22 January 2019

Gleanings from "Cosmos - A Personal Voyage"

I was entranced about 40 years ago when PBS first broadcast Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, so this year I decided to give it one final watch.  I particularly wanted to revisit his comparison of the stars to grains of sands on earth's beaches.  Here are some notes I jotted down while watching all 13 episodes:
Mankind has existed for 40,000 generations.  Humans have always viewed the stars as a metaphor for life after death, rebirth, reincarnation because of the cyclicality of the cosmos - a new moon is followed by a crescent moon, the sun rises every day, the constellations rise and fall.

There are a hundred billion galaxies containing a billion trillion stars in the observable universe.  Those galaxies are typically 300,000 light-years apart.

A handful of beach sand contains about 10,000 individual grains, which is more than the number of stars we can see on a clear night.  But the number of stars in the universe is greater than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the entire world. [episode 8]

The distance from earth to the center of the Milky Way is about 30,000 light-years.
The distance to the nearest other spiral galaxy is 2 million light-years.
The distance to the ost distant quasar is 8 billion light-years.

The distant galaxies are receding at a speed of 200 million kilometers per hour.

If you postulate that God created the universe, you have to ask where God came from.  If this is unanswerable, then just save a step and say the same of the universe.  Ditto for the reply that God always existed.  Then delete God and say the same for the universe.

"It is the birthright of every child to encounter the cosmos anew in every culture in every age. When this happens to us, we experience a deep sense of wonder. The most fortunate among us are guided by teachers who channel this exhilaration. We are born to delight in the world..."

We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far.  These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution."
It seems appropriate to close with Vangelis' "Heaven and Hell" - the theme song for Cosmos.


  1. About the God thing....

    I go about this the other way. I ask why people say that matter/energy has always existed (since it cannot be either created or destroyed), but the first question they ask when debating the existence of God is "Where did God come from?" It seems that the very nature of a being that we would call "God" is that He certainly has been around as long as anything else. Of course, orthodox Christianity holds that He predated everything else.

    Another question: Why do so many hold that matter has always existed, but would resist the proposition that "intelligence" (in some form or another) has existed forever? The usual argument against such an "intelligence" is that while matter can be seen, measured, or in some way calculated, not so with intelligence. But consider something....

    If I have a CD, it is the case that, in theory, it weighs no more if there is nothing saved on the CD...or all the world's knowledge is saved on it. That is, if we have the CD in hand (but no way to "read" it via a computer, etc.), then it could be argued that the CD (matter) exists, but nothing else. Yet all the world's knowledge might actually be written on the CD.

    While I am a believer, it is my OPINION that if intelligence existed "alongside" matter (instead of God just doing the whole ex nihilo thing), then might not intelligence in some way "influence" matter in a certain way or direction? Our minds, if they are more than just brain, somehow connect with US, influencing us in ways that might not be easily discerned.

    Sorry. I always get carried away with philosophy. Should have majored in History.

    1. Coincidentally the baddie in the movie "BlacKKKlansman" also was repeating this "Energy cannot be destroyed" half-truth.

      You destroy matter and energy every time you eat a sandwich or start a car engine. In a process that is energetically irreversible. This is the only destruction we know, this is what the term "destruction" means. This profound realization (second Law of Thermodynamics) implies both a Big Bang and the Heat Death of the Universe, quite the opposite of eternity either way.

      Destruction ≠ vanishing or disappearance. You meant to say: "You can't vanish heat!" But that's not much of an argument for anything, is it?

      Equivocation or deliberate confusion of words is how lies are fabricated. It is to this self-serving dishonesty to which atheists like Carl Sagan so vehemently object. Cosmos has a great line (which sent shivers down my spine) about documenting things as they are, rather than jumping to poetic metaphor and interpretation. And how it is to this type of historian we are forever indebted.

      Information (such as is stored in our DNA or a punch card) is potentially long lived, but it not eternal it is subject to entropy. Optical media do deteriorate, which isn't a coincidence.

      Unfortunately Thermodynamics requires advanced differential Calculus, which is why it isn't taught in school much. It's also quite a challenge for undergraduate students of STEM.

  2. I am not religious in any way. To me, the closest thing to sacred is pretty much encapsulated in this Sagan clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8


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