The Rise and Fall of the Universe, or Who Put the Cause in Cosmos?

The last episode of The Universe premiered on the History Channel last Tuesday and after two hours of following the thread of thought through human history we find that despite some new discoveries and CGI graphics, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is still by far the best film series on the subject.
Sagan’s series is much more dynamic, delving deeper into the subject matter than the simplistic; “this guy discovered this so that guy could discover that” of The Universe. Although Sagan is always trying to shove his materialistic worldview down our throats, at least he gives you enough nice pictures and pretty music to make it go down easer.
The Universe does not seem to have a particular worldview. It does pause to give homage to the fact that the universe having a beginning indicates some sort of creation,* but then wisely observes that science is not equipped to handle metaphysical matters. The real problem with The Universe is that it spends precious little time on real science.
Take relativity for example. Without getting too technical or going into unnecessary details Sagan demonstrates the fundamental principles and why they must be the case. While The Universe on the other hand, literally turns it into a circus, a fairly incoherent circus.
The last episode of Cosmos ironically begins with a quote from Deuteronomy. Of course Sagan would have accepted any source that agreed with his basic premise that we should avoid wiping ourselves out. He apparently thought that it was much better to let our local star or some other natural phenomena do it instead. Perhaps in the meantime we could putter around some tiny percentage of our galaxy, and maybe even feel so much less lonely by discovering bacteria on Europa or perhaps even Alpha Centauri!
But The Universe has no cold war to worry about, and with general stagnation in space exploration on most fronts, there is not much room for propaganda there either. So The Universe takes a more sublime approach. It leaves us with the thought that no matter what we do all humans and human endeavor, all terrestrial life, even the microbes on Europa and untold alien civilizations scattered across the galaxies, even all the constituent particles will ultimately come to naught and be dissolved.
There. Wasn’t that worth waiting for generations of geniuses to build relentlessly on each other’s knowledge to find out?


*Carl Sagan, in his effort to avoid the implications of the cosmos having a definite beginning, dabbled in some rather strange and exotic hypotheses, particularly the “oscillating universe”. The oscillating universe requires an infinite chain of Omega over one universes. Now pretty much all observable data points to our universe not being an Omega over one universe. So either we are the last link in an infinite chain, which is a philosophically difficult position to maintain or there is some other explanation for our universe’s beginning.