Don’t miss the California Academy of Sciences’ newest original, all-digital planetarium show, Living Worlds, takes viewers on a revealing exploration of the ways life has transformed Earth’s surface and atmosphere over billions of years, and invites audiences to journey through the cosmos in search of life in our Solar System and beyond.

Living Worlds is a breathtaking, thought-provoking show that carries viewers across our globe and to the farthest reaches of space in a quest to understand life as an essential quality of our home planet. Along the way, we see how light and color can help planetary scientists spot a living world, even from great distances. From the awe-inspiring expanses of space, to microscopic amoebas living high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, to the ice-covered ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, Morrison Planetarium’s 75-foot dome will immerse viewers inside cutting-edge visualizations and hyper-realistic virtual environments.

“Living Worlds takes viewers on a journey to answer some of our biggest questions: How does understanding life’s influence on our planet inform our search for life elsewhere—and what would it mean to find evidence for extraterrestrial life?” Ryan Wyatt, Senior Director of Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the California Academy of Sciences, continues, “To ponder these existential quandaries we dig deep into cutting-edge science, combining the expertise and research of hundreds of scientists across dozens of disciplines and leveraging simulations and data from around the globe. We hope that viewers will come away with a deeper understanding of our living world in a cosmic context, and that they will be inspired to seek an active role in regenerating life on Earth.”

Living Worlds begins the quest for life right here on Earth, in the stark, rugged Atacama Desert of northern Chile, a place with environmental conditions so extreme that scientists run experiments there to simulate trips to Mars. Yet it retains life-friendly “microclimates” that are home to a multitude of living creatures, such as the single-celled Cabrolae amoeba, named in honor of Dr. Cabrol. Zooming out to look at Earth from space, viewers are given a new lens through which to see its pale deserts, blue oceans, and green forests: these colors indicate a planet that harbors life. Using spectral data direct from astrobiology researchers, we see what colors reflected by a planet can reveal about the chemistry of its atmosphere, and we learn how, by teasing apart different wavelengths of light, we can uncover a planet’s spectral fingerprint and detect signs of life.

Living Worlds will play everyday in Morrison Planetarium following its in-house premiere at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on November 5.

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