This challenged the pre-existing widely accepted theory that the planets moved in a circular rotation and, after Kepler was able to prove it, his theory of the laws of planetary motion replaced the prior assumption. All but one of the science advisers for the acclaimed series are Cornell faculty. 60 years later, astronomer Johannes Kepler expounded on this theoryby positing that the planets actually orbited around the sun in an elliptical fashion. Forty years after Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan first introduced the world to the wonders of science through his Cosmos television series, a new season of thought-provoking scientific adventures will air on the National Geographic Channel, beginning March 9. But of course, as Nicolaus Copernicus discovered in 1543, the planets (including earth) actually revolve around the sun. Once again, through this logic, we see how human perception colors our understanding of the world because the earth is the center of our universe, we assume it must be the same for the entire Cosmos. This observation led early philosophers to theorize that the planets move on some sort of rotation (which they do) and to get it slightly wrong by suggesting that the earth is the center of the universe. When you think about it that way, it kind of makes you wonder how we could ever think our problems matter at all! But if your mind isn’t blown already, then let’s consider that each separate galaxy contains 1011 planets and 1011 galaxies! And as the author explains, that makes our planet only one of 1022 planets in the Cosmos. For most of us, “a hundred billion” just sounds like the kind of hyperbolic number we would have made up when we were kids! That’s why we use mathematical formulas to simplify it a little bit by writing it out as 1011. Most of us have never seen a billion of anything, let alone a billion galaxies, each with their own complex life cycles and solar systems. If you’re like most people, your brain can’t even stretch to imagine how much that really is. (And if you didn’t feel like your problems were insignificant before, get ready!) Because the Cosmos contains a hundred billion galaxies. But now that we know how we measure the Cosmos, let’s think about what it contains.

Carl of cosmos