TV
series airing on Fox is a worthy reboot of Carl Sagan’s original.
Following in Sagan’s footsteps, host Neil deGrasse Tyson takes viewers
on a voyage through the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond,
showing how our sun is just one star out of a hundred billion in the
majestic spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, and even the Milky Way itself
is a speck in the observable universe. As in the original series, he
compresses the history of the universe into a single year, showing that
on that scale, the human species emerges only in the last few seconds
before midnight on December 31.
was due
for an update, and not just because our computer graphics are better.
Since the original series aired, we’ve sent robotic rovers to Mars,
sampling its rocks and exploring its history. We’ve detected hundreds of
alien planets outside the solar system, finding them by the slight
gravitational wobble they cause in their home stars, or by the brief
dips in light as they pass across the star’s face as seen from Earth.
We’ve found the Higgs boson, the elusive and long-theorized particle
that endows everything else with mass. We’ve discovered that the
expansion of the Universe which began with the Big Bang is accelerating,
driven by a mysterious force called dark energy. All these scientific
advances deserve to be recognized and celebrated.
is
also the story of human beings. For the vast majority of our history as
a species, we were wanderers, small hunter-gatherer bands. Civilization
is a recent innovation, arising within the last few thousand years, and
science is more recent still, appearing only in the last few hundred.
But in just those few short centuries, we’ve made dramatic strides, from
wooden sailing ships to space shuttles, bloodletting to bionic limbs,
quill pens to the Internet. We’ve drawn back the curtain on ancient
mythologies and glimpsed the true immensity of time and space. Compared
to that vastness, we’re unimaginably small and insignificant; yet we
possess an intelligence and a power of understanding that, as far as we
still know, is unique among all the countless worlds. As Carl Sagan
said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
However,
not everyone accepts this as a positive development. There have always
been those who prefer a small, comprehensible cosmos, with human beings
placed firmly at the center. The religious belief systems that posit
such a universe were our first, fumbling attempts to explain the origin
of the world, and they rarely share power gladly. Those who clash
against conventional wisdom, who dare to suggest that the cosmos holds
wonders undreamed of in conventional mythology, have always found
themselves in grave peril from the gatekeepers of dogma who presume to
dictate the thoughts human beings should be permitted to think.
The first episode of the new
Cosmos graphically
illustrates this with the story of Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century monk
who argued that the sun was a star like all the rest, and that every
star had its own planets and its own living beings. Bruno wasn’t a
scientist, as the show makes clear: his cosmological views flowed from
his mystical, pantheist theology, not from evidence. But that made no
difference to the Inquisition, which imprisoned and tortured Bruno, and
when he refused to recant, burned him at the stake.
His statue still stands in the Campo dei Fiori where he was executed, facing the Vatican as if accusing those who murdered him.
There’s also Bruno’s contemporary, Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who discovered
the moons of Jupiter and
argued for the heliocentric solar system. As a reward for his
revolutionary scientific work, he was judged suspect of heresy by the
Inquisition and forced to abjure his own work under threat of torture;
his books were banned and he was sentenced to house arrest for the
remainder of his life. The story of Galileo’s persecution is so
well-known that I’d hesitate to retell it yet again, if it weren’t for
the fact that church apologists like Jay Wesley Richards are
still defending and soft-pedaling it.
In fact, even Bruno’s torture and execution still have their defenders, like
the creationist site Evolution News and Views, or professional outrage-monger William Donohue of the Catholic League, who ludicrously
claimed that the Spanish Inquisition was a good thing. A Catholic cardinal, Angelo Sodano,
likewise said in 2000 that
the inquisitors who condemned Bruno “had the desire to serve freedom
and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his
life.”
And from Carl Sagan’s original series, one more cautionary
tale: the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher, astronomer and
mathematician who lived in fourth-century Egypt in the waning days of
the Roman Empire. Christianity was on the rise and bent on stamping out
pagan ideas, and Hypatia was despised by the local bishop, Cyril of
Alexandria, who hated her for her friendship with the governor and the
different worldview she represented. Despite the personal danger she was
in, she continued to study and to teach until, one day, she was
assaulted in the street by a mob of Christian fanatics who dragged her
from her chariot and hacked her to death with tiles. Her works were
destroyed, her books lost. Cyril was made a saint. (Hypatia’s life and
death were dramatized in the 2009 film
Agora, starring Rachel Weisz.)
But
this kind of persecution isn’t just a relic of ancient history. While
we’re thankfully past the days when scientists could be stoned in the
streets or imprisoned by church tribunals, the anti-science spirit is
alive and virulent in the world today,
waving away facts that disagree with its ideology and seeking to silence or intimidate those who speak inconvenient truths.
