I sure hope this turns out to be true. Cosmos with Carl Sagan in the 1980’s was inspirational. You can watch all the episodes here, and it’s well worth your time to do so, but I think the kids today would have a hard time sitting still for it because, yeah, it looks a little bit dated. A new Cosmos for the 2010’s, especially one on a major TV network, ought to have a well-known, attractive, and enthusiastic presenter — Neil deGrasse Tyson fits the bill perfectly. And we can be confident that Ann Druyan, who was married to Sagan and helped write the original series, will keep the new series true to the original vision of presenting an intelligent, joyous, and appealing vision of science and looking at the world with clear eyes. I sincerely hope this becomes a reality and a new generation of kids can become inspired the way I was, lo these many years ago.
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If ever there was an ATF that I am actually excited about an update for, this would be it.
Thanks, Burt. I had not heard this was in the works.
I have mixed feelings about this. I watched Cosmos when I was young, and I recently netflixed and watched the first five or so episodes. On the one hand, they are indeed fascinating. They open up a new world to young people (and older people). It’ll be great for young people today to have a more (for them) generationally relevant version.
But what bothered me about Cosmos is what I consider to be the many straw man-like arguments Sagan seemed to use to denigrate religious belief, as if he were part of a long chain of people who have been championing truth and light and “Religion” was the obstacle. In his episode on some of the innovations of the Ancient Greeks, this innovation all came to an end when Pythagoras, and later Plato, quashed the intellectual fervor with “mysticism.” Much of a simplistic and ahistorical rendering of what happen if ever there was one.
The problem is that attacking “Religion” was usually not even necessary to Sagan’s purpose.
A few years ago, I saw Neil de Grasse Tyson on TV speaking to a group of students, and he was explaining why he didn’t believe in God: it’s the old myth that people who believe in God do so only because of the God hypothesis, and any efforts by the “Religious” to accommodate science are merely retreats in the face of ever triumphant scientific renderings of the history of the universe.
Obviously, you can tell from what I just wrote that I have a bias here, and perhaps I am being less fair to Tyson and Sagan than I ought. Also, no one asked my opinion, but I thought I’d register the fact that I’m ambivalent.
ditto on everything above, plus I’m pretty sure they’re going to exorcise some of Sagan’s more, I’ll call naive, political beliefs.
Kolohe, I want to thank you. You’ve inspired a future post. Stay tuned for tomorrow when I write it (tonight is date night with The Wife, which takes priority).
Like the world being more than 6000 years old?
I’m not sure exactly what Kolohe was referring to, but maybe it was to Sagan’s belief that such problems as global warming and the cold war were easily and simply solvable. Whether his exact ideas on those issues were naive or not, I don’t know, but they were different from his discussion of scientific facts, such as the age of the earth.
Short version: Sagan was Edith Keeler, but without the doe eyes.
I took away in my pre-teen watching of Cosmos and reading the associated book was a feeling that the Cold War was Bad. And We’re All Going to Die if we kept up with it. Now, the label ‘Commie-Dem’ gets thrown around a little too freely, but if there’s one person is sorta fits, it was Dr. Sagan (which doesn’t make him a bad person, just simply wrong about the Nuclear Freeze movement and the nature of the Soviet Union).
I don’t remember too much about Global Warming, just pollution in general (and I think the Ozone hole and Acid Rain, which were the big things (and bad things – really!) at the time. Global Warming took until Earth in Balance to really take off in the public consciousness, at the best of my recollection.) Anyway, it turns out that Sagan wasn’t naive about those things, that they are in fact a lot simpler to deal with than anyone at the time (including the public, including my 10 year old self). All you need is a little Wealth, a little Rule of Law, and a little small d democracy, and your got yourself a fairly effective pollution fighter. (and you know who’s not effective at fighting pollution? Commies, in either their then Soviet or modern PRC form)
Coincidently enough, Dr Tyson was on Bill Maher’s show last night. Based on what he was saying, they may not remove some of the political stuff after all. He seems like a fairly conventional liberal (again, not that that makes him a bad person) but interestingly enough is more of a fan of Hillary Clinton than Barrack Obama – and believes we would have been better off with her instead of him.
On the other hand, they (rightly, and effectively,) took out all the Cold War stuff that was in Contact, and I have a feeling they’ll probably do the same thing here. It’s not only dated, it’s hard to do when there is actually no politically viable ‘peace’ movement on either left or right (or their combination) in this country.
But Winston Churchill was right, not Edith Keeler. Good thing that car hit her.
Pierre-
I’m not so sure I agree with the criticism, either for Sagan or for Tyson. In Tyson’s case I’m not sure why him saying what he did was any different from someone talking about why they know God exists because of X.
In Sagan’s case, I think it’s important to remember not only where he was coming from but when.
I was a teen when Cosmos came out, and science was a political boogeyman. The tech boom hadn’t really hit yet, so the while “nerds are cool” thing hadn’t happened. Liberals hated science and spoke of them with contempt in speeches, mostly because scientists were an easier political target than anyone else in an age where total annihilation of the human species throughout nuclear war was a huge concern. This led to a huge liberal push into New Ageism, which if I remember correctly was a bigger target of Sagan’s than God. It’s hard to watch Cosmos now and not think that every time Sagan discuses religion he doesn’t really mean Christians, but he’s just as oft talking about the healing powers of chrystals.
Also, at that time established religion’s were far more openly at odds with science than they are today. It’s hard to remember, but at the time Cosmos was airing the country’s president elect was putting together his cabinet. The person picked for Sec of Interior was a guy who based his policies of no resource management and throwing out any scientific data on the basis that Christ was about to return, so what did it matter if we blew through everything we had too quickly?
Cosmos was certainly a show meant to educate and instill wonder, but it had grander designs than what we see on the Discovery channel. It was meant to be a defense of science and an argument for it’s continued funding in a time when it really seemed the country was happy to choose to kick it to the curb.
(btw, writing this on my phone so I apologize for the cringeworthy misspellings and weird autocorrects I’m sure have happened)
As for Tyson: I probably judge too much from one (offhand) speech he gave in what was, as far as I know, an otherwise good discussion of science. You’re right, it’s not much different from someone saying “I believe in God because of X.”
Your points about Sagan’s time are also well-taken. (I was speaking about Sagan with a friend of mine recently and he brought up the same point, a point I should acknowledge more openly especially because I’m an aspiring historian.) I remember in one of the episodes I watched, he dismissed (to my mind, too perfunctorily, but that’s a different issue) the then current (and probably now current) popularity of astrology.
I guess what I am looking for is a bit of epistemological humility, a willingness not to assume facts not yet in evidence and not to assume conclusions only weakly supported by the evidence, or at least to be open about what is speculation and what is debatable.
I’d like to see this among religiously oriented people, too. So many people appear from their public statements to believe that the truth or falsity or utility of their beliefs rests so much with whether the earth is indeed c. 6,000 years old, when such questions are rarely the basis upon which, in other instances, they claim to believe what they believe. (Heaven and hell, sin and virtue, despair and happiness, the functioning of “grace” and the meaning of “salvation”–all these and their ultimate causes–seem, to me, to have much more to do with what most, or at least “many,” religious people believe in practice.)
Here I’m rambling. I’m also writing on a desktop computer, so I have no excuse for any cringeworthy misspellings I may have made.
It won’t be remotely the same without Sagan’s narration. Why not keep his narration and on-screen talking shots and just reanimate all the rest? NGT has laways sounded more pedantic and less filled with wonder than Sagan did to me. Not that Tyson isn’t filled with wonder for his field. It just doesn’t come through as much as with Sagan. That’s not a knock: it couldn’t for anyone, ever.
I’d hate to have a new generation of wonderers introduced to this stuff in a series entitled Cosmos, but be denied that particular guide and his voice. But I guess I’ll have to cope.