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WILLIAM SHATNER: You know, I've been around for a while.

Met some interesting people, done some crazy things.

So you just might think that there's not much that

can take me by surprise.

You'd be wrong.

The world is full of stories and science and

things that amaze and confound me every single day,

incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

Some I can answer.

Others just defy logic.

NARRATOR: Is the end of the world upon us?

In Wyoming, a deadly force is sleeping underneath

Yellowstone National Park.

Could it awake and destroy the planet?

ROBERT VICINO: It could happen today.

It could happen tomorrow. It's a race against time.

NARRATOR: In Alabama, a NASA scientist makes

a remarkable discovery.

Is a killer solar storm coming our way?

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: If it were to hit today,

it would knock us out.

It would knock civilization to its knees.

NARRATOR: And across the world comes the threat of

an invasion by robots.

Could the terminator be real?

WILLIAM SHATNER: Yeah, it's a weird world.

And I love it.

[♪]

WILLIAM SHATNER: Do you believe in prophecies?

Some of the biggest events in history have been

foreseen by some of the greatest minds.

Nostradamus predicted World War I, Hitler,

Napoleon, the election of US president Barack Obama

and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

How did he do that?

And why can't I do that?

Were they simply lucky guesses?

Can we somehow see with incredible accuracy what

will happen hundreds or perhaps thousands of years

into the future?

And if we can, do we really want to know what's coming?

NARRATOR: Patrick Geryl is an astronomer.

In 1996, he did something extraordinary.

He devoted his life to studying the complex and

mysterious texts of the ancient Mayans.

What he found is now the stuff of Hollywood -

the world is coming to an end, and soon.

PATRICK GERYL: What captivated me the most

after reading the Mayan prophecies was that they

calculated this huge cataclysm at the end of

2012 and this was very uh disturbing information for me.

I said, wow, gee, my whole future and the whole

future of everybody will be destroyed in a few years.

What am I going to do?

And that changed my whole life.

NARRATOR: But knowing when the world would end wasn't enough.

Patrick had to know how it would happen.

For the next two years, using complex mathematical

formulas, he set out to decode the Mayans' hidden messages.

PATRICK GERYL: I was immediately grasped by the

fact that they had very high accuracy in that they

were able to calculate something very spectacular

into the future and it took me several years to

decode it but I found what will happen in 2012.

NARRATOR: What did Patrick find?

Is it an asteroid? Nuclear war?

How will the world end?

Geryl believes on December 12th, 2012, a sleeping

giant will awake.

PATRICK GERYL: The super volcano will erupt and

that will destroy completely our civilization.

NARRATOR: There are at least seven known

supervolcanoes on earth.

They contain massive amounts of molten rock,

which is trapped inside them below the earth's crust.

The pressure builds until finally it bursts,

exploding in a catastrophic eruption thousands

of times more powerful than a regular volcano.

The last eruption occurred over 70,000 years ago.

Could one of these giants be a threat to us now?

Remarkably, the answer could be yes - and it's

underneath Yellowstone National Park.

Over two million tourists visit Yellowstone every year.

Little do they know that under the surface lies one

of the deadliest forces on the planet.

Incredibly, this sleeping supervolcano may be coming

to life.

In 2004, scientists detected the ground

starting to bulge around Yellowstone.

Soon after, over one thousand mini earthquakes

occurred there in just a few months.

Some dismiss it but others say it can only mean one thing.

PATRICK GERYL: The scientists that are saying

that well the rumbling at Yellowstone Park, that is

normal, well they don't know what the Maya knew.

The rotation from the earth will change.

Once the inner core of the earth starts moving on its

head, then the lava that is around the inner core will

be pushed also very sharply to the crust and we will

have an eruption of the Yellowstone, at the end of 2012.

NARRATOR: Did Patrick Geryl unlock the Mayans' secret?

Is the Yellowstone supervolcano about to erupt?

And could it mean the end of the world?

Robert Vicino is an entrepreneur and survivalist.

He's not waiting to find out.

ROBERT VICINO: If you thought Mt. Saint Helens

was something to see, wait 'til you see Yellowstone go.

