Premiering Monday, March 9, at 8/7c on the National Geographic Channel.
Please feel free to visit our previous article introducing “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” containing information on the history of 40 years of the “Cosmos” series of documentaries and an introduction into our Host Neil deGrasse Tyson. This article also contains some background into the minds behind the scenes as we traverse into the newest iteration of most card-carrying nerds favorite educational programing “Cosmos: Possible Worlds.”
I am one of the lucky few to be honored with the opportunity to view this documentary before it is released this coming Monday in hopes of reviewing this masterpiece of educational wonder. Sadly the thesaurus fails to adequately express in words how spectacularly well written and presented this documentary is humbling my literary abilities. Expertly guiding me, a true Nerd of the Round Table, exposing how much more there is to learn after a lifetime of diving deep in the aether of information life has accumulated.
“Ladders to the Stars” is the first of two, one-hour documentaries presented by Narrator and born educator Neil deGrasse Tyson presented by National Geographic beginning March 9, at 8/7c. Immediately followed by the second hour of this premier ‘The Fleeting Grace of the Habitable Zone’ Premiering Monday, March 9, at 9/8c, with a review to follow shortly on Nerd Alert News.
My initial impressions of “Ladders to the Stars” were jaw-dropping from the moment it started as I am presented with our host surrounded in a picture-perfect augmented reality. The quality of this presentation is evident from the beginning and only gets better as the show progresses clearly setting a very high bar for all future scientific documentaries. Supported by rich and full headphone quality audio you should experience for yourself and the calming voice of our capable narrator projecting confidence and respect to their viewers. Written in a way that any person would easily be able to learn from even if you are new to science and the world around us yet engaging or detailed enough for the most seasoned of scientists to enjoy and appreciate.
This documentary begins by introducing us to the gravitational waves caused by distant catastrophes in our past that began the possibility for life to exist as we know it. Spectacularly showing us the effects of space-time disturbances caused by distant explosions that educated us early in our understanding of astrophysics and the effects of electromagnetic waves we have put to work in our day to day lives. Wrapping this introduction up with a visual calendar of this universe’s history leading to how life grew from the simplest of organic compounds to complex single-cell life and beyond. We all are aware of natural selection and the miracle of life somehow managing to grow to the point of near-infinite diversity because of a simple chain of proteins and acids creating the genes of life and the DNA of our existence. Even though we are all aware of this fact, few are capable of visualizing how we managed to transcend a chemical cocktail early in our history to complex life, until now.
Humanity has a humble beginning that took billions of years to even resemble the simplest of what we would consider life on a microscopic level, then quickly accelerating to what we would call humanity as we know it now. But we were not always this form of a human, our lost history is full of wonder and partnership that seems foreign to the materialistic existence much of us enjoy today developing from the necessity of community and a sense of the greater good. Perhaps a lost history we all could learn from and even create examples in our future of what we would call an ideal civilization based on experience and community as the institutions of old to lose their purpose and we struggle to find our way. We have come so far and learned so much, built an understanding of our environment and our position in the Cosmos while understanding the vastness of nature and its diversity. It is our destiny to support and promote intelligence and develop answers to the questions we have not dreamed exist.
I finished watching this documentary full of hope, appreciative of science, and in awe of how interconnected we are with our environment humbled by the power of life and the frailty of extinction. If every person realized how lucky we are to have evolved to this point, how rare life is and how quickly it can be extinguished we would all be a little more loving, a little more appreciative and a lot more protective of what makes life possible. Please help me in sharing this video with the world and future civilizations in hopes of learning from our past as we escape our trend of historic amnesia and create a future we all want to be proud of.
Thank you for enjoying my review and recap of “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” Episode 1: ‘Ladders to the Stars’ and please stay tuned for more reviews including my next review on Episode 2 ‘The Fleeting Grace of the Habitable Zone’ coming to Nerd Alert News soon.
Written by Elijah Perrin
