Comments on: Cosmos

By: Sarah D. Bunting

Sarah D. Bunting — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:04:33 +0000

"My cat is named after Carl Sagan. Do I win?"

Belatedly: yes. Yes, you do.

By: CJB

CJB — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:42:31 +0000

My cat is named after Carl Sagan. Do I win? (Hee!) (She's named Carina, which is a cop-out, but we couldn't quite live with "Carla.")

I also have HUGE love for Contact, the book, which is ponderous and full of lecturing and Mary-Sue-ing, but is so effing awesome to me because the aliens are discovered when they…send a bunch of numbers to earth. No ray guns, no green antennae, no action WHATSOEVER. But if you were hanging around looking at space noise and suddenly a ton of prime numbers were being transmitted…that would be pretty goddamn exciting. A bunch of scientists sit around trying to figure out what the HELL could be the reason for SETI suddenly receiving an unending stream of prime numbers, and it is (to me at least) riveting. I was OBSESSED with that book. And the end, I don't want to give it away, but math doesn't usually make me cry.

I ran the SETI@home screensaver for YEARS before they redesigned it and it got unwieldy and didn't work anymore. Man, I loved that thing. Hopefully I helped find some aliens, someday.

I love you, Carl.

By: dimestorem;ipstick

dimestorem;ipstick — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:00:04 +0000

Ooh, James Burke fans! I've found my people! "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" were the two most powerful educational weapons in my high school history teacher's arsenal. We all looked forward to Tape Tuesdays.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:47:04 +0000

"Carl Sagan Meets Billions and Billions of Martians" will not be shown today…

By: Laura M.

Laura M. — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:56:38 +0000

@Adrienne, I checked out "Connections" on DVD from Netflix this year, so they must exist somewhere…

By: GracieGirl

GracieGirl — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:27:42 +0000

A fun little 'toon for the Sagan fans: http://xkcd.com/663

By: Obliquered

Obliquered — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:49:25 +0000

I'll admit it. My husband showed me the "Glorious Dawn" Sagan video, thinking I'd be amused by it (I cackle madly at "AutoTune the News") and I TOTALLY got choked up. "A still more glorious dawn awaits… a morning filled with 400 billion suns." It's SO BEAUTIFUL, y'all.

By: JennyMoo

JennyMoo — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:25:37 +0000

It was a sad, sad day, the day the VCR ate Tape 3 of Cosmos. (sigh)

I love Carl Sagan.

By: funtime42

funtime42 — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:18:43 +0000

I loved the series enough that I bought the soundtrack album( and have fruitlessly searched for it again on CD – it's the reason I own a USB turntable).

By: meltina

meltina — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:55:09 +0000

The Planet Earth series, while painstakingly beautiful and awe-inspiring visually, kinda suffers from the lack of a narrator who truly sounds fascinated by the topic. The narration is the one part that is so restrained as to be dry.

Which I guess is the point though: my cat certainly loved the series enough to actually try to climb inside the tv so he could join (say) the lions on a hunt, and the one thing that usually bugs him about our TV is hearing human voices he doesn't know coming from it. ;)