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What would an alien planet really look like?
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I missed this special on Discovery, but I own Wayne Barlowe’s incredible book, Expedition, on which this special is based. Highly recommended. If you are developing a space-faring campaign, I can’t think of any better inspiration than Wayne Barlowe’s creature designs, and this Discovery special.
An excerpt from the Discovery website about this special:
“The drama takes place on Darwin IV, a fictional planet 6.5 light-years from Earth, with two suns and 60 percent gravity. Having identified Darwin as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the mothership Von Braun and three probes: Balboa, Da Vinci and Newton. This unmanned fleet is responsible for finding and assessing any life-forms on Darwin IV. Initially, the expectation is to find microscopic life, but the probes soon find themselves in the middle of a developed ecosystem teeming with life of all sizes.”
Your thoughts?
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Mh. I am not a biologist, but some of those creatures do seem a little badly explained. Even so, the design of the mission seems dumb. If I have 2 probes, and one gets destroyed mysteriously, I wouldn’t send my last remaining into death’s maw. Anyway, thanks for the tipp, it did make for interesting watching.
I still haven’t seen it. I’ll have to remedy that, lest I start losing my street cred.
I’m not a biologist either,but the premise and the alien design seems to coincide with natural prgression of life, I’m also a ex- military man,and the sending of the last probe makes sense in part,
due to the programming the engineers would have to include in the subroutine package. I mean that they are their looking for life,and the destruction of a probe is a tempting mystery, due to the “What If” principle that even engineers follow. you might want to check out “life after people” from the history channel as a christian I didn’t agree with alot of it but it was still interesting “What If” scenario.
the look and feel of the world would be influenced by 1. it’s star and its distance from it. 2. Wether it was a binary,trinary or even possibly quadinary star system though the last would be almost impossible for humans in our current state to land there.
3. the first two would greatly influence things such as atmosphere,plant life, and cellular growth of the corresponding lifeforms. It could be possible that the creatures shown on the show are intirely correct.
I really loved this documentary. It doesn’t show how versatile life can be, but it sure tells how versatile people’s minds can be.