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When Will Time End?
It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time. How long it can survive depends on whether Stephen Hawking’s theory checks out. Special thanks to Ivan Bridgewater for use of footage.
Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet… as life changes and evolves from second to second.
And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average … way up from just 20 in the Stone Age.
Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives… indeed the life span of the human species… is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting.
It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time…
And that even it may be just a blip within the grand sweep of deep time.
Scholars debate whether time is a property of the universe… or a human invention.
What’s certain is that we use the ticking of all kinds of clocks… from the decay of radioactive elements to the oscillation of light beams… to chart and measure a changing universe… to understand how it works and what drives it.
Our own major reference for the passage of time is the 24-hour day… the time it takes the Earth to rotate once. Well, it’s actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds… approximately… if you’re judging by the stars, not the sun.
Earth acquired its spin during its birth, from the bombardment of rocks and dust that formed it.
But it’s gradually losing that rotation to drag from the moon’s gravity.
That’s why, in the time of the dinosaurs, a year was 370 days… and why we have to add a leap second to our clocks about every 18 months.
In a few hundred million years, we’ll gain a whole hour.
The day-night cycle is so reliable that it has come to regulate our internal chemistry.
The fading rays of the sun, picked up by the retinas in our eyes, set our so-called “circadian rhythms” in motion.
If I die Tonight
“No Justice!” “No Peace!” This rising chant from the streets escalated in answer to the seemingly endless incidents of police brutality throughout this great nation. Following the shooting of Amadou Diallo by 4 members of the NY City Police Department these chants rose from the streets by heartbroken and enraged voices. However, there are two sides to every story and the truth is often found where you least expect it. “If I Die Tonight” reflects on the lives and stories of those who survive on both sides of an impenetrable divide.
Last Living Dinosaur
Leading scientists use cutting-edge CGI to trace the extraordinary evolutionary path of the turkey, starting with one of the first dinosaurs.
Examined Life
This documentary puts philosophy on the streets. We meet some of today’s most influential thinkers: Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.
Inside the Living Body
* The human body is made up of around 100 trillion cells.
* The human brain contains 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) — about as many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy — and it can generate enough electricity to power a lightbulb for 24 hours.
* The heart pumps 100,000 times per day, sending 8 to 10 pints of blood through about 60,000 miles (96,560 kilometers) of blood vessels.
* A newborn baby’s skeleton has 300 parts. Gradually, these fuse together during childhood to form the 206 bones of an adult. By the time you are 25, this process is complete.
* We change our skin about every 4 weeks. Every minute, we shed as many as 30,000 dead skin cells.
* The human head has around 100,000 hairs. We lose 40 to 100 every day. Each follicle grows around 20 times in a lifetime.
* The combined growth of hair on your head and body totals 100 inches (254 centimeters) a day, making an incredible 7 miles (11 kilometers) of hair a year.
* We breathe an average of 700 million breaths over the course of an average lifetime of 70 years.
The Cove
In a sleepy lagoon off the coast of Japan lies a shocking secret that a few desperate men will stop at nothing to keep hidden from the world. In Taiji, Japan, former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry has come to set things right after a long search for redemption. In the 1960s, it was O’Barry who captured and trained the 5 dolphins who played the title character in the international television sensation “Flipper.” One fateful day, a heartbroken Barry came to realize that these deeply sensitive, highly intelligent and self-aware creatures must never be subjected to human captivity again. This mission has brought him to Taiji, a town that appears to be devoted to the wonders and mysteries of the sleek, playful dolphins and whales that swim off their coast. But in a remote, glistening cove, surrounded by barbed wire and “Keep Out” signs, lies a dark reality. It is here, under cover of night, that the fishermen of Taiji, driven by a multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry and an underhanded market for mercury-tainted dolphin meat, engage in an unseen hunt. The nature of what they do is so chilling and the consequences are so dangerous to human health that they will go to great lengths to halt anyone from seeing it.
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Time – Daytime
We humans seem to run to the beat of time, often without being aware of how this is the case or how our perception of it may differ from another person’s, from nature’s rhythms or from our own internal clock. In the first episode of the series, string theory pioneer Michio Kaku witnesses one of the most extraordinary feats of timing in nature on a remote Californian beach.
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The Private Life of Plants – Growing
This programme is about how plants gain their sustenance. Sunlight is one of the essential requirements if a seed is to germinate, and Attenborough highlights the cheese plant as an example whose young shoots head for the nearest tree trunk and then climb to the top of the forest canopy, developing its leaves en route. Using sunshine, air, water and a few minerals, the leaves are, in effect, the “factories” that produce food. However, some, such as the begonia, can thrive without much light.
To gain moisture, plants typically use their roots to probe underground. Trees pump water up pipes that run inside their trunks, and Attenborough observes that a sycamore can do this at the rate of 450 litres an hour — in total silence. Too much rainfall can clog up a leaf’s pores, and many have specially designed ‘gutters’ to cope with it. However, their biggest threat is from animals, and some require extreme methods of defence, such as spines, camouflage, or poison.
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