Reviews

Cosmos: Immortals fails to address individual biological immortality. A realist sees immortality only one way, which is individual immortality. Once one is dead, whatever he/she left after him/her ceases to matter for that person, for the obvious reason that the person doesn't exist any more. Biological immortality in the sense of eternal life for the individual is supremely challenging a pursuit, to be sure, yet at the age of genetics and computers it is precisely what we should be talking about. Rejuvenation and lifespan extension; disease treatment; disease prevention; global safety; all the measures required to keep every single human safe and living indefinitely.

And yet this episode does not broach the subject. The words "aging", "telomeres", and even "lifespan" are never spoken. Instead, Tyson waxes romantic about "living on through written documents" and "surviving as a species". These things are certainly important issues in their own right, but not in the specific context of true immortality. Rather, they are important in relation to such subjects as cultural heritage and the collective future of mankind.

This episode does cover such interesting and vital topics as the possible interstellar travels of biological building blocks, and the possible future emigration of humans from Earth... but I must give it a low score nonetheless, it being a work titled "Immortals" that neglects to discuss immortality.

3/10.

In the beginning, there was darkness..." - what's with the biblical quotes? In another couple of minutes the narrator claims that dark matter is estimated to make up 90% of the total mass in the Universe. Wrong; DM is estimated to amount to 90% of the total MATTER, but only 23-26% of the mass (mass-energy). Taking into account that the series had a whole episode on dark matter only a little while back, this is an egregious error.

The rest of the episode is excellent, though. The largest object in the Universe is proposed to be the "cosmic web" of dark matter. The intersections of this web contain galaxy superclusters, the biggest of which is currently thought to be Shapley (400 million light-years across). Next, we look at giant voids (biggest - Bootes), Lyman-alpha blobs (that aggregate into even more gigantic structures), the largest galaxies (cluster-diffuse), and galactic radio lobes.

Furthermore, the documentary covers the largest individual objects: black holes (supermassive ones can go up to 10 billion Suns' worth in mass), red hypergiant stars (2000 times larger than the Sun), the heaviest stars, and the largest known planet (TrES-4).

In conclusion, the episode surveys the hugest structures in our own Solar System, such as the moon Ganimed, the Olympus Mons volcano, and the Oort Cloud surrounding the Solar System.

9/10.

Vitality is NOT a documentary promoting "alternative medicine" - I'd probably be the first one to rip into it if that were the case, as I'm skeptical towards a lot of that field's aspects. In fact, the doc does not mention a single special/exotic treatment, or herb, or procedure. What Vitality contains is an hour-long, sober argument in favor of healthy living as the means of avoiding disease in the first place as opposed to leading an irresponsible lifestyle and relying on drugs and treatments to cure illnesses once they arise. A seemingly self-evident thesis - but extremely valuable, and worth presenting over and over.

Vitality lists 4 areas for improvement - diet, exercise, sleep, and mindset - and goes over each in turn. Before it gets to them, however, the narrator and the interviewees make some comments on the mechanisms of medicine in the marketplace, which are, unfortunately, only too accurate. The medical industry indeed profits from extending treatment for as long as possible, and selling as many expensive drugs and procedures as it can... and healthy people are detrimental to their business. This system is very obviously flawed, and revision is required. Then the authors move on to specific advice for staying healthy and preventing the onset of disease. Most of the information set forth is well-known to the general public, but, like I said before, you can't repeat things as important as these enough. Good posture, eating organic, drinking enough water... all very sensible. I particularly liked the segment on the action of stress hormones, specifically - how they shuttle blood away from the forebrain to the hindbrain, effectively making continually stressed-out people less intelligent.

There was no obvious "quackery" in the documentary, although a couple of bits did give me pause. A man started talking about quantum mechanics as the definite proof of invisible energy fields and vibrations that regulate life... and the fact is that we're ways away from discovering what quantum mechanics really means for biology. Also, praise for "traditional healing arts" immediately made me cringe a little... but they never elaborated what that statement referred to. Finally, at least three of the interviewed experts were noticeably overweight, which, in my humble opinion, went counter to Vitality's premise.

Overall, a great and lucid documentary, and definitely worth watching. 9/10.

The subject is highly intriguing, and this episode is a great overview of its history. Dark matter was proposed back in the 1930s as the explanation for the galaxies' overly fast motion relative to their visible mass. (Galaxies behave like they contain some hidden matter or force that's 10 times as massive as the matter that we CAN detect in them.)

DM doesn't interact with other matter except by gravitational pull, so its effects on "normal matter" and light (gravitational lensing) are the indirect proof of its existence. Neutrinos, axions, brown dwarfs, black holes, and MACHOs have all been proposed as candidates for DM - and turned down.

Scientists have now plotted the hypothetical distribution of DM around the universe. It's being described as the scaffolding for ordinary matter, and estimated to constitute 23% of the universe's mass.

(Note: Big Bang is NOT an "explosion", despite often being described as such in documentaries, including this one. An explosion explodes into something; it's due to the pressure and heat difference between "the inside" and "the outside". The Big Bang had nothing to explode into; it was the creation of both the inside and the outside.)

Anyway, the second half of the episode is dedicated to the discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating. This is attributed to the action of a repulsive vacuum energy - "dark energy". It is thought that 9 billion years ago, dark energy prevailed in a tug-of-war with dark matter. Interestingly, Einstein did have the idea of dark energy, but then renounced it as his "biggest blunder".

9/10.

The episode explores the issues regarding the settlement of other solar systems and galaxies. How do you build a Space Ark? SLS rockets take the components of the spacecraft shipyard into space. A platform is put together, and a giant ship is built, with raw materials being delivered from the asteroid belt. What will propel the Ark to the required speed? Antimatter is too hard to control, so fusion may be the answer. How do you stop muscles from atrophying? Create a centrifugal (or, physicists will say more precisely, centripetal) force by spinning the living quarters to achieve 1 g. How do you protect against radiation? A layer of hydrogen will absorb the high-energy particles. How do you avoid mental breakdowns of people who are locked together in a highly vulnerable tin can? Put them into suspended animation. What if the planet at the other end doesn't have Earth-like conditions? Genetically alter the settlers; for example, using tardigrade-like tricks to increase resilience. How do you go faster than the speed of light? Warp drives and wormholes, of course! The last few minutes are dedicated to the idea of blindly tossing pods full of human genomes into space, which, in my idea, is a waste of resources, and potentially more dangerous than beneficial.

What's interesting, and annoying, is that the show's sound department sticks sound FX everywhere - even places where there's supposed no medium for sound to propagate through.

8/10; definitely worth seeing.

Well-made simulations of cosmic creation processes and astronomical bodies are always a joy to behold, and this episode does not disappoint. The first half of it mainly focuses on the history of Solar System studies, including such highlights as sending a space probe to capture comet fragments for analysis, and gives an overview of star formation theory. The hypothesis that our solar system's birth was catalyzed by a nearby supernova is explained.

The second half of the episode features concise descriptions of the metal-rich Mercury, the violent Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the main asteroid belt. Then, we briefly look at the Outer planets, the Kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud.

Finally, the latest theories of the Late Heavy Bombardment are presented. At the center are Jupiter and Saturn, whose interplay caused a chain of events that led to the Earth and the Moon being shot to shreds with gargantuan rocks around 3.9 bya.

9/10; an excellent program.

This episode delves into the new types of materials that scientists are creating by manipulating atoms, and their potential use in devices like space elevators. It then goes into the attempts to control the energy of nuclear fusion on a scale useful for power production. Nanotechnology is next on the menu: artificial proteins that imitate the process of photosynthesis; nanobots that will bring about a medical revolution; future military technologies and their dangers; and, finally, "personal fabricators", also known as 3D printers, that will be able to build any item of food, clothing, or technology from scratch.

The episode closes off with an excursion into quantum entanglement research, as an Austrian scientist shares his team's achievement: they've been able to instantly transfer information about a state change from a photon to its duplicate photon across the river Danube. What's fascinating is that the original photon shed the alteration afterwards, while the double retained it.

8/10.

The episode is OK, but often irritatingly bad. It starts off with a look at the Human Genome Project. We then proceed to look at the ongoing Cancer Genome Project, which sounds very promising. The increasing role of computers in biology and medicine is highlighted. Then the show covers growing organs in a lab - in and of itself a fascinating field. After that, we move on to calorie restriction, and then - life extension in general.

Some parts of the episode are, to put it mildly, weak. To get his genome tested for disease-relevant markers, Michio interacts with a certain Harry Ostrer, a doctor at the NYU Institute of Biomolecular Medicine. Ostrer sullenly stares at Michio Kaku as he reveals the following "valuable information": 1. Michio Kaku has double the genetic risk for coronary artery disease, but that's no reason for concern, because the Japanese statistically don't have high incidence of heart disease. 2. Michio Kaku doesn't have the genetic marker for Alzheimer's, but he should be concerned nonetheless, since Alzheimer's has manifested in his parents. In other words: genetic markers are basically useless, and you can get more relevant information from the statistics of your group. If so, why get the test at all? Somehow, the makers of the episode don't connect the dots on this, and Michio goes on to talk about the breakthrough that is genetic testing, as if his genetic test results for two specific diseases weren't just effectively pronounced inconsequential.

Also, during the segment on organ growth and replacement, we get to hear from a pessimistic Dr. Susan Greenfield, who offers up the following imbecilic opinion: if - rather, when - growing and transplanting organs becomes easy, and overcoming trauma and disease becomes next to painless, humans will become less "interesting", and less in touch with their "humanity". To that I say: people who are rational will always pick the benefits of improved medical care and the absence of pain over the scenarios we have now, with individuals dying in agony and misery while fruitlessly waiting for an available lung transplant. Dr. Greenfield, however, apparently finds the status quo preferable, as it enables the victim to retain his/her "humanity", and to remain "interesting".

