Episode 10: THE LOST WORLDS OF PLANET EARTH
The Ship of the Imagination takes us on a tour trees to take root, irrevocably altering the environment
through space and time, to all new frontiers, to grasp
the history of Earth, writ small in its atoms, to the
monumental scale of its oceans, continents, and the
variety of inhabitants on our globe.
Visiting the primeval Carboniferous Era we encounter
giant dragonflies and plants soaring hundreds of feet
high. Yet this world will ensnare humans millions of years
later. The arrival of lignin in the carbon cycle allows
Image: Daniel Smith/FOX
“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do
about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions
and by the depth of our answers.” – Carl Sagan, “Cosmos”
Episode 11: THE IMMORTALS
Must we die? What must it be like to live forever? If
there were timeless beings such as these in the Cosmos,
what would their infinite existence be like across space
and time?
To answer this question, we first visit the young and
beautiful Akkadian Princess Enheduanna as she sails
down the Euphrates River in 2300 B.C. Her place in history
is forever immortalised by the words she wrote. 5,000
years after she passed away, she
lives on, remembered by her poem
of a goddess of love triumphant
over the universe. Enheduanna
is the first key in understanding
the diverse interpretations of
immortality.
The grand walls of Uruq (Iraq)
rise up as we meet the heroic
Gilgamesh. His personal journey is
a quest for immortality. He meets
a sage named Utnapushtim, who
was instructed to build an ark, a millennium before
Noah.
These historical figures have their own immortality
thousands of years after their time as stories are written
and reinterpreted across the generations. Their lives
are coded within our own DNA.
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of our young planet forever. Our trek takes us to a world
of purple oceans and green skies – ours; and we dive
into an ocean – in Texas…
We meet the genius who solved an ancient
geological mystery but died before being accepted
by his peers. And we’ll meet the lady who proved his
discoveries to be correct and exposed the largest
feature on Earth. Diving our ship beneath the waves
we’ll explore the largest oceanic mountain range and
descend into a mammoth underwater canyon where
life has found a way to thrive in the dark cold. And the
wonders around us continue to reveal themselves as
we take the Ship of the Imagination into the Earth’s
mantle itself.
The young Earth was a rapidly changing series
of worlds, active and destructive. We are just the
latest inhabitants in its long history of renewal. We will
recreate these old worlds and travel forward in our
Ship of the Imagination to an older Earth, a quarter of
a billion years in our far future.
More timeless stories have been given to us through
the ages. An early 20th century meteorite strike in a
remote Egyptian village held a story, but we could not
read it for seventy years. Not until we sent our robot
ambassadors to Mars and learned the language of the
Red Planet. Immortality is preserved in our migrations
from one place to the next. Life moves between
planets and perhaps across the Cosmos itself.
1946: We record our first attempt
to contact extra-terrestrial life. See
what happened to that message.
Great civilisations rise and fall. We
ask do they have finite lifespans?
We look at intelligent life on our own
planet through the lens of a new
Drake Equation and conclude the
possibility of intelligent life across
the whole observable universe.
We ponder about intelligent
beings living in Red Dwarf star
systems for trillions of years. How would they evolve
over this seemingly infinite time? Would they unlock
new doors to becoming the new immortals? We
revisit the Cosmic Calendar of a future unseen and
live through the first seconds of January 1st in a new
Cosmic Year.
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