TYSON: Our Ship of the
Imagination can take us
anywhere in space and time.
The cosmos is right
outside our front window.
If you want to see
the past, look down.
And if you want
to see the future, look up.
On this voyage, we are
bound for a distant galaxy.
And we'll discover how
we as a species became
explorers of the cosmos.
There. There she is.
NASA's Voyager 1.
Launched in 1977,
she is the most distant
object built by human hands.
She's done some hard traveling
since our last encounter,
logged another
billion and a half miles.
Voyager's making for
other parts of our Milky Way,
but we have another, far
more distant destination.
The cosmic ocean is
made of space and time.
You can't move in space
without also moving in time.
Our voyage will take us
a long way from home,
a little more than a
billion light-years.
We're also traveling a
billion years into the past,
to an event so violent it
will even shatter time.
Now, we're getting
close to our destination.
This is what we came for.
These two black holes were
born from the collapse of a
pair of massive stars.
And they've been doing a
gravitational tango ever since
for millions of years.
We're here for the climax.
When those two collide,
they will set off a space-time
tsunami that will
stretch and compress space
in all directions.
And it will slow
down time itself,
before speeding it up
and slowing it down again.
(distorted, echoes).
Gravitational...
and it will slow
down time itself...
Set off a
space-time tsunami...
Stretch and compress space
in all directions a billion
light-years away.
(grunts and exhales).
What does an event that
took place more than a billion
light-years away
have to do with us?
Albert Einstein was the first
to understand that matter
could send ripples
across space-time.
He imagined that catastrophic
explosions of matter should
create something much bigger
than ripples, great waves,
gravitational waves.
You are seeing and
hearing me right now,
on whatever device you have,
because we figured out a way
to manipulate the
electromagnetic spectrum.
If we can learn to surf
those gravitational waves the
way we know how to ride
the electromagnetic ones,
who knows?
It's as impossible to foresee
as our world was to the
scientists who experimented
with electricity back
in the 19th century.
Cosmologists predicted the
existence of black holes.
Gravitational waves are the
first direct evidence that
black holes are real.
But they may also provide
a new way of knowing and
exploring the cosmos.
We can add it to the
other senses that science has
devised to penetrate
the great dark ocean,
all the kinds of
light we use; gamma ray,
X-ray, ultraviolet,
infrared, microwave,
radio wave and visible light.
This newest way to search the
cosmos could help us to one
day know what's happening
inside those black holes,
and the other hidden
places that make up most
of the universe.
What if we could detect the
gravitational waves that were
caused by the first
moment of creation,
the birth of the cosmos?
What if we could extend our
vision to see the whole sweep
of 14 billion years
of cosmic evolution?
So, how did we get so smart?
We know something about the
evolution of our species,
but how did the
human mind evolve?
Where did that crazy ambition
to climb the ladder to the
stars come from?
How did we become a way for
the universe to know itself?
It started over there.
is a way for us to grasp theCr
vastness of time.
We've taken all of time,
from the birth of the
universe to this very moment,
and compressed it into
a single calendar year.
On this scale, every
month represents a little
more than a billion years.
Every day represents
nearly 40 million years.
Our own story begins
with all the other life on
our little world.
Every living thing on
Earth is descended from
a single origin.
It happened in the deep ocean
darkness on September 15,
about four billion years ago.
Within this tiny single-celled
organism was a kind of
chemical ladder,
the DNA double helix.
Star stuff...
Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen...
Elements cooked in the
hearts of distant stars,
combined with hydrogen from
the Big Bang to become alive
on this little world.
Through random changes,
mutations in the genes,
some of which led to
more successful life-forms,
what we call evolution
by natural selection.
The ladder grew,
adding more and more rungs.
It took another three billion
years for life to evolve the
complexity of the plants and
animals that you could see
with the naked eye.
If the Cosmic
Calendar had holidays,
surely December 26
would be one of them.
Some time on this day,
about 200 million years ago,
the first mammals evolved.
They brought a new
feature to life on Earth:
the neocortex.
Back in the Triassic,
the odds were against her kind,
but the dinosaurs that
terrorized the
mammals went extinct.
