Wayne Barlowe's Expedition: A BRUTALLY HONEST Review

The portrayal of humans as reckless, ravenous and callous that is shown in Man after Man and Expedition is also present in James Cameron's Avatar.

The most shocking thing about expedition is that the evil, anti-environmentalist, enjoyers of setting elephants on fire, industrialist humans would just hand all power over to these random aliens. It seems more like to me the aliens threatened complete destruction or something lmao.

I absolutely loved that documentary as a kid

I agree with the preference for an artistic approach to speculative evolution. Though the scientific accuracy and understanding how features of an organism work is interesting, I feel like the "accuracy" attempts at speculative evolution end up creating results that don't feel natural, but instead like derivations of a theme

I LOVED this ramble-y video style, absolutely adored listening to this while revising

Might you be doing a spec evo review of HBO Max show: “Scavengers Reign” anytime in the future? Its a large bit fantasy, BUT the art and the biology is really intriguing

I like to judge pieces of media on their single moment that stays with me and keeps me thinking about it long after experiencing it for the first time… All Tomorrows’ moment for me is when the dinosaur was found on an alien planet. The existential dread that more than 60 million years ago, an intelligent species was capable of going “that’s neat” and warping its anatomy to work on another world is horrifying! In Expedition (I read it for the first and only time last year, pardon if I misremember-), I think that moment is the idea that a world can be so dominated by life that a single entity can be discerned from an image from sPaCe (as in the emperor sea strider) is just a fascinating idea.

Have you ever heard of humanity lost by callum diggle? The best way i can describe it is it’s a bit like all tomorrows meets star wars on steroids. It’s on amazon and is one of my favorite graphic novels of all time, and one of my all time favorite works of spec evo alongside after man, the future is wild, and darwin iv

I found my copy of Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials at my local Half-Price Books. It's also available through Amazon, though the paperback isn't exactly cheap.

there was a book club edition of the guide to extraterrestrials, it shouldn't be too hard to find. i got it and his guide to fantasy for around $50 US a few years ago. They aren't original ideas for the most part, they depict creatures from classic genre novels.

I used to love it as a kid though the animation with the two drones and the alien planet.

As much as I really do love these speculative biology works, my problem has always been that they just seem like the adult version of kids drawing the weirdest monsters they can think of and saying, 'Look! Isn’t this one cool and scary?' Sometimes it seems the authors are just making things weird for the sake of being weird. I can't help but feel examples in terrestrial life that we find banal such as quadrupeds, or forward facing eyes, or feathers, or cranial brain pans, etc. may well be that; Just banal. That we see them everywhere because they're the most optimal structures for the job. I mean, an animal that leaps between mountain crags lowering its grip surface area from four feet to three feet because four just seems too commonplace? Maybe it's commonplace for a reason. I think I'd much prefer a speculative biology tome in which the creatures are not as grotesque or bizarre, but instead tells the whole picture of how said creatures come about. 'Expedition' has some good examples of this regarding the Crystallines, and some of the more closely related species divergence, but a lot of it really also doesn't hang together very well. Why would aerial creatures evolve lifting sacs filled with either dangerously combustible gas, or exceedingly rare gas? Why would creatures' bodies evolve around their method of locomotion, and not the other way around? How could multiple predator species exist in relatively small environments with limited prey species without causing constant Malthusian Crises? Why would creatures who do not live underground nor are not nocturnal still rely on sonar when visual sight is so much more superior? How is it the case that such enormous land based creatures can exist? We know here on Earth there's a pretty hard limit on the size of land based life, so how on a relatively comparable planet is this barrier overcome? I don't know, the whole thing seems very Lamarckian, which we know to be an incorrect interpretation of evolution via natural selection. Evolution doesn't work as life deliberately slotting itself into its environment; It works through random mutations making life more suitable to its environment. Whilst I apppreciate the ground up approach of 'Let's start from one creature and move forward from there' it's also a pretty basic misunderstanding of evolution; That life likely had but one beginning and every incident of life can trace back to two very rudimentary creatures. However these are but small gripes. The saviour of speculative biology is the author can always say that the life they imagine has a fundamentally different chemistry or composition, which a really intriguing proposition, but tell us what that entails. What would it actually mean to have a triple DNA helix, or different base pairs, or cells without mitochondria, or energy storage that isn't phosphene based. I realise I'm probably asking for a lot, and I really don't want to deflate the fun and whimsy from speculative biology fiction, but I mean this purely as constructive criticism. Love your videos! 😁

Yaaaay, a new Qu upload!! Hype about this. Expedition is one of those things that I feel is important for what it is/was at the time, but it's a bit too "speculative". I still like the imagination of it, though.

I hate that he doesn't have more fans. This man needs governmental funding cuz i need more audio books / reviews

The Yma sound like what could have happened if the Qu had bothered to use actual diplomacy and not be complete jerks. I can at least see a bright side in that the Yma saw humanity as worth helping abd deserving to live, and maybe if they help with the cleanup and then get us past the technological gap where we have a hard time managing clean energy without major sacrifices to standard of living, then things could work out. I see our current situation as a combo people and technology gap. The big thing we need to get going is nuclear fusion but that may be very tough to do.

Will you ever review snaiad or phatanum b ?

Love your channel! That's the best way of learning English!

I recommend checking out Barlowes Inferno

I watched this on discovery Channel when it first came out. Was pretty well done

I remember the show. Didn't know it was based on a book tbh.