NARRATOR: In 2003, Robert decided that there was

only one way to survive the blast of a

supervolcano - by building volcano-proof bunkers

all over America.

ROBERT VICINO: It's a race against time to get our

shelters built.

You could say it isn't so and ignore the

possibilities but it's not gonna make it go away.

NARRATOR: Made of concrete and steel, these

self-contained bunkers are buried underground.

They can house up to one thousand people and store

enough food for a year.

But who is going to use them?

ROBERT VICINO: We have about ten thousand members

currently signed up from all over the world.

NARRATOR: Could Vicino and his friends someday be the

only surviving members of the human race?

ROBERT VICINO: If Yellowstone blows, you're

looking at a life extinction event.

The only parties that are gonna survive are those

that are underground.

It could happen today. It could happen tomorrow.

NARRATOR: Does this survivalist know something we don't?

Whatever the truth is, he's taking no chances.

ROBERT VICINO: I don't know what inspired Noah

but I would imagine he was as passionate about what

he was doing as I am.

NARRATOR: Are Robert Vicino and Patrick Geryl

simply prophets of doom?

Or could they be right?

Will a supervolcano cause he end of the world?

WILLIAM SHATNER: Crazy, isn't it?

I mean if you listened to every doomsday prediction,

prophecy or conspiracy theory, you'd never leave

the house right?

I mean what is it with these people?

Do they think that just because they say a giant

volcano is gonna rip through this planet and

wipe us out that we're gonna believe them?

I don't believe a word they say.

I'm just being careful.

NARRATOR: A man decoding the texts of the ancients

Mayans uncovers an astonishing prophecy.

Will a supervolcano at Yellowstone destroy our planet?

Stanley Ambrose is an anthropologist.

He thinks we have reason to believe it might.

STANLEY AMBROSE: I suppose if you really wanted to

stay around in a place that was struck by an

apocalypse that would be a good idea.

I'd rather move.

NARRATOR: A lifetime spent studying supervolcanoes

has convinced Ambrose they're a force to be feared.

STANLEY AMBROSE: If Yellowstone blows,

it would eject a huge amount of dust and gasses up

to fifty kilometers into the stratosphere.

We have to fear global famine.

We can imagine complete loss of crop production

for decades to centuries.

NARRATOR: In 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted in

Washington State, sending volcanic ash over

ten kilometers into the air.

Ambrose thinks this massive eruption would be

dwarfed by Yellowstone.

Could humans survive this kind of catastrophic explosion?

We may know the answer, because it's already happened.

STANLEY AMBROSE: The volcanic eruption of Toba

stands among the most explosive and largest

in earth history.

NARRATOR: Around seventy thousand years ago,

a supervolcano exploded at Toba in Indonesia.

It was so powerful it left a crater one hundred

kilometers long, still visible today.

STANLEY AMBROSE: Volcanic ash rained down over an

area larger than the size of the United States.

That's big.

The earth was surrounded by this thick blanket of

sulfuric acid haze.

The sun weakened.

Much solar energy was reflected back into outer space.

The landscape around the world was basically de-vegetated.

It's a global shock to the world's system, what

I call an instant ice age.

NARRATOR: Before the eruption at Toba,

the earth was home to a healthy population of humans.

Ambrose believes we can judge our fate by looking

at what happened to them.

STANLEY AMBROSE: The volcanic eruption caused

a population crash unlike any that had been seen

previously in human history and during the

next 10,000 years there were very few

archaeological traces of humans.

NARRATOR: Did a supervolcano take us to

the brink of extinction?

Could Yellowstone do the same now?

STANLEY AMBROSE: Everything within the

blast zone will be buried.

There would probably be general infrastructure failure.

Agricultural production would of course be hammered.

The United States would lose its entire grain belt.

And if the whole world got cold the way it did with

Toba, then there would be few choices of where to go

to get food.

NARRATOR: It's an alarming scenario.

Should we heed the warning?

Is the Yellowstone supervolcano ready to blow?

STANLEY AMBROSE: Sometimes it's bulging up like

it's going to explode.

Then these bulges go back down.

One of these bulges coming up is not going to go back down.