It was the evolution of
the neocortex in small,
furtive creatures
such as this one,
that enabled their descendants
to take over the planet.
Mammals brought
something else that was new.
They suckled their young.
They nurtured them.
And there was love.
Mother's Day on
the Cosmic Calendar.
Evolution by natural selection
means that those living things
able to better adapt to their
environment are more likely to
survive and leave offspring.
Intelligence can be a
huge selective advantage.
The fate of this planet was
changed forever by an event
involving just 13 atoms.
How small is 13 atoms?
It's a quadrillionth the
size of a grain of salt.
A mutation occurred in the DNA
of just one of our ancestors.
Every source of self-esteem,
everything we've learned,
and built, might come down
to nothing more than this.
One base pair of
a single gene.
Just a single rung programmed
the neocortex to grow larger
still and fold more deeply.
Maybe it was a random
zap from a cosmic ray,
or a simple error
in transmission from
one cell to another.
Whatever it was, it led to
a change in our species that
would ultimately
affect every other species
of life on Earth.
It happened late on
New Year's Eve on this
Cosmic Calendar of ours.
To think that,
for good or evil,
our ability to feel loyalty
and concern for increasingly
larger groups, our obsession
with certain belief systems,
our capacity to
imagine the future,
our power to transform the
world and to search the cosmos
for answers...
The very name we gave
to our own species,
homo sapiens, Latin for
"wise persons" all of it
comes down to nothing more
than a single rung on our tiny
DNA ladder to the stars.
For much of the last hour
on the Cosmic Calendar,
for all but the last minute,
our ancestors were
hunters and gatherers,
living in small bands.
You know, when
people just shrug and say
"chalk it up to human nature,"
it puzzles me.
They're usually
talking about our greed,
our arrogance, our violence.
But we've been human
for at least a couple of
hundred thousand years.
For most of that time we
weren't that way at all.
How do we know?
From the accounts of
explorers and anthropologists
encountering surviving
hunter-gatherer societies
across four centuries.
There are, of course,
exceptions, especially in
the circumstances
of extreme scarcity.
But the overwhelming consensus
paints a picture of humans
who lived in relative
harmony with each other
and the environment.
We shared the little we
had because we knew that our
survival depended
on the group.
We didn't prize wealth beyond
our needs because possessions
would just weigh us
down as we wandered.
We were different from our
non-human primate ancestors
with their alpha-males
bullying their way to dominance.
And where was God?
Everywhere.
In the rocks and in the rivers,
in the trees, in the
birds and every living thing.
And that was human nature
for a couple of
hundred thousand years.
I'm standing on the southern
tip of Africa and imagining
what it was like some
time in the last hundreds
of thousands of years.
Back then, Africa
was home to all the
world's homo sapiens...
All 10,000 of them.
If you were an
extra-terrestrial
on a survey mission,
you might have thought we
were an endangered species.
Someday soon there
will be ten billion of us.
What happened?
How did we become
the globe-girdling,
space-traveling
species that we are today?
Welcome to the first
laboratory on Earth.
We're in Blombos Cave
where the evolution of the mind
made a great leap.
Our ancestors were conducting
chemistry experiments
here with a mineral
rich in iron, ocher.
They used it to decorate
objects with bits of red color,
but it may have
also had other uses,
to preserve animal
hides or as a medicine,
or as a way to
sharpen their tools,
or maybe as an
insect repellent.
And they engraved the
ocher with symbols.
Something completely
new on the planet Earth, art.
Not to be eaten.
Not to provide shelter.
But to symbolize something...
Or just to be.
It looks a little
bit like a ladder,
or a double helix.
Whatever it was
supposed to be,
it's the earliest remnant
we have of human culture.
We had found a
way to leave behind
something distinctly human.
A means to communicate,
however enigmatically,
to you and me
100,000 years away.
A great power was discovered
here in Blombos Cave.
At 25 cosmic
seconds-to-midnight,
between 10,000
and 12,000 years ago,
humans discovered
another great power.
Instead of foraging for food,
we learned how to
grow it in the earth.
This changed everything.
Our ancestors did
something else they had
never done before.
They invented new tools,
technology,
to plant and pull
food out of the earth.
