Darwin IV is a fictional planet

Planet

A planet is a celestial body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals.The term planet is ancient, with ties to history, science,...

 that was the subject of Wayne Barlowe

Wayne Barlowe

Wayne Douglas Barlowe is an American science fiction and fantasy painter. He has paintedover 300 book and magazine covers and illustrations for many major book publishers, as well as Life magazine, Time, and Newsweek...

's book Expedition

Expedition (book)

Expedition is the title of a science fiction book by artist-author Wayne Douglas Barlowe. Subtitled "Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D...

and the television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 special, Alien Planet

Alien Planet

Alien Planet is a 94-minute docufiction, originally airing on the Discovery Channel, about two internationally built robot probes searching for alien life on the fictional planet Darwin IV. It was based on the book Expedition, by sci-fi/fantasy artist and writer Wayne Douglas Barlowe, who was also...

, based on Expedition. Although the details of the discovery and exploration of Darwin IV differ in the two presentations, both are essentially the same in their depiction of the planetary environment and its native life-forms

Extraterrestrial life

Extraterrestrial life is defined as life that does not originate from Earth...

, whose abundance and variety prompt the name Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

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In Alien Planet, a more basic scenario is presented where a ship called the Von Braun is sent to explore an alien world outside the solar system

Solar System

The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...

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