If you like stars, as I do, this episode is not to be missed. However, if you are also afraid of the end of the universe, even though it will happen well after you actually kick it, you may want to rethink that.
For me, this episode brought back all the nightmares of childhood brought on by my science classes. I don’t know why, but I was terrified that the sun was going to die while I was living, and that I was going to die a horridly slow and cold death. But hey, at least Neil Degrasse Tyson made the whole ordeal seem kind of cool.
The highlight of the episode was paying homage to the women of science, those that worked tirelessly to contribute to the fundamentals of what we know about stars. Very few people know who Cecilia Payne is, but she and a group of women called “computers” discovered that stars burn at different heats and are made mostly of hydrogen.
That may seem like a simple concept, but imagine if no one knew that. How would you go about figuring that out? You would have to catalogue thousands and thousands of stars and decipher their light spectrums. So yeah… You go Cecilia Payne.
The episode also went out of its way to comment on the fact that women who make these discoveries are often relegated to a dusty backroom where they are quickly forgotten. Or, they undermine their own ground-breaking theses because it’s a man’s world. It was a message to the girls watching ‘Cosmos’, as if to say, “Hey, you’re a part of this conversation and you always were.”
In any case, this was a good episode that is well worth the watch, even if it does give you anxiety because you think a star may now blow up at any second.
