The same black and white TV on which I watched the Six Million Dollar Man was the source of other inspiration during my fifth year. In the summer of 1976 (I was born in 1971) the Viking 1 probe landed on the surface of Mars, the first ever landing on another planet. This was a big deal. I remember excitedly watching with Mom as the first photographic image from Mars appeared slowly, strip-by-strip, on the TV screen as it was shown on the Today show. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why the image appeared strip-by-strip – the data rate from Viking would have been far too slow to show this image live, and it certainly wouldn’t have been much effort to piece the image together before showing it on TV. But the strips, which were the individual tall/skinny photos that in montage formed the full landscape photos, showed how the image was taken, and also made quite a dramatic presentation; perhaps that was the reason for showing them in this way. In any case, I was mesmerized, and that image of an alien, rocky desert is still perfectly clear in my memory decades later.

Sadly, the flimsy public excitement over these amazing Mars landing photos and in general over the Viking Mars mission was apparently measured in mere days. It was this disappointment that led Carl Sagan, a planetary geochemist on the Viking team, to propose a book and PBS series called Cosmos, which would educate and excite the general public about science. The series was very successful, and Dad and I watched it religiously when it came out in 1980. I’m not sure the series had the broad impact Sagan had hoped for however, as the space program and sciences in general still have the same funding problems and lack of public interest nowadays, but I sure loved the TV show. Still, it's nice to see that after decades, some (rather marginally) science-themed prime time TV shows have caught on, with programs like Numb3rs, CSI, and Bones - the main character of that last one even advises grad students. They're not quite what was being advocated by the famous Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman, who for years has pushed for an LA Law-like show that takes place at a scientific research lab. The above shows are all variants of the forensic cop show, but yet who would've guessed that Bill Nye would land a role in an episode of Numb3rs?

In the meanwhile, many of us scientists and engineers still attribute some of our early inspirations to silly TV shows like the Six Million Dollar Man. (And there was that cool talking computer on Wonder Woman, for note I wasn’t old enough yet at the time to appreciate other aspects of that show.) Usually when folks talk about benefits of TV to society one thinks of PBS shows, but I suppose in the inspiration sense even these schlocky shows can have their benefits!