A Piece of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Unafraid of the Dark”

                Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is a tv programme hosted by the well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for National Geographic Channel and FOX. This programme is inspired by the former Cosmos: A Private Voyage by Carl Sagan. Here is the piece of the last episode, the most trembling part, 13th episode, of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey season one. It is truly highly extremely recommended to watch. That’s it. Watch it.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson-

How long is a billion years?

If you can press all the time since the Big Bang, the explosive birth of the universe, into a single Earth year, a billion years is about one month of that year.

What was happening on Earth a billion years ago?

Most of Earth's land was amassed into a supercontinent called Rodinia. It was a barren desert-- no animals, no plants. A billion years ago, there wasn't enough oxygen in our atmosphere to form an ozone layer, and without it, ultraviolet radiation prevented life from colonizing the land. Rodinia probably looked more like Mars than present-day Earth.

The giant world ocean produced huge rainstorms causing flooding and erosion. Glaciers formed, and their slow but relentless movements carved the land into new shapes. Single-celled organisms dominated the oceans, but some existed in colonies called "microbial mats," and the first multicellular organisms would soon evolve.

And a billion years from now, what will Earth be like... long after our cities, the Egyptian pyramids, the Rocky Mountains have all been eroded to dust?

There are few things we can say with confidence about such a far distant time. The only thing we can say for sure is that Earth as we know it will be so changed that we would scarcely recognize it as home. But even a thousand million years from now, something of who we were and the music that we made in that long-ago spring... will live on. In that distant future, our Sun will have completed another four orbits around the center of the galaxy... ...and the Voyagers will have ventured far from the Sun.

Carl Sagan was a member of Voyager's imaging team, and it was his idea that Voyager took one last picture. A generation before, an astronaut on the last Apollo flight to the Moon had taken a picture of the whole Earth-- the planet as a world without borders. It became an icon of a new consciousness. Carl realized the next step in this process. He convinced NASA to turn the Voyager 1 camera back towards Earth when the spacecraft went beyond Neptune for one last look homeward at what he called...

the pale blue dot.

-Carl Sagan’s Voice-

That's here.

That's home.

That's us.

On it, everyone you love,

everyone you know,

everyone you ever heard of,

every human being who ever was,

lived out their lives.

The aggregate

of our joy and suffering,

thousands of confident

religions, ideologies,

and economic doctrines,

every hunter and forager,

every hero and coward,

every creator and destroyer of civilization,

every king and peasant,

every young couple in love,

every mother and father, hopeful child,

inventor and explorer,

every teacher of morals,

every corrupt politician,

every superstar,

every supreme leader,

every saint and sinner

in the history of our species,

lived there...

on a mote of dust

suspended... in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage

in a vast, cosmic arena.

Think of the rivers of blood

spilled by all those

generals and emperors

so that in glory and triumph

they could become the momentary masters

of a fraction... of a dot.

Think of the endless

cruelties visited by the inhabitants

of one corner of this pixel

on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants

of some other corner.

How frequent their misunderstandings,

how eager they are to kill one another,

how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,

the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe,

are challenged

by this point of pale light.

Our planet... is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity, in all this vastness,

there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere

to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.

There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.

Visit, yes.

Settle, not yet.

For the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling

and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration

of the folly of human conceits

than this distant image.

To me, it underscores

our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another

and to preserve and cherish

the pale blue dot,

the only home we've ever known.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson-

How did we, tiny creatures living on that speck of dust, ever manage to figure out how to send spacecraft out among the stars of the Milky Way?

Only a few centuries ago, a mere second of cosmic time, we knew nothing of where or when we were.

Oblivious to the rest of the cosmos, we inhabited a kind of prison-- a tiny universe bounded by a nutshell.

How did we escape from the prison?

It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart.

*Question authority.

No idea is true just because someone says so, including me.

Think for yourself.

*Question yourself.

Don't believe anything just because you want to.

Believing something doesn't make it so.

*Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment.

If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong!

Get over it.

*Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.

If you have no evidence, reserve judgment.

And perhaps the most important rule of all...

*Remember, you could be wrong.

Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history, they all made mistakes. Of course they did-- they were human.

Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves... and each other.

Have scientists known sin?

Of course. We have misused science, just as we have every other tool at our disposal, and that's why we can't afford to leave it in the hands of a powerful few. The more science belongs to all of us, the less likely it is to be misused. These values undermine the appeals of fanaticism and ignorance and, after all, the universe is mostly dark, dotted by islands of light.

Learning the age of the Earth or the distance to the stars or how life evolves-- what difference does that make?

Well, part of it depends on how big a universe you're willing to live in. Some of us like it small. That's fine. Understandable. But I like it big. And when I take all of this into my heart and my mind, I'm uplifted by it. And when I have that feeling, I want to know that it's real, that it's not just something happening inside my own head, because it matters what's true, and our imagination is nothing compared with Nature's awesome reality.

I want to know what's in those dark places, and what happened before the Big Bang. I want to know what lies beyond the cosmic horizon, and how life began. Are there other places in the cosmos where matter and energy have become alive... and aware? I want to know my ancestors-- all of them. I want to be a good, strong link in the chain of generations. I want to protect my children and the children of ages to come.

We, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we've begun to learn the story of our origins-- star stuff contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness. We and the other living things on this planet carry a legacy of cosmic evolution spanning billions of years.

If we take that knowledge to heart, if we come to know and love nature as it really is, then we will surely be remembered by our descendants as good, strong links in the chain of life. And our children will continue this sacred searching, seeing for us as we have seen for those who came before,

discovering wonders

yet undreamt of...

in the cosmos.

Poster of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Our pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

*al