Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Ship being cheesy is fine, they just need to spend less time zoomed in on the fucking thing.

Kirun_sl said:

"The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." - Dat voice, so soothing.

Pretty solid introductory episode. One takeaway from the episode that never really resonated with me before, but that was the explanation about the "observable" universe being 13.8 billion years old(which I knew). It was a "mind = blown" moment, when the realization hit that the universe is likely even older, but the light from the furthest objects simply hasn't reached us yet. Something that seems so simple to comprehend in retrospect, but one of those things I never really thought about(likely due to how difficult it is for humans to perceive units of time that large).

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Not the right take away. We're pretty sure the universe is 13.8 billion years old, but we don't know how big it is. We can see back into the bubble 13.8 billion years, but we don't know how much of that bubble of the observable universe represents the total universe. Somewhat recently scientists have pegged down the shape of the universe as essentially flat, which means it could and maybe even likely is infinite.

The Big bang created space and space continues to expand. The big bang happened everywhere, and so it looks more or less the same from everywhere. So, if a alien civilization is 40 billion light years away, they would see a different 13.8 billion light year bubble of the universe.

edit: As for new stuff, when they were doing the universal address and they zoomed out of the virgo supercluster to show the strands forming a net of superclusters of galaxies that is new. It's not just artistic license, that's new science about the structure of the universe. Rogue planets and the abundance of planets was also new. They are sticking close to the original, but they are updating it albeit subtly so far.

edit 2: The shape of the universe being measured as flat brings up its own conundrum because it means the universe could be infinite, but if the universe is much, much bigger than the observable universe then the straight line we draw might only look straight because we can't see far enough. So, universe looks flat to us, which means it either is flat and roughly the size of the observable universe, is flat and is bigger and potentially much bigger than the observable universe, or is not flat and much bigger than the observable universe. So, that matter is pretty well taken care of.

lendarios_sl said:

Anyone has an hd link?

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First ep is up on Hulu plus now if ya missed it.

chaos_sl said:

I actually never saw the original, before my time really.

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For those his missed the original series, in it Sagan detailed the death of Hypatia in Alexandria as the parallel to the new series' Bruno. He told how she was the last of the teachers of the great library there and how a mob of Christians pulled her from her chariot and flayed the flesh from her body with abalone shells and then burned her remains, and how the Bishop of Alexandria at the time was elevated to sainthood after his own death.

He didn't let Greek scientists and philosophers of Alexandria off either though. He pointed out how they secluded themselves in learning, contemplating the permanency of the heavens but never questioned the injustice of slavery, which was rampant in the city and they themselves were the chief proponents of. They never used what they learned to ease the day to day lives of the common people of their time, but valued learning only for it's own sake and in doing so never gave anyone else a stake in the advances they were making. Science that concerns itself only with it's own ends is science wasted.

Cosmos earned a 2.1 adults 18-49 with 5.79 million viewers on Fox
and 2.9 adults 18-49 with 8.5 million viewers last night across the 10 simulcasting networks
behind to Resurrection's 3.6 13.31m on network and Walking Dead's 6.3 12.652m

While i think it did pretty good, been reading a bunch of nuttiness saying Fox picked that time slot for it would get bad rating and be able to cancel it.

Having never seen the original, I watched it after reading this thread and really enjoyed it. Tyson has that rare combination of intellect and affable charisma which makes listening to someone expound on life, the universe and everything so much fun, and I was impressed that they managed to deal with the material and perspective they had without taking the easy way out and slinging mindless vitriole at religion (although I'm tired of that debate in general, and hope that future episodes can stick to showing us how awesome the universe is without shoving the /r/atheism treatment down our throats).

I liked the episode. Thought it was entertaining and informative. Both my wife and I are atheists but we both felt they could have eased up on the imagery depicting the church in a few scenes. Basically drawing them as fantasy book evil villains. But since it was Macfarlane doing the animation I'm sure he was absolutely jacking himself off when he could portray the church as being a prime evil. On the other hand the truth hurts.

Church was massively corrupt and power hungry back then, so making some figures "mwah ha ha" evil isn't much of a stretch.

Yeah it's hard to defend the Church of that era, they were tied into a whole lot of massively fucked up shit,, but that was pretty much a result of the power inherent in the role they played in the social structure of the era - I was impressed that they didn't use that to start making wild attacks on religion in general, which they could easily have done (and which I'm sure a large portion of the fedora brigade would have eaten up).

I was glad they didn't attack religion in general. It would have turned a ton of people off of the series and I feel the more people watching this the better.

It would have lowered my opinion of the show and Tyson considerably if they had - it's boring and played out and doesn't achieve anything meaningful.

NDT is pretty aggressive about pointing out he doesn't consider himself an atheist and dislikes when people put the label on him.

Azrayne_sl said:

It would have lowered my opinion of the show and Tyson considerably if they had - it's boring and played out and doesn't achieve anything meaningful.

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I don't think Tyson would have signed on if they had tried to go that direction. He isn't Dawkins. And in the youtube clips I have seen he seems to really shy away from flat out blasting religion.

I never watched the original, I have seen it on Netflix but though and figured it was already dated. I really enjoyed the first episode with NDT, and am looking forward to the series. I hope the rake religion over the coals, I don't have a problem with God, just the people who commit atrocities in his name.

pretty awesome start, one of the infinitely small number of shows I can watch with the whole family without anyone complaining. I started tearing up at the end when NDGT talked about how Sagan showed him what kind of man he wants to be.

Its pretty damn amazing to think Sagan would take a 18 year old black kid and show him around and treat him with respect back in the 70s, makes me sad for all the small racist things I always shitpost i'll still do it though, i'm not as good a man as sagan, my kids will be better though thanks to obama

Gankak_sl said:

I don't think Tyson would have signed on if they had tried to go that direction. He isn't Dawkins. And in the youtube clips I have seen he seems to really shy away from flat out blasting religion.

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Aggressive atheists are just as obnoxious as aggressive religious nuts. Honestly I would see NDT as being more of a pantheist/agnostic...humility to understand that you probably will never be able to truly know (people always say Agnostic is same as Atheist, but it's not. Atheist is stating an absolute: There is no god. Period. Agnostic is stating: There may be or not be a god, but I don't have sufficient information or evidence to say one way or the other. The 2nd is open to the possibility, while the 1st has already stated a firm position). There's also the view that the universe and the laws that govern it are essentially god, so it basically becomes a distinction between that and a personal human god which most of the organized religions believe in.