Cosmos 2.0 with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Like the original, it's educational television. Ergo it's intended to educate the many people, kids and adults, who don't know this stuff. Considering that's the objective, I think it's been exceptional.

Tyson is so different from Sagan. Sagan was so unusual, particularly the way he spoke, and that hypnotized me as a kid. Tyson is a normal guy who speaks in a normal way. So it's a different vibe. Not better or worse, just different. The old Cosmos had a host that was charismatic and palpably ecstatic about science. Tyson fits that bill perfectly. Whatever else might be true, they got the right person to host the program, clearly.

I am liking it so far, definite a different feel than Sagan but Tyson has always been great at showing his infectious passion and amazement about science, and that's a key thing to have as presenter.

It's pretty.

As someone who's done a lot of 'history of science' tourism in London, the third episode was great

As a result of something I saw on Twitter regarding a Salon article, I'd like to vent for a moment about evolution. I wish people would stop saying that evolution produces more and more complex organisms and culminates in consciousness.

Evolution has no directionality. Evolution produces a great deal more single celled organisms than anything else. It has only produced consciousness one time in about a million. Humans and other higher animals are basically just wind-swept piles of sand in a vast landscape of nearly flat land. We are piles of accidents.

That is all.

Well, the series is now over.  While Neil's presentation was suitably charismatic, and the visuals fine for a TV show, the editing was all over the shop. It jumped from one topic to another without any coherent theme. The entire 13 episodes need to be totally re-cut, otherwise it's just a series of sequences. It feels like it was very rushed in the end. I'd love to see a science series where every visual underscored the point being made.

Luckily, in the final episode, the producers did find time to include Carl Sagan's famous Pale Blue Dot speech from the audiobook. This has long been a meme on youtube to see who can compile the best/most appropriate visuals to the eloquent words. Here are two examples...

Last edited by avatar (2014-06-08 20:17:58)