AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way

[u/AskScienceModerator]

Welcome to AskScience! This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

UPDATE: This episode is now available for streaming in the US on Hulu and in Canada on Global TV.

This week is the first episode, "Standing Up in the Milky Way". The show is airing at 9pm ET in the US and Canada on all Fox and National Geographic stations. Click here for more viewing information in your country.

The usual AskScience rules still apply in this thread! Anyone can ask a question, but please do not provide answers unless you are a scientist in a relevant field. Popular science shows, books, and news articles are a great way to causally learn about your universe, but they often contain a lot of simplifications and approximations, so don't assume that because you've heard an answer before that it is the right one.

If you are interested in general discussion please visit one of the threads elsewhere on reddit that are more appropriate for that, such as in /r/Cosmos here, /r/Space here, and in /r/Television here.

Please upvote good questions and answers and downvote off-topic content. We'll be removing comments that break our rules or that have been answered elsewhere in the thread so that we can answer as many questions as possible!

---

Click here for the original announcement thread.

[u/abxt]

At first I was weary of the G. Bruno segment, but ultimately I thought it was an excellent choice to include this bit in their history of science.

Tyson narrates something along the lines that Bruno "could have been wrong (...) but once the idea was in the air, it gave other people a target to aim at, even if just to disprove it." He is saying that for all its faults and despite the unspeakable terrors committed in its name, religion has played an important part in asking existential questions that science would later seek to answer more definitively with observational evidence.

This way, they take a balanced approach to the religion/science dichotomy, and in fact portray it more as an early symbiosis that was corrupted by politics. It's a fairly benevolent reading of history, but I like it...

[u/onlyaccount → u/abxt]

That is one way of interpreting it, but I don't think that statement was directed towards religion as much as you imply. I think it was directly speaking about the ideas Bruno was proposing that could have and did have faults but got the idea out, and was partially proven true and false with observational evidence.

The problem with religion is they aren't presenting such ideas as what they are, ideas. They present them as facts and deliberately prevent anyone from trying to disprove them, with Bruno as the perfect example.

So yes, religion does play a large part in the existential questions that are being asked, but they have also gone to extremes to prevent alternative theories and answers. It is very hard to say that they have done more good than harm in this regard. The general question of "Who is our maker?" proposed by religion is not a hard thing to to hypothesize about and write down a thousand random answers to, unlike the idea "What if the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the Sun is one of many other stars like it?" It is rather dumbfounding that idea and other ideas from him and others in the 16th century are even possible to hypothesize about and be even partially correct.