For this week's episode of Cosmos, "The Immortals," Neil deGrasse Tyson has got us thinkin' about bout eternity -- or at least the transmission of messages through time and space. (It's a nice tie-in to last week's episode, which closed with all that communications tech bringing the world together.) The episode begins with an animation of ancient Uruk -- Iraq -- and the Akkadian priestess Enheduanna, the first person known to have signed her name to a piece of writing (Rand Paul probably plagiarized from her, too). We also get a capsule description of the Epic of Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality, including a retelling of the Flood story told to Gilgamesh by the wise Utnapishtim, an Ark story that predates the Genesis account by a millennium. We can look forward to an Answers in Genesis rebuttal that Tyson has it backwards: Gilgamesh, though merely a fable, confirms the reality of the Genesis flood. Tyson's point, of course, is that narratives are just one form of immortality, "a story sent from one civilization to another across thousands of years."

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