Even the most primitive form of life – bacteria – need water for their survival. And there are no exceptions. And this seemingly fundamental link between water and life is driving the search for life out there in the solar system. Wonders of the Solar System: Aliens, BBC 2010
So the first amino acids on Earth – the fundamental building blocks of life – may have formed in the depths of space and delivered to the Earth on meteorites. Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe 2/4: Stardust, BBC 2011
Dragonflies are beautiful pieces of engineering. Brian Cox, Wonders of Life I: What is Life? BBC 2013
What is the difference between the living and the dead? What is Life? ibid.
What is it that animates living things? ibid.
Energy is conserved … energy is eternal. ibid.
The spark of life is ‘proton gradients’. ibid.
The energy itself becomes less and less useful – it becomes ever more disordered. ibid.
This descent into disorder is happening across the entire universe. ibid.
There’s something that separates life from every other process in the universe. ibid.
DNA: on average only one mistake in a billion letters. ibid.
A living cosmos might be the only way our cosmos can be. ibid.
The sensory world of the catfish is a remarkable one. Its map of the universe is built from the thousands of chemicals it can detect in the water. Brian Cox, Wonders of Life II: Expanding Universe
The lens is the crowning glory of the evolution of the eye. ibid.
The octopus is one of the only invertebrates to have complex camera eyes. ibid.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection was built on the work of naturalists who were discovering thousands of new species across the world. Brian Cox, Wonders of Life III: Endless Forms Most Beautiful
This newly discovered arachnid: Darwin’s bark spider … The largest web span anywhere on Earth … they can span over 25 metres. ibid.
From the universe’s earliest times carbon has been created inside ageing stars ... The chemistry of carbon allows the existence of a molecule that is able to replicate itself and pass information on from generation from generation. ibid.
Our world is covered in giants … they’re trees. Brian Cox, Wonders of Life IV: Size Matters
Evolution doesn’t have a free hand: it is constrained by the universal laws of physics. ibid.
Great Whites are highly evolved predators. ibid.
The largest animals there have ever lived have lived in the sea. ibid.
There are over 900,000 known species of insect on the planet. ibid.
A bat’s size clearly affects the speed at which it lives its life. ibid.
The only way that large animals can exist on planet Earth is to operate at a reduced metabolic rate. ibid.
As things get bigger they tend to live longer. ibid.
Christmas Island: the robber crabs are not only the biggest, they’re also the longest lived. ibid.
Your size influences every aspect of your life. ibid.
Mexico is bursting with life. And if you know where to look, hidden inside these creatures are clues that tell how this planet became their home. Brian Cox, Wonders of Life V: Home
We live on a beautiful blue anomaly of a world. ibid.
The cyanobacteria changed the world turning it green. ibid.
Beyond Earth’s atmosphere life is impossible. Exposed to the vacuum of space you'd be unconscious within twelve seconds. Brian Cox, Human Universe, BBC 2014
The International Space Station has been permanently occupied. ibid.
As far as we know we humans are unique in the universe. ibid.
At its peak Petra had a population of 30,000. ibid.
Each one of us is made from mere matter. Yet we are matter with curiosity ... Why are we here? Brian Cox, Human Universe II: Why Are We Here?
We appear to live on a perfect planet in a perfect universe. It feels as if it’s made for us. The Earth orbits at just the right distance around just the right star with the temperatures on its surface to be just right for liquid water to exist. ibid.
We live in a universe that’s expanding at just the right rate. ibid.
‘The gods are later than creation.’ ibid. Vadic verse
Are we a lone island of life lost in a vast galaxy? Brian Cox, Human Universe III: Are We Alone?
Red Dwarfs are by far the most numerous stars in our galaxy. ibid.
There are ten billion inhabitable worlds out there in the Milky Way Galaxy. ibid.
The question of how often Life spontaneously arises on a planet. ibid.
The silence persists. We remain alone ... We are unique. ibid.
Every human life has to start somewhere, a place in Space and Time. Brian Cox, Human Universe IV: A Place in Space and Time
The Milky Way is a disc of between two and four hundred billion stars reaching out in giant spiral arms. ibid.
Our inquisitive minds began to develop models of the universe. Brian Cox, Human Universe: What is Our Future?
By looking carefully at nature, by doing science, we might be able to understand what life is and perhaps how it began. The origin of life is one of the great unsolved mysteries. Forces of Nature with Brian Cox III: The Moth and the Flame, BBC 2016
What are the ingredients of life? How does complex life form from such simple ingredients? And what was the driving force, the energy source, that ignited the flame four billion years ago? ibid.
We’re made of the same stuff as our planet. ibid.
The Earth teems with life. But billions of years ago our planet was just a ball of molten rock. Did the first earthlings rise from a chemical soup bubbling in a primordial pond, or did the seeds of life crash down from outer space? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s1e5: How Did We Get Here? Science 2010
When a comet makes a glancing blow it doesn’t incinerate, it melts, dumping large amounts of water and amino acids on our planet. ibid.
For the first time these chemists achieve what those before them never did: they create two of the four basic building blocks of RNA. ibid.
Life on Earth may not have been from Earth at all. ibid.
There might have been more than one genesis. Our planet may not harbour one but two trees of life. ibid.
Mars could have harboured life sooner than Earth ... The last Martians may have jumped ship. ibid.
What or Who is out there? Is there other life in the universe? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s1e6: Are We Alone?
The Wow! signal was a one-time event. ibid.
Twenty years after the Wow! signal SETI detected another signal from space ... It came from a man-made space probe. ibid.
Kepler is the first ever satellite solely devoted to the hunt for planets outside our solar system. ibid.
What if the aliens don’t need things like bodies? Looking for life as we know it could be a mistake. ibid.
What are we really made of? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s1e7: What Are We Really Made Of?