We
can see this most clearly with one of the most urgent issues
confronting the human species, the danger of global climate change.
While it’s a matter of uncontroversial fact among scientists that the
burning of fossil fuels is changing the Earth’s climate in perilous
ways, climate science is far less accepted among the public, driven by
fierce resistance from those who have an ideological reason for
disbelieving it.
The renowned climate scientist Michael Mann, whose work forms the basis for United Nations climate reports and the famous “
hockey stick”
graph that illustrates global temperature rises, has been the subject
of continual harassment by conservative legislators, including
frivolous subpoenas by
Ken Cuccinelli, the former right-wing attorney general of Virginia,
accusing him of scientific fraud. In other localities, the right-wing
response to climate change has reached epic levels of head-in-the-sand
denial, such as when the North Carolina legislature passed a law
forbidding science to be used in forecasting future sea-level rise.
Religious groups have joined the banner of climate-change denial as well, calling the environmental movement
a pagan religion and arguing that global warming is a nonissue because
the Bible says God won’t allow the Earth to change too much. When moderate evangelical Richard Cizik argued that Christians should devote more time to environmental issues, he was
pressured and eventually forced to resign his
vice-presidential position in the National Association of Evangelicals
by religious-right groups who said that talking about global warming
would “shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”
The
theory of evolution is, if anything, even more convincingly established
than climate change—if only because it has the benefit of over a
hundred years of diligent scientific work in support of it—yet it too
runs into
roadblocks of resistance from religious conservatives.
A Pew poll from last year found that
a majority of Republican voters are creationists, and church-state separation groups routinely hear reports of
creationists working as teachers in public schools and preaching their beliefs in the classroom.
Just last month,
Bill Nye the Science Guypublicly debated Ken Ham, a creationist who believes the universe is only 6,000 years old—which is, for the record,
considerably younger than the oldest cities on the planet—and
who wants to build a theme park dedicated to the genetically and
geologically impossible proposition that every species on the planet is
descended from just two individuals who sailed on Noah’s ark.
But
while future generations will suffer the consequences of climate change,
and rejecting evolution deprives us of a keystone in the scientific
understanding of our place in the world, the deadly consequences of the
anti-scientific mindset can most clearly be seen in the anti-vaccination
movement.
Thanks to the unsubstantiated fear-mongering of
celebrities with no medical or scientific credentials, vaccination rates
are declining and herd immunity has weakened—with the entirely
predictable consequence that highly contagious diseases like
measles and
whooping cough have
reemerged, including in cities and countries that had long been free of
them. Vaccination is one of the simplest, safest and most effective
medical interventions ever invented, and
the diseases it prevents are killers (yes, even chicken pox).
There’s no reason whatsoever why people (mostly children) should still
suffer and die from them, other than a foolish and tragic lack of trust
in scientific knowledge.
These stories go on and on, from antichoice groups pushing the pseudoscientific myth that
IUDs and other contraceptive methods cause abortions or spreading
falsehoods about the health risks of abortion, to the gun paranoia lobby demanding
prohibitions on using public money to study gun violence.
But no matter the field or the discovery, the ideologically driven
rejection of science diminishes and impoverishes us in ways even beyond
the immediate, practical harm it causes.
Science is the most
powerful tool ever invented for the expansion of our intellectual
horizon, and even besides its concrete benefits, it’s done us the
immeasurable service of helping reveal our place in a vast, ancient and
wondrous universe. Through following the scientific method, we’ve
learned that we are congealed stardust, the heavy elements of our bodies
forged in supernovae; we’ve learned that we were shaped by evolution,
our DNA reaching back in an unbroken chain of descent to the origin of
life on Earth, expanding outward to bind us to every other living
organism in a tree of kinship.
These profound revelations ought to
have far more power to move and inspire us than any human-centered
mythology — and they ought to expand our moral horizons as well, by
showing us our fragility and fundamental equality at the genetic and
cognitive level. While science can be misused to create tools of
terrible destruction, there have been at least as many times when it
resolutely refused to confirm popular prejudices, and so it’s no
surprise that it’s so often hated by regressive,
superstitious,
authoritarian world views both religious and political.
The new Cosmos TV
series airing on Fox is a worthy reboot of Carl Sagan’s original.
Following in Sagan’s footsteps, host Neil deGrasse Tyson takes viewers
on a voyage through the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond,
showing how our sun is just one star out of a hundred billion in the
majestic spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, and even the Milky Way itself
is a speck in the observable universe. As in the original series, he
compresses the history of the universe into a single year, showing that
on that scale, the human species emerges only in the last few seconds
before midnight on December 31.
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