Cosmos

I have acquired a new tv show (I know, I know, like I need one, right?). It's only been the pilot two episodes, and I've not seen the old one yet to compare, but already I am enamored with Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. It's obviously geared for younger or probably not-as-exposed-to-science audiences, but it gave me that same feeling that watching Bill Nye the Science Guy as a kid did, and that feeling I will eloquently sum up as: OMG SCIENCE IS SO *BLEEPING* COOL!!!!
 

Anyway, Cosmos is about the universe and everything in it. The narrative was well-written, incorporating history and science and personal touches from narrator Neil Degrasse Tyson, and paired with absolutely stunning visual imagery. It's the kind of show that I think would get more kids into science, because it really displays well how literally science is all around us. One of my favorite examples of the sheer wonder of the universe is depicted in the above picture. Neil Degrasse Tyson explained how if the annual calendar represented all of spacetime since the Big Bang, all of the history of modern humans on Earth occurred in the last hour of December 31st. Whaaa?! 

Finally, something really poignant that was said that I thought was particularly poetic was that it's easy to watch something like this and learn about the cosmos and feel really small and insignificant. Instead of thinking about how temporally little you seem in the cosmic world, he said to think about how there has been all of spacetime so far, all these reactions and evolutions and chance occurrences and failed experiments of nature, and yet here you are. You and I are such improbable miracles, formed from the same stuff as stars, we should feel large.