Sagan's COSMOS Updated by Neil deGrasse Tyson at 9 PM tonight

[libby]

Well the last episode has aired and I hope at least some took some messages from the series to heart and actually help change things.  In part of the closing of the last episode, it went back to this:



Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

  The current COSMOS took me back to my interest in Astronomy and Cosmology, and one thing led to another and I ended up with a book, The Cosmic Code, by physicist Hans R. Pagels -- quantum physics without the math -- and even then, it's been hard reading -- a line or two at a time, thinking, dictionary at hand, not sure I want to continue.  Why? Carl Sagan said it well, without too much about the science of why. I have his book somewhere -- my daughter bought it for me years ago -- but I never got around to reading it. Now's the time.   

[Locutus]

This topic hasn't been posted to in quite some time.  However, I would like to let everyone know that the entire COSMOS series, hosted by Dr. Tyson, is now available for streaming on Netflix.  So if you missed it the first time, you can now catch it.  I personally am going to watch the entire series again from start to finish.