Origins Mini-Series Airs Tonight

SeaDour writes "The much-anticipated NOVA mini-series Origins begins tonight on PBS (check local listings for time). Hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, the ambitious show plans to journey all the way to the Big Bang and back again, "blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself." MSNBC has an interesting write-up on the show that's been four years in the making."

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[nacturation]

I just finished reading Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything which covers just about the exact same topics. It starts out with the creation of the universe, and works itself forward in the timeline, covering formation of the planet, early life, cambrian explosion, etc. until it ends up with the advent of homo sapien. Not a bad read.

Re:Should be a good night of television

[Monkelectric]

The biggest proof that macro evolution is possible, is a research field I'm involved in called Genetic Programming. Using a system that is directly analagous to biological evolution, computers are directed to discover solutions to problems. Wanna know the SCARY thing? It works like crazy. Here's a quote:

"There are now 36 instances where genetic programming has automatically produced a result that is competitive with human performance, including 15 instances where genetic programming has created an entity that either infringes or duplicates the functionality of a previously patented 20th-century invention, 6 instances where genetic programming has done the same with respect to a 21st-centry invention, and 2 instances where genetic programming has created a patentable new invention.".

Now the computational power of these computers is faily meager. I think the largest cluster applied so far has been 1000 pentium 350's. The "computational" power of a population of species is massive. If quantum computers can be developed, and genetic programming algorithms can be written in such a way that takes advantadge of the properties of quantum machines, we *really* will be entering a new era in humanity (however there is no indication this is possible or not possible, I am just speculating)