Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey (Television documentary) 3/9/2014

[Moss]

I liked the anecdote about Sagan and young NDT, that was new to me.

[TummieGaruda]

I think they nailed the cosmic calendar. I've seen other time scales, but that one was by far the best representation that I have seen that showed just how little time our civilization has been here on Earth.

Also, I love how people are commenting on how the episode bashed the church. Some people really don't know their history and that the Church really was like that back in those days. If you went against their teachings of the Geocentric Model, you were going to be in some serious trouble.

[Waraji]

Didn't catch the show last night so downloaded at midnight and watched it then. It was pretty damn good, and those feels at the start and at the end. Thought the "Star Stuff" was pretty corny.

As soon as they brought out the Calender I laughed and said "You bout to piss off some people NDT! Let's do it!" Also agree with the Church bits, shit they could have added so many more examples, but who has the time or care to give that much more attention then it deserves.

[Indalecia]

To be fair, he's been saying the star stuff line for years. It's kind of his personal punchline. It's just now he got a chance to hit a bigger audience with it.

[Moss]

Also, I love how people are commenting on how the episode bashed the church. Some people really don't know their history and that the Church really was like that back in those days. If you went against their teachings of the Geocentric Model, you were going to be in some serious trouble.

That's idiotic... that stuff is basic history. Maybe they don't teach it in Catholic/otherreligion schools?

[Slycer]

The "cosmic calendar" and "star stuff" references are both throwbacks to Carl Sagan and his books/the original Cosmos.

As far as the church part which they really belabored, I think they spent a lot of time on it because they want to overtly get the message across that people need to approach science with an open mind. It's also clear that they used Bruno as the focus of that part of the show because Bruno was a firm believer that his faith and a greater understanding of our universe could coexist. That part of the show was anything but anti-religion, at least in my opinion.

NDT is a cool guy, by the way, I bumped into him a few times back in high school when I volunteered at the Rose Center (where the Hayden Planetarium is, he's the director of it) in the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. They have a lengthy to-scale timeline that you walk along chronicling the history of the universe since the big bang and they show human history contained within the width of a hair at the end, a pretty direct physical analog to the cosmic calendar. Awesome place, for people who have been there you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, when I first started that summer as volunteers we were all paying for our own lunches and he flipped when he found out and made sure we got lunch for free for the rest of the summer. The version of him on Cosmos is definitely turned down a few notches, check out his interview with The Verge or something, should be able to find it on Youtube.

[Alarial]

Anywhere to watch this online?

[TummieGaruda]

Anywhere to watch this online?

You can watch it on fox's website.

[bungiefan]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/...-love-science/

Science shows picking back up. Hosted by Craig Fergusen.

[Koul]

It's also on hulu

[Scythiroth]

Really enjoyed the first episode, looking forward to more. The ending of the episode had me tearing up though, quite the touching story. I've always enjoyed watching shows like this on the science/history channel (before it became complete shit full of reality shows).

[archibaldcrane]

Did it kill anyone else that the first episode propogated the "dense asteroid belt" myth of, like, every depiction of it in history?

The asteroid belt is like, if they were all on the same plane, you'd get one asteroid in an area the size of Rhode Island.

And they aren't all on the same plane.

I figured if anyone was going to not fuck this up, it would be NDT. I'm sure he knows this, no idea why he wouldn't fight to dispel the myth. I mean if he's going to give John Stewart shit about his earth spinning the wrong way, at least get his own show right.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...iction-movies/

Spoiler: show

In science fiction movies, the "asteroid belt" is always pictured as a very crowded place. How dense is it really: impossible to navigate, risky or just interesting?


