Feast your eyes on a reconstruction of the mega-city and its amazing buildings. Alexandria, built in the middle of rancid marshland, had become in less than a century, the greatest city of the Mediterranean. An ideal position at the crossroads of east and west, and one that brought her great riches. Huge, modern, gleaming white and cosmopolitan, like no other in antiquity, it created its own identity. While the beauty of its planning, its great arteries, its temples and its ports would be equalled only by its openness to the rest of the world. And the monumental achievements of its sovereigns, still shrouded in mystery, we'll never cease to fire our imagination for millennia to come.
Located in Central America, Tikal is one of the largest of the ancient cities of the Mayan civilization. Occupied for more than a millennium, Tikal, founded in the 8th century BC and nestled in the jungle of Guatemala, will have up to 12,000 structures and reach over 2 million inhabitants. This episode shows its extraordinary pyramid-temples, designed with human power alone. Thanks to new technologies, the ancient Mayan city is revealed there, entirely reconstituted in 3D synthetic images.
Thanks to stunning reconstitutions with computer-generated images, this documentary retraces the manufacturing secrets of the largest and most exceptional city of Antiquity: Rome, the capital of the Mediterranean world. Three of its most emblematic monuments come to life. The Pantheon and its majestic dome, the sumptuous palace of Nero which covered a quarter of the city, and finally the legendary Colosseum, the largest Roman amphitheater ever built.
In just one generation, our ability to search for planets beyond our solar system has transformed. With modern techniques and telescopes, planetary scientists have found thousands of exoplanets in our universe, and many of them have the perfect conditions for life. Are we about to find Earth’s twin?
The meteoric rise of renewable energy has consequences for our electricity supply. While coal and gas fired power stations can generate electricity whenever you need it, renewables are intermittent by nature. So we need a backup plan for when the wind stops or the sun goes down. All over the world, engineers and scientists are racing to solve one key problem; how to safely and efficiently store electricity at a huge scale but at a low cost. The quest is producing some truly remarkable ideas and this episode details three of them.
The last episode explores Mescaline, the psychoactive molecule in San Pedro and peyote cacti, a sacred medicine that Native Americans have had to fight for the right to use. At the Indigenous practices there's always an elder, someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding. There's usually a group, a community is involved, There's always an intention, a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred, in order to achieve altered states of consciousness, which contribute to worship in various ways, or celebration or healing. But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all. In the old Greek histories of Eleusis, people who were initiated there got the drink, the kykeon, and then they had the illumination. The precise recipe is a mystery, but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries, a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment practiced by some of the world's greatest minds including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago? Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness considered threatening to the powers that be? Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear? Psychedelics has a major part in how we can heal as a community, how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country. The current renaissance of psychedelics could not come at a better time as the world confronts a crisis in mental health. But psychedelics have much to offer. The psychedelic experience changes the mind in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works. All these altered states allow us to probe what is the greatest mystery in all of nature. The emergence from mere matter of something as miraculous as consciousness. But an even bigger question is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis of how we think about our place in nature. One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject, the spirit of all species, not just our own. And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.
While the beauty of its planning, its great arteries, its temples and its ports would be equalled only by its openness to the rest of the world. And the monumental achievements of its sovereigns, still shrouded in mystery, we'll never cease to fire our imagination for millennia to come.