Carl Sagan I:
Growing up, my oldest brother was the geeky science-y one, but it gave him the foresight to record the entire now-legendary and classic Carl Sagan "Cosmos" documentary series when it first aired on PBS in the early 80's. He recorded it on our cutting edge, state-of-the-art Betamax, which was the size of a small English sportscar.

About a decade later, I had the foresight to ask my other brother, who still had a Beta machine, to transfer the entire series to VHS. He not only obliged, but he had the foresight to record it at high speed to try to maintain the Betamax quality (historical note: Sony Betamax format was more compact and better quality than VHS, but due to poor marketing by Sony, VHS became the standard videotape format).

Now, a decade after that, I still have the VHS tapes, even though the series has been released on DVD. I don't know, doesn't that make me sorta hipster in a vintage pocket protector-geek sorta way, yo? I'm the real deal, homes, old school! *flashes slide-rule gang signs*

But, man, even with a few dated ideas and a Western-centric bias, there is no more poetic and elegant spokesperson for cosmology than Carl Sagan. I just watched an episode ("The Backbone of the Night", #7), about the journey of cosmological knowledge from its infancy in Ancient Greece to near maturity in modern times.

He nicely juxtaposes in his own journey of broadening knowledge with recollections of growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And then to put a fine point on it, he returns to his elementary school to give a lecture to the kids on astronomy, replete with shots of eager, young, fresh faces, "oh, oh, oh!"-ing and hands groping for 70's-era photos that Sagan was handing out of images beamed back from the Voyager spacecrafts.

A fascinating bit in all this is when he explains theorized basic techniques for discovering planets around other stars. He impresses upon the kids that within your lifetime we would be discovering maybe hundreds of planets around other stars, perhaps having them all mapped out to several dozen light years!

And, as we all know, in the past several years, scientists have been regularly detecting extrasolar planets using those same basic techniques. Those kids were probably just a bit younger than me.