Article #15: We are All One, and One with the Stars

When I was little, I was there for what was, basically, the beginning of science in the popular media. I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday–watching Jacques Cousteau’s TV specials on the “Undersea World” and Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom and, maybe best of all, the Apollo Moon landings. In a world that still only had 10 or 12 TV channels, science specials really were special because there weren’t very many of them. I loved them, mostly I think, because the worlds they showed me were so far from and so much more exotic than my own. Then, in 1980, came the science show that would change the relationship between science and popular media forever—“COSMOS, A Personal Journey”. COSMOS was thirteen glorious, hour-long episodes, not just on cool and/or amazing things in the universe, but on WHY those amazing, science-y things mattered to everyone. That was the true miracle of COSMOS—it wasn’t the universe it showed us (although that was WAY cool)—it was that it showed us where we fit into that universe. It was science for non-science-geeks. It was science for Everyman, because science IS for Everyman. I think one of the driving motivations behind the making of COSMOS was that people are less likely to destroy things they have a little understanding of. Making science relevant to people made it important to people. I think we were more optimistic back then, even in the face of such traumatic events as Vietnam and Watergate. Despite the misgivings many people had over the social and political issues of the time, we still believed in science and technology. We were still living it the light that shone from the rocket engines of Apollo, believing that our science would keep opening up a brighter and brighter future. We were mostly right about that, too. It hasn’t been all puppies and cupcakes, but we are living in a world that is far more advanced, technologically, than it was 40 or 50 years ago and, in many ways, much better. We’ll revisit this issue again in more detail, but this article is about those people who opened my eyes to the universe.

Jacques Cousteau and Marlin Perkins got it all started for me. Jacques Cousteau was a Frenchman, as you might have guessed. He developed a fascination with the sea, more particularly, UNDER the sea when he was serving in the French Navy. He and a colleague co-invented the first useful aqualung, allowing people to stay underwater without bulky diving suits, greatly enhancing mobility and availability. He also developed one of the first useful underwater cameras, and he continuously pushed technology to make oceanography better and more accessible. In 1950, he leased an old British minesweeper and turned it into a research vessel. This ship, the Calypso, became almost as famous as he was, as it was the backdrop for his adventures and his science documentaries. In 1953, he wrote a book, called The Silent World. It was (and remains) amazing for how it depicted the undersea world. He made it into a documentary movie in 1956. It was the TV shows, however, that made a whole generation of kids like me want to be oceanographers and aquanauts, at least until Apollo made us want to be rocket scientists and astronauts. “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” ran from 1968 to 1976, on ABC, one of the three commercial networks in the country, at the time. That was amazing in the TV landscape of the time. One of the 3 major networks aired a science show in prime time. Thorough that show, I felt like I knew the crew and Cousteau’s wife, Simone, and kids, Phillipe and Jean-Michel, who all accompanied him on the Calypso, like they were neighbors. He followed that show with another one, on PBS, from 1977 to 1982. He didn’t just show the cool stuff, but he also showed us the environmental toll we were taking on the oceans and on the world. He made this world matter to us. His nonprofit, “The Cousteau Society” was a major international force in ecology and science literacy for decades. It still exists, but It’s a shadow of what it was in the 70’s and 80’s. The Calypso was damaged and sank in 1996, which came as quite a blow to me, even then. Jacques died in 1997 at the age of 87, having been an idol to a generation of kids like me.

Marlin Perkins was the director of the Saint Louis Zoo (having worked his way up from laborer) and a very forward-thinking guy. He loved bringing people face-to-face with the animals at the zoo. He believed that kind of experience would lead to people having a better understanding of the animals with whom we share the world and an appreciation of the need to protect and preserve them. The still fairly-new medium of television was just the ticket to help him reach a bigger audience. With the financial support of Mutual of Omaha (an insurance company), he started “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”, which ran from 1963 to 1988, on NBC. “Wild Kingdom” followed Marlin and his sidekick, Jim Fowler, around the world, showcasing all kinds of exotic (and sometimes, not so exotic) animals. In what became something of a long-running joke, Marlin mostly did the talking while Jim was wrestling with alligators and such. I loved that show and, like “the Undersea World”, it helped open the eyes of a generation to the natural world.

