Do We Really Need the Moon? - BBC Documentary 2011

The moon is such a familiar presence in the sky that most of us take it for granted. But what if it wasn't where it is now? How would that affect life on earth?

Space scientist and lunar fanatic Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock explores our intimate relationship with the moon. Besides orchestrating the tides, the moon dictates the length of a day, the rhythm of the seasons and the very stability of our planet.

Yet the moon is always on the move. In the past it was closer to the Earth and in the future it'll be farther away. That it is now perfectly placed to sustain life is pure luck, a cosmic coincidence. Using computer graphics to summon up great tides and set the Earth spinning on its side, Aderin-Pocock implores us to look at the moon afresh: to see it not as an inert rock, but as a key player in the story of our planet, past, present and future.

Copyright by BBC © 2012. No copyright infringement intended. Purely for educational purposes

The Mars Underground [HD]

A very well-crafted documentary with excellent special effects and awesome musical score that outline a basic, affordable and realistically plausible plan for the human exploration of the red planet in the very near future -- as few as just 10 years away (if it can be funded). It shows Dr. Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer and president of The Mars Society, for the visionary and futurist that he is. Mars, as a destination for our planet's various combined space agencies, is both an amazingly welcoming Earth-like world, as well as a cold, forbidding and distant challenge. Unlike our Moon, Mars will be the stepping stone to the rest of the universe, and will be the first real and sustainable off-world human colony. A great glimpse of our future as a spacefaring species.

 The Universe - "God and the Universe"

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have wondered who or what created the universe. Religion offers a spiritual answer, but do the latest discoveries in physics show evidence of a transcendent intelligence, or simply that the laws of physics by themselves could have led to the universe in which we live? This episode embarks on a mind-bending scientific search for God, asking physicists and theologians if the seemingly miraculous way the universe has been calibrated to support life is evidence of a creator...whether string theory will eventually be able to rule out the existence of God...why Stephen Hawking says the universe could have been created spontaneously...and how an advanced civilization in another universe could have conceivably created our own.

Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything

Physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi presents a controversial new model of the universe that -- just maybe -- answers all the big questions. If nothing else, it's the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you've ever seen.

Bermuda Triangle Exposed (HQ)

It s called the Bermuda Triangle.

the most deadly and unexplained marine graveyard on Earth. It spans from Bermuda to Miami to Puerto Rico and from 28000 feet below the surface of the sea to 28000 feet into the sky. For decades it has held us spellbound as it defies explanation.

Some 2000 boats and 75 planes have disappeared without a trace. Bermuda Triangle Exposed will explore the Triangle in an entirely new way. We will voyage not only through its three dimensions of space exploring what makes it unique but through its history as well. As we peel back each layer of the Triangle s natural features ,we ll connect individual experiences in the area to reveal the links that tie the mystery together.

The Universe - Science Fiction, Science Fact - History Channel

In the beginning, there was darkness, and then, bang—giving birth to an endless, expanding existence of time, space and matter. Now, see further than we've ever imagined, beyond the limits of our existence, in a place we call The Universe.

A look at fantastic technology concepts, once mocked by physicists, that could be just over the horizon, such as teleportation, anti-gravity, and breaking the light speed barrier. Once only achieved by Hollywood, these concepts are now gaining serious attention within the scientific community.

What We Still Don't Know: "Are We Real?"

There is a fundamental chasm in our understanding of ourselves, the universe, and everything. To solve this, Sir Martin takes us on a mind-boggling journey through multiple universes to post-biological life. On the way we learn of the disturbing possibility that we could be the product of someone elses experiment.

Curiosity with Stephen Hawking, Did God Create 

the Universe?

Amazing documentary hosted by Stephen Hawking asking the key question so many people have wondered since the beginning of mankind, does a "god" or a "celestial dictator" exist?? Stephen Hawking disects the science of the universe in answering this very fundamental question.
Follow-up lecture by Lawrence Krauss entitled "The Universe From Nothing" - you will all enjoy it very much as it will provide you a beautiful scientific explanation on how the universe came into fruition spontaneously.

Cosmic Energy: Cold Sparks to Black Holes

What's the hottest place in the universe? What's it like inside a Black Hole? This video climbs the power scales of the universe, from the coldest and bleakest reaches of our galaxy on out to the hottest and 

most violent places known. How and where do Earth and humanity fit within the immensely powerful scales that define our universe? 

All across the immense reaches of time and space, energy is being exchanged, transferred, released, in a great cosmic pinball game we call our universe. 

To see how energy stitches the cosmos together, and how we fit within it, we now journey through the cosmic power scales of the universe, from atoms nearly frozen to stillness. To Earth's largest explosions. From stars colliding, exploding, to distant centers of power so strange, and violent, they challenge our imaginations. 

Today, energy is very much on our minds, as we search for ways to power our civilization and serve the needs of our citizens. But what is energy? Where does it come from? And where do we stand within the great power streams that shape time and space? 

Energy comes from a Greek word for activity or working. In physics, it's simply the property or the state of anything in our universe that allows it to do work. Whether it's thermal, kinetic, electro-magnetic, chemical, or gravitational. 

The 19th century German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz found that all forms of energy are equivalent, that one form can be transformed into any other. The laws of physics say that in a closed system - such as our universe - energy is conserved. It may be converted, concentrated, or dissipated, but it's never lost.

Humans today generate about two and a half trillion watts of electrical power. How does that stack up to the power generated by planet Earth? Deep inside our planet, the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium generates 44 trillion watts of power. As this heat rises to the surface, it drives the movement of Earth's crustal plates, and powers volcanoes. 

Remarkably, that's just a fraction of the energy released by a large hurricane in the form of rain. At the storm's peak, it can rise to 600 trillion watts. A hurricane draws upon solar heat collected in tropical oceans in the summer. You have to jump another power of ten to reach the estimated total heat flowing through Earth's atmosphere and oceans from the equator to the poles, and another two to get the power received by the Earth from the sun, at 174 quadrillion watts. 

Believe it or not, there's one human technology that has exceeded this level. The AN602 hydrogen bomb was detonated by the Soviet Union on October 30, 1961. It unleashed some 1400 times the combined power of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs. With a blast yield of up to 57,000 tons of TNT, it generated 5.3 trillion trillion watts, if only for a tiny fraction of a second. That's 5.3 Yottawatts, a term that will come in handy as we now begin to ascend the power scales of the universe. 

To Nikolai Kardashev, a Level 2 civilization would achieve a constant energy output 80 times higher than the Russian superbomb. That's equivalent to the total luminosity of our sun, a medium-sized star that emits 375 yottawatts. However, in the grand scheme of things, our sun is but a cold spark in a hot universe. Look up into Southern skies and you'll see the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. 

Deep within is the brightest star yet discovered. R136a1 is 10 million times brighter than the sun. Now if that star happened to go supernova, at its peak, it would blast out photons with a luminosity of around 500 billion yottawatts. To advance to a level three civilization, you have to marshal the power of an entire galaxy. The Milky Way, with about two hundred billion stars, has an estimated total luminosity of 3 trillion yottawatts, a three followed by 36 zeros. 

To boldly go beyond Level 3, a civilization would need to marshal the power of a quasar. A quasar is about a thousand times brighter than our galaxy. Here is where cosmic power production enters a whole new realm, based on the physics of extreme gravity. It was Isaac Newton who first defined gravity as the force that pulls the apple down, and holds the earth in orbit around the sun. Albert Einstein redefined it in his famous General Theory of Relativity. 

Gravity isn't simply the attraction of objects like stars and planets, he said, but a distortion of space and time, what he called space-time. If space-time is like a fabric, he said, gravity is the warping of this fabric by a massive object like a star. A planet orbits a star when it's caught in this warped space, like a ball spinning around a roulette wheel.

MARS [NEW!!!] Constellation : Manned Mission

Nasa HD Constellation Earth Moon Mars

'The God Particle': The Higgs Boson

Monster of the Milky Way [Full - HD 720p]

Astronomers are closing in on the proof they've sought for years that one of the most destructive objects in the universe—a supermassive black hole—lurks at the center of our own galaxy. Could it flare up and consume our entire galactic neighborhood? Join NOVA on a mind-bending investigation into one of the most bizarre corners of cosmological science: black hole research. From event horizon to singularity, the elusive secrets of supermassive black holes are revealed through stunning computer-generated imagery, including an extraordinary simulation of what it might look like to fall into the belly of such an all-devouring beast.

Crashing into the Moon

This is a full-HD update of our first "Cosmic Journeys" episode. There was a time when only government agencies had the ability to blast rockets into space, or send missions to worlds beyond our own. These days, countries around the world are preparing to send missions to the Moon. They are joined by a rash of private ventures.

Their interest goes beyond exploration. They see a chance to make money, by supplying launch or human transport services, including tourism. Some hope to begin exploiting space resources like energy, or rare minerals.

Over 30 private robotics teams are now vying for the 30 million dollar Google Lunar X-Prize, a contest designed to spur the building and launching of rovers equipped to explore the lunar surface.

It was inspired by the Orteig prize that sent Charles Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic Ocean more than 80 years ago. That feat helped launch the civil aviation industry. The sponsors of this prize hope it will unleash the entrepreneurial spirit into space.

To many, lunar exploration is the first step in fulfilling one of the great promises of the space age: to send humans to the moon and beyond to permanently live and work in space.

Preparations for that day are taking place right now aboard the international space station, where astronauts are developing a whole new way of living. To stay healthy, for example, they are working out routines for exercise and nutrition to keep muscles and bones from weakening and thinning in zero gravity.

Just as important, they are developing technologies that ensure clean air and water, shelter from solar radiation, and flexible space suits to work and explore in hostile environments like the moon.

Our fascination with the moon, Earth's traveling companion, goes back to the dawn of humankind. Its true nature began to come into focus four centuries ago. Galileo Galilei had heard of an instrument built by Dutch opticians that was capable of "seeing faraway things as though nearby."

In many ways the first modern scientist, Galileo saw this new instrument as a tool to help settle a long standing question. What was the nature of the heavens, and how did the world of men fit within it? To some philosophers, the moon was a perfect, crystalline sphere of divine substance, free of Earth's imperfections.

Galileo, with his telescope, saw a more familiar reality. He noted mountains and valleys on the moon, features like those of Earth.

Birth of the Moon

The latest episode of Cosmic Journeys, enjoy in full HD 1080p. Scientists have been reconstructing the history of the moon by scouring its surface, mapping its mountains and craters, and probing its interior. What are they learning about our own planet's beginnings?Decades ago, we sent astronauts to the moon as a symbol of confidence in the face of the great cold war struggle. Landing on the moon was a giant leap for mankind. But it's what the astronauts picked up from the lunar surface that may turn out to be Apollo's greatest legacy.When the astronauts of Apollo stepped out of their landing craft, they entered a world draped in fine sticky dust, strewn with rocks, and pocked with craters. They walked and rambled about, picking up rocks that they packed for the return flight.Back in earth-bound labs, scientists went to work probing the rocks for clues to one of the most vexing questions in all of science. Where did the moon come from? The answer promised to shed light on an even grander question. Where did Earth come from? And how did it evolve into the planet we know today?The nature of the moon began to come into focus four centuries ago. Galileo Galilei had heard of an instrument built by Dutch opticians capable of "seeing faraway things as though nearby." Galileo, in many ways the first modern scientist, saw this new instrument as a tool to help settle a long standing question.What was the nature of the heavens, and how did the world of men fit within it?To some philosophers, the moon was a perfect, crystalline sphere of divine substance, free of Earth's imperfections. Galileo, with his telescope, saw a more familiar reality. He noted mountains and valleys on the moon, features like those of Earth.The astronauts of Apollo lifted off on a series of missions to get a close up look at the moon and perhaps settle the debate. Because there's no atmosphere there, the astronauts entered landscapes that are nearly frozen in time. They could scour the lunar surface for evidence of events going back almost to the time of its birth.Indeed, eons of impacts had opened up the Moon's interior, leaving a wealth of information strewn about their landing sites. Scientists had already noticed that some large old craters were surrounded by concentric rings. You can see one of the most pronounced examples in this image of the Mare Orientale, captured recently by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO. The colors show differences in elevation.The old view was that the impact had melted the rock below. A newer view held that the impactor had actually splashed down on a molten surface. That gave rise to the radical notion that, early in its history, the moon's surface was covered in a vast ocean of magma.When the astronauts arrived, they found relatively light rocks known as anorthosites. Their presence suggested that heavier material had sunk toward the moon's interior, forcing lighter material to the surface.The rocks they brought back were found to be strikingly similar to those on Earth, in part because they share forms of oxygen, called isotopes, that scientists regard as "blood types" for solar system bodies. Then there was this. The moon appeared to be completely, utterly, dry, with no evidence that water was ever present on its surface.

Mysteries of a Dark Universe

DARK ENERGY in Full HD 1080p. Cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, has been turned on its head by a stunning discovery that the universe is flying apart in all directions at an ever-increasing rate.Is the universe bursting at the seams? Or is nature somehow fooling us?The astronomers whose data revealed this accelerating universe have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
And yet, since 1998, when the discovery was first announced, scientists have struggled to come to grips with a mysterious presence that now appears to control the future of the cosmos: dark energy.On remote mountaintops around the world, major astronomical centers hum along, with state of the art digital sensors, computers, air conditioning, infrastructure, and motors to turn the giant telescopes.Deep in Chile's Atacama desert, the Paranal Observatory is an astronomical Mecca.This facility draws two megawatts of power, enough for around two thousand homes.What astronomers get for all this is photons, tiny mass-less particles of light. They stream in from across time and space by the trillions from nearby sources, down to one or two per second from objects at the edge of the visible universe.
In this age of precision astronomy, observers have been studying the properties of these particles, to find clues to how stars live and die, how galaxies form, how black holes grow, and more.But for all we've learned, we are finding out just how much still eludes our grasp, how short our efforts to understand the workings of the universe still fall.

A hundred years ago, most astronomers believed the universe consisted of a grand disk, the Milky Way. They saw stars, like our own sun, moving around it amid giant regions of dust and luminous gas.The overall size and shape of this "island universe" appeared static and unchanging.That view posed a challenge to Albert Einstein, who sought to explore the role that gravity, a dynamic force, plays in the universe as a whole.There is a now legendary story in which Einstein tried to show why the gravity of all the stars and gas out there didn't simply cause the universe to collapse into a heap.He reasoned that there must be some repulsive force that countered gravity and held the Universe up.He called this force the "cosmological constant." Represented in his equations by the Greek letter Lambda, it's often referred to as a fudge factor.In 1916, the idea seemed reasonable. The Dutch physicist Willem de Sitter solved Einstein's equations with a cosmological constant, lending support to the idea of a static universe.Now enter the American astronomer, Vesto Slipher.Working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, he examined a series of fuzzy patches in the sky called spiral nebulae, what we know as galaxies. He found that their light was slightly shifted in color.It's similar to the way a siren distorts, as an ambulance races past us.If an object is moving toward Earth, the wavelength of its light is compressed, making it bluer. If it's moving away, the light gets stretched out, making it redder.12 of the 15 nebulae that Slipher examined were red-shifted, a sign they are racing away from us.

Edwin Hubble, a young astronomer, went in for a closer look. Using the giant new Hooker telescope in Southern California, he scoured the nebulae for a type of pulsating star, called a Cepheid. The rate at which their light rises and falls is an indicator of their intrinsic brightness.By measuring their apparent brightness, Hubble could calculate the distance to their host galaxies.Combining distances with redshifts, he found that the farther away these spirals are, the faster they are moving away from us. This relationship, called the Hubble Constant, showed that the universe is not static, but expanding.Einstein acknowledged the breakthrough, and admitted that his famous fudge factor was the greatest blunder of his career.

The Asteroid that Flattened Mars

In 1080p. Did Mars long ago develop far enough for life to arise? If so, does anything still live within Mars' dusty plains, beneath its ice caps, or somewhere underground?

In 1964 the Mariner Four spacecraft flew by Mars and got a good look. What it saw looked more like the Moon than the Earth. Then, in the mid-1970's, two lander-orbiter robot teams, named Viking, went in for an even closer look. The landers tested the soil for the chemical residues of life. All the evidence from Viking told us: Mars is dead. And extremely harsh.

The mission recorded Martian surface temperatures from -17 degrees Celsius down to -107. We now know it can get even colder than that at the poles. The atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, with only traces of oxygen. And it's extremely thin, with less than one percent the surface pressure of Earth's atmosphere.

And it's bone dry. In fact, the Sahara Desert is a rainforest compared to Mars, where water vapor is a trace gas in the atmosphere. On Earth, impact craters erode over time from wind and water... and even volcanic activity. On Mars, they can linger for billions of years.

Earth's surface is shaped and reshaped by the horizontal movement of plates that make up its crust driven by heat welling up from the planet's hot interior. At half the width and only 11% the mass of Earth, Mars doesn't generate enough heat to support wide-scale plate tectonics.

Nor does it have the gravity to hold a thick atmosphere needed to store enough heat at the surface to allow liquid water to flow. Nonetheless, some areas that looked to Viking-era scientists like craters and volcanic areas, were later shown to be riverbeds, lake bottoms, and ocean shorelines.

If water once flowed on Mars' surface, where did it all go?

This was the scene at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in 2004. The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity had just bounced down on the Red Planet. When the excitement died down, the rovers were set off on one of the most remarkable journeys in the history of planetary exploration. Missions like this could one day pave the way for a day when we'll view images from a real astronaut's camera.

Opportunity had come to rest in a small crater near the equator, at a spot called Meridiani Planum. Here, in plain view, on a nearby crater wall, its camera revealed exposed bedrock, the first ever seen on Mars. Not far away, the rover found layered rocks on the face of a cliff. On Earth, they typically form as sedimentary layers at the bottom of oceans.

And at every turn, Opportunity rolled across tiny, smooth, round pellets. They became known as "blueberries" because they appeared purplish-brown against Mars' rust-colored surface. Initially thought to be volcanic in origin, they turned out to be iron-rich spherules of the type that form within cavities in the mud at the bottom of an ocean.

Drilling into rocks, the rover inserted a spectrometer to read the mineral content. The readings showed significant amounts of sulfate salt, a tracer for standing water. That wasn't all. Spirit's broken wheel, dragging behind it, exposed soils saturated in salt.

Clearly there once was water on Mars' surface, but how long ago? And, if there is anything left, where would you find it? One possible answer: the North Pole. From orbit, this region seemed to be covered in frozen CO2 - what we call dry ice. But was there water ice below the surface?

Enter Phoenix, a lander that touched down near the North Pole in early 2008. Radar readings from orbit, taken by the Mars Express mission, hinted at the presence of ice just below the surface.

The Phoenix lander's descent thrusters blew away the top layer of soil, allowing its camera to snap pictures of what looked like ice. Scientists instructed the robot to conduct a simple experiment: reach out and dig a trench, then watch what happens.

As expected, clumps of white stuff appeared. A couple of days later, it was gone. Vaporized. That means it can't be salt or frozen CO2, which is stable in the cold dry temperatures of the Martian pole. So it had to be water, the first ever directly seen on Mars.

There are indications that the North Pole was actually warm enough in the recent past for water ice to become liquid. The Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, or MRO, used radar pulses to peer beneath the surface of the ice cap. These data reveal that the ice, just over a mile thick, formed in a succession of layers as the climate alternated between warm and cold.

Our planet avoids mood swings like this in part because its spin is stabilized by a massive moon. Mars' spin is not, so it can really wobble, with the pole tilting toward the sun for long periods. New observations by the MRO spacecraft show that these wobbles can lead to dramatic releases of CO2, and warming periods due to an increase in the greenhouse effect.

ScienceCasts: Meteor Smoke Makes Strange Clouds

A key ingredient of Earth's strangest clouds does not come from Earth. New data from NASA's AIM spacecraft proves that "meteor smoke" is essential to the formation of noctilucent clouds.

Electromagnetic Spectrum Basics

Electromagnetism is all around us in world in which we live. 


We rely on electromagnetic waves to heat our food, carry cell phone calls, and even bring music to the radios in our cars. NASA uses this energy to study vegetation on Earth, monitor solar eruptions on the Sun and detect elements on another planet.


Here's a short video to illustrate the basics.


Images courtesy of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)