Alien Planet

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Alien Planet is a 2005 docufiction TV special created for the Discovery Channel. Based on the 1990 book Expedition by the artist and writer Wayne Barlowe, Alien Planet explores the imagined extraterrestrial life of the fictional planet Darwin IV in the style of a nature documentary. Although closely following Barlowe's depiction of Darwin IV, Alien Planet features a team of scientists and science fiction figures discussing Darwin IV as if it had actually been discovered. Among the people featured are Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Jack Horner, James B. Garvin and George Lucas. Alien Planet garnered positive reviews as a thought-provoking programme, though some criticism was raised concerning the strange creatures featured, which some reviewers saw as bordering on implausible. Alien Planet starts out with an unmanned interstellar spacecraft named Von Braun, leaving Earth's orbit. Traveling at 20% the speed of light (37,000 miles/s), it reaches Darwin IV, a planet 6.5 light-years away, in 42 years. Upon reaching orbit, it deploys the Darwin Reconnaissance Orbiter, which looks for potential landing sites for the probes. The first probe, Balboa, explodes along with its lifting body transport during entry, because one of its wings failed to unfold. Two backup probes, Leonardo da Vinci (nicknamed Leo) and Isaac Newton (nicknamed Ike), successfully land on the planet, and learn much about its bizarre indigenous lifeforms, including an apparently sapient species.