Lecture 18: The First Living Things on Earth

How did life arise from non-life? Frankly, we don't know, but current experimental work is aimed at trying to understand how it might work in biochemical terms. This lecture sets out the problem of "abiogenesis", and describes our current thinking about the likely origins of life ...  Show more

In this lecture we step back and look at the history of life on Earth from the first signs of life at start of the Archaean Eon 3.5 billion years ago to just up to the present day. We will review the appearance of photosynthesis and the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere in the Pro ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life cycle of stars. In his poem Bright Star John Keats wrote, "Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art". For Keats the stars were symbols of eternity- they were beautiful and ordered and unchanging - but modern astronomy tells a very d ...  Show more

Are we alone in the Universe? This lecture explores the question of how we might go about finding life on planets around other stars. Rather than talking about speculative ideas, like the Drake Equation or SETI, I am instead taking the approach of posing it as a problem of what t ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the abrupt transformation of stars after shining brightly for millions or billions of years, once they lack the fuel to counter the force of gravity. Those like our own star, the Sun, become red giants, expanding outwards and consuming nearby plane ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the abrupt transformation of stars after shining brightly for millions or billions of years, once they lack the fuel to counter the force of gravity. Those like our own star, the Sun, become red giants, expanding outwards and consuming nearby plane ...  Show more