Sep 2, 1997


David Morrison of the NASA Ames Research Center adds some additional information about collisions to last week's responses from Michael Briley and Tom Gehrels: There are more than 100,000 asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter, but these objects are distributed within the huge volume of the asteroid belt. Their average spacing is several million kilometers. Collisions are thus extremely rare; an average 1-kilometer asteroid suffers one collision every few billion years, or maybe one or two collisions over the lifetime of the solar system.
Spacecraft pass through the asteroid belt with virtually no chance of a collision, and in fact considerable effort is required for a close flyby of even one asteroid, such as the Galileo spacecraft flyby of Ida in 1993. The spacing is also so large that seen from one asteroid, even the nearest 1-kilometer asteroid would likely be too faint to be visible without a telescope.
An illustration of how to calculate spacing and collision probabilities in the asteroid belt can be found in The Planetary Systyem by D. Morrison and T. Owen, on page 129 of the second edition.
Followup posted September 2, 1997
Michael Briley is an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. He offers this brief reply:
Even if there were 100,000 sizable asteroids (more than a few kilometers in size) in the asteroid belt--and the real number is quite likely about ten times less--the average separation between them would be about five million kilometers. That is more than ten times the distance between the earth and the moon. If you were standing on one of those asteroids and looked up, you would not see a sky full of asteroids; your neighbors would appear so small and dim that you would be quite lucky to even see one, let alone hundreds. I would not even call crossing through such emptiness terribly "interesting," which is fortunate for the space probes like Galileo and the Voyagers that have had to do just that.
Tom Gehrels of the University of Arizona is a veteran asteroid hunter; using the Spacewatch Telescope on Kitt Peak, he and his colleagues find roughly 20,000 objects a year, many of them uncatalogued asteroids. He adds some additional information:
Some scientists were seriously concerned about the possible high density of objects in the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, when the first robotic spacecraft were scheduled to be sent through it. The first crossing of the asteroid belt took place in the early 1970s, when the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft journeyed to Jupiter and beyond. The danger lies not in the risk of hitting a large object. In fact, such a risk is minuscule because there is a tremendous amount of space between Mars and Jupiter and because the objects there are very small in relation. Even though there are perhaps a million asteroids larger than one kilometer in diameter, the chance of a spacecraft not getting through the asteroid belt is nearly negligible.
In some ways, the asteroid belt is actually emptier than we might like. In the early 1990s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wanted the Galileo spacecraft to encounter an asteroid while it was passing through the asteroid belt on its way to Jupiter. But it took some effort to find an object that was located even roughly along Galileo's path. Special targeting was required to reach this object, but the result was the first close-up view of an asteroid, the one called Gaspra.
The number of objects in the asteroid belt increases steeply with decreasing size, but even at micrometer sizes the Pioneer spacecraft were hit only a few times during their passage. That is not to say that asteroids cannot pose any danger, however. It is worth noting that for a large planet like the earth, over a long period of time, there is an appreciable chance of being hit. This hazard comes from the fragments of mutual collisions in the asteroid belt; after their break-up, some of these fragments move towards the earth under the gravitational action of Jupiter. The largest of these pieces of debris is about 12 kilometers in diameter.
An asteroid about that large crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, killing nearly 90 percent of the animals, including the dinosaurs. Such major impacts are very rare events, but for smaller objects the likelihood of impact increases; the chance the earth being struck by an object approximately one kilometer in size is about one in 5,000 in a human lifetime (that is, they strike every 300,000 years on average). An object one kilometer across would still be large enough to cause a global disaster because of the enormous energy it would release upon impact, at least a million times the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. This problem and some possible solutions are discussed in a textbook I edited, Hazards due to Comets and Asteroids (University of Arizona Press, 1994, 1300 pp.); it is written by 120 experts and contains 46 chapters that deal with the various aspects of the asteroid problem.

[Jaybar]

I too was thrown off with that tiny segment of the show - but I just assumed they used the region broadly as a means for the viewers to understand. I want to believe he didn't purposely fuck that up. I want to believe.

[Tyrath]

Same, I went wtf at that segment. My only explanation for it is if they were to show the asteroid belt as it is, there would've been no asteroids to show on screen.

Just started watching episode 2. I know some local fox group in Oklahoma or wherever censored the 1 mention of evolution in the first episode. How are they gonna deal with this one? It's been all about evolution in the first 10 minutes lol.

[Correction]

This thread is depressingly inactive. This show is awesome yo.

[Koul]

gunna watch the new episode tomorrow when it's up on hulu. can't wait, I'm loving it so much. I link it on fb everytime to try and get some of my dumbass friends to learn themselves some shit

[notorious bum]

I thought the explanations about the speed of light were pretty good, but am I sure this episode confused the shit out of the majority of the population. Got them Matrix feels with the whole multi-verse surfing bit lol

[Viq]

I thought the explanations about the speed of light were pretty good, but am I sure this episode confused the shit out of the majority of the population. Got them Matrix feels with the whole multi-verse surfing bit lol

During the speed of light explanation I was thinking, "If I had my grandfather's 3rd grade education, I would think a dude in the sky made all this shit too."

[Jaybar]

I absolutely love Roy Kelly videos and thought this one fits perfectly in what this previous episode featured -

[Scythiroth]

This thread is depressingly inactive. This show is awesome yo.

I watch it every week, and have told friends/family to watch.....and no one seems to care about any of the stuff in this show. >.> I really enjoy this show even if I knew about some of the main subjects of each episode already, but I do still end up learning quite a few new things each episode as well. Always been a fan of educational shows that present material in a way that isn't boring.