I livetweet CBS' sci-fi show Extant every Wed night on Twitter at 8pm - check out the storify at the end of the article or click here!

Me and Astronaut Doug Wheelock in front of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the day before liftoff

In last night's episode of Extant, Molly (played by Halle Berry) sees a rocket lifting off, heading into space and likely docking with the space station. It reminded me of when I attended a shuttle launch. One of the most fascinating things was seeing the shuttle launch .... in silence. Then, 15 seconds later ... WWWWOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSHHHHHH you get blasted by the full sound of the rocket launching from the Earth. Why did it take so long?

In the above video, we start to hear sound about 15 seconds after we see it. Why is that? Well, the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) is much, much, much faster than the speed of sound (1130 ft per second). So if something is more than 1130 ft away from us, we should see it one second before we hear it. If it's 2260 ft away, we'll see it two seconds before we hear it. For 15 seconds, the math works out to just over 3 miles, which is the actual distance from the shuttle launch pad to the Kennedy Space Center press site that I was at.

This is the exact same reason why you see lightning before you hear thunder - if the lightning is far enough away, the light reaches your eyes way before the sound reaches your ears! You can also calculate how far away the lightning is by using the same method I used to calculate how far I was from the shuttle launch pad.

If you want to check out the livetweet of the show (watch out, there are spoilers), check out the Storify below!

(For all of my Cosmos recaps, please click here)

The 2nd episode of Cosmos, entitled "Some of the Things that Molecules Do", was awesome! Host Neil deGrasse Tyson took us through a journey of evolution, first looking at the establishment of villages after the first ice age, and how wolves began to rely on eating leftover food from humans. This eventually led to certain wolves being favored by the humans (yes, including the "cuter" wolves"). This is known as artificial selection, or selective breeding - humans decided which wolves survived and reproduced, and thus all of the breeds of dogs that we know today come directly from our ancestor's hands.

Next, Neil deGrasse Tyson shrunk his spaceship to the size of a molecule to go inside of a polar bear, to analyze the mutation that caused a polar bear to turn white. (This reminded me of the movie Innerspace , where Dennis Quaid was made small enough to go into Martin Short's body.) The white bears had an advantage to sneak up on prey during the ice age. Eventually, this mutation won out, and polar beats were all white after generations of evolution. And then they ended up on the Lost island. Poor Black bears.

I'm almost blind, but at least I have eyes. Underwater organisms used to have no eyes - then a mutation led them to become sensitive to light. These organisms were able to detect night and day cycles and more accurately avoid prey and hunt for food. After generations of mutations, the sensitivity became concentrated at points near the front, which become eyes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson covers the five main apocalypses of history, where a significant amount of life on Earth was eliminated. Only one form of life survived them all - the Tardigrades. I need to roll with them. And of course, the cycle of disasters will continue - just a matter of when. I doubt it will be something where John Cusack is driving over fault lines and saving the world, but it will happen.

Check out the live tweeting Storify below!

#Extant E3: See Things First, Hear Them Later

#Cosmos E2 - Cooler Than A Polar Bear's Toenails