Infinite Variety to the Swarming Hordes

So it starts at 7am 
A very large glass of water 

Dark outside
The familiar sound of the Life on Earth

First it’s "The Infinite Variety"
Facts
Figures 

Four million different types of plants and animals, 
Fifty different types of howler monkeys

Creationism versus evolution
A young David in his safari suit and binoculars
On a boat 
Headed for the Galapagos Islands

The natural selection of the un-measureable variety
In tree, in soil, in sea and rock

Fossils are the uneaten

Fill yourself with formaldehyde
Climb in your capsule
Become your own fossil

Tibetan sky ritual with no memory

To the Grand Canyon to stare at rocks
Exposed slowly by the river
20 feet per million years
Millions of years
A record in time

Life condensed into a year

1^st January – cloudy
No evolutionary certainty here

Atmosphere, gasses, water, heat, volcanoes, radiation, meteors etc.
Somehow amino acids, carbon compounds linking together
Somehow DNA structures
Somehow a split and an attraction
Somehow a copy
Some mistakes
Somethings we don’t know

So that's how it starts

I think its already summer

Some beautiful thing suffers the loss of half itself and repairs itself by attracting new pieces to make itself whole again

Not entirely whole, different

A self improvement story, something else decided what was an improvement. The “thing” only wanted to be whole again.

Then bacteria
A change in diet
From hot rock
To cool air
Liberating oxygen

Is it growing dark again?

From bacteria to ameoba
An organism from different types of bacteria
Under a single membrane
Cooperating

In September

Uncertain again, hesitantly
From splitting cells to sex
Shuffling genes
To create half selves
Attracted to other half selves

An explosion

Hairs
Now we move around
Waft food to my mouth

Bigger and bigger
Then joining a colony

Autumn sees the beautiful pin-head sized volvox
Her daughter colonies
Ejected

Sponges
Single cells living together loosely
Disassociate, re-organise
Take your place

The venus flower basket
Silica skeleton made by sponge cells
No mouth
No gut
No muscle
No nerves
A beautiful dead end

The cone jelly, the medusa
Start life as plants
Growing on a branch
Falling like seeds

Alternating sex and non-sex
A great variety
Metamorphosis

Jellyfish fossils
Portuguese man of war
A colony starts with one

Late December

Man a colony of cells
Mankind a colony of men

The reef
The first life to be spotted from space

A humbling hour
My back aches.

Building bodies

Perfection
Creatures that become so well adapted to their environment that they never change.
Is this the aim of life?
It seems very boring.

Fossilised experiments in the design of life
Nautilus, so successful
Ammenites.
They left their shells and all died
Out

Mozaic eye
Trilobites solved the problem of spherical aberration 400 million years ago.
Now dead.

Other unsuccessful males crowd around

The shell, the restriction.
Molting
Pre-adapted to life on land
Waiting for the plants (algae lingering on wave washed boulders)
The plants waiting for insects
Insects waiting for plants
Crustaceans out of water

First forests

Volcano envy.
Not like they used to be.
Mountain killers
Scatter the planet

Budding or sexing

Transitory creatures
Plants and animals
Live on land but use water for their sex cycle

Frog swimming.
Return to water
Water to exchange fluids
Again water

As the algae stood on rock
So the millipedes ate the algae

Me, descended from fish
Followed the predator
The sea scorpion who tasted the millipede
Who tasted the algae
Who lingered on the rock

We follow the food

The problem of sex is the problem of manipulation

The problem of manipulation is the problem of recognition
Lustful or hungry?

And so a million dances, a trillion songs

Courtship. I hold your hands so you cannot strike a blow.

Manoeuvring, signalling, caressing, stroking until safe
Until the dangerous and intimate encounter

He blows up a Welsh hill
To find the uneaten, the not fully rotted
The traces

The moss that grew to a tree
Spores in search of water
Always back to water to make life

The plants get wet to make love

A seed is an egg not made in water
It falls to the floor to grow again.

Up in the redwood, the biggest organism
An crustacean transfoms his shell to make a wing
To learn to fly to catch food
A spider learns to spin to catch the insect
A beetle builds a sheel to protect its wing and flies no more

A million dances, a trillion songs

Then colour finally comes to earth
Plants burst into flower to compete for insects

What does nectar taste like?

How does a flower look to an insect?

The beautiful flower courts the insect with precise instructions like an airfield

The dull flower courts the wind

Swarming hordes

Superimposed on a shot of locusts swarming
He holds one in his safari suit.
Is he pretending to be in the midst of the swarming horde?