“COSMOS: A Personal Voyage” was something else again. It was originally a book by an Astrophysicist from Cornell University by the name of Carl Sagan, but the book was written with the intent of coupling it to a TV series, taking advantage of all the magic of TV (special effects, sound, color) to help illustrate the various topics and tell the stories. What made COSMOS so original is that it was willing to get a little out into the weeds with the science, instead of just showing the cool and amazing stuff. The show aired in 1980 on PBS. Sagan was the presenter, and he was marvelous in that role, with his baritone voice, turtle-neck sweaters and groovy 1980 hair. He was one of the most well-respected scientists in the world, but he was, to my mind, first and foremost, a very, very gifted teacher. He started COSMOS at the beginning, with the origins of the universe, and showed us the size and scope of existence. He then went through what we had learned about the cosmos, and the Earth, and ourselves, and spent just as much time teaching us about HOW we learned all that as he did on WHAT we learned. He took pains to explain WHY the wonderful things he was showing us mattered to us, as individual people. It was magnificent. It seems a little dated now, because the special effects were so much more limited than the computer-generated wizardry we see every day now, and because we’ve learned a lot more new stuff since 1980.

There was a new COSMOS made in 2014, called “COSMOS, A Spacetime Odyssey”. Seth MacFarlane, the multi-talented force behind “Family Guy” and a bunch of other popular TV shows and movies, produced and paid for much of it. It was presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is probably the closest modern heir to Sagan’s mantle as a popularizer of science. It featured all the latest in computer graphics and mostly updated scientific information. It is very good, and I loved watching it with my son. There was a sequel to it that came out in 2020. If you just compare the new COSMOS to the old, as science documentaries, the new one wins hands-down. But if you take into account what an achievement the first one was in the context of when it was made and the ground it broke, it’s no contest—the first one wins by a landslide. When I think of my own life, I think Jacques Cousteau, Marlin Perkins and Carl Sagan probably had a very great deal to do with what I chose to spend my professional life doing. Along with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, who adorned a poster on the wall of my bedroom when I was six. Mrs. Pavy, my science teacher in middle school; Mr. Patterson, Mr. Parrish and Mr. Davis, my science teachers in the high school: and my mom and dad had a lot to do with it, too, but Jacques, Marlin, Carl, David Attenborough and a few others showed me a Technicolor path I couldn’t resist. They didn’t just teach me “things”. They thought me how to think.

Carl Sagan ended up with a couple of quotes from COSMOS that people (some people, anyway) still remember. One was that he loved the phrase “BILLions and BILLions” when he was talking about stars and galaxies. Even the way he said “BILLions” was cool. You have to put a lot of emphasis on the “BILL” when you read this. This was his way of trying to make a point that I tried to make in one of my first columns, about size and scale. The other thing he loved, and one of the most deeply moving descriptions I’ve ever heard, is when he was talking about the origins of the chemical elements found on Earth and where all the elements that go together to make up a human being come from. He said, “We are all made of Star Stuff”. It still gives me a little tickle up my spine to think of that. You see, as I mentioned in another article, the vast majority of all the matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium. In the beginning of the universe, it was even more so—almost everything that WAS, was hydrogen. As some of this hydrogen began to collect, it got denser and hotter and it collected more hydrogen and got denser and hotter still. Eventually, so much hydrogen collected that it generated so much heat and so much pressure, due to the gravity caused by the mass of the collected hydrogen, that hydrogen atoms started to fuse together to form helium. If you remember back when we were talking about elements, hydrogen is the smallest and simplest atom, with one proton in the nucleus and one electron in orbit around it. Helium is the second smallest, with two protons and two electrons. When two hydrogen nuclei (one proton each) fuse to make a helium nucleus (two protons), a tremendous amount of energy is released. This is the process called “nuclear fusion”. It is what powers the stars and what powers the so-called Hydrogen bomb. Even today, ALMOST 75% of all matter in the universe is hydrogen and ALMOST 25% is helium. What little bit of matter in the universe that isn’t hydrogen or helium, about 2%, is everything else.

So, fusion occurs in stars, and all of the elements lighter than iron were formed this way (along with some really complicated related mechanisms we won’t go into), because it’s the only way that those elements CAN form. Elements heavier than iron, like uranium, form only when a star explodes in a supernova, because that is the only source of energy great enough to cause heavier nuclei to fuse. We’ll look at this some more in another article. Everything you see had its beginning in the heart of a star. Every atom in every molecule that makes up you, or your kids, or your dog, or your cell phone was made inside a star. It kind of takes your breath away to think about it. Every one of the BILLions and Billions of carbon atoms that make up the fat molecules and protein molecules and carbohydrate molecules and nucleic acid molecules in one of the cells that compose the skin on the back of your hand originated in the stars, spread out over BILLions of light years of distance and BILLions of years of time. There are atoms in those cells on the back of your hand that may have existed for 10 billion years and more, traveling BILLions upon BILLions of light years through space from the stars where they were made, before they ended up here on Earth, eventually becoming part of the skin on the back of your hand. Truly, you are made of “Star Stuff”. If that doesn’t make you feel important, and special, and even noble, I don’t know what would. Thank you, Carl. And Jacques. And Marlin. And all the rest of my teachers.