Thank You, Science, For Making Me Passionate About Who I am.

Alright, normally I write blog posts because I'm stressed, because I need to write to get my frustration and sadness and pain out. It makes sense, considering the tone of all my other blog posts and how painful they are and how I turn them around to a positive side. It's not always that way. Sometimes there's a movie that gives you a startling adrenaline rush that you use to conquer your day that you just have to write about. Today, it's Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey .

I finally finished all 13 episodes today with "Unafraid Of The Dark", and even while I watched the first episode I was desperate for more. The fact of a second season possibly in the works is exhilarating, but not as exhilarating as episode #13.

The first episode of Cosmos was purely introductory. It explained the ship of the imagination, with the looking up to the future and down to the past, and the scale of the universe and the cosmic calendar. Every single episode I learned something new about someone new, someones that I never were taught about in my history or even my science class. In between the great Issac Newton and Albert Einstein, there was Micheal Faraday, who was revolutionary in that he was the one who figured out how electric motors work, even postulating the theory of magnetic lines around the earth. This guy figured out some cool shit, and was a persistent genius, so why the hell haven't we heard about him? Marie Curie? Jan Oort? That group of women that discovered the spectrum of stars? (I apologize for lack of an image I saw months ago)

The quote from the episode about the women who discovered the spectrum of stars is below, but I just needed to find a place to insert this picture.

"These are the women of science. You probably haven't heard of them. I wonder why..."

Anyways, I expected episode #13 to have something even more extraordinary than all the other episodes, as it was a season finale. The philosophical ending, however, was amazing. Cosmos had been adding in the philosophy aspect in with science after the first few episodes (which I'm not complaining about), and joining the ideas of science with philosophy even more as it went on to piss off many, many creationists. You rock, Neil.

The episode ended with Neil sharing the awe of the universe as one ever so small participant. The fact that we're so small, and there's so much to explore, is nothing but exhilarating, exhilarating to the point where you write a blog post right after watching it. The fact of us humans is beautiful and poetic. We progressed from these tiny unicellular organisms and became us today. Despite all our imperfections right now, imperfections rectified bit by bit with each idea shared between us all, with our network of worldwide communication. We possess a great web of information around our planet. One of the greatest things we have that our predecessors did not is the ability to communicate. I can send a message to instantly arrive in a person's mailbox on the other side of the world. Is that not amazing?

"These values undermine the appeals of fanaticism and ignorance, and, after all, the universe is mostly dark, dotted by islands of light. Learning the age of the earth or the distance to the stars or how life evolves, what difference does that make? Well, part of it depends on how big of a universe we're willing to live in. Some people like it small. That's fine, understandable, but I like it big. And when I take all of this into my heart and my mind, I'm uplifted by it, and when I have that feeling, I want to know that it's real, that it's not just something happening inside my own head. Because it matters what's true, and our imagination is nothing compared with nature's awesome reality."

I'd say RIP Neil Degrasse Tyson, except he's thankfully still alive and he can give us more mind-blowing shit like this.

This kind of stuff that Neil talks about it part of why I like the pain in life, and why the bad stuff is just as important as the good. I've frequently said that the pain keeps me lucid and helps me know that I'm alive. Sometimes, the pain drives me to write, but in reality, there is always a subtext of passion behind why I write. Passion is what drives us to do anything, as Joss Whedon said, "without passion, we are truly dead", and that cannot be more true. Man lives as though he's never going to die, and dies never having really lived.

When I write from pain, it's not because I'm in pain. I write from my pain is because I'm passionate about exploring my emotions and who I am. I'm passionate about philosophy, but not to the point where I'd take the class. I can learn a lot more from a year of life than someone pulling my hand in some other direction. That's not to say I desire no hand to guide, but rather I want to be guided based on my own decisions. I'm guided by the authority figures I have today, like Neil Degrasse Tyson. Neil is one of those significant few people who have truly changed my identity a substantial amount. We change on our own, sure, based on the experiences passively given from others. Neil is one of those people who is hardly passive in his influence. Neil began Cosmos not so that you might watch it, but so that you would. Neil had something to say, and so he said it, regardless of if he might be ignored.

"If you wiped out all traces of religion and science, people would rediscover science on their own. They might call it different things, but it's still the same. Oh, but I assure you, your story about a talking snake would be gone forever" -Penn Jillette

Neil Degrasse Tyson has taught me more about science that I have learned about in my science classes, even the ones at the magnet high school I go to. Cosmos was made with a sole purpose: to teach to even the most ignorant. Sure, I know how a mitochondrion works (sorta...), but it doesn't matter what I was forced to learn. If you got me really passionate about biology, I would've looked it up to learn it myself. The problem with schools is that they fail to have students retain interest in the subjects. Play Cosmos in every science classroom, and you're gonna get people interested in science, then they'll learn for themselves.

When you're a kid, it's easy to tell what you want to do. You just pick the one you like, and that's that for a couple years, at least until you redecide. When you're older, such as your teens, or even in your 50s just having to re-enter the workforce, it's harder. You have to reconsider your passion, and try to figure out where you will be happy, which can be harder than it seems.

Sometimes your passion will drive you to do something you may regret later, so what? Aren't all the smart people full of doubts while the stupid are full of confidence? Of course, there are definitely exceptions to this rule, but I digress.

I'll see you all in the Cosmos, my friends.