Cosmos

I first watched Cosmos when I was no older than 5, PBS has always had a love affair with Carl Sagan and the Cosmos program became the most widely watched piece of public media in the world. I, among countless others, can credit Cosmos with turning my attention to the stars. It is a piece of media so finely produced that even now, almost 45 years later, it's a staple of Middle and High School science classes the world around. I can gush for hours about the television program, but this is my first time reading Cosmos, and to my ignominy my first time reading Carl Sagan.

This is yet another foundational text that I am very happy to have finally sat down to read. I didn't realize how much of the message of Cosmos I had internalized through a childhood of rewatches; reading Cosmos was rediscovering the seeds of a lifetime of shower thoughts. There is a surfeit of information contained within 439 pages, containing the history of scientific advancement by the human race and a thorough accounting of our understanding of the universe as it stood in 1980. Sagan trudges across the centuries, takes us on a jaunt through the solar system, and points the way forward- toward the ever-expanding sky.

Reading Cosmos was just as moving as the first time I watched it; I know now why I always find myself tearing up when observing the stars on a clear night. Contained within these pages are cautious optimism, an unshakable belief in the spirit of discovery, and a humanist esprit de corps through scientific advancement. If science had a holy book I think it would be Cosmos; there is more to Cosmos than scientific information, there is a dream of a world saved by science, a crowded universe waiting for us to make our debut would we not just get our collective shit together.

Cosmos is a sober accounting of all of our achievements, and all of our missteps on the road to a world collective. For every triumphal step humanity took forward, we took several bloody and ignorant steps back, and Sagan rightly condemns the diseases of the human condition. Cosmos is steadfast in its condemnation of war and religion, the tales of Copernicus, of Hypatia; literal parables of the dangers of ignorance and blind faith. Where he condemns and tears down the old and new orders of fear and control, he replaces that expired world view with faith in the observable universe and our chosen tool of observation, the scientific method. Sagan preaches, and while I typically roll my eyes when any sermon is directed my way, I have to say that this message is the only one that would serve to improve the human condition. There is a philosophy contained in Cosmos, one that hopes to go beyond the understanding facade of our current enlightened age and achieve the dreams of those first few who looked to the stars and wondered. We should all embrace a philosophy that would put down our differences and guide us to the next step, are we not all the same when considered from a Cosmic perspective? Afterall:

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

Cosmos

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage