A Critical Analysis on Discovery's [Alien Planet]

WHY DISCOVERY'S 'ALIEN PLANET' IS BAD

Alien Planet is a 94-minute docufiction, originally airing on the Discovery Channel, about two internationally built robot probes searching for alien life on the fictional planet Darwin IV. It was based on the book Expedition, by sci-fi/fantasy artist and writer Wayne Douglas Barlowe, who was also executive producer on the special. It premiered on May 14, 2005. - Wikipedia

So, as an enthusiast of Science-Fiction, you and I have heard and stumbled upon Extraterrestrial - Alien Worlds (2005), The Future is Wild (2002), and Alien Planet (2005), among others.

I recall seeing those somewhere else earlier, maybe on Animal Planet and Discovery channel - my favorites as a kid and the places where it was initially exhibited, and definitely on later months during quarantine.

A couple hours ago I decided to get my hands on Discovery's docufiction Alien Planet. And honestly, with the amount of people I saw and heard from, elevating this work up high in the sky as a great reference to science fiction and worldbuilding, I must admit I'm pretty much disappointed with the show.

Assume you are no science person, and you'll see why is that - and now I get why many people may regard this a great show, while actually is more of a fiction fantasy thing than actual hard science as some may hoist it,

Before I get stoned by you hard fans of Wayne D. Barlowe's work, I will only refer to what is presented on the show, and point what is misleading and straight out fiction about it, I got my hands on a copy of the book hoping for some answers on the matter, and this post might get a second part - so, let's get into it.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The show opens with an impacting line:

We now take a simulated journey scientifically verified by leading experts - to a planet called Darwin IV - Narrator, 1:40 into the show

Alright, they have brought us Jack Horner (Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana) and Victoria Meadows (Professor with the Astronomy Department and Director of the Astrobiology Program at the University of Washington) - so they might have checked on something, right?

They make it very clear to the audience they did put a lot of effort into fact checking every aspect of the work they were doing, as stated:

It seemed utterly important to me that the foundation to create a world, was to make sure the world was acceptable to the science community. - Wayne D. Barlowe, 2:45 into the show.

Now we put together a team of scientists to have a look at that concept, and to make sure that the laws of Physics and Chemistry were all represented in that model. - Victoria Meadows, 2:55 ITS.

By this point, I was expecting the next Interstellar (2014), by stated amount of effort and specialists on the matter - and they expend the next few minutes explaining the ship and interstellar travel.

LIFE ON DARWIN IV

As soon as we arrive, we are presented to a pair of creatures (apart from the microbes on a nearby pond), one which is a two legged T-rex analogue predator, and the other is a two legged large prey.

At first, this might sound reasonable, both may be related, until you notice the prey apparently descends from a 4-legged animal, which frontal and back pairs of limbs fused into a front and back limb.

Now, won't discuss the actual feasibility of this form of motion - but the actual process which lead to this animal in the first place, because, imagine how actually inefficient would be the transitional forms from quadruped to biped in this case - and how exactly that turned out to be a viable solution when you could have gotten smaller? Stronger? developed antlers or something else? But then nature comes with the hardest way, make it biped in the less efficient way possible.

The predator is rather intriguing, as the rest of the creatures of the show also are - it is actually the first to be introduced, and we are informed it cannot see properly, as it uses sonar to identify it's surroundings - along with other creatures we will see later, and that by the night creatures produce bioluminescence.

So... WTH is happening here?

SONAR... REALLY?

Because, as we've seem so far into the show (+20min), and we will continue to see that, there is plenty of sunlight available - of course, there is this thick layer of clouds and atmosphere partially blocking most of sunlight, but there is still sufficient light that plant-life can make good use of.

Low light plants can sustain photosynthesis with around 10~15 W/ft², or about 107,6~161,4 W/m² of fluorescent lighting - which means that theoretically you could grow plants in an asteroid or planet 3,5 AU away from the Sun, further than that only algae and mosses may grow, but only to a certain extent, given the ambient is maintained warm enough so they don't freeze.

