Neil Degrasse Tyson’s COSMOS Series is MUST SEE TV. If you haven’t seen it yet, please do so. It’s an amazing adventure and a dire warning all wrapped up in one utterly fascinating saga !
If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch it FREE. Here are the links.
https://amzn.to/3lEqgmV Season One (2014)
https://amzn.to/3YSOkkE Season Two (2020)
I know I’m behind the times, so you may ahve already seen these. But even if you have, rewatching them will enhance your life even further. I plan to watch them again in about six months to catch whatever I missed, or found perplexing because I was a babe in the woods the first time through.
I read Carl Sagan’s book COSMOS last year. That led me to want to find Sagan’s initial TV series at Amazon, but the only version I could find was in Spanish and I couldn’t figure out how to get the English vesrion (suppposedly on the same disk) to play, so I sent it back for a refund. That’s when I ran across Tyson’s later COSMOS series. I just bought the first episode at first, to make sure I would stick with it (I didn’t do well in Science class in middle school).I LOVED it so I bought the two season series for $19.99 each, and I’m glad I did. It has been an amazing journey.
It covers the universe and our planet from their beginnings. Our planet didn’t form until 4.5 billion years ago, and it was uninhabitable when it formed for millions of years. Our sun didn’t even form until 4.6 billion uears ago. Our universe (there may be more than the one we know about, according to scientists) is 13.8 billion years old. And humans (our line, homo sapiens) evolved from earlier versions just 200,000 years ago. The earlier versions appeared about two million years ago.
So we’re serious newcomers in the universe, and to Planet Earth.
There have been five major extinction periods during Earth’s existence, none of which happened during our presence heer on Earth. We may be causing the next major extinction period, though by way of global warming, habitat destruction, overhunting, and pollution. COSMOS is a series with a serious conclusion.
It wonders what we will do to preserve Earth and its inhabitants at least until we can figure out how to escape it for other habitable worlds that are impossibly far away (except for a few theoretical ideas about how we can fly spaceships faster than the speed of light to get where we need to go, whch is what is required if we plan to make some kind of escape before our solar system becomes uninhabitable some 4.5 billion years hence).
It also wnders if we can evolve psychologically as a species fast enough to keep from blowing ourselves to smithereens during some ridiculous (self immolating) turf or ideology war.
COSMOS makes the viewer fall in love with our immense possibilities. It is not gloom and doom. Instead, it is a call to reflection and to action. The powers that be do bent to the will of the people when enough people raise hell and demand correction.
PCBs nearly destroyed our ozone layer, until worldwide protests stopped their manufacture altogether. Had they not been stopped, we would already, right now, be living in a hellscape of unimaginable misery and death. (Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are highly carcinogenic chemical compounds, formerly used in industrial and consumer products, whose production was banned in the United States by the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1979 and internationally by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001.) Our ozone layer is recovering and will be fully recovered within the next couple of decades, thankfully. Without the ozone layer, life as we know it on and above the land, could not have evolved and it could not have survived. That’s something WE did during my lifetime — PCBs came very close to killing us all. Thanks to two scientists who had been measuring the ozone layer, we averted certain disaster.
And we can avert nuclear winters and unsustainable global warming the same way, by demanding better of the popwesr that be. We need to self-correct and to evolve psychologcally if we’re going to have a shot at any kind of surviveable future.
Watching COSMOS gives me hope, and some marching orders. Everyone’s voice needs to be heard NOW!
Watch COSMOS and FIND YOUR VOICE!
