So I’ve started watching Carl Sagan’s landmark PBS miniseries again. Thirty years on, we tend to forget that until Ken Burns produced The Civil War for PBS, Cosmos was the highest-rated PBS program of all time. I don’t know how I came to it, but I distinctly remember being allowed, even encouraged, to watch it. Looking back now, I didn’t really grasp now much of an anti-nuclear-war jeremiad it was, but then a lot of stuff from the era looks dated as hell (The Day After, anybody? Amerika? Hell, Red Dawn? How exactly do they plan to remake that? Why exactly do they plan to remake that?) Also, it’s clear that I really did have that line of demarcation at a young age: God created the universe in six days on Sundays and in 4.5 trillion years the rest of the week. Anybody who’s ever done any quality time in Nashville is well aware of the duality of Saturday night and Sunday morning. What can I say, I am large, I contain multitudes. Even then.
It’s amazing how well the thing holds up, though. This was at the apex of space science in this country – Pioneer, Viking and Voyager had all gone off in the 70s, we had landed man on the moon as late as 1972, we had Skylab, we had the Shuttle coming any minute now and the promise of the Hubble…it’s not hard to see how somebody as distinctive as Sagan could turn into a celebrity. I honestly can’t think of a hard-science celebrity that would turn up routinely on The Tonight Show these days. Stephen Hawking maybe, but not really. Anyway, so far, most everything they talk about – historically as well as scientifically – is still germane to the present day, enough so that you could still use the whole trick in science class anywhere about third grade up.
It’s comfortable, like finding one of your favorite old jackets from decades ago and realizing it still fits. For some reason, though, the opening makes me feel the slightest twinge of sad – it’s been a long thirty years, and maybe I’m just regretting that I didn’t make it as a Jedi astronaut, but what can I say – it’s hard as hell to find a place that offers that as a major…
An aside: in my previous job, there was a wizened old scientist who I privately grumbled about as “America’s Silliest Scientist” (or worse) but who was foisted on me as the new guy – because he’d exhausted everyone else’s patience. And yet, there he is, looking very capable as he pipettes some mysterious substance into the cosmic brew. I think that’s because there wasn’t a computer involved…