The fact that plants grew seeking the sun
Is why insects grew wings

Climb up, float down
Flyup, float down

Social signals
An obstacle course for insects
Only if you can read the signals
Can you get the reward

Class sticks to class

I need exercise
Flagging
Coffee not matte

Caterpillars are eating machines

No sex, just eat until its time
To turn into a butterfly

People eat experiences
Waiting to settle and transform
With their vulnerable soft bodies

Poisonous, moving strangely, camouflaged, rebellious, unappealing
Avoiding the transformation
Until the time comes
The time does come

But again the shell surrounds
The only way out is to
Come together
A super organisms
Taking as much oxygen as it likes

Each member incomplete
Lick the queen
Exchange fluids
Find out the why

When are your genes not my genes?

Somewhere a smell and I know it is time to stop gardening and take out the rubbish
I don’t ask about the smell
It doesn’t do to ask

And have we killed a single species?

End

Conquest of the Water

I’m tired
Of the Life on Earth
Disk two

Hello sea squirt.
Ancestor with muscle and tail
Lanclet, Lamprey, Hagfish
No jaw, no backbone
Fish in swimming, but in swimming not fish

Slacks and jumper now
It grows cold

The lancelet stiffens with cartilage to be
A shark
A ray

The boney ones swam up river to find lakes
Shallow pools
Gulping for air
The sense of the lateral line

Not changed since

Perfect fish
Sleepy fish

On the reef to stand out
The crowds grow colourful

I need you to know
Who I am

I dress like this because
I need you to know
Who I am

Some take to the air, several hundred meters
Some retire to the bottom
Abandoning even floating
Dreaming not of flying
But flattening

The two oceans
Sunlit
Deep
Thermocline betwenen

The old fish swims like an S
And the pictures from the deep are 1970s still
A mark of time
Technology

He stands in the murky river
Holding a pole with a Heath Robinson hat
Looking for electric fish
Who navigate the mud
They read electric currents like maps
Can we?

The eel discharges 400 volts
To the red glow of another contraption

From the river to a volcanic spring
Fish at 43 degrees
Fish at freezing point
Anti-freeze for blood

How well adapted is the king of fish
Salmon
Navigation, senses, strength
Teeth for battle now the feeding is over

And you step in the water without boots
And get your jeans wet

So many eggs
So sad to see
So many dead

A walking catfish leads the march
To frogs
To reptiles
To mammals
To me
An invasion of the land
Now there is food there
Easier to catch than the slippery fish

You squinting in the sun on a beach in the Comoro Islands
Waiting to grow extra lids?

Or forgotten your sunglasses


To the desert
To find fish living and breathing in air
Dug up from a dry pond
Like something that climbed from water
Because it wanted to be a frog
A salamander

With permeable skin to breathe
To dry out out
To return to water

Peter pan
Water monster
Axolotyl
Always juvenile

And once you had feet to walk and jump on the land
You quickly lost them to swim again in sand

Goliath toad
Bigger than your head
Almost got away

Flying frogs like flying fish
Fish out of water
So vulnerable
Soft bodies
Defended in infinite ways

Camouflage
Rearing up
Bright colours
Shinning
Even as they dry out
No use in darkness

The first to sing

With the only accompaniment
The beating insect wings
You try to quiet

A rain song in a varnished skin

And sticky out sticky tongues

Prelude to the rain

Below a frenetic orgy of frogs in the rain
At the end of the reproductive season
Indiscriminate tangle

Above in plant trapped ponds
A safer bet

Or a foam filled cocoon

Beautiful eyes and tails
Inside soft illuminated shells
Hearts and eyes

And the finger of god descends to show us scale

Eggs absorbed into your back
Eggs swallowed hole
Only to vomit whole frogs sometime later

The frog who covers itself in a bag
Waiting for the water
Five years underground

They become a precious sponge drink
And having drunk one for us
You find it a pond for water

3pm, 8 hours straight, jesus H, half way

Victory on the dry land

But the frogs covet the limiting hard shell their ancestors left behind

Now water tight scaly skin
Reptiles

You, muddy, emerge next to the giant turtles drinking in muddy pools
Thirsty creatures
No returning to water
Creating their own ponds in hard shelled eggs


A marine Iguana in cold blood
Blood boiling
Not sweating
No need to eat for heat

In breeding fettle you say
The tiny eggs are your internal pond

From these to dinosaurs
King lizards

The richest deposit of bones in the world

Walking fermenters
Living on the fibrous plants
Controlling temperature
With skin panels

So heavy they left footprints in rock

And why did they leave?
Not a comet
No a planet killer
But a slow cooling
Leaving only the water dinosaurs
To cradle their chirping eggs in their giant teeth
To delicately fondle the baby crocodile in a blanket of teeth

And the lizards lost their feet and started to burrow
Then emerged once more to swim the surface

A snake orgy, Southern Canada

Waiting for scales to become feathers.

