Another Great Resource
Illustra Media, the producers of the widely acclaimed video Unlocking the Mystery of Life, have now released another excellent documentary.
This hour long program entitled The Privileged Planet, does for astronomy fans what the earlier video did for biologists. This new release features beautiful photography and also many computer animated images of space.
Despite all this, The Privileged Planet does not quite achieve the pizzaz of the Unlocking the Mystery of Life video. This is perfectly understandable however when one considers that astronomy is more remote from everyday life, so that the concepts are less familiar. Another interesting feature of this video is the commentary by well known experts like astronomer Robert Jastrow and Donald Brownlee (co-author with Peter Ward of the book Rare Earth).
The discussion begins with the image, captured by Voyager I on February 14, 1990, of our sun and six circling planets. Among the latter planets, was a tiny dot representing our planet, recorded by the spacecraft from four billion miles away. The focus of this part of the video, is to assess the significance of this tiny dot. Is there anything special about our globe, or is it just another artifact, among many, in space?
The modern view that earth is an insignificant globe, has its roots in the description of our solar system made by Nicolaus Copernicus in the sixteenth century. Previously, based on Greek thought, everyone believed that the earth was the focal point of the heavens. This displacing of earth from a central position, has been extended by modern scientists into a philosophy. They consider that nothing about our globe, ourselves included, is at all special or remarkable. The work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s also greatly contributed to the same view. Based on his work, astronomers realized that our galaxy is only one among billions in space, not the only one, as had formerly been assumed.
The video then discusses how new scientific studies are making it harder and harder to sustain this prejudice about our lack of significance in the universe. Firstly the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program is reviewed. For almost 45 years, astronomers have tried to detect radio signals from distant advanced civilizations. So far nothing has been detected despite increasingly sophisticated listening equipment. The discussion focuses on why intelligent life appears to be so rare in the universe. Not only do suitably sized planets seem rare in our galaxy, but the factors which also must be present for life to exist (such as water and oxygen) turn out to be exceedingly rare.
The probability of a planet possessing all such factors turns out to be basically nil, a situation which demonstrates that our globe is actually “very very special, miraculous or extraordinarily unusual.” These words are spoken by Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. He does not believe our globe is that special, but that is where the discussion actually takes us.
The second half of the program is based on a book by astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Richards. Beginning with the remarkable situation which allows our moon to completely eclipse the sun, thereby allowing the sun’s corona to be seen and studied, these scientists assess the significance of earth’s position in space. They establish that the earth is in the best possible position in our solar system and in our galaxy, not only for life to exist on earth, but also for us to view and appreciate the heavens. Moreover Australian astrophysicist Paul Davies points out that we have been provided with brains which are able to study the universe at the same time that our remarkable position in space allows us to do so. The question as to why this is so, takes us to the final topic in this program.
The universe is obviously ordered and intelligible. Something beyond matter, indeed it is obviously God the Creator, who has wrought this wonderful universe. At the end, in a computer animated sequence, we retreat through space from the earth, from the solar system, from the galaxy, and through deep space characterized by a three-dimensional frothy arrangement of the celestial bodies out there. Even deep space has structure and order, however subtle.
This video, in VHS and DVD formats, is excellent for high school science classes and adult audiences.
Margaret Helder
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