Living Worlds
Senior Producer
California Academy of Sciences
Visualization Studio
Fulldome Film 2021
Narrated by Daveed Diggs
What forms might life take in the Solar System and beyond? In the Academy’s newest original planetarium show, see how a deeper understanding of Earth might help us locate other living worlds, light years away.
On earth, life exists in extreme environments, such as inside rocks high in the Atacama desert, exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation. The interior of such a rock can be home to a tiny, hospitable “nanoclimate“ teeming with microbial life. | California Academy of Sciences
Planetary geologists design rovers to operate autonomously on Mars, achieving specific scientific objectives. Chile’s Atacama desert provides ideal conditions to test these designs on Earth. | NASA / Carnegie Mellon University / California Academy of Sciences
More than 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Era, the first forests took root on land. They transformed rock into soil and helped create the world we know today. | California Academy of Sciences
NASA devises numerous plans for how to get instruments to the martian surface. One of those is the Small High Impact Energy Landing Device (SHIELD) concept, which would provide a relatively inexpensive way to deliver rugged technology that can survive a rapid descent onto the Red Planet. | NASA / JPL / California Academy of Sciences
The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) is designed to navigate down the deep crevasses of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which shows signs of organic chemistry emerging from vents near its south pole. | NASA / JPL / California Academy of Sciences
In this view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, you can easily spot the geysers erupting from around its south pole. When the Cassini spacecraft passed through these jets, it detected organic compounds that suggest that the building blocks of life exist in the moon’s subsurface ocean. | Paul Schenk / Lunar and Planetary Institute / California Academy of Sciences
More than 2 billion years ago, Earth was plunged into a deep freeze, and scientists suspect microbes were responsible. Among other things, tiny photosynthetic organisms could have produced enough oxygen to convert the abundant atmospheric methane into carbon dioxide and water, bringing below-zero temperatures to much of the planet. | California Academy of Sciences
Spotting a dim planet around its bright parent star is an especially tricky technical challenge. One proposed solution is to deploy a giant, specially-shaped “starshade” that would block the light of the star, revealing any planets in orbit around it. | Tim Pyle, Juan Vargas / Caltech / IPAC / California Academy of Sciences
About the production…