Its 4pm. End of disk Two

Finished

Finished. +60 hours, 24 DVDs, 3 weeks. Finished. Finished. Finished.

Good Evening Mr Waldhiem

OK third post. Things still go very slowly. Ive finished the fourth part of the Life Box. The Life of Mammals, having completed The Trials of Life at the weekend. I'm on my way home again after looking after my daughter and hope to finish the Life in the Freezer and make a start on The Private Life of Plants tonight. Any luck Ill be finished this weekend or maybe early next week.

So Life of Mammals. In terms of production values this is a whole different story. It seems like modern TV, unlike the predecessors. It starts with David waxing about how clever Mammals are and end with a plea for population control. Before that he notes that we seem at the moment destined to reach further to the stars as we outgrow our planet. And so it occurs to me what a fantastic survey of life on Earth the Life Box actually is. If you wanted to prepare aliens in other galaxies for our arrival - just give them the box, some popcorn and a very large drink and tell them not to make an plans for the next couple of weeks. Better still, stick rockets on the bottom of the box and launch some into space.

This made me think about that other attempt to make first contact with aliens: The Golden Record. This is the gold LP which they attached to two of the voyager space probes when the sent them on their merry way through our solar system. They are now both out of our solar system and in others, waiting to be picked up by intelligent aliens, and provided they have a record player, played by them so that first contact (for us at least) can be achieved.

The Golden Record is a very strange thing indeed. If I had one I couldn’t play it. Even though I have an LP player this one is gold and has to revolve at a different speed. Apparently they included instructions on how to build a player! Why didn’t they just send a player? The aliens are probably staring at the record and instructions in much the same way as some mammals stare at flat pack furniture.

Luckily someone had the good sense to copy everything on the disk to CD before they sent it. On the CD at least is a large number of photographs/images and lots of music and some messages from the people of earth. The opening address is from one Mr Kurt Waldhiem. The head of the UN at the time and now infamous for his refusal to admit knowledge of the holocaust during his time as a Nazi functionary in Austria. There seems to be a strange tension about whether or not this is a UN thing or an American thing. There are messages from the UN and the people of the Earth but there is also a separate message from the people of the US who cant help pointing out that they “built this craft”.

After browsing the images and listening to the music you cant help feeling that the impression the aliens will form is “what a confusing and depressing bunch but don’t they make a lot of music”. The survey of music is really a very refreshing mix of classical European music, folk music from various countries and very limited “popular” music. Only Chuck Berry's Johnny be Good made it on to the disk. The only concession to the Rock n Roll era. Apparently the Beetles Here Comes the Sun was considered but ultimately rejected. But the text and images are depressing and confusing. There is clearly a cold war feel about it, with more than one suggestion that mankind will probably blow itself and the planet up before anyone so much as lays tentacles on the disk. And the images, well where do I start? There is no narrative in them, yet they seem to be numbered. An image of man's internal organs precedes one of his actual likeness – so aliens are probably going to expect us to look like something that fell off the operating table.

There are lots of mathemaical type drawings. One, the only one I could easily understand was about our number system, another seemed to be explaining our solar system in terms of he distance to various planets. Others I don't have a clue. I'm an averagely intelligent human (I must stop calling myself a mammal) and I honestly can't understand most of the drawings, we seem to have been a little optimistic about what the aliens are going to be able to glean from the drawings. They also look very unappealing a bit like the drawings you would get on those Open University TV shows you would sometimes wake up to when you had fallen asleep in front of the TV.

The photographs seem to be the kind you find on our computer when you haven't added any and your computer decides to scan the drive for media files. I think you know the ones. Theres the sprinter getting ready to start the race, the flower, the not very funny "amusing cartoon" head. Well the photos on the Golden Record are not so different from these. There is one of sprinters - so politically correct that it seems to have captured contestants from our different races, but oddly shows the white skinned guy winning. Hope the aliens don't expect that to happen often.

