Examines the emergent processes that bridge the gap between organisms that think and have consciousness and those that do not and discusses the origins of life, information, and free will.

Host Neil deGrasse Tyson will tackle one of science's major challenges in each episode, framed as a simple question that ordinary people wonder and worry about. Neil will guide us as he explores dramatic discoveries and the frontiers of research that connect each central, provocative mystery. Episode includes: ORIGINS OF LIFE: Scientists have long argued that billions of years ago, life emerged on its own, from the self-assembly of non-living matter,...

"A breakout bestseller in Italy, now available for American readers for the first time, Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began is a short, humanistic tour of the origins of the universe, earth, and life-drawing on the latest discoveries in physics to explain the seven most significant moments in the creation of the cosmos"--

"In the tradition of E.H. Gombrich, Stephen Hawking, and Alan Weisman-an entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life's life story. In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place-in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in...

Tells the story of how the celestial objects that make up the solar system arose from common beginnings billions of years ago, and how scientists and philosophers have sought to unravel this mystery down through the centuries, piecing together the clues that enabled them to deduce the solar system's layout, its age, and the likely way it formed.

Describes the startling discoveries being made in the very real science of astrobiology, an intriguing new field that blends astronomy, biology, and geology to explore the possibility of life on other planets. Jeffrey Bennett takes readers beyond UFOs to discuss some of the tantalizing questions astrobiologists grapple with every day: What is life and how does it begin? What makes a planet or moon habitable? Is there life on Mars or elsewhere in the...

"How scientists are closer than ever to not only uncovering the mystery of how life was created, but to replicating that moment. Within the first billion years after this planet formed, a spark of life spontaneously ignited, turning inanimate chemicals into what we now would recognize as a living thing: a cell. Four billion years later, science has catalogued more than a million species. Science writer Adam Rutherford shows how unprecedented advances...