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Scriptwriter's Audition + Pitches

WORKING TITLE: EXOTIC EARTHS: Weird Worlds Where We Might Find Complex Life

THEMES: Exoplanets, Alien Life, Discovery, Imagination

WRITER/RESEARCHER: Trenton McNulty

PITCH:

For thirty years astronomers have scrutinized the transits of faraway planets, vainly searching for a second Earth. They’ve found instead that most planets amenable to life might look nothing like the one we call home. ‘EXOTIC EARTHS’ takes viewers on a galaxy-spanning expedition to these worlds—worlds of endless seas and never-setting suns—to imagine how their denizens might live.

TREATMENT:

Open on the Earth. On its clouds, seen from orbit. Then its full face, rising over the Moon. Finally, its pale blue light glimpsed from a million miles away—scarcely a dot in the lonely dark.

When we look through the yawning apertures of satellites like Kepler, or TESS, we search for a yellow sun with a rocky, spinning world. Surely, we think, that must be the surest sign of life. From what we’re seen so far, Earth is alone. We have no equal, no sibling. But in any family, there are outliers: the weird uncles, eccentric aunts. And in thirty years of searching, scientists have discovered that most exoplanets that meet the conditions for life as we know it would be uncanny to our Earthly eyes.

If life evolved on these worlds—what would they be like? Open the aperture of your mind’s eye, and resolve them in your imagination…

We first visit KEPLER 62e, a WATER WORLD. We see an unending expanse of ocean, unspoiled by land. The life of this world would be simple, sustaining itself solely by the light of the sun, as the lack of nutrient run-off from land would make life in the deep impossible. Swim down far enough and you’ll find the dead seafloor concealed in ice, frozen by the immense pressures of the ocean above.

We visit KEPLER 186f, an ARCHIPELAGO world. We see its chains of islands, its shallow waters. Think Hawaii, or the Galapagos—where Charles Darwin first noted the striking evolutionary diversity between creatures isolated from each other only by a short swim. If humans evolved on such a world, early sailors might discover hundreds of human subspecies—some with hooves, some with wings—each driven radically apart by water and time.

Finally, we visit TRAPPIST-1e, a TIDALLY LOCKED world that never rotates relative to its sun. We see its scorching deserts, its glaciers trapped in darkness, and in the space between extremes, a land of eternal twilight. Here, aliens build their cities in tiers upon the mountainsides (similar to Santorini in Greece) ensuring everyone gets their fair share of light.

We end back on Earth, on the lens of a telescope. The aperture closes. And again, we see the stars.

[Other possible worlds include KEPLER-1708 b-I, an Earth-like EXOMOON orbiting a gas giant, or a theoretical ‘ROCHEWORLD,’ where two planets orbit each other so closely they share an atmosphere.]

WORKS CITED:

“Water worlds could support life, study says” (Eurekalert) (Peer Reviewed)

“Exoplanet hunters rethink search for life” (Nature) (Peer Reviewed)

“Are planets with oceans common in the galaxy? It’s Likely, NASA Scientists Find” (NASA)

“Better Than Earth: Planets quite different from our own may be the best homes for life in the Universe” (Scientific American) (Peer Reviewed)

“The Diversity of Exoplanets in the Galaxy” (Gregschool) (Not peer-reviewed, but comprehensive)

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OTHER EPISODE IDEAS:

  • "Stellar Shuffleboard"
    Real Ways We Could Move Stars and Planets
  • "Behavioural Modernity"
    When Did Humans Start Thinking Like Humans?
  • "Intergalactic Facetime"
    How To Communicate Faster Than Light
  • "Death From Above"
    All the Ways Aliens Might Destroy Us
  • "The Nature of Time (According to Movies)"
    Explores how different media franchises conceptualize time travel, e.g. as fixed/deterministic (Harry Potter), malleable (Back to the Future), or some mix of the two (Avengers Endgame)
  • “Forgive Yourself For Literally Everything” or “The Power of Radical Self-Compassion”
    Most people use shame and self-criticism to motivate themselves to get things done; however, research suggests that actively and compassionately accepting your flaws, mistakes, and lack of achievement can paradoxically increase your motivation to improve yourself. Why, then, does conventional wisdom suggest strict discipline is neccessary to avoid laziness? What would it mean to truly forgive ourselves?
  • “The Death of Art” or “Computing Creativity: The Automation of Art”
    AI-generated images used to be nothing more than a novelty, but a new AI called “DALL-E 2” is capable of rendering an image of any subject you could possibly imagine, in any style, based only on a few words of description. What does it mean to make art in a world where creativity is literally a commodity—made better, cheaper and faster than any human can? Will digital images become worthless? Will we begin to advertise physical art as “hand-made,” assigning value not to the outcome, but the process? Will artists gain acclaim, not for their art skills, but for their skills in programming a computer to do what they want? [Possible follow-up video idea: “Making Things By Hand in a Post-Industrial World,” exploring the rise of DIY culture, Etsy, how humans assign meaning, etc.]
  • “Dark Flow: The Negatives of Being ‘In The Zone’”
    When you’re intensely focused on something you love, you enter a ‘Flow’ state. The world falls away and you lose track of time. This is a wonderful thing when working on something artistic, or playing your favourite video game—but what if it could be exploited for less-than-ideal ends? Research suggests that gambling and social media companies do precisely that. How do we regain control of our own focus in a world determined to use our own biology against us?
  • “Grieving Our Possible Lives” or “How to Mourn Who We Might Have Been”
    Every time we make a decision, we collapse the spectrum of possibility to one single path. This doesn’t bother us much when choosing what to have for breakfast. But the big decisions follow us for years, haunting us with dreams of regret, of what Might Have Been. How do we reckon with our possible lives? How do we move on, leaving these potential futures in the past?
  • “Agriculture: Our Best, Worst Invention”
    Exploring how the invention of agriculture—the choice to settle down in exchange for stability and consistency—has actually made our day-to-day lives appreciably worse than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For the past 10000 years, we’ve worked longer and harder, our diets have become more limited, we’ve grown more isolated interpersonally, and the pressures of navigating a world entirely alien to our biology has caused an explosion of stress and mental illness. Is the solution to return to how we once lived? Try to incorporate their lifestyle into our own? Or should we simply work, enjoy our creature comforts, and pray that technology will one day free us from the new problems we’ve created? [Inspired by the book “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari]
  • “Mystery is Dead, Long Live The Internet” or “Will You Get Dumber As Humanity Grows Wiser?”
    Google, Wikipedia and the smartphones have given us access to the entirety of human knowledge, any time, anywhere. When we wonder, “Who starred in that one movie?” we can look it up. When we need to remember how to knot a tie, the answer is only a Youtube video away. And as a result, we’re not left wondering about anything for long. We have no incentive to remember trivial things, so we don’t. This externalization of knowledge has been happening for a long time—so long that our civilized brains have actually shrunk in size compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, whose survival hinged on storing the entirety of Prehistoric Wikipedia in their heads. Is this a good thing? Should we strive to remember more? How much of our brains could we outsource? And will we one day be utterly helpless without the aid of technology?
  • When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants” https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.742639/full
  • “A World Without Work” or “How Do We Create Meaning In a World Without Work?"
    The recent social movement advocating for a Universal Basic Income has started a conversation about the necessity of work in our lives, and the question of what people would do without the need to work. How could we reasonably affect this change, when so many people see the unemployed as aimless and lazy. Is that really true? Or do we rely on work to give our lives meaning? What meaning would work even have in a post-scarcity future where robots do everything, and all our needs are accounted for?
  • “An Argument for Immortality”
    The debate around biological immortality often hinges on the likely scenario of it being exclusive to the rich and powerful. But if it were available to everyone equally, would it really be so bad? What would it mean to our society if the elders never died? How would we relate our families and spouses if we knew we’d never be without them? How would we react to true death, having so rarely experienced loss?