Cosmos A Spacetime Odyssey

Episode 9 Summary

We’ll travel to the Earth of the Carboniferous Epoch of hundreds of millions of years ago, where an oxygen overdose made it possible for dragonflies to grow two-foot wingspans and for plants to soar a hundred feet high. Something new, called “lignin,” caused a biological revolution: trees. Lignin also laid a trap for beings hundreds of millions of years in the future – us.

The book of geological time may be read in the Joggins Cliffs of Nova Scotia. We will thumb through its “layer cake” pages and decipher its history of the world.

What kind of planet has a purple ocean and a green sky? Ours did, a quarter of a billion years ago. The great ocean that once flourished in the middle of Texas comes back to life so that we will never be able to look at a desert landscape again without imagining what it once must have been.

Alfred Wegener’s life provides one of the great cautionary tales of what happens when the scientific community fails to openly evaluate new ideas. Wegener solved one of the central mysteries of geology, but died the laughingstock of his field. It wasn't until 50 years later that Marie Tharp came along and proved him right. And, Tharp herself had to battle another kind of prejudice, long after she discovered the single largest feature on the face of the Earth.

We’ll board the Ship of the Imagination to dive into the ocean to explore the largest submarine mountain range. We’ll plunge into its deepest canyons to meet life that knows nothing of the Sun.

And we’ll venture deeper still, to the Earth’s mantle.

The past is another planet — many, actually — and we will visit several of them and ride the Ship of the Imagination to a vision of the Earth a quarter of a billion years into the future.