1. Neil deGrasse Tyson is very sad.

From what I can tell, he seems utterly incapable of living in a world where people don’t believe what he does. Yet, at same the same time, he seems firmly aware there is no hope of changing everyone’s mind for the better. It reminds me of the time I overheard my great-grandmother tell my grandmother how sad it was that my family will “never know Christs’ love”. Condescending, sure. But you can’t be that upset when someone just wants to hold your hand on a blind road to salvation.

2. Human history is fundamentally unscientific.

Tyson’s version of human history is essentially a series of vast epistemological conspiracies. Monks dig up hidden books, scientific truths are revealed in dreams and snarling Catholics wield unbounded (yet somehow arbitrary) power. As a result, humanity went more or less without progress until around the 17th century, when some enterprising figures together and formalized the method of interrogation developed by Aristotle three-hundred years before Christ*.

More peculiar than the mere fact that he’s wrong, is why. Tyson’s whig-history is not just un-empirical, it borders on anti-empirical — stressing the importance of what happened inside Giordani Bruno’s head over the events of fifteen-years as a salaried lecturer in London and Paris. In effect, one of the most profoundly scientific men on earth seems to be saying that the most important things anyone can learn from human history are articles of faith (i.e. what people thought, why they chose to do one thing or another). This leads him to make all sorts of weird claims about science, like when he describes it as “…a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward into the future”. Could anything be less scientific?

3. Science thinks you are an idiot.

“We are 100,000 light years from earth. It would take light 100,000 years to reach us.”

Right from the outset, Tyson draws a rigid hierarchy: only those with access to the scientific toolkit are welcome on his imagination spaceship. Of course, the pitch is a bit disingenuous. There is no person who jumps out of your television to verify adherence and one suspects it may still be possible to watch the show without practicing a rigid scientific methodology. Still, the show makes a point of beating you over the head with the obvious; lest you think this it’s all really about time magic, explosions and rotating CGI universes.

4. Science is a second-order representation.

It is truly unfortunate that Cosmos is re-appearing one-year after the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness. While hardly a high-point for science (or film-making for that matter), that movie seems to have beaten Seth McFarlane to the punch on every slick visual sequence he could muster. Flying space ships into a crab nebula? Done. Pulsing fire astroids? Got those too. Exploding fire-planet? Dropped that one the first time around, welcome to 2009.

Of course, normally this kind of thing isn’t an issue. No one expects science to compete with science fiction when it comes to pure entertainment. Except that isn’t exactly true this time around. Perhaps this is the price science must pay for trying to appeal to the “general” public. But if Cosmos wants to impress, to show how science can access things and places beyond anything we can imagine — you get the feeling it must actually show things beyond what any of us can imagine. After all, movies promise the same things, and without all that irritating math.

5. No doubt about it: I’ll watch the next one.

*Tyson’s rather limited grasp of human history was recently contested by science historian Patrick McCray, who penned an open letter contesting Tyson’s claim that: “you will never find scientists leading armies into battle”. One could, of course, argue the point is semantic (‘only military leaders actually lead armies into battle’). But sticking with it, I find McCrary’s point a bit generous in that it notes only how scientists have “improved” military technologies from crossbows to atom bombs. One could add that scientific knowledge has benefited immensely from human suffering, since governments tend to throw money into scientific research during wartime and also because ethically dubious human subjects research (eg. Milgram, Nuremberg or Tuskeegee) can be frighteningly profitable.