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[Hyndis]

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/inside-planet-earth/

Very interesting documentary for what happens when you dig too deep. Haven't finished watching it yet, but it is very awesome so far. Great visuals too! 


To the core!

Urist McMiner has died in the heat.

[Creamcorn]

This kind of destroys the underground. Unless of course there are two layers to the worlds of DF.

[Sir Finkus]

Blah, I can barely watching shows on geology anymore because they always bring up doomsday scenarios that we are "overdue" for.  I think I counted 3 or 4 in this one alone.  I love how they played out that "the earth is gonna cool and everyone is going to die" bit until the last moment when they mention that it won't happen for billions of years.

[Doombell]

Blah, I can barely watching shows on geology anymore...

Scratch the geology part. Just about every single documentary on anything I see these days requires a doomsday scenario.
Saw one about bacteria in comet dust. The scientists were all excited over the possibility of new, foreign life systems and the possible source of life on Earth, and one seemed to even be a little dissatisfied with a project to collect comet dust, as the method would not permit anything living to survive.
Then the documentary makers took over and it was suddenly IMMINENT DOOMSDAY, where we would ALL DIE FROM ALIEN SUPER-DISEASES, especially since NASA IS BRINGING THE MURDEROUS SUPER-BACTERIA TO EARTH!
It just struck me as unusually stupid, as the leading scientist explained they had only found traces of cell-like structures so far. The only excuse I can think of is that they filmed the interviews very late in production. And it's still a poor one.

[Il Palazzo]

Blah, I can barely watching shows on geology anymore...

Scratch the geology part. Just about every single documentary on anything I see these days requires a doomsday scenario.

The most notorious ones are those about black holes, though.

[Ieb]

What can you do, just like sex, panic sells.

Black holes and alien bacteria have one thing in common though, we can't do much about them if they happen. Or well, with bacteria we might be able to do something. Black holes, just like gamma-ray bursts, not so much.

This is some interesting stuff so far, although it doesn't really phase me regarding DF caverns and so on. It's a fantasy game afterall, it doesn't have to follow reality 100% accurately.

[Shrugging Khan]

Alien bacteria are probably not going to do a damn thing to us, since it takes a lot of evolution to have bacteria that can even infect us properly...and even then, killing the host is a disadvantageous side-effect at the most, since a happy living one provides longer-term sustenance than a dead one. So in all probability, it'd be either very harmless, or, for some freak reason, so aggressive it'll kill its hosts fast enough for the rest of humanity to keep a lot of distance.

And hell fuck all, that's a terrible documentary up there...unscientific doesn't even begin to describe it.

[Il Palazzo]

Black holes and alien bacteria have one thing in common though, we can't do much about them if they happen. Or well, with bacteria we might be able to do something. Black holes, just like gamma-ray bursts, not so much.

Re: Black holes, that's exactly the sort of shit the above mentioned programs try to feed us. A black hole is invisible, eats all on it's way, and is out to get us. One day, it can just swallow the Earth, and we won't even see it coming.
What a bunch of bullcrap.
The perturbation in planetary movement, caused by a massive body would've been noticed hundreds of years in advance. The closer it'd get to our system, the more accurate would the predictions of it's effect on all the planets would become.
The probability of it actually "hitting" any of the planets or the Sun is near zero, as it'd either start orbiting our star, or fly past like so many comets do.
On the other hand, it's possible that it'd cause enough perturbations in the orbital characteristics of Earth, that we could end up closer(bad) or farther(also bad) to the Sun. Or we could end up being launched out of the solar system on a voyage to nowhere.
Still, such outcomes would be predictable with enough of headstart to start thinking on how to save our sorry arses.

[Eugenitor]

Um. A black hole wouldn't orbit the Sun. The Sun would orbit the black hole.

[Shrugging Khan]

Not necessarily. If it's a *very* old one, it might have radiated most of its mass away already, and be lighter than the sun. Although I have no idea whether the universe is old enough for that to happen.

[Il Palazzo]

Um. A black hole wouldn't orbit the Sun. The Sun would orbit the black hole.

Technicaly, they would both orbit their common barycenter. But I see what you mean.

[Hyndis]

Not necessarily. If it's a *very* old one, it might have radiated most of its mass away already, and be lighter than the sun. Although I have no idea whether the universe is old enough for that to happen.

Black holes do "evaporate" due to Hawking radiation, and very tiny black holes are not dangerous at all. The LHC could very well start making black holes once they turn it up to max power but these microscopic black holes will be perfectly safe. Due to their tiny size, on the order of an atom, they're not going to last longer than a fraction of a second.

Its only the very huge black holes that can be dangerous. Unfortunately there is jack squat we can do about it. People just need to accept that we are the ants in the playground. If a giant steps on us, we go squish. It would be on the order of god saying "let there be darkness." Game over! Luckily the odds of a black hole eating the planet in your lifespan are pretty much negligable. Even if the Earth were headed straight at one for some reason there would be literally millions of years of warning. Its not like an active black hole is very subtle. The accretion disks are x-ray beacons.

[Hyndis]

Blah, I can barely watching shows on geology anymore...

Scratch the geology part. Just about every single documentary on anything I see these days requires a doomsday scenario.
Saw one about bacteria in comet dust. The scientists were all excited over the possibility of new, foreign life systems and the possible source of life on Earth, and one seemed to even be a little dissatisfied with a project to collect comet dust, as the method would not permit anything living to survive.
Then the documentary makers took over and it was suddenly IMMINENT DOOMSDAY, where we would ALL DIE FROM ALIEN SUPER-DISEASES, especially since NASA IS BRINGING THE MURDEROUS SUPER-BACTERIA TO EARTH!
It just struck me as unusually stupid, as the leading scientist explained they had only found traces of cell-like structures so far. The only excuse I can think of is that they filmed the interviews very late in production. And it's still a poor one.

I tend to be very picky about the documentaries I watch due to this. I guess I've been spoiled by real science, like Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I miss Carl Sagan.

Stephen Hawking is good too. He gets down to business and doesn't allow things to get sidetracked by sensationalism.

A lot of the stuff on the "History" Channel is pure and utter shit, sadly. Its not science. Its fantasy. One documentary I had to turn off in disgust. It was about nearby star systems. And in the first few minutes it did this:

"The only fuel able to send a ship to another star would be antimatter. Once the ship is constructed and fueled with antimatter our travelers would then take off..."

It would be more plausible to say a wizard did it. You don't just casually make many, many tons of antimatter. They just assume downright crazy stuff as if it were completely mundane, and then spent the rest of the show describing how a planet around another start might be like Pandora out of Avatar.

This sums up my reaction:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I then turned it off in disgust.

[ungulateman]

The only documentaries I really enjoy are nature ones - especially David Attenborough's.

*killer whale goes CHOMP!*

And yes, Carl Sagan was a brilliant writer. I miss him too.

[Eugenitor]

Remember, Stephen Hawking has radiation named after him and talks by typing with horribly neurologically damaged fingers. This makes him the world champion of not having time for media shit.

Yeah, History Channel gets clueless fast these days. The BBC's still mostly good, but gets trounced by the right Youtube channels. (Note: The *right* channels. Diamonds in the rough. I leave the art of finding them to you.)

And I can't believe I missed the part about comet proto-cells infecting Earth. Oh god LOL. That's like saying an naked, untrained goblin is a threat to legendary adamantine-clad axedwarves. Our life forms of all sizes have been brutally slaughtering and eating each other since the first amino acids started clumping. Earth bacteria would just have a dance party on their microscopic torn-apart corpses. Even if you injected them into a human, it'd be the same dance party with our T-cells as MC.