Darwin IV orbits the largest member of a binary system, and being in the HZ, should receive similar amounts of lighting Earth does, the planet does host vegetation, and the planet does receive a decent lighting - even through the dense water vapor atmosphere, often cloudy as we see depicted. - and even so, creatures on Darwin IV for some reason haven't evolved eyes, or at least proper vision - instead recurring to sonar, making howls and roaring to scan their surroundings, when those conditions actually favor eyesight in every way, although not as much as on Earth.

See, as explained on the post about Animal Vision, eyesight is actually a pretty game changing evolutionary step,  it basically shaped life on Earth, and other ways to scan it's environment like sonar and pit organs wouldn't appear for a couple hundred millions years after eyesight was already established, and they did appear as auxiliary senses to vision.

It seems very unlikely life would develop other way in that sense, having to come up with sonar rather than developing decent eyesight to it's environment, and given the worst scenario - that Darwin IV lies on the outer edge of the habitable zone and receives less light than Earth, it wouldn't justify sonar still, as creatures could use larger eyes, pit organs or UV sensing rods to further increase image exposure, all of which are actually more likely and energy efficient than using sonar.

Another problem with sonar, is that the way we actually use sonar on Earth is very different than the way portrayed in the show, and implies the breaking of some basic already well established strategies in nature.

In the sea, sonar turns out to be pretty useful, the water as a denser medium than air transmits sound waves quicker and more intensely, and given light does not penetrate well further than 200m into the water - sonar is a viable tool to use.

Sonar, depending on the frequency you are using, works as both a pulsating flashlight, or as a faint x-ray of the environment.

If you use high-frequency sound in your sonar, the small waves will bounce off objects like you were emitting light in the dark, ie, your readings would be unable to reach for example behind a whale, or a rock.
If you use low-frequency sound, small objects such as little fish, or details on surfaces are ignored, but the lower frequency waves can bend around corners of a certain size with ease, and thus giving you some faint reading from behind objects.
Use a mix of both, and you can pretty much scan your surroundings no problem, HOWEVER that assumes you are actually totally immersed in such medium.

The problem with sonar use for active hunting is the same with sonar in underwater warfare, and the same with radar in space warfare. If you can see them, they can see you.

Submarines and ships often use passive sonar, either from listening to animals like whales and dolphins, the engine of their own ship or enemy ships, or sonar buoys in the area, because if they use Active Sonar, they will ping your position every time the sonar ticks.

Air isn't a good medium for sound, half the energy of the ping will be discharged onto the ground around you, and nearly the other half onto the air above you, you're only using a ring which is a couple meters tall to detect prey or predators, your best chance against them is high-frequency sonar like a bat, because low-frequency will just go around objects and not bump into something else to come back to you (like the seafloor or a coral reef), sonar on the air medium as portrayed is very energy wasteful and then no more efficient than actual eyesight in plain daylight.

One could argue that camouflage would trick eyesight in that case - but UV and IR markings can be used and are used by reptiles and birds to identify comrades and prey, so it isn't far fetched such system would be used in another planet by life, also, Darwin IV lacks the savanna vegetation that gives animals like lions their camouflage advantages, there isn't much about the Darwinian landscape that you can mix into for camouflage, eyesight again would be a great tool against any of those threats.


And thus no real apex predator would use active sonar for hunting, unless it was extremely necessary like in the dark, as bats and dolphins do, and much less use low frequency sounds to do so, because you will be just pinging your position much before you reveal from your ambush spot, it would be actually much easier if the presented predator actually sat and waited listening to it's prey approaching it's killzone and then launched an attack - much by the contrary of what is said by minute 27:42, the animal presented is a walking waste of evolution points, there are much more efficient ways to be an ambush predator, and it does in the less efficient way.

