Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' Revised

I was watching today an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It was entitled "The Persistence of Memory". I grew up on a steady diet of Cosmos back in the 1980's and it's just stunning how relevant the series continues to be. This episode starts of with an examination of the communication of whales. Whale songs fascinatingly enough have been conjectured to be able to travel thousands of miles such that whales may in fact had something equivalent to the World Wide Web.

Carl Sagan however adds that its the emergence of man and his ships that not only has disrupted the whale's communication system but eventually isolated them from each other. Now if that wasn't upsetting enough, he mentions the continued slaughter of whales 'for dog food' and begins to wonder which species is the 'bigger monster'. Sagan surely knows how to make one feel embarassed to be human! (Insignificant too, considering how our solar system sits at the outskirts of a galaxy of 100 billion stars in a universe of 100 billion galaxies)

The original Cosmos series was produced in 1980, more than a decade before the World Wide Web came into existence. So, it would have been impossible for the show to make such a conclusion about the WWW. However, towards the end of the episode, as Sagan explained the emerging communication capabilities of humans powered by computers and 'satellites', video clips showing what I believe to be the WWW browser developed at CERN. I don't the recall the web browser being available in the 80's, so I had to get to the bottom of this with a little bit of googling, I discovered that the Cosmos had been revised.

It is easy to think that 'Cosmos' is mostly about astronomy, that is about inanimate objects in the dead of space. However, the true brilliance of the series is that it blends history, biology and astronomy in a way that truly gives the human race a perspective as to where we've come from, what we're made of and where we may go. Truly a nebulous experience, that's even so relevant today as it was over a quarter century ago (gasp!).

For some explicable reason, I had thought Sagan had passed away just a couple of years ago. To my surprise, Carl Sagan, had passed away exactly a decade ago from this date (i.e. December 20th, 1996). I remember the movie Contact which was finished right his death, I forgot that was in fact released in 1997. Time surely flies, however Carl Sagan's vision for humanity remains timeless.

Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman, both I never had the opportunity to meet in person, where the two main personalities that molded my beliefs growing up. It's just unfortunate that a science personality of equal stature has not emerged since.