The pressure just might continue increasing and

that's when it's time to head for the hills.

NARRATOR: Could Stanley Ambrose be right?

Are billions of people in imminent danger of death

by supervolcano?

Jake Lowenstern is the chief scientist at the

Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

JAKE LOWENSTERN: It's my job to worry about whether

Yellowstone's going to erupt.

NARRATOR: Jake's studied the supervolcano's

behaviour.

He believes it's not a monster, but a pussycat.

JAKE LOWENSTERN: People talk about impending doom

because they know there have been eruptions in

Yellowstone's past.

There have been very, very large eruptions at

Yellowstone the size of eruptions that people will

call super eruptions but there's no reason to

expect an, a big eruption at Yellowstone within our

lifetime, which doesn't seem very worrying to me.

NARRATOR: Why is Jake so sure?

He thinks there's something the prophets of

doom have overlooked.

JAKE LOWENSTERN: Well the way that Yellowstone has

erupted most of the time is through these smaller

lava flows which are similar to those that happen

in Hawaii, which as you can imagine would be locally

very interesting but not an international uh problem.

NARRATOR: In the last two million years, the

Yellowstone supervolcano has had three giant eruptions.

Jake believes a crucial fact is preventing another one.

Yellowstone erupts all the time, but on such a tiny

scale it produces nothing but harmless flows of lava.

JAKE LOWENSTERN: Lava flows can block roads.

Forest fires might start but they sort of roll very

slowly across the ground.

You could generally outrun them very easily so

they're not very damaging events.

NARRATOR: Far from causing a disaster, Jake thinks

these lava flows are keeping a lid on the sleeping giant.

JAKE LOWENSTERN: Anytime that you're having a volcanic

eruption you're removing pressure on the magma chamber.

It seems to be relatively commonplace for

Yellowstone to have this kind of activity.

NARRATOR: Are mini eruptions at Yellowstone

keeping us safe from the supervolcano?

Do they explain its recent rumblings?

JAKE LOWENSTERN: Around 2009, 2010, we had a

couple earthquake swarms.

In a swarm you have a number of medium sized

earthquakes and they happen all in one

particular location.

They were among the larger ones that we've had.

NARRATOR: But what caused the quakes?

Scientists believe magma is flowing into the

volcanic chamber, pushing up the crust.

Is this a sign of an impending giant eruption?

JAKE LOWENSTERN: There was about twenty-five

centimeters or ten inches, something like this, of

uplift at Yellowstone.

Between 1925 and 1975, it rose about three times

that amount so that uplift doesn't in particular seem

very worrying to me.

The kinds of activity we're seeing are the kind

of activity that clearly has been going on for

hundreds and even thousands of years.

NARRATOR: Even if Jake is right, there's another

burning question.

Why are some people certain the Yellowstone

supervolcano will erupt in 2012?

JAKE LOWENSTERN: I think there's a subset of the

population out there that just likes to be scared in a way.

They like to, to come up with things that, that

kind of stir the pot but there's no clock beneath

volcanoes that tells them when to erupt.

Based on the information that we're seeing,

there's no guarantee that Yellowstone will ever

have another one of these super eruptions.

NARRATOR: Were the ancient Mayans right?

Will a supervolcano wipe out the human race in the

greatest mass extinction since the big bang?

Or is Yellowstone's sleeping giant nothing

more than a harmless firecracker?

Weird or what?

[♪]

WILLIAM SHATNER: Everywhere you look,

our planet is teeming with life, whether a single

celled amoeba, a snail, or incredibly complex

organisms and species - like us.

But all life forms on earth have one thing in common.

Our very existence depends upon - in fact is at the

mercy of - just one thing.

If it's in trouble, then there's trouble for all of us.

NARRATOR: They say you shouldn't stare directly

into the sun.

But for over three decades, NASA scientist

David Hathaway has done exactly that.

In 2005, he noticed something very strange.

DAVID HATHAWAY: It was a little unexpected by many

of us, myself included.

NARRATOR: Hathaway was tracking sunspots in giant

regions of intense magnetic activity that

occur on the surface of the sun.

But the greatest danger to our planet is what

explodes out of them - solar flares.