Even the T-rex isn't believed anymore to be an active predator anymore, but partially a scavenger.

The second predator, the gliding vampire alien, actually makes a lot more sense than the first presented on that matter.

Sonar, as an active communication tool is otherwise good for reasons already shown.


Bioluminescense is cited multiple times, we are informed that besides mainly using sonar, eyesight is still a thing, though poorly developed (somehow), and we will tackle that later on.


A LIVING... JET FIGHTER?

The third predator shows at 49:22 ITS, a flying creature that hunts in pairs, impales and drains prey in the air.

The flying creatures do not use their wings and tail in the way you would expect a typical flying creature to do so, beat their wings around and tip their tail to the side to maneuver, no.

These flying predators are actually using jet propulsion to fly (53:25 ITS) - by combusting methane in 4 pods located in their wings (2 on each side).

Now, apart from other creatures, this flying predator is one I actually wanted to investigate the first time I saw it.

At first my thoughts were, there is no real, feasible way the creature can produce the liters of methane required for sustained flight they way it appears to need.

One of my works as a Chemical Engineering student was to plan a methane gas generator, and after going through the research to do so, you too will be rather upset of how little methane you can make over the course of days compared to amount of work, which might enough to cook a meal, but no enough for a rocket also.

To plot that, we will need a way to measure the creature's size, and velocity, to estimate it's mass and fuel consumption.

Now for that, I recurred to Darwin IV's wikipedia page to get the planet distance to it's star, so I can calculate the apparent size of the main sun in the sky, and use the 53:10~53:14 scene to estimate the creature's velocity, knowing it's stated size at 53:18.

50ft = 15,24m

Darwin A angular size in the sky: 0,617º

I took two prints, one at 53:12 and the other at 53:13, a ~1 second interval.

First, we range the distance between the creature and the imaginary line that passes through the viewer and the sun.

On the next step we do the same.

Here is the frames collated together, from the angular size of the animal, and knowing it's true wingspan, we can calculate it's distance from the viewer, the line connecting both lines that pass through have somewhat between 83m and 102,2m, these 20-ish meters can be considered the curve the animal does on flight while turning around so we will stay with with 83m direct measure.

Bellow is an schematic of what is happening on the scene, and how we calculate the speed from this scene.

So it turns out that our little living jets fly at Mach 2,84 - as on the portuguese wiki (link further bellow) cites, Darwin IV's atmospheric pressure is around double that of Earth's (due more air present),  the actual speed is Mach 2,6 because on a denser atmosphere, sound travels faster (376,63m/s in this case).

Fandom wiki says it is actually 880km/h, but as we could measure in the show, it is 4x as fast.

There is no mention to the creature's mass so far, on Earth,  the largest flying animal, the Quetzalcoatlus, had a wingspan of 10~18m, weighing about 200~250kg.
However is clear that the animal portrayed is far from having the same body structure and thus weigh class as the largest known pterosaur.

The way the creature maneuvers thorough the show suggests it's external structure is mostly composed of some time of thick hide, and the hard structures are apparently limited to it's head and sharp lance.

To first make a rough estimate of it's volume, I went after a top view image of the creature onto the Alien Planet fandom wiki, and then masked out the surroundings as shown.


Then going into Image Summarizer, I set the color cluster to 6, the precision to 100px, and the final result is that the red part of the image is ~85% of the pixels.

The image is 933x677 px, which makes the total number about 631.641 pixels - we only care about the remaining 15% of them, ie, 94.746,15 px, which is the total area of the creature. The creature in turn is 792px wide, what makes each px about 2x2cm (actually 1,924x1,924cm).
The flat area of the creature is then about 35,07m².

The mean height of the creature is similar to it's body horizontal length, which is like a cylinder, the wing is thinner after the last burning pod, about 1/4th the head height. These are our parameters.

With a body 46px wide, ie, 88,5cm wide, that gives us body height of ~88,5cm too, and it also makes our wing thickness about 22,12cm.

