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Has the universe always existed? How did it become a place that could harbor life? Are we alone, or are there alien worlds waiting to be discovered? NOVA presents some startling new answers in Origins, a groundbreaking four-part NOVA miniseries. New clues from the frontiers of science are presented by dynamic astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. As the host of Origins, Tyson leads viewers on a … More >>
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What about DNA? This is the question I raised after seeing this documentary. It’s the very foundation of life, the programmed instructions for everything that makes us who we are physically. I wished this video had addressed the incredibly long odds of how this marvelous program came into being. It poses a major challenge to the Big Bang concept.
The Origins of Life DVD was well put-together, with good music, great commentary, and excellent special effects. The history of the universe was portrayed as an explosion of the universe out of a dot smaller that the one at the end of this sentence. Everything, including you and me, eventually came out of this explosion called the Big Bang. It took perhaps 20 to 30 billions of years for the energy and chemicals to combine in just the right ways to make this happen. It was aided by earthquakes, volcanoes, bombardments from space, undersea eruptions, and so on. Little-by-little creatures came into being, and one creature eventually evolved into another, depending on its environment. Eventually, we see the world as it is right now, a miracle of scientific processes and enough chance and time. Or so the story goes, or does it really? How does DNA come down to us?
I was astonished in reading Phillip Johnson’s `Darwinism on Trial’ last year, that the odds of a single DNA module coming together accidentally over the supposed 15 to 30 billion year age of the universe are unimaginably long. Our human DNA contains about 3-billion lines of information in a given sequence. The odds of this happening accidentally are 1/10 (raised to the 40,000th power), which is a 1 divided by 10, raised to a power of 40,000 zeroes. Dr. Francis Crick, the co-founder of DNA, came up with this number 20 years ago or so, and, to my knowledge, hasn’t been challenged down from that level. Think of the chances of immediately picking out the one red dime out of a universe (the size of ours) that is full of dimes, and you are not even close to the odds for accidental DNA. The odds are off the charts!
I also read `Origins/Skeptics’ which was written by DNA evolutionist scientist Robert Shapiro who thinks the odds are immeasurably greater: 1/10 (raised to the 100,000,000,000th power). Shapiro still believes DNA evolved somehow, but says we have no idea at this point how it could have happened scientifically. I respected his candor and scientific approach.
In Phillip Johnson’s book, I found that Indian astronomer and poet Dr Chandra Wickramasinghe is perhaps the leading advocate of an idea called panspermia, the theory that life on earth originated from outer space. It either came in rocks exploded from somewhere like Mars (undirected panspermia), or even in spaceships sent by advanced civilizations elsewhere (directed panspermia). I’m sure this theory is a reaction to the incredibly long odds that DNA occurred accidentally, and life emanating from somewhere else doesn’t mitigate those odds. He recently retired, but I’m sure you can get plenty of information from the web on him since he is very promotional about what he believes. You can easily google articles about him and his theory (recently regarding the shuttle disaster and the red rain). By the way, does this sound like astronomy or Star trek? You guessed it: I don’t have a lot of respect for this theory.
Finally, I read Stephen Hawking’s fascinating A Brief History of Time. In this book, Hawking postulated that if time were imaginary, thus there would be no real beginning of time, and time would essentially be infinite. Instead of the singularity called the Big Bang, there would be a smooth Einsteinian space-time continuum with no rupture at the beginning. If there is no beginning of time, then DNA would, of course, essentially have an infinite amount of time to come about. Also, of course, if matter is eternal, the necessity of a First Cause is removed. The problem is that the imaginary time is, well, imaginary. Imaginary numbers are those that contain the square root of -1; there is no number that can be multiplied by itself to make -1. If it were true, we would have a time without temporal qualities, like before, during, and after, beginning, end, etc. Imaginary time doesn’t exist and is not time at all. Hawking, in fairness, is not dogmatic about imaginary time’s role in the origin of the universe, but just floats it as a possible concept.
I’m sure you get the idea. DNA is too important to ignore when it comes to the subject of origins. The video should have addressed it since it is a major challenge to the Big Bang Theory.
Rating: 3 / 5
It is a good video but it is nothing more than one person’s opinion about how human brain works. The presenter’s about human spirtuality were less developed and he was trying to understand everything from physical point of view which is not always correct.
Rating: 3 / 5
NOVA isn’t what it used to be. The BBC Series “The Planets” contains much of the same subject matter, presented more accurately with interviews of more relevant people.
Rating: 2 / 5
Maybe I was spoiled by Sagan’s COSMOS that was produced 30 years ago, but this video really didn’t impress me. I found the host somewhat distracting and a little bit of a ham in the way he presented things. As for the content, very little of it is anything new. Like one other reviewer said, a lot was missing from this video (and I haven’t even read the book). They could have used some of the time they “wasted” on the anecdotal details of discovery to include more material. Most of the stuff in the video are things that we’ve known for a long time, with one or two newish ideas. I would recommend watching this if you can catch it on TV, and maybe as a purchase if you can get it for just a few $$.
Rating: 1 / 5
What a great story and an ending! I was so excited about the conclusion of this 2 hr program that I coudn’t sleep at all.
Rating: 5 / 5