Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (Page 3)

I basically have a tattoo of that. It was the first of two. Enormity of space, and smallness of a carbon atom. Beauty of Earth, bleakness of emptiness. Water for life, asteroid for death. All changing to and forming from... evolving. With hieroglyphics that mean "What is life". It's all so awe inspiring. Even the worlds are an understatement.

And even funnier... I used to claim to be an  atheist. Someone noticed my tat and asked me what it was about. I explained it and their response was... "and you are an atheist... ya, right." they said nothing in their was about atheism. I found their observation to be very interesting.... because really they were right, I'm not an atheist. I claim agnostic now.

I found Carl Sagans comments on the subject and his view of approaching death to be very personally profound. How blessed are we to have the lives we have... and how hard it is to imagine that hundreds of years from now they will look at us like we were two year olds for having such shallow views of the world around us.

God I love this stuff. The series has me jazzed. I should add on to the tat.

So you admit it, somebody built us.  ;-)

One thing for sure, no matter if we were created or randomly came together it's friggen amazing!

Are you saying stars are someone?  

The ONLY problem I have with it so far is the ridiculous amount of commercials AND the abrupt ending.  It cuts it up so much.  

Content wise, though, I love it.

I was most interested in the last episode considering my question on space/time... but thought they really glossed over a lot. I wanted a lot more explanation. A lot of fertile ground on that episode.

Keep watching.  They may still address.  

In many ways this series is like USA Today for science.  Yes it glosses over many of the specifics.  But it at least gets your attention, leading to you potentially wanting to do further research and reading on your own.  It is not meant to be complete coverage of each topic.  To do so would make it significantly longer AND would likely be no where near as interesting to the masses. 

This is just the hook to get young and old alike to think.  AND to start a great discussion about science in general.

Depends on how much depth you expect it to go into. 

IMO, the show is for the masses, not the science community.  They want to introduce and explain some of the concepts, but obviously can't get too technical to lost half your audience.

I mean, the creator of Family Guy is producing it! 

Even then, some of the concepts, even known, still blow my mind.  I forget the shear vastness of space and when they put it in language we all understand?  Like taking Voyager 65,000 years traveling 50,000 kph to get to the closes galaxy?  (I forget the numbers).

Since I knew most of this stuff before, nothing surprises me except one interesting fact.  He said two galaxy's were going to collide.  But because they are still SO vast, and stars are SO far apart, that they will pass through each other and no one would notice...  I figured with all that gravity at play, something would screw up, but I guess not...

Oh, and black holes still are creepy, fascinating.  All the mass of a giant start compressed into a 75km diameter sphere?  It's incomprehensible.  What do atoms basically fuse together at that point?.

That was an excellent program.  I was hoping they would go into a whole series - not just the three parter.

I seem to recall that Stephen Hawking's Universe was also very good (on PBS I think).

I've seen a few sites that are critical of the whole thing, NOT because of the creationism/beginning of everything/religion thing but because of it not going in depth enough of slighting it because of production issues.  My favorite one is a guy in an opinion piece slams it because "there is no sound in space" so therefore there shouldn't be a doppler sound effect when the "ship of imagination" is traveling.  Really?!?!  THAT is your problem?  

I'm curious if Neil deGrasse Tyson has a response.  He apparently did the same thing to the movie Gravity.  Sort of picked it apart.  Granted, I think he wasn't criticizing the movie, just pointing out inaccuracies.  I think I said the same thing about his comments - along the lines of "who cares, it's a good movie".   Something about the satellite debris was going in the wrong direction around the earth.

On a somewhat related side note, have you guys ever looked up what would happen to the Human body in space if it were exposed to the vacuum unprotected?
My kids asked me this a few months back and I just assumed you would "explode" like is often depicted in the movies but it's actually not that big of a deal at all.  Obviously you die from either cold or lack of oxygen, but our bodies take a relatively long time to dissipate heat so you'd die from oxygen deprivation long before the cold.
The vacuum itself isn't really harmful to our bodies unless you were to try and hold your breath.  Apparently that can damage your lungs.

So, if you happen to find yourself stuck in space you've got a good couple of minutes before you die from lack of oxygen.  

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html

One thing that used to drive me absolutely bananas was on space shows when they "ran out of gas" they would just stop in space. They did it all the time in Battle star Galactic... I was like 13...and even I knew how stupid that was.

Vacuum is not a mysterious "thing"... it's just no pressure. It's minus the 14.7 psi you feel at sea level normally. When divers get the bends, they are usually more than one bar under... 3-4. So that is you breathing 45-60 psi air to overcome the pressure on your chest, and you soak up much more gases... which come out of solution when you surface too quick. So ya, going from 15 psi to zero... not "that" big of a deal.

As an aside, Cosmos has a viewership of just over 4 million and a rating of 1.5.  Not bad for a documentary style series up against traditional Sunday night entertainment.  Not bad at all.  

Same here... I really like the discussions on the scientist and their route to discovery. And no, I did not know a lot of this. Very interesting.

Everyone still watching?  Great show last night.  Finally getting the ladies involved.  I hope it isn't the only one as there are so many other women who have contributed to science.