WildTrekker

George interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about human identity and the challenges of organizational control.

George shares music he has composed. He performs both on his own and with friends.

In this archival interview, George accurately predicts the very day Sir John Sulston wins the Nobel Prize.

In this archival interview, George meets author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.

George meets writer, conservationist and explorer John Hare, who crossed the Sahara riding a camel.

In this archival interview, musician Emily Doolittle says she devoted her doctorate in composition at Princeton University to the songs of blackbirds and humpback whales. She also composed a chamber piece incorporating some blackbird themes. And then George experiments with other kinds of music based on Nature sounds...

In this final episode of a three-part series, George concludes his exploration of The Arrow of Time. It may sound like a contradiction in terms, but the future has a history – this episode focuses on projections since the Renaissance of human longing for the perfect society into the future. This episode creates sound pictures of secular prophecies, from Thomas More’s Utopia, to Francis Bacon’s Utopia, and Condorcet’s failed dream of progress to Karl Marx’s ideal but cruel working-class state. The episode wraps up with Samuel Butler’s satirical Erewhon and the technocratic fantasies ... and nightmares ... of H.G. Wells

In this second episode of a three-part series, George continues presenting The Arrow of Time. This episode examines the importance of chronology. Does the world have a beginning and an end? Basing themselves on the Bible, Early Church Fathers sought to date the divine Creation of the world (in 4004 BC), as well as to anticipate the Second Coming (perhaps in 800 AD). They tried to reconcile their hope for a better future with the disasters of their own day. After the Renaissance and Reformation, chronologies began to fan out – the world no longer seemed thousands of years old, but stretched back millions of years. Recent discoveries put the origin of life on Earth some 4 billion years ago.

In this first episode of a three-part series, George explores In this first episode of a three-part series, George presents the history of an idea – The Arrow of Time. He starts off showing humans have not always seen time as a unique past pointing to a unique present and then to a unique future. There have been several competing models of time, from the cosmic wheel of time to the cyclical model of time, and from the regressive to the flux and Nemesis models of time.

Whale biologist Richard Sears has devoted his career to understanding the blue whales, humpbacks, fin whales and belugas of the Gulf of St. Lawrence of Eastern Canada. In this archival interview, he tells George what he has discovered, how humans tend to project their own emotions and way of thinking onto whales, and what new knowledge we may gain in the future.