Karen says:

Wow, Phil – you look so … cheerful describing the destructive capability of a gamma ray burst!

Not just Phil, Seth Shostak and Michio Kaku looked positively cheerful, too. Well, Kaku, who I like a lot, is always the cheerful, telegenic physicist. The flip side is sounding dour or alarmist, which is better left to the more immediate doomsday scenarios such as how we are killing off species and raping the earth. I appreciated the lack of smiles there. Regrettably I fell asleep during the virus segment, so I’ll have to watch it again, but I hope some viewers thought, “Gamma ray bursts–yeah cool!” and do some online researching about them. Too, I liked the comment by Phil about aliens hurling a rock at us being a good way to cause general mayhem on our “mudball,” as Kaku calls Earth.

From a telegenic perspective, you did good.

Maksutov said:

The narration contained numerous scientific errors, such as, “Solar flares get released when the Sun gets overloaded with the magnetic energy it’s constantly burning.”

Mak, I especially liked that segment (my electromagnetic storm-desire post never posted here, though admittedly I sounded like I welcome another Canada scenario), but I don’t think that’s a way-off comment. In the interest of time information gets sliced and diced and sometimes oversimplified, but to quote from the April Sky & Telescope by solar physicist Carolus Schrijver who works on the TRACE mission:

We now understand these so-alled coronal loops as a consequence of the magnetic forces dominating the corona….Heating the corona is just one of the roles played by the electrical currents coursing through coronal loops. When the largest of these immense currents becomes unstable they cause solar flares…we are far from understanding how these solar flares release their energy…we do know that much, if not most, of a flare’s energy goes into generating large numbers of ions and electrons, which are accelerated to speeds of light. These charged particles race along the magnetic field away from the flare-initiation sites…the coronal gases and those waves exert pressure on the magnetic field. In most of the corono the magnetic field is strong enough to resist these forces, and the gas remains in closed loops…a few times each day, such events force the magnetic field to snap open above as much as 10 percent of the upper corona…[then he goes on to discuss CMEs]

Earlier he says, that we “are gradually learning to appreciate all the ways in which magnetic activity within the Sun’s atmosphere spreads into interplanetary space…” So, how would you briefly sum it up into one sentence? And what were some other errors?

Many of the videos segments looked very familiar (of course with the movie clips), but for the non-movie clips, especially after they shown for the third, fourth, etc., time.

The narration contained numerous scientific errors, such as, “Solar flares get released when the Sun gets overloaded with the magnetic energy it’s constantly burning.”

On the plus side, it’s always good to see Kimberly Weaver.

And the BA really got into that GRB section, (with a big smile) “It could boil the oceans, it could melt the crust, this is real, you know, end-of-the-world kind of stuff!”

GRB: Grinning, but Realistic Badastronomer.

jbs