Blue Planet

This past month, I’ve been watching BBC’s Blue Planet and Blue Planet II. As the narrator David Attenborough reminds his viewers, we know more about the surface of the moon and possibly Mars than about the seabed on our own planet. I’m amazed by the diversity of aquatic life, but perhaps this should not be so surprising if life on Earth began and evolved first in the waters before venturing on to dry land. I was also amazed at how underwater filming technology had progressed by the sharpness of the images in Blue Planet II. It wasn’t just more of the same, it was spectacular.

 

Overall, I had the same feeling as when I watched Planet Earth and Planet Earth II. If I had encountered these documentaries earlier in my life, I might have become a biologist or an ecologist. And because I’ve also been reading The Optics of Life, it made me think about an interdisciplinary elective class I could put together on the interaction of life and matter – underwater! I don’t know what I’m thinking; I can’t even scuba-dive and going to the beach or into the ocean doesn’t hold any interest for me. But I do know about photons and electrons and the idiosyncracies of the chemical world.

 

Why have the deep seas and oceans remained mostly unexplored? I don’t know. The cost can’t be higher than for space exploration. There’s so much of interest that’s alive and kicking; and the Blue Planet documentaries highlight how life is stranger than fiction. I had some notion that many creatures are purposeful and intelligent, but seeing the intricate web of behaviors was astounding. I’m thankful to the patient camera operators who must have spent hour after hour getting footage that could be edited into an engaging story. Real life is stranger than fiction.

 

My favorite episode is “The Deep”, #2 on Blue Planet II. Given my interests in the chemical origins of life, it was cool to see the sharp images of life in hydrothermal vents. I’d seen some online videos and Blue Planet does show some of these, but the images in “The Deep” wowed me. I’m also happy that they had footage of Lost City, an example of alkaline hydrothermal vent with conditions that might have been suitable as the cradle of life. I’d known about methane bubbles from the ocean floor, but I found the footage especially striking. Wow!

 

I briefly lamented being a theorist rather than an experimentalist, although I know I’m well-suited to being a computational scientist rather than one who works in a wet lab or out in the field. Johnsen’s penultimate chapter in The Optics of Life reminded me that there’s no substitute for experience if you’re a field scientist. You might know gobs of theory but if you don’t have practical experience, your experiments and measurements could just as well turn out to be useless junk. As a theorist, I am good at some things, but I’m glad that I’m also surrounded by colleagues who have experimental expertise. I suppose I do have some practical experience as a chemistry instructor. I know where the tricky parts are and I do have an arsenal of approaches to help students understand the material. And I guess I’m satisfied with being an armchair viewer of the beauty of life in the oceans.