They settled down
and moved indoors.
Our relationship to
nature, and to one another,
would never be the same.
This agricultural revolution,
the domestication of
plants and animals,
is the mother of all
revolutions because all
others trace back to it.
Its consequences
reach far beyond even our
own moment in time.
Like most revolutions,
this one brought
change that was both great,
and horrifying.
There was a new concept
in the world, "Home."
A specific place on the
planet where your ancestors,
and you, were born and lived.
And over time these
settlements grew larger,
until about 20 cosmic seconds
ago or around 7000 BCE.
Welcome to Çatalhöyük,
a community on
the Anatolian plain.
It's about 9,000 years ago
and everyone has settled
in for the evening.
Tonight, roughly the same
number of people who once
populated all of Africa
are living together
in this proto-city.
The city is such a new idea,
they haven't
invented the street yet,
or the window.
So the only way you can get
into your apartment is to walk
along the rooftops till
you arrive at the opening
to your dwelling.
Çatalhöyük lacked something
much more significant than
streets and windows.
There is no palace here.
The bitter price that the
invention of agriculture cost
human society had
yet to be paid.
Here, there was no dominance
of the few over the many.
There was no 1%
attaining lavish wealth,
while most everyone
else merely subsisted.
Forensic analysis of the
women, men, and children
who lived here show a
remarkable similarity in diet.
They still cherished
the hunter-gatherer
ethos of sharing.
Çatalhöyük was egalitarian.
The weakest ate the same
food that the strongest did,
and everyone lived in
the same kind of home.
But, man, it was
anything but drab.
Come on. I'll show you.
TYSON: This was a
typical apartment in
one of the first cities,
Çatalhöyük,
in what is now Turkey,
as it looked about
9,000 years ago.
They were a lot like us.
This bit of volcanic glass,
called obsidian,
made an excellent mirror.
If we could only find a
way to see all the things
that were once reflected here.
This apartment was home
for an extended family of
seven to ten people.
Every apartment had a
similar floor plan.
Bedroom. Living room.
Kitchen.
Plaster auroch head.
The people of Çatalhöyük
had a passion for decorating.
Apartments were richly
appointed with the teeth and
bones and skins of animals.
The ocher that our
ancestors picked up in Africa,
about 100,000 years before,
was now the medium of choice
for the interior
decorators of Çatalhöyük.
And the red ocher had yet
another profound application.
They used it to create
an entirely new art form:
the map.
For the first time ever,
humans created a
two-dimensional representation
of their location
in space and time.
"This is where my home is
in relation to the volcano."
And with a few
magical strokes,
the artist sent a message
across 9,000 years...
"I was here when the
volcano awakened."
The experiment at
Çatalhöyük was a success,
and within a few thousand years
there were cities everywhere.
♪ ♪
TYSON: When different
kinds of people congregate
in a single place,
ideas are exchanged
and new possibilities arise.
The city is a kind of brain,
creating and
processing new ideas.
Here, in the
city of Amsterdam,
in the 17th century,
citizens of the old and
new worlds mingled as
they never had before,
and there was an unprecedented
freedom of thought.
These conditions produced a
golden age of science and art.
In Italy, Giordano Bruno
had proclaimed the existence
of other worlds.
For this he had
been made to suffer.
But a mere 50 years
later in Holland,
the astronomer
Christiaan Huygens,
who held the same belief,
was showered with honors.
Light was the
central theme of the age:
The enlightenment
of human curiosity set free,
and the light shed
by Europe's first look at
the once hidden realms
of the planet.
The light that permeated
the paintings of the time,
particularly the
work of Vermeer.
And light as an object
of scientific inquiry.
For generations, textile
merchants had used a lens to
examine the thread count
of finely stitched fabrics.
In the Amsterdam of that time,
there lived three
men whose passion for
light inspired them to
use that ancient device
in a completely new way.
They aimed the textile
merchants' lens at objects no
one had ever thought to
examine closely before.
It became a window, an
aperture for finding and
exploring new worlds.
Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek
used a single lens to reveal
the teeming microcosm
in a drop of water.
His friend,
Christiaan Huygens used
two lenses to bring the stars,
planets, and
moons close enough to
reveal their features.