DAVID HATHAWAY: Solar flares can blast material

off of the sun a million miles an hour.

NARRATOR: With a force of ten billion atomic bombs,

solar flares catapult billions of tons of red

hot plasma into space and sometimes directly at Earth.

DAVID HATHAWAY: When it strikes the earth, can

shake the earth's magnetic field.

Uh it does some spectacular things like

produce Aurora Borealis.

It can also do things to our technology in particular.

Solar flares can cause satellites to de-orbit and

ultimately re-enter the earth's atmosphere and

burn up so you literally lose the satellite.

NARRATOR: Solar flares and sunspots occur in regular

cycles but in 2008 Hathaway discovered

something remarkable.

Suddenly they appeared to mysteriously stop.

DAVID HATHAWAY: We're seeing the sun spot cycle

the smallest we've seen in at least a hundred years

or perhaps two hundred years.

We didn't see sunspots for literally months at a time.

That had us a little surprised.

NARRATOR: Some scientists believe the change in the

sunspot cycles is the calm before an unprecedented

solar storm, a wave of solar flares so

destructive scientists call it Space Katrina.

But now other ominous signs suggest the sun

could be waking from its deep slumber.

DAVID HATHAWAY: We've gone from no sunspots to twenty

or thirty sunspots on the sun at, on a given day now.

We've also seen the number of flares increase.

NARRATOR: Is there something wrong with the

star that gives life to all things on earth?

DAVID HATHAWAY: We've had some fairly wild predictions.

You've got to go way back.

You've got to go back to the sixteen hundreds to find

the sun misbehaving or acting as weirdly as it is now.

NARRATOR: Is our sun preparing to launch the

biggest solar stormn history?

NARRATOR: A NASA scientist discovers strange activity

in solar flares on the surface of the sun.

Could a giant solar storm be coming our way?

Or is there another explanation for the sun's

weird behaviour?

Nassim Haramein is a scientist.

He believes he has the answer.

In 2009, he made a remarkable discovery when

viewing images taken by a NASA satellite.

NASSIM HARAMEIN: What I notice is when I was

looking at this, first of all we see two objects appear.

Those two objects seem to have moved together and

have moved across the frame.

What's strange about this particular sequence is

that when you follow this object, they make almost a

ninety degree angle turn and then entering the sun.

NARRATOR: NASA claimed the objects were simply comets

or glitches, but when Nassim studied them more

closely he came to an amazing conclusion.

NASSIM HARAMEIN: When I started to see these objects,

I couldn't believe my eyes.

They were immense.

I mean they only looked like little dots on the

data but the little dot beside the sun mean that

the object's almost the size of the earth.

NARRATOR: Planet sized objects entering the sun?

Had Nassim found something extraordinary that even

NASA had missed?

He thinks there's only one explanation.

NASSIM HARAMEIN: I believe these objects may be

intergalactic ships from advanced civilization.

They appear to be under intelligent control.

They don't appear to act in a natural way that you

would expect from, you know, cosmological objects

like comets and meteorites and so on.

NARRATOR: Could this explain the sun's odd behaviour?

Are changes in its sunspot and solar flare activity

being caused by alien ships?

NASSIM HARAMEIN: The solar flare appears to emanate

right after the objects impact the sun.

To me, clear that the two are absolutely related and

the sun flare is most likely the shock wave

resulting from the penetration of the objects

through the surface of the sun.

NARRATOR: Alien spacecraft deliberately crashing into

the sun?

It's an incredible theory, but why would they do it?

According to Nassim, the answer lies in the

astronomical records of the ancient Egyptians.

NASSIM HARAMEIN: When I looked at all the data

around the world from all these civilizations, they

all talked about the sun gods.

When you looked at these texts and the way they

described them, they talked about the sun gods

using the, the sun as a gateway.

If you were an advanced civilization, and here I'm

talking about a very advanced civilization, you

could maybe enter and then come out at any other

point in the universe.

NARRATOR: Is our sun part of an intergalactic

highway being used by alien traffic?

Are they responsible for disrupting its natural

cycles and threatening the earth?

