.......but the heart of fools proclaimeth foolishness.
Proverbs 12:23
"President Obama pronounced his blessing before episode one of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the re-invented TV series by Carl Sagan (Cosmos: A Personal Journey, 1980), immediately followed by a recap of Sagan’s manifesto of materialism, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” A key phrase in Obama’s appeal to viewers was, “Open your imagination” – and that’s exactly what narrator Neil de Grasse Tyson emphasized. From the deck of his Spaceship of the Imagination, the New York astronomer, a proud disciple of Sagan, told viewers, “To make this journey, we’ll need imagination, but imagination is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine” – in other words, viewers will need a super-imagination.
It would be hard to argue that Tyson was actually focusing on “the reality of nature,” because the program concentrated on imaginary realities, like the Oort Cloud, which no one can see, and rogue planets, never observed, that might have oceans below their ice: “Who knows what might be swimming there?” he teased. Most egregious of the imaginary realities was a pictorial representation of “the multiverse” in which our observable universe is but a bubble in an infinite array of imaginary universes. Like Sagan, Tyson spent a great deal of imaginary energy on an imaginary “Cosmic Calendar” in which the evolutionary scenario of the universe (from big bang to the present) is compressed into a single year. Within this imaginary timeline, life emerges somehow, though Tyson admits that the origin of life is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science. Then, without explanation, life explodes into a variety of forms (the Cambrian explosion). An imaginary Tiktaalik crawls out onto the shore behind Tyson as he spins his tale of the evolution of life, walking on imaginary legs that even its fossil discoverer, Neil Shubin, agrees did not exist (1/14/14)." CEH
"The launch of Fox's "Cosmos" TV series reboot on 10 different networks Sunday (March 9) attracted in 8.5 million viewers according to a Neilsen ratings summary, the Los Angeles Times reports today. According to the LA Times' Ryan Faughnder, Fox's "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" pulled in a "solid" audience despite tough competition in its 9 p.m. ET/PT time slot." Space.com
