Sat, May 3, 2003

If you can come away from a DVD understanding something, that's a pretty remarkable feeling. But to come away from a DVD understanding everything (at least a little bit) – well, wow.

I like to learn things. I'm fairly curious, and while I have a rather active imagination I don't have the discipline to sit still and think about things until I end up with a theory about the universe. So, I take the lazy way out and peruse the science section of the bookstore whenever I have some time to kill. My shelves have more than their share of unopened volumes by Stephen Jay Gould or James Gleick or Richard Dawkins or Richard P. Feynman. And, among the ones I've actually bothered to read, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and his widow Ann Druyan.

Sagan is the kind of name everyone knows at least a little. Readers of Dave Barry are familiar with his frequent attribution of "Billions and billions" to Sagan (although he never actually said it; this is like James Cagney's "You dirty rat!" or Werner Dappen's "homeworks," one of those quotes that everyone attributes to a person who never uttered them) and I think I probably first heard about him in the pages of Berke Breathed's "Bloom County." But regardless of how you came to know him, Sagan is one of those pillars that everyone is simply aware of. In 1997, a screenplay of Sagan and Druyan's that had been in turnaround so long that Sagan had turned it into a novel made it to the screen in Robert Zemeckis's Contact, which is quite possibly my favorite movie ever. Top three anyway. So it was around that time that I picked up Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and met Carl Sagan up close for the first time.

Sagan was an absolutely astonishing man. He ranks with Rachel Carson and Richard Feynman as one of those stellar science writers that can effortlessly introduce the rest of us to their intricate world without getting so lost in the details that the bigger picture loses focus. And his courageous, undying faith in science emboldened him to take many hits for his ideas about the universe, evolution, religion, and humankind. On the rare occasion that I start to feel a little guilty about being an atheist, I think of Sagan and Dawkins (and Douglas Adams) and realize I couldn't be in better company. If you haven't read Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, read it. I don't care who you are or how interested you are in science or evolution. Anyone who's human has something to gain from it.

Another fantastic illustration of Sagan's ability to make infinity-sized concepts relatable to the layman is his 1980 television mini-series Cosmos. The entire series was re-mastered, with a few science updates added, and released on DVD in 2000. I'm only two episodes into the 13-episode collection, but already I'm wowed enough to write a rave review. Cosmos is a fascinating and expertly-produced look at our selves and our universe. It's no small achievement that each episode only warrants one or two "science updates," small subtitle blurbs that explain areas where science has advanced in the two decades since the series's original airing. What's even more surprising is that the visual effects have also aged so well.

My first Independent Study report in the fourth grade was on movie and TV special effects, and I remember reading about the illusion of placing Sagan in a scale model of the Alexandrian Library for the Cosmos series. At the time, it was an impressive idea, but I had no idea how flawlessly it had been executed. Watching it, I'm really not sure how they pulled it off. I've seen movies in the last year which used motion control photography and sophisticated matchmoving software to marry miniature, full-size, and computer-generated images into one believable shot – and Cosmos, nearly a quarter-century earlier, looks as good or better! Someone from ILM told me that motion control was practically invented for Back to the Future Part II. If so, the Cosmos guys were doing some extremely detailed work by hand eight years earlier!

As much as production values help to substantiate Sagan's lessons in Cosmos, Sagan himself is the real star, writing and hosting all 13 episodes. Sagan exudes enthusiasm, and relates every part of the story charismatically and patiently. He has the good sense to know which parts are harder to grasp, and gently repeats the important bits a few times so they sink in. He and the rest of the team have created some memorable and effective visual aids, most notably the "cosmic calendar," in which the entire life of the cosmos is mapped onto a single virtual "year," in which each month represents a little over a billion years. (All of recorded human history fits into the final ten seconds of December 31.) And, Sagan is a nurturing and engaging personality to lead the tour. He speaks calmly and distinctly with a voice that sounds like a mix between Mr. Rogers and Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith. (Literally.)

Certainly the content of Cosmos couldn't be more important. The ultimate reality program, Cosmos covers everything about us and our place in the universe. As Ann Druyan's introduction mentions, at the time of its original airing the world was held in the grip of the Cold War arms race – Sagan was staring down the barrel of a species that had become so ignorant of its biological history and intellectual achievement that it was on the verge of self-destruction. Cosmos resonates as a desperate plea to re-inform people and direct more energy toward discovery than armageddon. (Druyan makes the point that we've moved beyond that. So much has changed in the past 20 years, she remarks. And so much has changed in the past two! Once again, we're on the eve of eliminating ourselves from our own planet, but in today's climate a program as thoughtfully produced and full of fascinating facts and important knowledge would air no more than three episodes before our short-sighted programming executives yanked it from the airwaves.) In an age when the president of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet (yet still itching to prove it!), thinks evolution is a fairy tale, it's heartening to believe there were times when we as a nation at least believed in the power of science and rational inquiry to interpret the world around us.

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