PBS Airs the Journey of the Universe Documentary Film
In his television series Cosmos, whose Emmy-award winning co-creator served as one of the directors of the new film Journey of the Universe, astronomer Carl Sagan declared, “We are all stardust.” The sentiment was already a familiar one, for in Joni Mitchell’s famous 1970 song “Woodstock,” she too sang about our kinship with the stars:
We are stardust,
Billion year old carbon.
We are golden,
Caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
For Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, the devil’s bargain is our increasing investment in an industrial, mechanized way of life that pushes us farther and farther away from the natural rhythms of our humanity. “To get ourselves back to the garden,” they propose, we have to understand who we are and where we came from, and appreciate the dazzling creative forces of nature that will ultimately allow us to flourish on planet Earth.
Starting this weekend, Swimme and Tucker’s film, Journey of the Universe, airs on PBS nationwide. It is a lush, high-definition epic, which covers the last 14 billion years of Earth’s history with narrative ease, demonstrating the interdependence that permeates the world we live in. The film begins at dawn on the Greek island of Samos, the birthplace of the mathematician Pythagoras, and concludes at the end of a single day, over the course of which author and evolutionary philosopher Swimme guides the viewer from the Big Bang to the present.
The film’s trajectory that runs parallel to that of the book Swimme wrote with Tucker, which tells the same story in clear, evocate prose instead of images. Both the book and the film craft a narrative of the universe uniquely suited to our world today, bringing together astronomy, biology, geology, and the history of philosophy and religion with a virtuosity that promises to change the way Swimme and Tucker’s readers and viewers consider their own journeys in the universe.
Check your local listings or the film’s website for details on watching Journey of the Universe on PBS.
Unfortunately, my local PBS station begins it’s latest, grueling membership pledge drive tonight, continuing for at least the next week-and-a-half, preempting nearly all regular, quality programming such as “Journey of the Universe,” in favor of typically horrible pledge shows. Hopefully they’ll catch up with Journey of the Universe after pledging ends (although, I suppose I could check to see if pbs.org is posting the program before then, but I’m just not in the habit of viewing shows online).