Extraterrestrial (2005)

Genre

documentary

Country

United Kingdom, United States

Length

1 season, 2 episodes

Rated

TV-PG

Rating

10.0 of 10 from 1 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This two-part documentary speculates on what alien life might look like on two fictional exoplanets. Scientists use real biology and climate science to imagine creatures evolving on a tidally locked world and a large moon.

speculativeeducationalcontemplativewonder-filledgroundedscientificthought-provokingvisually imaginative

What happens

Extraterrestrial, also known in the UK as Alien Worlds, is a British-American two-part television documentary miniseries, aired in 2005 in the UK by Channel 4, by the National Geographic Channel in the US on Monday, May 30, 2005 and produced by Big Wave Productions Ltd. The program focuses on the hypothetical and scientifically feasible evolution of alien life on extrasolar planets, providing model examples of two different fictional worlds, one in each of the series's two episodes. The documentary is based on speculative collaboration of a group of American and British scientists, who were collectively commissioned by National Geographic. For the purposes of the documentary, the team of scientists divides two hypothetical examples of realistic worlds on which extraterrestrial life could evolve: A tidally locked planet (dubbed "Aurelia") orbiting a red dwarf star and a large moon (dubbed "Blue Moon") orbiting a gas giant in a binary star system. The scientific team of the series used a combination of accretion theory, climatology, and xenobiology to imagine the most likely locations for extraterrestrial life and most probable evolutionary path such life would take. The "Aurelia" and "Blue Moon" concepts seen in the series were also featured in the touring exhibition The Science of Aliens. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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