When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
-- Walt Whitman
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
The writer has this memory of a live TV broadcast, direct from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, back in 1964. That was when the early interplanetary spacecraft, Mariner 2, was slowly transmitting its first photographs of the Martian surface back to Earth, once the picture had been captured on a magnetic tape recorder inside the craft. JPL was in control of the Mariner craft, once its launch on a NASA rocket had sent it on its way towards Mars.
It was late in the evening and America’s Public Broadcasting System was broadcasting the celebratory scene at the JPL, as pixel by pixel, the image was being received back on Earth from the Mariner craft. Projected onto a big screen, the image slowly resolved into a view of that big, roughly triangular feature of the Martian landscape, Syrtis Major. The on-air commentator was none other than the young planetary astronomer, Carl Sagan. And his voice was already bringing his trademark enthusiasm for the wonder of science to what might otherwise have been the painfully slow accumulation of new scientific evidence. Years later, one of his frequent pull quotes would become the rapturous exclamation, “billions and billions of stars!”
Flash forward years later as the television series, Cosmos, starring Carl Sagan, exploded onto television screens across the United States - and around the world. It became an instant hit and one of the top-rated shows ever to appear on American public television. Critics and scientists alike praised its no-holds-barred exploration of the big questions in astronomy (and so much more) - as well as sheer quality of its entertainment as television.
Watch: Carl Sagan's Cosmos original trailer
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Sagan, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and a specialist in planetary exploration and exobiology, had become one of the first American scientists to co-author a major scientific study, Intelligent Life in the Universe, together with a Russian scientist, IS Shklovski?, right in the midst of the Cold War, in 1966. Later on, no stranger to controversy, in 1983, Sagan co-authored an article in “Science” on the prospects of a planet-killing nuclear winter in the aftermath of an exchange of nuclear warheads in an all-out war between the Soviet Union and the US. While this paper was not the first publication on the general idea, through their thoroughly argued article, Sagan and his co-authors fanned concern internationally about the possibilities of catastrophic climate change at the hand of man - and the article was the first to use the phrase, “nuclear winter”.
Along the way, Sagan found time to write bestsellers like “The Dragons of Eden”, “Broca’s Brain” and the science fiction novel, “Contact”, a book that was turned into that big 1997 Jodie Foster/Matthew McConaughey film about the how an alien civilization would welcome humans into the galactic community. (This writer actually has a modest connection to the film. Part of it was filmed in Washington, DC while I was doing an intensive refresher course in the Japanese language. The man who had the coffee wagon outside the language school where I bought my doses of caffeine was also an actor. He disappeared one week from his street corner and when he returned, I asked where he’d been. He told me to watch out for a big sci-fi flick coming next year. As a result of the money he earned when he had been cast as a senator for several scenes in the film, he opened up a small restaurant specializing in Guatemalan cuisine – riding the wave of Washington’s growing ethnic foods boom.)
Sagan was unabashed in his enthusiasm to connect, somehow, some way, with extra-terrestrial life. He and a team of scientific colleagues were responsible for those gold-plated recordings affixed to the two Voyager spacecraft dispatched in 1977 to travel through the solar system - and then on to the stars. While the craft were designed to monitor solar winds, interplanetary particles and other serious scientific questions, they also included those recordings of sounds and images that had been picked to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth – intended for any intelligent extra-terrestrial life form that managed to snare the two spacecraft well into the future.
When the craft were first launched into space, Carl Sagan explained the point of the recordings, saying, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilisations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”
Included were over a hundred images and a selection of natural sounds from Earth, as well as musical selections from throughout human history and across the world’s cultures, greetings in more than fifty languages and a message from then-President Carter: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours”.
Just imagine the bureaucratic battles that had had to be won so a bunch of long-haired scientists could spend American taxpayers’ hard-earned money to create two gold-plated records of bird calls, whale whistles and “howzit” in Russian, Chinese, Esperanto, Twi and Tibetan - and then send them off on a zillion light years’ worth of a trip, thousands of years into the future.
Now, over a quarter of a century has passed and a re-do of Cosmos was born. This time around, since Carl Sagan had sadly passed away from a rare form of cancer, some years earlier, a new host - a noted scientist and an enthusiastic science educator – was clearly needed for the series. Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, was involved in this second version, just as she had been in the first one, and she and the rest of the production team almost certainly had only one possible name on their short list – Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, in the renowned American Museum of Natural History. Tyson was already a veteran of numerous made-for-television documentaries on science, but there was one other thing that must have cinched the decision.
Watch: Cosmos 2014 trailer