When we get to lifespan extension, there's a similar problem. Michio himself, as well as aforementioned Susan and others, can't wait to threaten us with the vague problems and unspecified downsides of living longer, potentially - forever. By this point, I was really tired of the series' approach to the subject matter. They spent so much more time on speculating about the negative sides of all the impending progress that a more accurate name for the series would have been "Gloomy Musings on the Future".

At least there's Professor Julian Savalescu (Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics), who has a more sensible, positive outlook on the coming changes.

6/10.

Unreasonably fearful stance. A question like "When I am cybernetically enhanced, how will I know where my self begins and ends?" rings contrived and empty to me. A statement like "In the coming age, there will be winners and losers" is so painfully obvious that it should not be uttered by anyone ever. The scruples about getting tested for genetic predispositions to disease, on the grounds that "What if it shows something bad? I'd have to make some adjustments, and talk to my family about it (the horror!)" border on the ludicrous. It's hard to discern how much of this Michio sincerely thinks/feels, as opposed to purposely dumbing the material down for the audience, but what matters is the result: a documentary with an extremely simplistic and conservative viewpoint. To compound the issue, Michio gets a lot of commentators with narrow, paranoid views of the occurring progress. It's not illuminating or even pleasant to listen to these people who are hopelessly behind the times.

A note to Biotech Revolution: Joel Garreau, who has written a book called "Radical Evolution", says: that "Humans will be the first species to take control of their own evolution." The problem with that statement is the lack of a sense of continuity. Bacteria have been able to directly incorporate new DNA segments into their genomes for billions of years. Modifying and improving DNA is what life DOES. Or, more precisely, DNA has always modified and improved itself. It's just that now it has created humans to streamline the process.

6/10.

The episode starts off by pointing out that processors have been shrinking in size, and proposing that diagnoses will be given with the aid of a tiny high-tech pill navigating your insides. A large segment is then dedicated to people who spend large amounts of time in virtual reality settings, and examining the advantages those people think virtual reality has as compared with the "real reality". So far, nothing particularly interesting.

The episode then picks up somewhat, as we see "intelligent bots" that converge into various shapes to explore their surroundings in optimal ways. Technologies like this will be very important in the future, so I enjoyed this part. It was also curious to see how advanced computers have become in the aspect image recognition.

Humanoid robots are the next topic, and human emotional attachment to them is discussed. From there, the prospect of the robots themselves having genuine emotion is touched on, as are the possible dangers of creating a superior intelligence in machines.

The last segment is dedicated to the progress and implications of work in the field of restoring, correcting, and augmenting brain function by means of specialized devices.

I think that the episode could have done with more technologies and concepts that haven't already been featured multiple times in mass media. 6/10.

Episode 5 of the series focuses on the Jews' 20th-century return to their homeland. Zionist activists had been pushing for steps to be taken, so in 1917, the Balfour Declaration was produced, and and in 1922, Great Britain received the Mandate for Palestine, laying the ground for the creation of Israel.

Weizmann was the diplomat statesman, Jabotinsky - the militant ideologue, Martin Buber - "the moral conscience", and Ben-Gurion - the political organizer.

Tel Aviv and other settlements had been developing during the 1st half of the 20th century, and in the 1940, a flood of immigrants arrived. The Muslim neighbors weren't going to idly stand by as their Palestinian brethren were being displaced by the arriving Jews, and attacked the new country from all sides in 1948. 10 months later, after the dust had cleared, Israel stood unbroken. It had even grabbed some additional territory in the commotion. However, the Old City of Jerusalem - a religiously important site - remained Muslim. (Israel annexed it during a later, 1967 conflict.) The rest of the episode talks about Israeli expansion by way of "settlements". The presenter expresses his disagreement with the justification for this process.

The ending is left open, just like, Schama says, is Jewish history.

8/10.

This episode starts out bleakly - in the Polish-Lithuanian forest lands that were annexed by the Russian Empire and designated to be the only place in Russia where Jews could live. In those harsh conditions, the mystical tradition of Hasidism, - "direct line" to God, drawing on the Kabbalah, a course in Hebrew magic, - is born.

The Pale lasts for roughly 1.5 centuries, during which East European Jews are heavily oppressed, and in 1881 and 1903-1905 - slaughtered in pogroms. About 2.5 million of them emigrate to the United States during the period of 1880-1920.

We next hear about the successes of the Jewish Americans: Levi Strauss; the bosses of Hollywood companies like MGM, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, and Paramount; and Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, who created the music for "The Wizard of Oz".

The episode ends on a depressing note. The Nazis have started their march eastward, and Schama vividly describes how the Jewish inhabitants of his family's native Lithuanian town were rounded up, subjected to beastly torture, forced to dig their own graves, and then murdered en masse in the summer of 1941.

8/10.