not seen as well , and the Church found him guilty of heresy , and burned at the stake.
Phil Plait talked more about this today in his review of " Cosmos" and I agree with him that it was not really showing religion in a bad light, but to make " a point on thought suppression and greatness of free exploration of ideas . "
Other fun moments were when a CGI (but very realistic ) dinosaur named Tiktaalik fish crawled out of the sea just off Tyson , which represents the evolution of life on Earth. Most endearing was perhaps Tyson 's assertion that "we are all descendants from astronomers , " how our ancestors relied on the stars to know the change of seasons.
While this premier series was a quick glance, a surprise is that it was only a theory - and the oldest and perhaps outdated - how our moon was formed by a conglomerate of the same residues that make up the Earth . These days it seems that the theory of planetary collision size of Mars is the most accepted theory.
The show began and ended with the voice and words of Carl Sagan and Tyson shared his story about his own personal interactions with Sagan. This was a very real part of the series , allowing the torch to be passed from Sagan Tyson.