"What We Still Don't Know"

is a science series that was broadcast around the end of last year on Channel 4 in Britain. It asks three really basic but hard questions: Are we alone? Why are we here? Are we real? (three programs, one question each)

The title appears overly clichéd (I still know what you did last summer, anybody?) but that doesn't affect the quality of it, though again they could do better without the ill-designed official web pages on Channel 4. They ought to start hiring professionals. Wouldn't you think they could have selected a more decent picture?

This, for example, would be a better-sounding title: Chart the Uncharted: Cosmobiology Incognita. Please ask me before borrowing this title from Utoddpia.

Martin Rees is the host. Direct quote from him, "we are literally the ashes of long-dead star."

Sir Martin John Rees (born June 23, 1942) has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2004. Educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied in the United States before taking a professorship at Sussex University. Returning to Cambridge, he held the post of Plumian Professor until 1991 and was director of the Institute of Astronomy there.

Rees won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1987. He was knighted in 1992 and won the Bruce Medal in 1993. He was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society in 2004. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious Crafoord Prize along with James Gunn and James Peebles.

Download the three videos here, torrent file.

Edit: Am I not undersanding what they're talking about, or are they really sometimes just not the geniuses they appear to be? In the third program the cosmologists/physicists are having a tough time disproving the need of a superior being/creator to logically explain things. They keep saying that if any of the values or numbers in the physical world changes 0.0000000000000000000000000001% we couldn't have evolved. Since when did we decide we'd mess up the order of things? The universe obviously precedes us, a living thing. WE adopt to the environment, NOT the other way around. If a different set of numbers and values were given, living things simply take up different sizes and shapes to survive in it.

Hmm. We might just be in a simulation called Life.