Tag: Doctor Who

A New Season of Doctor Who, and a Very New Doctor

Did you see it? Did you catch the season premier of Doctor Who? The first episode of the 2018-2019 season was simultaneously broadcast by the BBC around the world on Sunday October 7th at 1845 Hrs UTC time, that’s 1:45PM Eastern Daylight Time for me.

Doctor Who on the BBC (Credit: BBC)

Now every Doctor Who fan knows that the character of the Doctor is an alien scientist who travels throughout time and space in his Tardis (which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space). The Tardis is a Time / Space machine that looks like a policeman’s box and is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!

The Tardis (Credit: All Posters)

Being an alien whenever the Doctor is badly wounded he doesn’t die but rather he regenerates. This regeneration has allowed the show to use twelve different actors in the role, and allowed Doctor Who to be the only scripted, dramatic show to last now for 55 years.

The first episode was broadcast way back on November 23, 1963! The original Doctor was portrayed by William Hartnell as an eccentric old man but over the years the Doctor has become younger and more athletic in order to better fit into his role as a heroic protagonist (and wouldn’t we all like to be able to do that).

The First Twelve Doctors (Credit: PPC Wiki)

This year’s season premier also brought a new Doctor, and the big news is that lucky number 13 is a woman, the actress Jodie Whittaker. Judging by the first episode she’s gonna be a good one, she seemed to fit right into the essential personality of the Doctor while already showing something of where she wants to take the role.

Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Number 13 (Credit: RTE)

You see, like every fictional hero The Doctor fights for justice and equality while defending the weak. Unlike most good guys however, The Doctor fights exclusively with his, and now her brains. This is the essential Doctor, the inner core values they all share. Around that core each actor playing the Doctor must fashion their own character, and in that way the show reincarnates itself with every new incarnation of The Doctor.

As you can probably tell, Doctor Who is the hero of the nerds of the world, their Superman or Rambo, or I suppose I should say our Superman or Rambo. Like Odysseus or Sherlock Holmes or Mister Spock the Doctor wins by brains not brawn, and in my opinion at least that is our best, our only hope.

This season’s premier also saw the introduction of a new species of enemy for the Doctor. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot but while the creature was sufficiently menacing it seemed a little bit too much of a takeoff on the alien from the ‘Predator’ series of movies. We only get to see a single bad alien however so maybe if the producers decide to use the species again they’ll flesh them out a bit.

Anyway, we have a new season of Doctor Who to look forward to, and a brand new Doctor. Man or Woman it really makes no difference, and maybe shows like Doctor Who are what we all need in order to make us realize that the differences between us are insignificant compared to all of the things we share.

NASA Scientists Speculate on Pre-Human Intelligent Life on Earth.

“Nor is it to be thought, that man is either oldest or the last of Earth’s masters.” That is a quote from the story ‘The Dunwich Horror” by H.P. Lovecraft. Several of Lovecraft’s stories deal with the idea that millions of years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs or even earlier, there were intelligent creatures living here on Earth the remains of whose existence the passage of time has practically erased. The image below shows Lovecraft’s ‘The great race of Yith’ who lived in the area we call Australia during the Jurassic period, at least in the story ‘The Shadow out of Time’ that is.

The Great Race of Yith (Credit: Astounding)

Could that be true? Human history only goes back some 6 thousand years but the Earth is over 4 billion years old. If a pre-human species had built a civilization 100 million years ago how would we know? Would there be any traces remaining that we could find as evidence?

Two scientists, Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adam Frank of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rochester University are trying to answer those questions. Together they’ve written a paper ‘The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geologic record.’ The Silurians by the way are from another science fiction franchise. Back in the 1970s the British TV series Doctor Who ran a series of episodes where the Doctor encounters an ancient race of intelligent lizards who have been in hibernation since the days of the dinosaurs but are now waking up! The image below shows one of the silurians from Doctor Who.

Silurians in Doctor Who (Credit: Doctor Who, BBC)

O’k so the whole idea is inspired by science fiction but so what, so have airplanes and submarines. Science fiction has predicted many things that turned out to be true so lets take a good look at the Silurian Hypothesis by considering how a future intelligent species might discover evidence of our existence!

Now at first you might think that the biggest things humanity has built would survive the best. The pyramids have lasted now for 4 thousand years and they are still in reasonably good shape. But how recognizable will they be in 4 million years, that’s a thousand times their present age. That’s lot of erosion and remember what’s left will just be a pile of limestone, no different than the bedrock its sitting on!

Great Pyramid of Kheops (Credit: Wikipedia)

O’k then what about something like the Golden Gate Bridge. Iron is stronger than limestone and you could never mistake a something like a bridge for a natural formation. That’s true, iron doesn’t erode, it rusts, faster than stone erodes and then it falls to pieces that can be dispersed by wind or water and just become a stray outcrop of iron ore.

Golden Gate Bridge (Credit: Bay City Guide)

Then let’s think bigger, how about entire cities like New York or Mumbai, in fact with sea level rise due to global warming both of those cities may soon be submerged into river deltas that would bury them in new rock formations. Couldn’t the fossil remains of New York City be found 10 million years from now?

Yes, it could, but you have to remember that New York City, indeed our entire industrialized society is only a little over 300 years old and that’s a very, very thin layer in the geologic record (the latest estimate for sediment deposition in the oceans is 1cm of thickness per 1000 years). Worse, our entire urban landscape today is only about 1% of the Earth’s total surface area making the odds of future, non-human geologists finding extensive evidence of our existence very low.

So do Schmidt and Frank think that there are any markers of our existence will survive for millions of years. Yes, but they’re not exactly flattering. For example, one is plastic. All of those bottles, cups and containers we just throw away are forming an unmistakable layer of artificial polyethylene and polypropylene covering much of the globe, making it both easier to spot and identify as a product of industrial civilization. The image below shows the plastic trash island in the Pacific Ocean, a huge amount artificial material that is now larger than any city.

Great Pacific Trash Heap (Credit: Sputnik International)

Other indicators that Schmidt and Frank consider are subtler. The carbon deposited by our burning of fossil fuels will have an unnatural ratio of the isotopes C13 to C12 and similar unnatural ratios will occur to the elements strontium (Sr87 to Sr86) and osmium (Os187 to Os188). It is humbling indeed to think that for all of our importance, as we believe, if we were to destroy ourselves today (Nuclear War or Global Warming or etc) a few million years from now there would be little if anything remaining to prove that we had ever existed!

So perhaps we are not the first intelligent creatures to live on Earth, perhaps one day we will find the evidence to prove this. H. P. Lovecraft and Doctor Who have open minds, maybe we should as well!