But one I'd suggest, which I pretty much never see anyone else mention, is The Day the Universe Changed (companion to the BBC miniseries, now available on YouTube.) It's sort of about the history of science, but more so it's about how our discoveries about the world changed (and continue to change) our perception of it.
Okay, but there were how many billion copies of the sample when the creature died? If there were two, after 521 years I still have (on average) at least one copy of 3/4 of the data, extending the half-life to (check my math here) 737 years. With 15 billion copies or so, the half-life gets up to, hey!, about 65 million years, and there are trillions of cells (and so trillions of copies of DNA) in a human-sized body.
When he says "virtual explorers", he doesn't mean you'll be sitting in New York while playing on Alpha Centauri I via VR. He means uploading your mind to the probe before launching it.
tl;dr: rtfa.
He who steps on others to reach the top has good balance.