Then there is my favorite pair. First we seen an old artisan carving a wooden elephant. Then the next shot we see a real elephant pushing logs of wood. I am able to understand this is probably a random juxtaposition but the alien? I'm pretty sure it will at least cross his mind that some of us can turn tiny pieces of wood into immense creatures.

The rest of the pictures are as inexplicable as they are boring and its all rounded off with the depressing farewell from Jimmy Carter that we going to be lucky to "survive our time". Perhaps David is right we should probably stay here. If its true what they say about first impressions I think we've blown it. At least if we used the Life Box as our calling card we could have played on the cuteness of some of the other lifeforms here. Some of them are musical too.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

So I'm on my way home to Peckham after spending the day in Harrow with my daughter. Everyone (well the newspaper and emails from work, usually harbingers of bad news) are talking about the 18 inches of snow that's arriving tonight. Sounds like good news to me. I'm on day three of my Life Box project and I have only one post to show for it. So I'm sitting here on the tube thinking what have I learned so far? Well, for starters:

• Never underestimate how tiring watching TV can be. That first day when I watched eleven hours nearly killed me.
• David Attenborough had a much more varied wardrobe than I had remembered. In fact he had a different outfit for everyplace he went to.
• Be careful who you ask to look at your first blog. Asking the most critical person you know might not be the best thing to do initially when you need some early encouragement.

And that's about it. Those are the biggies.

Oh and a couple of other things:

• Natural selection, the most powerful force on the planet stopped some time ago. Unlike the insects, reptiles, dinosaurs and small mamals we didn't have to develop wings when we wanted to fly, we figured it out and built them. Long live "unnatural selection".
• The expanse of time is as humbling as the expanse of space. Many times I've heard people talk about the Earth's history condensed to a year. But I never really took it on board. Imagine humans have been around for the last 2 minutes of the year! Dinosaurs came and went in a day, actually Christmas day.
• Im part of a super-organism. I was born in a huge mammal colony which existed before I was born and will doubtless be here long after I've gone. I'm not an individual but a member of that super-organism, which unlike the ant colony it resembles, is not quite sure what its purpose is.

So that's what I have learned so far. That and rabbits eat their own poo. Im now in Peckham Rye. It still hasnt snowed though it looks like it could. I hope it does. David had a rather fetching ice blue parker last time he was in Antarctica I think. I wonder what hes going to wear tonight.

Prologue

I'm watching a DVD with my daughter the other day. I bought her the Life Collection DVD Box set. She is 5. It cost me £55. She's already watched The Blue Planet and Planet Earth on DVD. In fact both of them many times. Thats why I bought the Life Box. We picked one of the 24 DVDs almost at random. Actually I think she liked the picture of the frog on the DVD. We are watching it. I'm not paying that much attention until David starts to talk about frogs in the desert and how they conserve water. He proceeds to squeeze some water from this frog and drink it. I'm agog. I'm thinking never mind the life of frogs, somebody should document the behavior of this guy. How could he? Its then that the idea crystallized for me. I'm going to watch this Life Box and see what I can learn about life. I'm going to set aside a week or however long it takes and try and get through the lot. I'll write a blog to document what I learn. Maybe there's a book at the end of it all. My mind starts to wander on this. I'll call it "Everything I learned about life, I learned from David Attenborough". Catchy title.

OK, so tomorrow it starts. I'm going to watch in one week the Life Collection Box set of natural history documentaries and document what I learn in a blog. I'm finishing off the last alcohol in the house. I cant imagine drinking is going to help me get through this. Coffee is what Ill be on tomorrow. Having given some thought to the logistics its starting to feel a little infeasible. The 24 DVDs amount to around 60 hours of programmes. Excluding all the "special features". Nothing you might say. A long weekend. Yeah, well, some of us have to work and to look after kids and I need my sleep. So I'm going to aim for a week and see how long it actually takes. Anyway once thats over there are two DVD sets which are not included in the Life Box. I guess they will have to follow on later.

Tonight I'm going to read the Wikipedia entry about David. I realise I don't know that much about him, though he's been like a distant relative in my life. Never further away than the TV or the remote control. The first of the DVD box sets, "Life on Earth" was broadcast in 1979 - when I was twelve. I bet I watched it with my mum and dad. In those days there were only 2 or maybe 3 channels, and as I recall we spent most evenings in front of the telly.

