Here On Earth contd...

More On Here On Earth

the Thing I wanted to say, but forgot, about 'Here On Eath', the biggest error:

Tim talks twice aboout life "Breaking apart CO₂" - into Carbon and Oxygen.

This is a basic biochemical blunder. Any first-year undergraduate from 40 years ago would tell you that its H₂O that gets split by light. The H is added to CO₂ to make live stuff, the O₂ comes from the water. This is perhaps life's grandest achievement.
It takes two (count'em) photons and a quantum mechanical array of antenna pigments. The difficulty of getting this together, more than the difficulty of getting complex enough to build a TV transmitter, may be the reason that the we get only static from the billion water planets in this galaxy.
So Flannery exhibits ignorance in basic biochemistry and basic physics. Was a great popularist, now my confidence has been shook.