Wing tips can be covered by a right triangle 230x110px, making each wing tip 12.650px² in area, or about 4,68m² on each wing.

Given that, we have a body volume of: 35,07 - 2(4,68) = 25,71m² * 0,885m = 22,75m³

Wing tip volume: (2*4,68) * 0,2212m = 2,07m³

Total volume: 24,82m³

For perspective;

Mammalian muscle tissue have a density of 1.060kg/m³, and human bone is 1850kg/m², assume this animal is 70/30 meat and bone, and we get an average density of 1.297kg/m³, which then makes this animal's weight about................ 32,19 tons.

Even if we make the bones lighter, say about 1.250kg/m³, we get 27,35 tons.
And if you make the creature out of water, you get 24,82 tons.

Give it an internal cavity of 40% (from an original bulk of 25t) and it is still weighing about 15 tons.

For our next calculation, let's cap a low-end moderate estimate of 20 tons to the creature.

The creature has 4 similarly sized "engines", so I will assume they have the same power.

Methane could produce an exhaust velocity of 3.800 m/s depending the chamber where it's being combusted, LH2/LOX fuel engines for comparison produce over 4.500 m/s.

The rocket equation calculator says the creature would have to combust ~5.840kg of methane in order to reach speeds of 3.505km/h, but that's about it - once you've reached that top speed you're out of fuel.

The thrust of one engine, considering a mass flow rate of 10kg/s, and Darwinian gravity (0,6G), is about 22.344N. Times 4, we get 89.376N, which gives us an acceleration of 4,46m/s² which might seem slow, but is enough to get the creature into top speed in ~3min40s.

To get the total flight time, we have a combustion of 40kg/s and 5.840kg of fuel, that renders us about 146s of flight, or 2min26s, and that's not even speaking of the maneuvers.
For 10 minutes of flight, it would have to carry 24tons of methane, or somehow, collect and instantly produce fuel on the fly in large amounts.

Speaking of which, if the creature produces methane inside it's body to further burning, from the digestion of food. Then, by biogas production standards, each 1kg of food would yield 400 l of gas, or about just 222g of methane, not really taking into account the time needed to do so, which is of at least 40~80 Earth days.

Even if it had some magical cocktail of bacteria that could do it 4x faster, you would need 10~20 days still to convert the fuel, it would need to also eat ~5x the weight of the desired amount of fuel to produce, ie 5*5,8tons = about 29tons of food.

And that's the actual problem I talked about, there is actually no feasible way for the creature to even acquire such quantities of fuel, let alone have sustained flight.

Even so, sonar isn't the best way to equip such a hunter, the sonar ping is useless when you have 4 jet engines strapped to your wings, the sheer noise coming from the combustion is enough to produce the ping you need, the actual problem would be to turn these off at a safe distance so the prey knows you are there already but can't really track your direction by your propulsion noise.


And remember:

Now we put together a team of scientists to have a look at that concept, and to make sure that the laws of Physics and Chemistry were all represented in that model. - Victoria Meadows, 2:55 ITS.

SO WHAT THE H*** JUST HAPPENED OVER HERE???

After that, all of the other animal problems will be addressed later on, let's talk about the world where this is all set...

THE CLIMATE OF DARWIN IV MAKES NO SENSE

I cannot reproduce original Expedition content, however I can show you what other artists have done based of it's material, and here is a map of Darwin IV.

And here is a globe model, highlights to the Amoebic Sea:

Let's take notes on what is portrayed and compare to what would we really see based on what we can take from the map.

