Archive for the 'TV and Movies' Category

I just finished watching The Universe: Spaceship Earth on The History Channel. As someone intimately involved in origin-of-life research, I’d give it a B for accuracy. As an unabashed fan of TV documentaries, I’d give it a C+ for entertainment value. Fortunately, an episode of Ice Road Truckers came on immediately afterward to cleanse the palate.

The first twenty minutes of Spaceship Earth were a pretty solid introduction to the formation of the solar system and planetary accretion. The only gripe I had was that the producers seemed to heavily favor the water-from-comets theory over the water-from-volcanic-outgassing theory, where the debate in the community isn’t nearly so one-sided.

The program soon moved into the development of life, and that’s where the wheels came off. They used the origin of life as a tease, like, “we’re going to tell you how life originated after you watch these fabulous commercials.”

“This will be interesting,” I thought, “Here’s comes the chemistry; I wonder what they’ll focus on. Prebiotic soup? RNA world?”

Nope. Boy, was I disappointed. After a two-minute segue that implied the Earth was seeded by life from an asteroid (the panspermia theory), the discussion quickly moved to photosynthetic bacteria (which now magically existed). What a cop out. I suppose we chemists have made little progress in solving the problem, but the producers really provided a disservice to their viewers by resorting to using panspermia as a bridge from physics to biology.

As if the handwaving wasn’t bad enough, obvious errors soon followed. At one point, a professor being interviewed said that the first bacteria had a lot of gases like H₂S and CH₄ to use and a little CO₂. Hmmm. If 96% of the atmosphere is a little, then I guess he’s right.

The discussion quickly moved into thermophilic and extremophilic bacteria being potential models for early life, then into some simple evolution. The last 10-15 minutes of the hour-long program focused on the boring and played-out story of how the global climate is changing and that humans are probably to blame.

Overall, I guess it was OK. They could have included some interesting OoL chemistry, but until we have a more compelling and complete story, I suppose producers are going to be reluctant to talk about it. Bottom line: If you’re looking for something good on TV, watch Ice Road Truckers, Copa America action, U-20 World Cup action, or le Tour instead of a Spaceship Earth re-run.