WILLIAM SHATNER: Now we did some pretty strange

things on the Enterprise but this is ...

weird or what?

Let me see if I've got this straight.

NASA scientists say our sun's sunspot cycles are

behaving weirdly and this could cause a giant killer

solar flare to head towards Earth, right?

While another guy, Nassim, thinks that there's

something else causing these solar flares.

He thinks aliens in spaceships the size of the

Earth are crashing in and out of the sun wreaking havoc.

Nassim's theory seems crazy?

Or is it?

NARRATOR: Our sun is acting like an oddball.

Are its natural cycles being disrupted by giant UFOs?

Is a fatal solar storm on its way to earth?

NASA researcher David Hathaway has an

explanation that's far more down to earth.

He thinks we have nothing to worry about.

DAVID HATHAWAY: This recent sunspot cycle has

started later than expected and, and I think

I understand it.

The sunspot cycle is caused by magnetic fields.

NARRATOR: The sun's magnetic fields violently

swirl around the surface, like powerful ocean currents.

They produce sunspots and solar flares, until

finally something bizarre happens.

DAVID HATHAWAY: The sun's magnetic field flips.

NARRATOR: Every eleven years, the sun's magnetic

poles do a back flip.

Scientists believe this causes a dramatic decrease

in sunspot and solar flare activity, but does it

threaten us now?

DAVID HATHAWAY: We had weak magnetic fields produced

on the surface of the sun during the last sunspot cycle.

Because they were weak, we'll survive this without

any major inconvenience.

The end of the worlders almost certainly have it wrong.

The timing's just way off.

NARRATOR: We may be safe for the moment, but could

a mega solar storm hit us in the future?

And what would happen if it did?

Lawrence Joseph is a science journalist.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: If a solar storm hit today,

it would knock us out, would knock civilization

to its knees without any exaggeration.

NARRATOR: How?

An historical event could provide the answer.

On September 1st, 1859, British astronomer

Richard Carrington was looking through his telescope

when a giant solar flare exploded onto the earth.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: It caused the northern lights to

dance down to the equator.

You could read a book at midnight outside because

of the, the incredible radiation.

The Carrington Event caused some fires in

telegraph offices and caused some disruption but

basically it didn't inflict great damage.

NARRATOR: Why didn't this massive flare destroy us?

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: There was no power grid holding

society together.

There was no telecom.

There was no - none of the things that we've come to

rely upon existed back then.

NARRATOR: Joseph believes that if a similar solar

flare hit us today, our massive reliance on

electricity would be our downfall.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: We're talking a blackout that

could last months or years, could cover

half to two thirds of the continent.

After a month, I can't really see anything but

anarchy or the beginning of it.

It's the paradox of progress I call it.

We have become more vulnerable to these storms

and the storms are headed our way.

The shields are down, Scotty.

NARRATOR: In 1989, a small solar flare knocked out

the Quebec power grid and left six million people

without power in the dead of winter.

Joseph believes a giant flare would destroy every

power grid on the planet.

No electricity means no food.

LAWRENCE JOSEPH: I'm damn concerned.

People would really begin to die off in large numbers.

So what are you gonna do?

We don't know.

I mean people go head for the hills.

What are you going to do in the hills?

I don't know what to do in the hills.

Most people don't.

NARRATOR: Have our advances in technology

made us vulnerable to a super solar storm?

Is the sun's mysterious behaviour natural?

Or are aliens to blame?

Weird or what?

[♪]

NARRATOR: A world-renowned inventor makes an

astonishing prediction.

RAY KURZWEIL: Twenty years from now, computers will

be operating fully at human levels.

NARRATOR: Are we facing an uprising of killer machines?

Could the Terminator be real?

WILLIAM SHATNER: It's incredible, isn't it?

If we're to believe the ancient prophecies or our

modern day doomsday theorists or even some of

our best scientists, then not only is the end of the

world going to happen - but there's lots of ways

that nature could destroy us - and none of them are nice.

But what if they're all wrong?

What if the thing that will wipe us out has

nothing to do with volcanoes or solar storms?

What if there's something, aside from nuclear weapons

of course, that we've created that's an even

bigger threat.

Weird or what?

