“…Cosmos — in its original and updated form — is an experience that is nothing short of awesome, to use the word’s original meaning. It inspires awe. It does as much as any human creation can to reveal the infinite elegance of the universe. It makes you feel at once small and immensely important because you have the extraordinary privilege of bearing witness to such grand beauty.” —Robert Gifford
Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey will make you feel very small. Within 15 minutes, the show travels outward from Earth to the edges of the Milky Way, looking back at our galaxy from a position that would take 100,000 years to reach at the speed of light. And then it just keeps zooming out.
Part update and part sequel to Carl Sagan’s watershed 1980 PBS miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, this Cosmos is about putting things in perspective. There’s hard science and flashy special effects, sure, but its real aim is to get us to comprehend the incomprehensible scale of creation and the small but significant place we hold in it.
Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson — a figure who occupies about the same place in our culture Sagan did in 1980 — and produced by Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and frequent collaborator, Fox’s new Cosmos is a faithful and worthy successor to the original. With its big-budget CGI and major-network production and publicity, it’s a bit sleeker than the original, but it’s animated by the same spirit of scientific rigor and secular awe.
While the show tosses in some new findings, such as the recent discovery of hundreds of exoplanets, the pilot is content to return to concepts first laid out in the original series. It begins by establishing our cosmic “address” — Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, observable universe — pulling back until not only our galaxy, but our entire cluster of galaxies, is no more than one point of light in a sky full of them.
In the same vein, the show pulls out Sagan’s old “cosmic calendar,” a way of representing the universe’s 13.8 billion-year history in an easily understandable format. The Big Bang occurs at midnight Jan. 1. The first stars form on Jan. 13, but our sun isn’t born until Sept. 1. It takes until Dec. 20 for life to leave the oceans for land, and the last dinosaurs don’t die off until Dec. 30. Humanity only appears in the last hour of New Year’s Eve. All our recorded history occurs in the final 14 seconds of the year. Feeling small yet?
The reboot also doubles down on the original’s obsession with the clash between science and religion. Tyson and Sagan have about the same reverence for the scientific method that the ancient Israelites had for the Ten Commandments, and they aren’t afraid to dig in and draw battle lines.
A good chunk of the episode is dedicated to the story of Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century Dominican friar who challenged the Catholic establishment with a vision of an infinite universe filled with infinite stars and planets, no different from our own sun and Earth. The Roman Inquisition — not keen to admit that the Earth, much less the sun, wasn’t the center of the universe — didn’t take kindly to Bruno’s teachings and burned him at the stake for heresy.
Tyson presents Bruno as a martyr in the war between enlightenment and ignorance, and while he isn’t wrong to do so, there’s also something vaguely religious about the awe with which the show looks at the cosmos. Though rooted in observable and rigorously tested fact, the show’s reverence for the majesty of creation is not unlike spiritual ecstasy. What is Tyson’s scientifically possible but not scientifically provable assertion that ours might be just one universe in an infinite sea of them if not a sci-fi spin on Buddhist thought?
There’s even an evangelist strain to the series. The great strength of Sagan’s Cosmos was it not only taught science but also why it mattered. When Sagan famously calculated the distressingly long odds of ours or any other civilization successfully evading extinction, it wasn’t simply a mental exercise. It was the jumping-off point for a call to action against nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation.
The show’s core belief is that we are a small but beautiful part of a vast and wondrous universe and we can’t afford to ruin what precious little we have. Strip away the mythology and metaphor and that’s not so different than the core message of most major religions. Revere the beauty of the cosmos, go forth and do good works in its name, for so sayeth the prophet Sagan. The show’s own philosophy belies the divide it draws between science and spirituality. Both can spark transcendence; there need not be a war between them.
The point is, Cosmos — in its original and updated form — is an experience that is nothing short of awesome, to use the word’s original meaning. It inspires awe. It does as much as any human creation can to reveal the infinite elegance of the universe. It makes you feel at once small and immensely important because you have the extraordinary privilege of bearing witness to such grand beauty. As Sagan said, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Inspiring, high-minded in the best way and absolutely gorgeous, Cosmos is the perfect show for anyone who has ever looked up at the stars and wondered.
