"Billions and Billions"

I recently found a website (not Amazon Prime, Netflix, or Hulu) that has all of the episodes of the 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, a thirteen episode series written and starring the astronomer Carl Sagan.  I believe that it first aired on public television, and there was also a book that accompanied the series.  I remember reading the book (and I think that I even owned a copy of the original hardback version), and I remember watching at least the first few episodes.  As difficult as it may seem, back then if you didn't catch an episode when it aired, you were out of luck!

I watched the first episode again, and the first half wasn't very interesting.  Basically, Sagan was flying around space in an imaginary spaceship and naming various celestial bodies like pulsars, quasars, nebula, etc.  I kept pausing the show, which jogged my memory of the first time that I watched it - I lost interest back then too!  However, I kept coming back to it, just to see if my memories of some of the episodes were in fact true.  Having watched a few episodes now, it's all coming back.  I must have watched more of the show than I thought.

What's amazing to me is how much we didn't know back then.  Sagan talks about how the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared and how scientists still didn't know the reason why.  We now believe, and there is strong evidence to support it, that the dinosaurs were wiped out when a giant meteor or comet struck the Earth.  In another episode, he talks about how some day we will be able to manipulate different sequences of DNA, in order to cure certain diseases.  Today, it's relatively straightforward to change different sequences of DNA, and gene therapy is fast becoming reality.  It's amazing when I think about how much we have advanced as a society since I was a child.  And I can only imagine how more advanced we will be as a society in the not so distant future.  

A lot has happened in the last forty plus years, and we definitely know a lot more about the cosmos now than we did back then.  For that reason, I'm not really sure why I am watching (? re-watching) a science show from 1980, other than for a feeling of nostalgia.  Perhaps I am trying to re-capture that sense of wonder that I felt back then.  I am reminded of a great lyric by the rock-n-roll artist Bob Seger, "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then."