When you see the opening caption ‘4.6 billion years ago’, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re watching a programme presented by Professor Brian Cox. And so it proved again this week, as his latest exploration of the solar system began on BBC2, with an episode about Mercury and Venus.
Being an officially designated ‘landmark’ series, The Planets (Tuesday) has many of the features you’d expect: lush music, an impressive CGI budget, a ten-minute behind-the-scenes segment at the end. More surprising is Cox’s willingness to anthropomorphise the planets — and to regard the ones that aren’t lucky enough to be Earth with a touching level of sympathy. After all, it’s not their fault they’re so lifeless. Nor should we forget that some of them really did give it their best shot.
Admittedly, Cox started by walking through an Earth forest at its most biologically teeming — which felt a bit like rubbing it in the other planets’ faces. (Are you watching, Mercury?) But then, after he’d indisputably noted that Earth’s status as ‘the only living planet in an otherwise desolate solar system’ is ‘interesting when you think about it’, his compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves soon kicked in.
Take Mercury, for example. It might be ‘a small, tortured world’ now, yet only a few billion years ago it could have been a contender. The latest thinking is that Mercury first came together in the more promising region around Mars where it might have formed the kind of climate conducive to life. ‘But,’ said Cox dolefully, ‘it wasn’t to be.’ Instead, Mercury collided with other embryo planets, lost most of its outer crust and ended up too close to the Sun, where its small, tortured fate was sealed. And with that, Cox moved on to his next big question: ‘So where did it all go wrong for Venus?’
Oddly, Cox’s preferred term for a planet’s lost glory days was its ‘moment in the Sun’ — even though it turned out that being in the Sun was precisely what did for poor old Venus as well.
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