Huygens became the first to
see that Saturn's rings did not
touch the planet, and
the first to understand
what they really were.
He also discovered
Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Huygens, like Bruno,
believed that the
stars were other suns,
orbited by their own
systems of planets and moons.
But why was there no hint
of those other worlds and
their living things in
the sacred books?
Whatever disquiet this
contradiction may have stirred
in the hearts and minds of the
leaders of the Enlightenment,
there was only one man who
dared to address it head-on.
He was another
wizard of light.
Baruch Spinoza had been
a member of the Jewish
congregation of Amsterdam
through his teenage years.
But in his early 20s, he
began to speak publicly of
a new vision of God.
Spinoza's God was the
physical laws of the universe.
His sacred text,
the book of nature.
The Jews of Amsterdam
were mostly refugees from
the vicious Inquisitions
in Spain and Portugal,
where so many of them had
been tortured and murdered.
Amsterdam had
offered the Jews a refuge,
and they must have seen
Spinoza's radical ideas as a
threat to their
hard-won security in Holland.
They excommunicated
the young rebel,
and decreed that he
must be forever shunned.
Spinoza accepted their
punishment with dignity,
but without a
trace of submission.
He moved nearby, to The Hague.
Where he went even further,
daring to write that the Bible
was not dictated by God,
but written by human beings.
Spinoza wrote:
"Do not look for
God in miracles.
Miracles are violations
of the laws of nature.
God is best apprehended in
the study of those laws."
No one had ever said
these things aloud before.
Spinoza knew that
he was testing the
limits of free thought,
even for Holland.
To him, an official
state religion was more than
spiritual coercion
of the individual.
Spinoza regarded the
miraculous events of the major
religious traditions as
organized superstition.
In his view, magical
thinking posed a danger to
the future citizens of a
rational, free society.
There could be no such
thing as democracy without the
separation of
church and state.
He wrote a book that
introduced the ideas at the
heart of the American and
many another revolution.
Then, as now, there were
those who were threatened
by this view of God.
(grunting).
Spinoza continued to
write and speak about his
revolutionary view of God,
always wearing the slashed
cape as a badge of honor.
He died at 44, possibly from
inhaling particles of dust
during his years of
grinding lenses for
microscopes and telescopes.
250 years later, another man
with a passion for light made
a pilgrimage to the
humble workroom that had been
preserved as a testament
to the vast influence of
Spinoza's philosophy.
This man, world famous for
finding a new law of nature,
was often asked if
he believed in God.
Albert Einstein replied:
"I believe in Spinoza's God,
who reveals himself in the
harmony of all that exists."
Our understanding
of nature's laws
has advanced far beyond
Spinoza's, and even
Einstein's wildest dreams.
But there is one law of nature
we cannot seem to grasp.
Inscribed in the book of
nature is a parable about an
ancient alliance
between two kingdoms.
And those who
would tear it apart.
TYSON: Long ago,
there were two kingdoms.
An alliance was
formed between them,
one that would bring them
both riches beyond measure.
A partnership lasting more
than a 100 million years.
And then a new kind
of being evolved in
one of the two kingdoms.
Its descendants plundered
the riches and violated
the alliance.
In their arrogance, they
became a mortal danger to both
kingdoms and to themselves.
This parable is true.
It's the story of
two of the half dozen
realms of life on Earth,
the plant and animal kingdoms.
It's not easy being green.
Sex is challenging when
you're stuck in one place.
There's no dating.
You just sit there and
cast your seed to the winds.
Literally.
You just wait for
the wind to blow.
If you get lucky,
some of your pollen will
be carried away and land on
the sexual reproductive part
of another plant.
The plants played this
hit-or-miss game of chance for
a couple of
hundred million years,
until insects
evolved to play cupid.
What resulted was one of the
great co-evolution marriages
in the history of life.
The insect would visit a
flower for a dinner of
protein-rich pollen.
Inevitably, some of the
pollen would stick to the body
of the insect.
The insect would
visit another flower,
bringing along the
leftovers on its body.
That pollen
fertilized the next flower,
allowing it to reproduce.
