Skip to main content

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey


Last week, Fox News and Neil deGrasse Tyson helped to revive one of the best Science programs of all time. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage aired for the first time almost thirty years ago with Carl Sagan showing audiences the universe and more. Carl Sagan's way of breaking down the most complex concepts of the cosmos into ideas that everyone can understand made this science program fun to people that were not nerds. It gave many people a new love for science, and gave a new generation a passion for science. Since then we have found out so much more about space, have taken a planet out of the accepted Solar System, put a man made object outside our solar system, and have multiple rovers on Mars. One of them even sends us tweets. Today, not too many "youngsters" have that kind of passion for science. They want the most "hip and happening" jobs, and do not care about what science their country is working on. People do not want to be the same space explorers that we were in the 1960's when the United States and Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Presidential administrations have been cutting more and more from space exploration and science budgets, and this has made private companies like SpaceX step up to the interplanetary plate. Last Sunday, Fox and Neil deGrasse Tyson have set out to change this.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is not Neil deGrasse Tyson making a science television program similar to Carl Sagan's. Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to call it a continuation of Sagan's program. It is, like the old program, trying to get people fascinated about science again but in a much newer way. Tyson and the space ship Imagination take you through stunning visuals of the universe and more. He teaches you about how the Earth was made, the origin of the universe, and many more concepts of space and science. The show also dives into the more religious aspect with topics like Copernicus being condemned for his heliocentric representation of the universe. Instead of the widely accepted idea that everything revolved around the Earth, Copernicus thought that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead. Tyson has managed to take all the important things about the universe and how it was made, and teach them like he was just having a conversation with you. Some might say the show jumps around too much from place to place, but they all correlate in a way that makes it work so well. It is almost as if you were flipping through the pages of a Science textbook. Well, one written better than what most schools use. If you do not know much about life and the universe, Cosmos is a great way to learn the basics in a fun and beautiful way.

In general, not too many people like watching "educational" programs. Most people find them boring, hard to watch, and a waste of time. There are those few programs that manage to break that barrier, such as Mythbusters and Top Gear UK, and we believe that Cosmos is one of those. Through a combination of breathtaking visuals, beautiful images of our universe, and a simplistic conversation style way of explaining the universe, Cosmos makes science fun for anyone. Nerds, and not so nerdy people can enjoy the show for its entertainment value, and to learn something new about science in a fun, casual way. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Fox have found a way to get everyone excited about science, and we hope everyone gets to watch it.


Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey airs Sundays at 9/8c on Fox and Monday at 10/9c on National Geographic

Comments

  1. Wow. Programs like this are few and far between nowadays. Totally watching it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

It's 7:15 at night. The sun has been below the horizon for quite some time, but it is not yet my bedtime. I go to the cashier and ask her if they are showing my movie. She gives me a puzzled look, checks the queue, and luckily finds the tickets I am looking for. After asking my age she assures me that I have nothing to be ashamed about, nothing to fear. I then pass through the doors and embark on a journey I have been waiting for more than a decade to begin. Back in 2004 Nickelodeon, Stephen Hillenburg, & company released the very first feature film of the SpongeBob Squarepants franchise: The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie . The cartoon had been around for less than five years at the time, and many people did not expect much from its box office release. However, it did do very well for a television cartoon movie grossing more than $32 million opening weekend and receiving average scores of 66/100. This might sound mediocre compared to Oscar winning films, but this is incredib...

The Pursuit of Being Trash, with the Confederate Flag

Racial tensions have been high in the United States for awhile now, and in some areas, very similar to how they were during the 1960's Civil Rights movement. As a result, many problems have been exposed. Most recently, there was the horrible slaughtering of nine innocent churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. This was without a doubt a horrible, racially motivated event that blatantly showed once again how far America has to go to completely eradicate racism. Not only did this show how racism is still thriving in our country, it also sparked a debate over one of this country’s most racist symbols ever made: the Confederate flag. Everyone is arguing over the flag, but what is the actual argument? Right now, the Confederate flag is flying over the South Carolina capitol building and is currently apart of many states’ flags. Even though the Confederate States of America dissolved almost 150 years ago, they still felt the need to fly the flag. There are states that do not wave...

A New Leaf

Hello everybody; it's been a while. With school, work, and my extracurricular activities, I haven't had as much time as I would have wanted to spend writing. In the two years since I've last posted, I was vice president, president, and varsity captain for my high school's Academic Decathlon team, went to the California state Academic Decathlon competition twice, was a student commissioner for my city's Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission, a speech coach for Chinese students learning English, earned my Eagle Scout rank, and was accepted into my dream school, the University of California San Diego. With that in mind, I'm also about to graduate high school. I wasn't the speaker that my high school teachers were looking for as graduation speaker, but I thought it would be remiss if I did not say anything. My original speech would seem a bit out of context as an article, so this is a slightly abridged version. "Throughout my high school career, this...