Hank Stuever at the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle previews "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey," a 13-part series hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that follows in the footsteps of Carl Sagan's landmark "Cosmos" series from a quarter century ago. Given the intellectual devolution that has occurred in that quarter century =cough= creationists =cough= wingnuts =cough= Stuever notes:
To borrow that Max von Sydow line from Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters”: If Sagan returned to Earth on his interstellar Ship of the Imagination today, he might never stop throwing up. He’d see evidence of climate change. He read polls that find nearly half of Americans don’t buy evolution. He’d see creationist museums and theme parks.
This 2014 “Cosmos” has its work cut out for it, to say the least, in a far different context than Sagan’s series did.
“This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules,” Tyson tells viewers in a carefully but beautifully phrased invitation to have an open mind. “Test ideas by experiment and observation; build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail; follow the evidence wherever it leads and question everything. Accept these terms and the cosmos is yours.” (Reject these terms and you might wind up sitting on an Adam and Eve roller-coaster ride around our 6,000-year-old planet.) (our emphasis)We can bemoan a failure of public education, the success of ideologically-driven know-nothings, and/or other factors that might account for such a large portion of Americans retreating into anti-science, pre-Darwin 19th Century beliefs. But this series reminds us that evolution has had it's failures, dead-ends and back-tracks, too. Put into a socio-political context, that could provide some hope that, despite setbacks, evolution, climate change and other science tested by experiment and observation will come to be accepted by the vast majority. This series is a step in that direction.
"Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey" premieres Sunday night and repeats Monday night. In America, check your local listings for the time and channel.