NARRATOR: In 1984, Hollywood gave the world a

futuristic science fiction blockbuster - the story of

a cyborg assassin sent back in time from 2029.

The Terminator posed a remarkable question.

Could robots take over and destroy us?

Nearly three decades later, we may have the answer.

Ray Kurzweil is a world-renowned inventor

and futurist.

He believes science fiction will become

reality sooner than we think.

RAY KURZWEIL: In the last fifteen years we've seen

millions-fold improvement in the power of computers

and this is not just an idle speculation about the future.

That's what we've seen.

Twenty years from now computers will be

operating fully at human levels.

NARRATOR: It's an extraordinary theory based

on an extraordinary fact.

Today's computers are one hundred billion times more

powerful than they were a century ago and their

power is growing.

Kurzweil believes they are rapidly catching us.

RAY KURZWEIL: Computers already exceed humans at

logical uh thinking like playing games.

There are robotic cars with artificial

intelligence that are driving without human drivers.

A computer today can look at an electrocardiogram

and diagnose it with the accuracy of doctors and

that's something that wasn't feasible even a couple

years ago so things are moving more and more quickly.

NARRATOR: Are we experiencing the rise of

the machines?

Are our PCs more than simply harmless pieces

of plastic and metal?

RAY KURZWEIL: They'll continue to grow

exponentially in the basic hardware power,

more than doubling in power every year.

We'll get to human levels of intelligence in

a machine by my estimates around 2029.

NARRATOR: Wait a minute. What did he say?

[reverses speech]

RAY KURZWEIL: We'll get to human levels of

intelligence in a machine by my estimates around 2029.

NARRATOR: 2029 is the year from which the terminator

made its return.

Will machines equal, then surpass our brain power

in just twenty years?

Incredibly, Kurzweil believes it won't end there.

RAY KURZWEIL: By my calculations, when we get

to around 2045, we will have multiplied the

intelligence of our human machine civilization a

billion fold by merging with this intelligent

technology we're creating.

That will be such a profound singular

transformation when we can actually vastly multiple

our own intelligence.

NARRATOR: Will man and machine merge before the

middle of this century?

And if so, what does it mean for us?

RAY KURZWEIL: It's not an invasion, you know,

from another planet.

People say oh we'll lose our humanity.

In my mind that is our humanity.

That's part of who we are.

NARRATOR: Could our world end, not by natural disaster,

but with humankind simply becoming obsolete?

John Leslie is a professor of philosophy at the

University of Guelph in Canada.

JOHN LESLIE: It could be in the next twenty, thirty

years we have computers which are more intelligent

than humans and which take over control over our

lives and there's an obvious possibility there

that things could go badly wrong.

NARRATOR: John believes that far from advancing

humanity, creating über intelligent robots and

computers could backfire on all of us.

JOHN LESLIE: If robots became super intelligent,

they could well have very little interest in the human race.

They could think of themselves as superior

humans and look on us in the same way as we look on ants.

A machine could come to the answer let's get rid

of biological humans and put machines in place of them.

NARRATOR: Are the machines we've created going to

turn on us and take over our planet?

Is Hollywood right?

JOHN LESLIE: You have to remember that the science

fiction of today quite often turns out to be the

science fact of tomorrow.

NARRATOR: According to John, it's not only

terminators that pose a very real threat to our survival.

JOHN LESLIE: In fact, one of the dangers here is

that it may be that computers are in charge of

the system, which controls nuclear bombs.

We simply don't know to what extent they are

in charge of the destructive forces.

NARRATOR: Could a machine deliberately trigger a

nuclear holocaust?

It's a terrifying scenario, but Leslie has

an even more frightening theory.

The ultimate threat to the human race is already in

our homes.

JOHN LESLIE: You could argue that the internet is,

at present, a gigantic computer and that its

intelligence far exceeds the intelligence of any

individual human.

Certainly the amount of knowledge you can get very,

very rapidly on the internet is much bigger than

you could get by consulting the greatest memory experts.

I believe that the future of the internet is pretty

certainly gonna push it in the direction of more and

more intelligence.

NARRATOR: Every day, over two billion people log on

to the internet.