PORTRAYED:

Surface Temperature (assume it's average surface temp): about 20~21°C (8:30 ITS)

Darwin IV's oceans evaporated long time ago, changing the climate to it's current state (37:42 ITS)

Sunlight Received: 79% that of Earth's*

Distance to it's star: implied to be around 2AU*

Orbital Period: 1,6 Earth years*

Atmospheric Pressure: 2 atm*

*Source: Portuguese wiki on Darwin IV


CALCULATED:

Main Star Mass: ~3,12 Msol (A0V star, expected lifespan of 582Myr, 295x the Sun's luminosity) calculated from orbital period and orbital distance using Kepler's Third Law.

Main Star Size: ~3.229.331,7 km (calculated from stellar mass/diameter relationship)

Sunlight Received: 73,9x that of Earth's

Surface Temperature: 570ºC (473ºC without atmosphere)

Atmospheric Pressure: 47,82atm (atmospheric half-life is greater than 1Gyr, so the planet is pretty much an evaporating Venus-analogue)

Climatic Index: 73,9 (MERCURY ZONE)


Funny that when we look at the data, our view of the planet shifts from this:

To this:

DARWIN IV'S EVOLUTIONARY TREE IS A MESS

Or very questionable to say the least, the show presents us to a dying planet, which is having it's oceans evaporated - for what I could initially deduce, the planet would have a pretty weak magnetic field around itself, what would lead to the solar wind slowly blowing the water off its upper atmosphere over the eons, and given Darwin IV is a small planet when compared to Earth (just about 6.563km in diameter), it seems to be the case, that would also explain why, even though the oceans have evaporated, why the animals don't experience the weight of billions of tons of water above them, because there isn't that much water in the atmosphere either, once it evaporates, it gets lost to space forever.

The point is, that this seems to be a rather recent event in the planet's history, a few hundred million years to get to the extreme we are presented to in the show.

What I will now call The Recent Catastrophe Theory -  would justify the craziness of the wildlife present in the planet, as the sole survivors of the receding oceans of Darwin IV.

Here is what I propose:

Millions of years ago, Darwin IV used to be a colder and richer environment, like Earth is.
In it's ever changing tectonic process, the configuration it established would trigger a runaway greenhouse effect - with the combined evaporation of water from now desertified areas and from massive amounts of greenhouse gases released by volcanoes, which seems like it is the case, as there is a massive equatorial array of mountains, and wide spread lava plains throughout the surface, think of something like The Great Dying, but much, much worse, in a way it completely changes the worlds geography over the following million years, that reduces much of the pre-existing biodiversity, leaving only the tips of the tree for us to try put together, so rather than all creatures being closely related, you have pockets of creatures that are closely related, which evolved during or post catastrophe, and these pockets are then not related to each other by millions of years predating the Catastrophe, and now that much of the geographical barriers have been removed, like mountains or even oceans themselves, you have creatures that used to inhabit different parts of the world until a dozen or a hundred million years ago when it all changed, and everything looks radically different from what you would actually expect.

Darwin IV in that sense, would be the same to arrive at Earth sometime in the future and see Tigers competing with Lions and Wolves for Hippos in the Australian outback, or have harpies and flamingos in New Zealand - which still would be pretty relatable on a basal sense.

At first, I thought of making a cladogram of the creatures portrayed, but after facing this possibility, I had to toss idea away - however sometime ago a fellow deviant, Dragonthunders, tried to piece Darwinian biosphere together in a forum thread, and here is the result:

As I said before, it wouldn't be so hard at first, you can clearly relate creatures in groups, but you have to make massive stretches to relate groups between themselves, Darwinian biosphere is paradoxically diverse and at the same time so poor we can't properly relate the aliens with 100% accuracy.

CONCLUSION?

Darwin IV is a poor rendition of Triassic Earth. - M.O. Valent

Discovery's Alien Planet showed itself to be a more artistic work than a work SCIENTIFICALLY VERIFIED BY LEADING EXPERTS as it is advertised - and so far I'm very upset, and my expectations are comically low for the matter, as there will be tons of other material I will have to read with J. Jonah Jameson's spirit...

That's me having to read Expedition now...

- M.O. Valent, 18/07/2020