Humanity loves a good “what if?” proposition.
It is yet another manifestation of the curiosity about the world, and everything which lies beyond it, which has sent us hurtling up the evolutionary ladder, going from spears and arrows, hunting and gathering to cutting-edge medicine and spaceflight.
Alien Worlds, a British documentary series which examines what might await us when we reach planets far away from our own, takes this impelling curiosity and uses it to brilliantly good effect, imagining what life might be like throughout the galaxy by using Earth and the constants of life it represents as guideposts.
It’s an enthralling exploration made up of four equally compelling parts, which take us to the worlds of “Atlas”, “Janus”, “Eden” and “Terra” on which we spend time seeing how diverse and yet reliably constant life can be.
Drawing on the experience of evolutionary biologists, astronomers and ecologists, among others, Alien Worlds goes deep into our understanding of what life actually is, what it requires and what sustains us in a rich and impressively different range of environments.
In doing so, it touches us upon an inbuilt prejudice we have that life, real life, takes particular kinds of forms.
Hence, we see verdant forests, rolling grasslands and abundant seas as life-filled, the very essence of what it means to be alive; but while these environments are, by any measure, vibrantly, fulsomely full of life, that doesn’t mean other places can play host to life, too.
Take “Janus” for instance, a tidally-locked exoplanet, defined as any planet outside our solar system, which has one side locked in perpetual light facing its sun and one light wrapped in frigid night.
In-between sits a twilight zone, a place neither full of life nor caught in the depths of night, the only place we might Earth-centrically consider might be capable of supporting any kind of indigenous lifeform.
But the fact of the matter is that living beings do exists in both the hot, sunny zone and cold, dark zone, pentapods which walk on five spindly limbs and have adapted themselves to live in every environment offered by the planet.
The corollary here on Earth are scorpions, which have remain unchanged in design and adaptability for something like 400 million years, and turn up in the most inhospitable conditions, where they thrive where many of us would assume no life can exist.
Now, granted, no one can know for sure that the laws of life here on Earth will translate in any way, shape or form to those on other planets, assuming life exists there at all – there is strong belief among the scientists featured in Alien Worlds that it does exist given the increasing evidence of oxygen, water etc, the basic building blocks of life, on planets other than our own – and part of the fun of this documentary series is that is much of it what we are presented with is creative conjecture.
In other words, a great deal of known scientific knowledge, as articulated by the featured experts such as Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz who discovered the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b, has been spun and woven into portraying, using some pretty impressive CGI-rendered settings, what alien life might look like.
In a year in which we have found ourselves very much caught within the small little worlds of our home and immediate community, series like Alien Worlds, provide the kind of educative television we all crave.
Escapist it might be in a sense, science fiction sitting cheeky by jowl with the science with which it is both progenitor and successor, but the science in the series is hard, fast and known, and as such, if nothing else, Alien Worlds is a great introduction to the mysteries and wonder of our own impressive world.
Taken on those segments alone, Alien Worlds is an immersively exciting undertaking, one worth spending the time it takes to watch the four-roughly 45-minute episodes.
But beyond that, it allows to dream and imagine, to postulate what might be on planets where there are two suns – lots of life thanks to all the energy produced – or on a seemingly barren tidally-locked planet or on a planet with higher gravity and a thicker atmosphere than Earth.
It also allows us to see what might happen if we were to contact aliens or they were to contact us and what form these other civilisations might take, and the challenges they would have to face.
While it’s fair to assume, they would be nothing like us in some ways, the laws of life suggest that there would be more similarities than not, and that this is fear we all have, nestled deep down in our psyche, that all aliens are enslaving, invading aliens, might not be so true after all.
In the end, Alien Worlds is at heart a delicious documentary-sized slice of luxuriantly-visual “what-if”-ing but it is one based on scientific understanding and an appreciation of life as we know it, and if nothing else, finding out more about own our imperilled planet, even if we never make it planets far beyond our solar system, is a valuable thing in and of itself and one that makes this diverting series more than worth the watching.