Last Sunday, March 9 and this past Sunday, March 16, Channel 5 (Fox 5) aired the first two episodes of the highly praised series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”. The series had millions of viewers tune in for its debut episode and had many return for the second episode as well.
Hosted by popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the series covers a wide range of topics that consists of space, time, and the history of Earth and its inhabitants within the past several million years. As the host, Tyson flies around in his “Spaceship of the Imagination” where he can travel to any point in time within our universe and can go where no human has ever been able to go before.
Episode one of the series explains all of this in a much more detailed and complex manner. Tyson flies to the edge of the universe in his ship, explaining important objects such as other planets within Earth’s Solar System, Voyager 1, and many small objects and planets discovered within the past several years.
As Tyson comes to the edge off the universe, it is expressed that the human race, in fact, knows very little about the universe in which it occupies. Tyson expresses this through his use of a “Universal Calendar”, showing everything from the Big Bang to modern times all within a compacted, twelve month representation. This captivated audiences and broke the complex science down to a concept that many individuals could understand.
The second episode stayed mainly at home on Earth, as Tyson explained the possible origins of life and the entire idea off the tree of life in which everything stems from one common species or one “Missing Link”. He also made a very blunt statement in which he states, “Evolution is a scientific fact”, something that some Americans and people around the world may have found contrary to their religious beliefs.
Both episodes of Cosmos ended with a tribute to the original host of Cosmos back in the 1980’s; Carl Sagan, who was one of the most important and revolutionizing scientists off his generations, hosted the original show and captivated audiences with newfound scientific knowledge.
Cosmos will air on Fox (Channel 5) on Sundays and the National Geographic channel on Mondays for the next several weeks at nine o’ clock
