Per Ardua Ad Astra

Been struggling really hard to keep afloat with all the incessant bombardment of work, but I’m getting addicted to youtube.com thanks to the wonderful speeds of broadband in campus. Oh whattaheck, I’ve already screwed up my first test, so don’t carela.

This one’s for the documentary lovers out there. If you want to get freaked out by real life threats to humanity, watch this:

What’s the best part about this? You don’t need to spend 8 bucks to go to the movies and watch a senseless horror movie. : P To assuage your fears, most of the events explored here has negligible probabilities of occurring so you shouldn’t lose any sleep over this. That is, with the notable exception of global warming and climate change.

It basically covers some of the potential Extinction Level Events (10 in total in this documentary) that we may face in the future, such as supervolcanoes, global warming, gamma-ray bursts to the classic asteroid impact.

The documentary features notable experts (more like celebrities) in their respective fields such as Dr. James E. Hansen (NASA lead climate scientist who complained of government interference in science), Professor Michio Kaku (theoretical physicist whose books are freaking expensive!), Dr. Seth Shostak (SETI Institute Senior Astronomer who regularly writes for SPACE.com), Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium who was voted the "sexiest astrophysicist alive" by People Magazine in 2000), Al Gore (come on, you guys should know him!) and many many more. In short, it’s kind of a crash course if you ever need to write about the environment and astrophysical events.

It’s divided into 13 unequal parts (don’t quite understand why they need so many partitions) so it’s going to be a bit messy trying to watch it all. Plus, it’s not continuous for some reason but I think it covered the major parts. If you want to continue watching, go here and find the rest of the documentary in the sidebar here. Have fun!

P.S. On the subject of global warming, Leonardo DiCaprio is among the big Hollywood stars who actively campaigns on environment-related issues. There is a Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and their site features a couple of videos featuring Leonardo DiCaprio narrating on environmental issues (’Global Warming‘ and ‘Water Planet‘). Now who says that environmental activism is only for queers and geeks? Everybody can play a part! And have I mentioned Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.