It was a win-win deal for both
the flowers and the insects,
causing a series of delightful
evolutionary developments.
A new plant arose that
produced sugary nectar in
addition to the pollen.
Now, the insects
came not just for
their basic meal of pollen,
but also for dessert.
The insects got chubbier,
evolved furry bodies and even
little pouches on their legs
to snag more pollen on their
daily rounds in the flowers.
Now there were bees.
This was a bonus for
yet another species of
the animal kingdom...
Us.
We are indebted to the bees
and their fellow pollinators
for something even more
vital to our survival.
Every third bite of food you
take-and this is even true for
those of us who are omnivores,
was made possible by them.
35% of the world's crops
depend on their cooperation.
The plants eat starlight...
And we, and the animals,
we eat plants.
And they don't
just increase the
quantity of available food.
We owe them for much of the
biodiversity that has made our
food supply so dependable.
But we're
working them to death.
And for the first time ever,
many kinds of bees are on
the endangered species list.
I think you know
where this is headed.
The blessing and the curse
of the invention of agriculture
has brought us here, to
the Halls of Extinction.
A memorial to all the
living things lost in the mass
extinction events
in Earth's history.
It's a monument to the broken
branches on the tree of life.
Five times in the
history of life,
cataclysmic geological,
and astronomical events,
have threatened to
extinguish life itself.
The sixth one is different.
The last time we were
here together this hallway
had no name.
Why?
Because back then a
scientific consensus had yet
to be reached that we
were in the midst of a
mass extinction event.
That's changed.
Now, this hallway has a name.
It's ours.
The Anthropocene.
"Anthropo" from the Greek
word for "human" and "Cene."
the Greek word for "recent."
TYSON: These are the species
we hunted to extinction back
when we were wanderers.
Including our own
cousins, the Neanderthals.
What is it about
us, as a species,
that wherever we go,
we bring death?
Beyond here lies the future.
Even now it's not
too late to keep this
corridor from lengthening.
If we fail...
(children playing).
But if we succeed...
Come with me.
TYSON: In a possible
future only decades away,
project Starshot, a
flotilla of 1,000 spacecraft,
will depart from Earth.
This part of the
Atacama Desert west
of the Andes Mountains,
is so dry that it hasn't
rained in recorded history.
And that's great for us
because we're going to need
the clearest of skies.
There were no witnesses
when the first life left the
water for the land.
There was nobody to file a
report when the first birds
took to the skies.
But this is one great leap
that will be documented in
every conceivable way.
The whole world is watching.
We are, after all, sending
our first craft directly to the
planets of another sun:
the Alpha Centauri system.
These are the ships that
will carry our senses there.
These are interstellar sailing
ships propelled by light.
Their hulls weigh but a gram,
and they are no larger than a
pea, and yet they're equipped
with all that NASA's Voyagers
have and more.
When the first light blasts
forth from this phased array
of lasers, the spacecraft will
accelerate from zero to 20% of
the speed of light
in mere minutes.
Inside each nanocraft is
everything needed to perform
the preliminary reconnaissance
of the worlds of another star
and return that visual
and scientific information
back to Earth.
Space is mostly empty,
but there are tiny dust
particles that could
wreak havoc if they
were to collide with nanocraft
traveling at such high speeds.
That's one of the reasons we
need to send so many of them.
Voyager 1 is traveling
at 38,000 miles per hour.
It left home more
than 40 years ago.
It will take these
nanocraft only four days
to overtake her.
That's pretty fast,
but still only 20%
of the speed of light.
Proxima Centauri is
four light-years away.
That's a 20 year one-way trip.
Orbiting Proxima Centauri,
there is a world in the
habitable zone where we
think life might flourish.
Our robotic emissaries
will send accounts from
these new worlds.
Their messages will race
back to us on radio waves
at the speed of light.
They'll take four years to
reach us: 20 years one-way,
four years back.
That's a 24-year round-trip.
Many of you will be there then
to read and to write those new
pages in the book of nature,
and to chart our future
course of wandering...
♪ ♪
No longer
bounded by the earth,
the ocean,
or the sky.
♪ ♪
Captioned by Cotter
Captioning Services.
