h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Has anybody seen the new series "The Day the Earth was Born" on Monday night at 9pm, Channel 4? It's pretty good, and it covers the first few billion years of earth, and the formation of life there. From the first show (the first 200 million years), it is worth watching.

Also, did anyone see the Donal McIntyre show on Wild Weather on the BBC. I think it's finished now, but it was worth watching just to see McIntyre try to kill himself in a number of gruesome ways.

Woodpigeon

Wild Weather was great I unfortunatley missed heat last night but saw the rest. There was quite some series I hope it gets repeated soon there was so much I just couldn't take in.

Last night he went on a marathon run in the Sahara, and took a saunter through the Amazon jungle - there was amazing footage of a sandstorm hitting Melbourne, and some poor woman in the US who had been hit by lightning 3 times. McIntyre wrangled out of getting blasted by an artificial lightning strike himself. A pity .

That was something they did on 99 thing to do before you are 30 last week.

Durn, I knew I was missing something. Even *seeing* lightning is a rare event here!

What are you expected to have done before you reach 40? No. Don't answer...

Hewy of all the ting they ahd last week I'd managed one before I was 30.

Must have lead a boring life.

I shiver to think how I would score. Is it online?

I saw what I think was the final programme of "The Day the Earth was Born" yesterday and I can't help feeling that it was a cop-out. The "geological clock" was fast forwarded extremely rapidly from 1 billion years ago to the present day, with a small bit at the end about the appearance of multi-cellular lifeforms close to the end of the "day". The intervening 3.5 billion years were completely glossed over, despite evidence that life was present throughout this time. Maybe science just don't really know what happened then, or perhaps they ran out of funding...

Sorry, that should have read The "geological clock" was fast forwarded extremely rapidly from the *first* 1 billion years to the present day (a time interval of 3.5 billion years).

A heads up - there's a Horizon programme on BBC 2 this Thursday at 9pm about huge freak waves at sea, and the increasing evidence that such waves exist, and cause catastrophic damage to ships when they hit. Should be good!

The freak waves programme last night was pretty interesting. 30m (100ft) vertical walls of water that appear from nowhere during large storms, which defy all traditional scientific models. Apparently, the waves can only be explained using quantum mechanics, which is quite amazing. In a 3 week period alone, satellites spotted a small number of them in the southern atlantic ocean.

It's bad news for the shipping industry, who might be forced to re-assess all their ship designs in the future in order to account for these monsters. Waves such as this are quite capable of breaking a large ship in two, or punching holes in them from one side to the other.

Anyone else see it?