Part of my childhood I grew up in rural Maine, desperate for stimulation. There were a few kids my age nearby and fortunately we became friends pretty quickly, but my mind was hungry. I was all over the map, from learning from Radio Shack electronics kits my father would get me to taking apart calculators and reading Scientific American. I liked electronics, chemistry, math, computers, physics, astronomy and cosmology.

That was long enough ago that my sense of time is skewed. I have to work out when things happened by relating them to other things and deriving the dates and my age. Two of the most important things that I remember learning from are James Burke’s “Connections” and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and without looking them up online and seeing when they aired (Connections was filmed in 1978 but I’m not 100% certain when I saw it, and Cosmos in 1980), I was unsure how old I was when I saw them. It turns out I was older than I thought; I was 16 in 1980. I thought I’d seen them when I was younger… but many of my memories of TV from then are confused; were we living in the country or the city? When did we get cable? When did I see music videos? Were both my parents still there, or one, or none?

Both Connections and Cosmos left an indelible imprint on me. Connections was fun. Burke’s dry sense of humor, his accent, his wacky hair, his cream-colored suit, his appearances in the middle of historical enactments, were all charming and involving. For a while I wanted to be James Burke, without even being sure whether he was a scientist, a journalist, an historian or an actor. I had the chance to see Burke speak in the 90’s; I had been up for almost 48 hours and fell asleep during his talk, something I will forever regret. I seem to remember him saying he had an entire closet of cream-colored suits, and telling a joke about a parrot. How I wish I had stayed awake.

I never had the chance to see Carl Sagan talk, though I wish I had. I remember Cosmos less distinctly than Connections, but my memories of it are that it was big, it was beautiful, epic and personal at the same time. It was a different beast from Connections and yet it lived in the same world for me. I was never in doubt as to who Sagan was: he was clearly a scientist, though he seemed more some kind of mythic scientist hero than a white-coated lab technician. Sagan seemed passionate and compassionate, a scientist and a humanist all at once. He showed that rational didn’t have to mean unfeeling; you could be a scientist and feel deeply about the human condition, without being a Spock.

Sagan would come up again and again in my reading over the years. Oddly I don’t think that I read “Contact” until after the film was released, and I’m not quite sure how that happened. Contact presents one of the most open and positive views of exploration and the universe that I could hope for: our greatest enemies are ourselves; the Universe isn’t a cold and scary place. Contact is a rarity in science fiction; all too often the conflict in science fiction is between the known and the unknown. Contact is exophilic instead of exophobic.

The themes of critical thinking and skepticism have come up many times in my reading years ago, with Sagan a prominent force in favor of them. There are times when I’m a lousy skeptic. I too easily accept that what people tell me is true if they seem to know what they’re talking about; I too easily play the authority card when I think I know what I’m talking about. Some people seem to think that critical thinking is about being negative about everything, but it’s not. It’s about embracing ideas, but choosing which you embrace. Making a conscious decision about them. Being aware and alert about what you decide to believe.

As someone raised in a particular faith my wish that everyone had been raised with that faith, I wish that everyone had access to the things that shaped me when I was younger, at least the brighter ones. I don’t know how Cosmos would play today. I’m sure parts of it would be dated and seem very odd or incorrect. I was happy to find that you can buy “Cosmos” on DVD but appalled to find that it costs $130 for 7 DVDs. Connections on DVD is on sale for only $150 for 5 DVDs.

How is it that I can buy 6 DVDs of CSI for $40 and it costs more than three times that for Cosmos? I get economies of scale but still, it’s such a shame. These works need to be more available to people, not less available. And, alas, you can’t even get borrow them from Netflix.

Carl Sagan, I wish were were celebrating your 72nd birthday this year and not memorializing your death. My 16 year old self would thank you for what you meant to him if he could.

[tags]carl sagan[/tags][tags]james burke[/tags][tags]cosmos[/tags][tags]contact[/tags][tags]connections[/tags][tags]science[/tags][tags]skepticism[/tags][tags]rationality[/tags]

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