My good friend (and forum co-admin) Phil Plait has been working on a super secret project for a few months. But now the project has been revealed in all its glory… it’s a television show called “Bad Universe“. Phil made the announcement a couple of days ago, but had to remove the video for technical purposes (or perhaps it’s a vast conspiracy). Anyway, the trailer’s back online, so now you can check it out.
Nice work Phil!
Phil took a joy ride on an F16? Lucky bastard!
Of course it’s a conspiracy. The Universe is out to get us, and only Phil can save us. It’ll do anything it can to prevent the news getting out.
I’m not much of a TV guy, but I’ll watch this. When will it be on?
When the F16 that Phil was riding was doing a roll, did you hear him exclaim “Oh god!”? 😛
Wow…break out the Prozac, this show may be a good stimulant for depression. 😉
Phil Plait made a TV show? 😉
Wouldn’t surprise me if this show was a huge, huge hit. A little like mythbusters but in space. Good luck Phil.
Can’t wait. Should be a good show, and the host might just be tolerable! LOL We’ll have to start a write-in campaign to make him wear a hat outdoors!! 🙂 That was some glare in the first shot.
Do you think Dr. Plait has a fascination with things blowing up, errr I mean breaking molecular bonds? Naughty particles!!!
Good luck with the no longer secret project }:>
Oooh… Don’t mention MythBusters. I’m betting Discovery Channel has implemented a policy to keep Adam and Phil apart, else nobody could hear themselves think! 🙂
This looks like fun. Plait might have to work around Hawking’s recent admonition against hailing our presence to the nearby universe over fears of nasty aliens. Though I agree it does not take much to reduce the flying saucers to little toys as seen in the trailer.
The universe is not bad or good, benign or malevolent, but dispassionate towards us. Asteroids seem to be a reasonably probably source of trouble. The probability for a mass-extinction astro-boomer is pretty small. Those happen every 50 million years or so. Chances are somewhat reasonable for a ~ 100 meter asteroid to impact somewhere and cause a loss of life on a scale seen with some of our major wars. Yet the comparison with war brings back the fact that our real problems are largely manufactured by ourselves. Other concerns, such as a black hole, are beyond our ability to address. If a black hole, such as apparently illustrated in the trailer, were found to be heading our way the only thing we could do is write some sort of requiem.
LC
Definitely worth checking out.. I’ll be there!
P.S. The suggest to watch ‘Through the Black Hole’ with Morgan Freeman was a good tip too…
I haven’t read Hawkings on this, but “nasty aliens” are no threat. Light speed concerns makes conquest impractical.
Actually the large number argument goes for BH and other extinction risks as well. After 4.5 Gy it is safe to say that biosphere extinction risks are _extremely_ low.
The more immediate concern is that historically 99.9 % of all species goes extinct. That is a concern many orders of magnitude more acute. So it isn’t likely non-biological and environmentally rare factors will do us or our descendants in but biological and environmentally common ones.
Unless of course our social and technological prowess somehow makes us immune to that, which is an iffy proposition to test.
The threat of a black hole consuming the solar system, or passing through here so as to gravitationally slingshot Earth into interstellar space, is almost infinitesimal. Over the last few hundred million years this planet has been thumped by some big asteroids. It also seems that every few thousands of years there is a good H-bomb blasting asteroid of ~ 100 meters that hits us.
The average large mammalian species exists for a few million years before going extinct. We are probably no different. I think it is unlikely we really can do much to change that outcome. In fact it might be argued we can only make things worse. The chances are nearly 100% that Homo sapiens or any putative continuation of our species will not exist a million years from now.
LC
that preview looks effin awsome.
Hopefully this show will help influence asteroid impact response. In other words, trying to blow it up with nukes ain’t gonna work.