He always seemed like a really nice guy. The kind of guy you should go to for advice and not just about what types of frogs give up the most water, for lots of things. What I didn't realize was that he is the younger brother of the actor Richard Attenborough. I suppose I should have guessed that but I swear no one ever mentioned it and I don't usually assume everyone with the same name is related to one another. One thing I did know, that not a lot of people knew, was that he was very high up (in a managerial sense) in the BBC. This always seemed a bit odd to me. In the sense of "how come the Director of Programming at the BBC lands a job travelling all over the world seeing all its natural wonders". I told a few people about this in the past and they didn't believe me, but its true.

As I was reading it occured to me that I better check whether someone has already done what Im planning to do. So I checked a few websites but all I came up with was a guy listing "collecting and watching all David Attenborough's documentaries as one of his goals". According to the website this was one of about 30 goals he had set himself, none of which apparently he has accomplished. Other great things he hasnt yet accomplished include"random acts of kindness" ( I guess either he hasn't been kind or all the acts of kindness have been painstakingly planned); "see a tiger in the wild", "be a hippie for a month" and, if you can believe it, "create a database driven website". Reading this guys entries Im thinking 1) what a wanker, 2) I've done half the things you are still dreaming about and 3) Im going to see this Life Box thing to the bitter end. I dont want to end up as a list of 30 things I dreamed of doing but never actually did.

http://www.43things.com/person/g_force

The other thing I came across was the fact that David himself (should I call him Sir David?) had done a series of 20 radio shows (10 minutes each) called Life Stories which mix natural history topics with him talking about his life experiences. So I guess I'll have to listen to that too. Im drawing the line there though, or this could go on forever. I started with the 60 hours of the Life Box and in the course of deciding to do it Ive already added two more box sets and 3 hours of podcast. Enough is enough. If I cant learn something about life from that lot then what is the point.

Returning to the wikipedia entry for David I was amused to learn that some scientist had named a reptile after David. The Attenborosaurus conybeari was previously thought to be a type of Pleisiosaur and hence named Pleisiosaurus conybeari. Who would have known the creature was actually a type of Attenborough. Apparently there are also four living creatures of the genus Attenborough including a Long-beaked Echidna from Papua New Guinea no less. Oh and his brother Richard (Attenborosaurus luviness perhaps?).

Wikipedia also informs me that David has been voted the "most trusted celebrity" and is in the "top 10 heros of our time" from the New Statesman. Oddly wikipedia also quotes someone as saying David might be the "most traveled person on the planet". Surely that particular title must go to some airline pilot? Well if we are talking miles covered. Or maybe if its measured in terms of places visited it might be true. I wonder if he carbon offsets? I bet he does. I wonder how much he would owe if he went retrospective? He's probably one of the things that caused climate change.

Usefully Wikipedia has a top 20 David Attenborough TV moments for me too look out for. This includes sugestions from Bill Oddie "Attenborough watching a ladybird mimicking various noises" and Bjork "Attenborough being threatened by a bull elephant seal". No one, I repeat no one, mentioned the desert frog incident. I start to wonder how they compile these lists. Did Bjork really offer "threatening bull seal" without ptompting when someone from the BBC phoned her up? Or is it pick from a list and "by the way Bill Oddie has already chosen the ladybird noise thingy" but there are plently of others. I bet its the latter.

The rest of the Wiki entry is about David's environmental views (pretty traditional); religion (he's agnostic, not atheist. Not surprisingly has some interesting observations on those who point to orchids or humming birds as evidence of "intelligent design" but forget to mention parasitic worms, boring into the eyballs of children, in West Africa - I look forward to that episode; and public service brodcasting (guess what - he is pro BBC).

Well the alcohol is almost done. Tomorrow I start with episode one from Life on Earth - "the Infinite Variety" and lots of coffee. My last act of the night is to buy David's autobiography which I'm surprised to learn can be bought for £0.01 from Amazon Market Place. With £2.75 postage and packaging. How ridiculous is that? The guy I buy from has 100% feedback from >200,000 people. You would have thought someone would have complained about paying £2.75 postage for a book worth £0.01. But then I guess David's book is worth more than £0.01. So who cares about the ridiculous £2.75 anyway. Actually I lied. My last act of the night was to take the quiz on the "Life on Air" BBC page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programmes/tv/lifeonair/

I got 5 out of 8. Not bad. But then I probably would have got 4 out of 8 just by guessing. Lets see how do at the end of the week.