Looking forward to the new Cosmos TV series, with Neil deGrasse Tyson.<\/p>\n
The original series, with Carl Sagan, was not so much an influential event in my life as a realization and visualization and confirmation of what I’d learned to that point; it was broadcast in 1980, by which time I’d been reading Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Fred Hoyle and Sagan himself for 15 years; I’d read Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection<\/b> in 1974, at age 19. (It was a birthday present from my grandmother, who didn’t quite realize what she’d ordered….remember the back cover of the dust-jacket?)<\/p>\n
Today, here is a piece at Smithsonian.com about Why Carl Sagan is Truly Irreplaceable<\/a>.<\/p>\n \nWe live in Carl Sagan\u2019s universe — awesomely vast, deeply humbling. It\u2019s a universe that, as Sagan reminded us again and again, isn\u2019t about us. We\u2019re a granular element. Our presence may even be ephemeral — a flash of luminescence in a great dark ocean. Or perhaps we are here to stay, somehow finding a way to transcend our worst instincts and ancient hatreds, and eventually become a galactic species. We could even find others out there, the inhabitants of distant, highly advanced civilizations — the Old Ones, as Sagan might put it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And this worldview is my own. Atheism is not precisely concordant with a realistic understanding of the size and age of the universe, but it is difficult to separate them, though some people apparently manage to do so. So this piece at Salon,<\/p>\n Atheism\u2019s radical new heroes: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and an evolving new moral view<\/a><\/p>\n seems relevant here. It’s an excerpt from a book by Peter Watson called The Age of Atheists<\/b><\/a>, and this excerpt nicely summarizes how writers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris counter the charges that atheism implies a bleak worldview: reality is more awesome, if you bother to understand it.<\/p>\n The Cosmos TV series did expand my sensibilities to this extent: the music of Vangelis, and Hovhaness, and of Shostakovich (the 11th symphony).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Looking forward to the new Cosmos TV series, with Neil deGrasse Tyson. The original series, with Carl Sagan, was not so much an influential event in my life as a realization and visualization and confirmation of what I’d learned to … Continue reading