Humanity From Space - Review and Recommendation

I missed this when it was first presented last summer, but very glad I caught it on PBS last night as a repeat.  This is probably the first "post-big-data" documentary I've seen, incorporating modern data presentation styling overlayed into stunning graphics.  It makes for very impressive visuals.

Overall this 100 mile high view of our planet and the impact humans have had on it is a mesmerizing showcase of our ability to make use of big data and glean insight into the future of our planet and our species. From trade to communications humans have transformed the planet into single world system that is overwhelmingly complex and beautiful.  It also showcases how the ingenuity of people may pull us out of this nosedive we seem to be in toward extinction.

Some of the factoids are a bit obscure, for instance when the sum total of all data is stated as something like 500 quintillion bytes of information, enough to fill CD's in a stack from here to the moon, 7-8 times, is an odd way to try to put things into perspective and not as intuitive to the average user as the writers may have hoped.  Again though, the entire presentation is quite interesting and visually amazing.

This is not a doomsday is coming video and I highly recommend watching it. The best part is that it's free to view. The video is presented by PBS using the Flash browser plug-in (which for now is still viewable via a Chrome plug-in), and there are a reasonable number of commercials interspersed throughout the nearly 2 hour video, but it is well worth watching.

Here's the link to the PBS website which has a much larger and better quality rendition than Youtube. This is a video you'll want to see in the best resolution possible.