There was no episode last week, but there was today. This was the second-to-last episode if the series, and the tone has definitely changed. This Cosmos was always going to be different from the first one, and it definitely showed tonight. The original focused more on revealing the wonders of the universe to a world that had never seen such things, this series exists more of a reminder and a gentle admonition of our rather lackluster stewardship of the planet. Carl Sagan told us about our place in the universe and what we need to do to better the planet, Neil deGrasse Tyson is pushing us to follow through with our responsibilities.
Tonight was all about carbon dioxide. It's a simple molecule, one carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, but it is responsible for so much. Plants couldn't function without it, and without plants, there would be no animals, no people. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the planet would be frozen solid. Life depends on carbon dioxide's property as a greenhouse gas, but there has to be a balance. There is a planet in our solar system which shows us what happens when there is too much carbon dioxide, and it's right next door. Both series have made allusions to Venus when talking about the greenhouse effect, and while Earth will never be as bad as Venus, it will take less than we think to make Earth a very harsh place.
It's not like this is a recent thing, the issue about global warming. We've known about it for a long time, and as we learned tonight, there were multiple junctures throughout history where we could have gone down a path of clean, renewable energy. Unfortunately, the great tides of society were never on the side of solar power, instead always moving towards cheap fossil fuels. Now is the time for a switch to be made, and the transition is happening, but it is slow and painful, we are dragging it out with fossil fuels until the bitter end. Big energy companies will give us clean energy eventually, but only after getting every last dollar out of fossil fuels, and for a nation that loves to criticize big business, we sure seem happy to keep doing what we're doing. Maybe Tyson will have something to say about that in the finale, maybe not, actually, I hope not. I don't want the series to end with an indictment of what we've done, but rather look out and to the future, to a brighter time for mankind.
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