November is the birth month of the pioneering cosmologist and astronomer Carl Sagan. His groundbreaking vision of the Cosmos and our planet as a part of the infinite vastness that surround us, have given food for thought and tickled the imagination of many of us for decades. Carl Sagan is most popular with the TV series Cosmos he hosted back in the 80s, which are considered highly significant in the promotion of science through television programming.
“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be…..” This is how he opens in episode one and takes his viewers on a journey through space and time to discuss the origin of life, consciousness, spirituality, along with a perspective of our place in the Universe, among other scientific topics.
His meditation on Earth, Pale Blue Dot, is a humbling experience. In this monologue Sagan says insightful words, still relevant to the events that happen in our modern world every day and make us pause and hopefully think: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
The word cosmos originates from the Greek kosmos and signifies “order, good order, orderly arrangement”.
Pythagoras is believed to have been the first to apply this term to “the universe,” perhaps originally meaning “the starry firmament,” but later it was extended to the whole physical world, because of its “perfect order and arrangement” as opposed to chaos.
The term cosmos was also used in Christian religious writing with a sense of “worldly life, this world (as opposed to the afterlife).”
The first known usage of our word comes from Anthropometamorphosis – John Bulwer’s final and most popular work from 1650 – “As the greater World is called Cosmos from the beauty thereof.”
However, the word gained real popularity only after the publishing of the translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s work Cosmos: a sketch of a physical description of the universe in 1848. Cosmos was the scientific bestseller of the age, which gather together two generations of scientific research and discovery. “In this work I use the word Cosmos..[as] the assemblage of all things in heaven and earth, the universality of created things, constituting the perceptible world”.
An idea worth giving a spin – “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” – Carl Sagan,Cosmos
