RocketSTEM Issue #6 - March 2014 | Page 34

Episode 10: THE LOST WORLDS OF PLANET EARTH The Ship of the Imagination takes us on a tour 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 trees to take root, irrevocably altering the environment 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. “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. 32 32 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. www.RocketSTEM.org