Cosmos with Cosmos Episode 8: Journeys Through Space and Time

We see only a smattering of stars in our night sky. The few that we see appear to be flattened on a plane, shimmering in two dimensions instead of three. The brevity of our lives ensures that we see these stars frozen in place, not as the swarming bee hive of motion that I imagine plays out over billions of years.

These stars are so far away that we will never visit them. Even fast ships that use exotic technology we haven't invented yet will tax the limits of our endurance. We can increase our speed, but we pay a heavy price: we leave behind our former lives and perhaps even our civilization. The faster we go, the more remote we are in time from our origins. That seems to be an inescapable law of nature. Not that it really matters to us in the here and now–with our technology even the nearest stars are hopelessly distant.

We seem condemned to experience the cosmos through a sliver of space and time. We are severely limited by our own brief lifetimes and the incomprehensible distances between the stars. So how can we truly journey through either?

Cosmos episode 8, Journeys in Space and Time, provides us with a partial answer: science and our intellect allows us this journey. Despite our short lives, we've developed ways to preserve information over thousands of years, building a collective human understanding of the cosmos that hints at the richness of the natural world. We can use advanced instrumentation and clever techniques to visualize distant places and past and future events, but the journey there will be made within.

I've always felt that to be an unsatisfying answer. But we don't have much else. As Sagan says in this episode, the universe rarely accommodates our desires. Despite this somewhat dour idea, the journeys we are able to have with our intellect are reasonably satisfying.

This episode excels at showing how much of our everyday views of the cosmos are like looking upon that flat, two-dimensional sky. The sequence highlighting the stellar motion of stars in our favorite constellations remains one of my all-time favorite scenes in the series. We can't emphasize the arbitrary nature of constellations enough, in my opinion. Likewise, spinning around stars of the constellations themselves reinforces the tempting slip into an Earth-centric view of the cosmos. It's a humbling tour of the impermanence of what was once thought permanent and immutable.

The sequence with poor Vincenzo humming along near the speed of light not hold up well. This is one of the ideas I can't wait to see re-interpreted for the new series of Cosmos, which the assistance of CG providing the tools missing to the creative team in 1979. Einstein's ideas of relativity are difficult and excel at defying our commonsense notions of reality. They are difficult to explain and visualize, though I think Cosmos does a pretty good job of the first part.

And once again we see the great animation of evolution, which I believe is the fourth time we walk through the concept of evolution in this series. In line with Sagan's continuing desire to humble us, this step through of our evolution emphasizes the random nature of our adaptations. We are not an inevitable product of evolution. We are the result of a multitude of forgotten accidents, set in a sequence that would never happen again. For anyone who has read Stephen Jay Gould's great book, Wonderful Life, this concept is a familiar one. Through a process of decimation, death, coincidence, and catastrophe, humans are now able to ponder their own limitations before the immensity that surrounds us.

I'm reminded of something said by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker – that it's astonishing that the brains molded by blind evolution in the savannahs of Africa are able to understand even some of the patterns that underlie nature. There's no reason to expect that accidental biological adaptations millions of years ago would allow us to intellectually journey through space and time. We should be grateful for our frustrations.

Loren Eiseley, in his book The Invisible Pyramid, writes about the prisons that cage humanity: our short lifetime is one; the vast distances of space another. The study of astronomy provides us hints to the magnificence further out, but we will never personally explore those ourselves. Maybe, if we can travel close to the speed of light, but the price we pay for that is banishment – gone are the homes, families, and friends we left behind. Gone is the society that sent us. Gone, maybe, is humanity itself. Mortality still imprisons those left behind.

But the caged bird still sings. Our intellect allows us to see beyond our cell walls into the great cosmos that surrounds us. What we've learned humbles and moves us. There is beauty and mystery that calls out to us, and we can make our plans for escape even if we may never see them come to fruition. That's the optimism that drives us and that Sagan understood. The desire to explore and see beyond the horizon is a deep part of being human. That even caged within the great prison of biology and immensity, we still yearn to break free.

Stray observations

• Cosmos uses the ocean as its visual metaphor for immensity. A nice choice given that most people have stood out on a shore gazing out into an endless sea. Note the similar slow-motion composition used at the beginning of this episode to the opening shot from episode one.

• I was disappointed not to see the strange, sideways alligators constellation in Ursa Major mentioned this time out.

• The whole sequence with the theoretical interstellar spacecraft reminds me of how much an optimist Sagan was. Traveling arbitrarily close to the speed of light, we can circumnavigate the universe, we just may have no Earth or Sun left to come home to. This is why I like Cosmos, "hey, let's take a break from the science and talk about cool spaceships for 10 minutes."

• Note how Sagan always deeply ties the improvement of humanity and the exploration of the cosmos together, as if they are inseparable. The endeavors can (and should) benefit each other.

• The Cosmos update talks about wormholes as a way to get around the speed of light problem with exploring the universe. I'm no expert in wormholes, but I think I remember reading that even if these could exist in a stable way, introducing any matter into them would cause them to collapse. We still seem bound by our cosmic speed limit.

Quotes

• "The number of stars we see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars with a few more distant bright stars thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the cosmos is rich beyond measure."

• "Each creature on every world to the remotest star, owe their existence to the great coursing implacable forces nature, but also to minor happenstance."

• "Every constellation is a single frame in a cosmic movie. But because our lives are so short, because the star patterns change so slowly, we tend not to notice its a movie."

• "The roots of the present lie buried in the past."

• "We see that space and time are intertwined. We cannot look out into space without looking back into time. The speed of light is very fast, but space is very empty, and the stars are very far apart."

• "Why should we expect our common sense notions to have any reliability on a matter of this sort? Why should our experience at 10km/hr constrain the laws of nature at 300,000 km/s?"

• "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition."