Enter the world of extraterrestrials
Flying sky whales brought down by giant, hornetlike creatures hunting through a shared intelligence. Trees stretching upward a half a mile. Forty-foot, fan-shaped plants that undulate toward the never-setting sun.
Science fiction or science fact?
Well, a little of both, according to the National Geographic Channel’s captivating special “Extraterrestrial,” airing Monday night.
This show has nothing to do with movies by Steven Spielberg or with studying possible clues that aliens are visiting planet Earth.
It is far more fascinating.
The show informs us that within a few years, in the lifetime of most of us now living, NASA will launch a Terrestrial Planet Finder observatory (actually, two of them) in an attempt to find out what, or who, is beyond our solar system.
As one scientist in the two-hour National Geographic special says flat out: The probes and other scientific advancements will make this the century when we discover we are not alone.
National Geographic commissioned scientists from universities, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif., to create a likely scenario of what life might look like elsewhere.
The creators of these worlds are astrophysicists, biologists, biomechanists and astronomers who combine their knowledge with sophisticated 3-D and other special effects to create two planets they believe could exist in our own Milky Way galaxy.
One they name Aurelia. It circles a red dwarf star. One side of the planet always faces this sun and is in perpetual daylight; the other side is in frozen darkness. The scientists who created it say Aurelia, with its watery lagoons populated by Stinger Fans, Gulphogs and Mudpods, is very much a possibility.
The second is named Blue Moon, a satellite orbiting a massive gaseous planet and heated by twin stars. It has much higher levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen than Earth, which translates to denser and heavier air in which really big things, like Skywhales with 33-foot wingspans, can fly.
Blue Moon is a violent place, with its Death Trap plants that kill by acid and its eagle-sized, hornetlike Stalker Scouts that eat Skywhales alive after hunting them through a shared intelligence.
Both glimpses will make viewers appreciate the fact that Earth does not have endless sunlight and that our oxygen levels are, well, less scary. Blue Moon’s atmosphere is highly explosive. The Blue Moon creation is “a world on the edge,” meaning the scientists have taken their knowledge and run with it. But, they stress repeatedly, they follow the rules of creation and basic animal and plant design (as we know it), based on the latest scientific research and deep space observations.
This is riveting viewing as the scientists use the basic theory that all life, no matter where, needs water, and that carbon-based life equals DNA equals a complex web of life.
But they also believe that each story of creation will be different. We may not be alone, but what life is out there is unlikely to look anything like us.