“Journey of the Universe” is an hour-long documentary, previously aired on PBS, tracing, as the title implies, the history of the Universe. It begins at the “big bang” and tells the story of evolution of the universe, our planet, life, and human development. Throughout the documentary, host Brian Thomas Swimme, an “evolutionary philosopher,” (see bio here) projects a sense of awe and enthusiasm in relating the story. You can get a taste in a three-minute trailer here. This is an interesting documentary that gives an overview of this amazing journey. Unfortunately, near its end, the mood is shattered when Swimme devolves into doom-and-gloom environmental propaganda. This DVD serves as an introduction to the next.

“Journey of the Universe Conversations” is a four-DVD set containing 10 hours of interviews hosted by Mary Evelyn Tucker, an historian of religions (see bio here). There are 20 interviews. Interviews on the first two DVDs are those of scientists who relate, in more detail, the “Journey” of the documentary. DVDs three and four are populated mainly by non-scientist activists who are heavily into sustainable development and utopian environmental schemes. Most of the ideas expressed by these people have long been explored over the last 60 years or so in dystopian science fiction stories and found wanting. One interesting exception I found among this latter group, was Dr. David Begay, a physicist at Northern Arizona University, who related the way Navajos thought of the universe and related their “sense of place.”

These DVDs will be released on June 4, 2013 from most vendors. You can pre-order at Amazon here and here.

Biologists Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon have written an interesting speculative paper about the origin of life on Earth and in the universe (see full 19-page paper here). The paper is at times tough going with molecular biology jargon. They used a computer simulation to get back to the simplest form of life.

They start: “An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide.”

Some of their speculations and conclusions:

“Linear regression of genetic complexity extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago.” That is older than Earth.

This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences:

(1) life took a long time (ca. 5 billion years) to reach the complexity of bacteria;

(2) the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth;

(3) there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens;

(4) Earth was seeded by panspermia

(Panspermia: Theory that life on earth originated from organisms coming from outer space); I wonder if this begs the question. However did life originate elsewhere?

(5) experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events;

(6) the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe.

Physicist Luboš Motl, a fan pf panspermia, has some comments here.

Some of their other speculations:

“In summary, the functional complexity of human civilization grows exponentially with a doubling time ca. 20 years, but we do not see any signs of an approaching “technological singularity” when humans would be replaced by intelligent machines. Instead, we expect a stronger integration of human mind with technology that would result in augmented intelligence.”

 - Big Bang’s Sheldon Cooper can hardly wait.

The physiography of southeastern Arizona is characterized by long, thin mountain ranges separated by broad, fault-bounded valleys. This physiography, which is unique on the planet, is the result of crustal extension that occurred between 8- to 12 million years ago.

The story of the evolution of SE Arizona is the subject of a featured article in the new Fall-Winter 2012 issue of Arizona Geology magazine, published by the Arizona Geological Survey. The paper is “Post-Tectonic Landscape Evolution in Southeastern Arizona: When Did a River Start to Run Through It?” by Matthew C. Jungers.

Initially, the basins had internal drainage and were not connected. Jungers’ story shows how geologic forces gradually connected the basins and how the Gila-Santa Cruz-San Pedro river system developed. The article also describes how he figured it out.

The graphic below shows the sequence of events according to Jungers:

His figure caption reads:

“Figure 2. Final stages of the Basin and Range disturbance. (A) Structural basins were filled with sediment, and most basins were still internally drained. (B) Following the cessation of extensional tectonics in the region, basins continued to fill with sediment and faults were buried. Basins began to integrate with the main stem Gila River via a combination of basin spillover and headward drainage capture. (C) Following integration with an adjacent basin, sedimentary fill was incised as its basin adjusted to a new, lower base level. (D) As a new, through-flowing drainage network was established, integrated basins graded to the Gila River. The shift to an oscillating climate in the Quaternary may be preserved in flights of terraces that record alternating periods of floodplain stability followed by rapid incision. Figure adapted from Menges and Pearthree, 1989.”

Read the full article here.

For more geology stories, see my Article Index page.