Search - NOVA - Origins on DVD

Entertaining/Mind Blowing

Slo-Hand | 08/10/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This package contains 2 DVD's and about 4 hours of programming. The production quality is excellent for an educational series. The producers especially loved the visual animation of the earth colliding with a Mars sized planetesimal approximately 50 million years after the formation of the earth which resulted in the moon and a larger earth, because they used the graphic 5 or 6 times on the 1st two episodes(disc 1). The Earth was spinning 4 times faster in the early days and the moon was 6 times closer. The young sun was weaker and the atmosphere had only 1% Oxygen but within a few hundred million years there was solid crust and large volumes of liquid water. 6 hour days and up to 200 foot tidal pulls on the earth's crust by the moon's gravity with each rotation. Another concept the producer's absolutely loved was that it took almost 3 billion years for single celled photo-synthetic bacteria to bring the level of Oxygen in the atmosphere up enough to turn the planet from red to blue. When you think about it, that is a pretty awesome thing ! So for 21 hours of the 24 hour day analogy, the surface of planet earth was either lifeless(the first 600 million years (3.4 hours) or dominated by these single celled photo synthetic bacteria. Only in the last 3 hours did everything else evolve. There's more on the 1st two episodes including tests to confirm exploding meteors supplying the material for the spark of 1st life on the planet due to peptide formation from the pressure of impact on amino acids. Episode 1 Disc 2 is goes into great detail on the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and episode 2 deals with the making of a detailed map of the universe 380 thousand years after the Big Bang(13.7 billion years ago) when everything had finally cooled down enough to emit visible light. There are enough details in these two discs to make you think. It seems we owe our existence to serendipity as much as to inevitability. If Jupiter was not where it is for ie.,(deflecting comets and asteroids away from Earth) life would have been either extinguished or sent back to square I too many times for us to have evolved. If the earth hadn't collided with that mars sized planetesimal to form the moon we'd have a very wobbly planet with wild temperature swings. If the earth was as small as mars it's molten core would have hardened within half a billion years and it's atmosphere swept away by the solar wind. Ironically The asteroid that got through Jupiter's shield and supposedly finished off the dinosaurs was a huge stroke of luck because it allowed mammals to evolve freely eventually leading to us. Questions remain unanswered by these episodes such as, 'Why wouldn't aliens evolve faces ?' Why wouldn't other earthlike worlds have as much time for evolution as ours did ? You figure with a gas giant shield properly placed, a similar planet with a large moon in a sunlike starred solar system like ours, the time frames would be similar. The best argument put forth on this disc in my view against other technologically proficient life in the universe is the rarity of it here,(out of 100's of millions of speices in the history of multi-cellular life only we've achieved it). We could be as rare in the universe as 1 per every galactic cluster every 500 million years or less. If it were significantly more common we probably would have heard from them by now. To throw a bone to the Creationists, our existence for all practical purposes is a miracle ! As far as 'The Big Bang' or 'The Hyper-Expansion' of a super dense, super small mass to produce everything we know. It's just a theory supported by current science. We still have no clue as to where this mass came from. That would be the unanswerable question and left to whatever your concept of God is !"

Sensational... A+

Greg S | 01/23/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Beautiful images from single cell life forms to CGI representations of galaxies (and Hubble pics), plus a nicely paced presentation make this a must have for science doc fans. There are a few small areas it could explore more deeply, but for the most part it is 4 hrs of accurate and very entertaining viewing.

For those looking for a more in depth overview of why it is so difficult to actually detect other intelligences out there in the cosmos, checkout "Life Beyond Earth" by Timothy Ferris (another excellent science doc)"