It connects most of the world's computers and

databases, moving information around the planet.

John believes the internet could evolve into a central

brain that leads a cybernetic revolt against mankind.

JOHN LESLIE: It could become immensely

intelligent and become, therefore, what takes over

world government and possibly then decides that

humans are irrelevant and gets rid of them.

That's just one way in which we could be

annihilated almost immediately.

NARRATOR: Will robots blow us up with our

own nuclear weapons?

Is the internet going to destroy us?

Will man be enslaved by machines?

WILLIAM SHATNER: You know I never thought machines

were that smart.

I mean most of the gadgets I have are incapable of doing

anything useful at all, let alone reciting Shakespeare.

But if we believe what some of the world's

greatest minds are telling us, these things we've

created are gonna take us over - blow us up with our

own weapons and enslave us for the rest of time.

Could that, could be possible?

Not today my friends.

NARRATOR: Leading scientists believe

machines are becoming so intelligent they will

overtake humans by 2050.

Will they become terminators and annihilate us?

Noel Sharky is a professor of Artificial Intelligence

and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, England.

He says we have nothing to worry about.

NOEL SHARKY: We're really a long way off at the

moment of creating the kind of technology you see

in the likes of the Terminator, with big

humanoid robots armed with machine guns plodding

across the battlefield.

NARRATOR: Some of the world's greatest minds

disagree, but Sharky believes they haven't

asked one simple question - why?

NOEL SHARKY: As a scientist, I need evidence

and there's no evidence of any kind of really smart

intelligence or any kind of desire or robots would

have a desire to take over the world, any more than

a washing machine would want to take over the world.

NARRATOR: Not only does Sharky think that machines

aren't a threat, but they're not nearly as

smart as we make them out to be.

NOEL SHARKY: A lot of people talk about

artificial intelligence at the moment being at the

level of the rat or the slug, and it's going to

get so much smarter and be like a human later.

But for me, I've studied animals all my life,

really, and I would say that current robots

weren't at the intelligence of a bacteria

because bacteria can feed themselves and they know

how to survive.

Robots don't.

They're dependent on me and essentially they're

not bright enough to be called stupid.

NARRATOR: But even if robots and computers are

nothing more than digital dummies, couldn't someone

use them for evil rather than good?

NOEL SHARKY: The problem is that robots are very

limited in what they can do.

You just program a robot but it's all up to what

the programmer puts in there.

There's no reason why the robot themselves would do

anything that we haven't told them to do.

And I certainly wouldn't be programming a robot to

tell it to take over the world and I don't think

anybody else would.

NARRATOR: Instead of creatures with a super

intelligence that surpasses humans, Sharky

thinks machines are our moronic slaves that lack

the one essential ingredient for a robot-led

Armageddon - human emotion.

NOEL SHARKY: We have consciousness and we use

that in our everyday lives, in our thought, in

our desires whereas robots have a really rigid

silicone intelligence, no desires, no wants.

NARRATOR: But if robots have neither the brains

nor the drive for world domination,

why do so many others believe it will happen?

NOEL SHARKY: The whole idea of a robot takeover

is quite odd and it's really the subject of

science fiction right back since the word was

invented in 1921.

All science fiction movies have been about robots

killing humans and taking over the world, but it is

as it says fiction.

NARRATOR: Are robots just mindless heaps of metal?

Or will man and machine merge and destroy the human race?

We'll just have to wait and find out.

Weird or what?

[♪]

NARRATOR: So there we have it - doomsday stories from

the earth, and beyond.

In Wyoming, a deadly supervolcano lies dormant.

Will it explode in 2012 and fulfill a Mayan prophecy?

In Alabama, a NASA scientist discovers the

unthinkable - a giant solar storm could be on

its way to destroy the earth.

And one of the world's greatest minds makes a

startling prediction.

Man and machine will merge by 2050.

Will robots take over?

Are we facing a terminator Armageddon?

Are these stories evidence that the end of

the world is nigh?

Can we dismiss those who claim these things are true?

You decide.

WILLIAM SHATNER: Join me next time for more stories

that will undoubtedly be weird or what?

[♪]

[♪]

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