Kurt Cobain has been dead a while.

Today is the 20th anniversary of when musician Kurt Cobain shot himself. Of course the press jumps all over anniversaries like this, even when it’s a busy news day, ’cause nostalgia will steer web traffic just as effectively as actual news.

So, why are all the 30- and 40-somethings making such a fuss about him? Well, he was the first musician who died that we actually liked. We were too young to appreciate John Lennon or Marvin Gaye’s deaths, or feel any great loss at their passing. Cobain was different. We liked his music. True, we were young and dumb and had no taste, but that makes no difference. We liked him, and suddenly lost him.

Yeah, I watch 𝘊𝘰𝘴𝘮𝘰𝘴.

I’m not a scientist. I’m a science buff, in that I read a lot of stuff about science. I read a lot of history, and a certain amount of philosophy. Included in all that would be biographies of various scientists, or the history of scientific theory. When you read a biography of Benjamin Franklin, you’re gonna read a bit about his discoveries in electricity; when you read on Galileo Galilei, you’ll pick up astronomy; when you read on Albert Einstein, relativity. But sometimes I’ve just straight-up read Charles Darwin, or Nicolaus Copernicus, or Aristotle, just to see where these guys were coming from. Never be afraid of the original sources: I found Einstein himself explained relativity much more clearly than his biographer did.

So when I saw the promotions for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey last year, I was looking forward to it. I saw the original series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, back in 1980, on public television. Dad liked science shows, like Nova or National Geographic, and didn’t mind my watching them with him. Probably because they were “educational.” I found it interesting. Years later I found the companion book to the series and read it; also interesting.

Host and writer Dr. Carl Sagan used it to promote science and scientific discovery: As an agnostic, he’d ruled out the Judaism of his ancestors as an explanation for life in the universe, and the meaning of life. I’ve read enough of Sagan’s stuff to realize he hoped there was a God, but he didn’t care to search for him in temple, or a church. Instead he turned to nature. He looked to astronomy. He got his sense of awe from looking at the biggest things there are. And Cosmos (in both the original and 2014 versions) comes across as quite evangelical: It’s trying to give us that same sense of awe by showing us the wonders of nature, and getting us to be impressed by the science we used to discover it.