Original subtitles

Is there really a face on Mars?

Is this the Eye of God?

Why is there a giant hexagon on Saturn?

When I first saw these pictures,

I thought, "How the hell do you get that?"

What has astronomers blowing things up?

And why is one of Saturn's moons a Star Wars lookalike?

It looks just like the Death Star!

Could the strange shapes of the universe now solve mysteries

that have haunted mankind since ancient times?

Ancient mysteries shrouded in the shadows of time.

Now can they finally be solved

by looking to the heavens?

The truth is out there,

hidden among the stars

in a place we call

the universe.

Of all the wonders in the ancient sky,

perhaps nothing mystified mankind more than the moon.

But what could explain the face that appears

on its silvery surface?

Was it a magic spirit

or one of many gods ruling the heavens?

Some say the face belongs to Cain the Wanderer,

son of Adam and Eve,

condemned to circle the Earth endlessly

for killing his brother Abel.

Other ancients saw things differently.

The man in the moon is only a man to us.

In other cultures... for example, East Asian cultures...

Many people see other shapes or other faces.

In East Asian cultures,

it was thought that rabbits live on the moon,

and so the man in the moon is actually a rabbit.

Why does this mysterious anomaly

look as it does?

Is there an answer in science?

The dark areas are ancient lava flows

that are reasonably flat.

And the bright areas are more mountainous regions

where there are lots of craters,

and they reflect the sunlight more.

But what did the ancients make of the other imperfections

in the celestial sphere?

A star that suddenly brightened,

a comet appearing to streak through space?

The invention of telescopes 400 years ago

only deepened the mysteries,

revealing strange shapes everywhere.

When we look out into the universe

and we see shapes in the distant stars

or in other astronomical objects,

what we're really looking at is physics as the sculptor,

because the more detail that we get,

the better we can learn about the shape of that object

and the more detailed we can make our model of how it formed.

For each of the odd forms we see,

its shape is the latest chapter

in the sometimes violent and often dramatic events

that seem to speak to us with a story.

Could this be the Eye of God?

700 light-years away,

the haunting image appears in striking variations

as modern telescopes photograph its details

in different wavelengths of light.

It really just looks like an eye

staring down at you from space,

and if the celestial sphere is the home

of various gods or the single God,

well, gee, maybe this is the Eye of God.

To our ancestors, the stars were great mysteries.

What were they made of?

What was their purpose?

In those earlier times, the view of the night sky

is that you had all these bright objects...

The stars, the planets...

As immutable, everlasting objects.

The strange shape we perceive as an eye

proves that stars are not unchanging and everlasting.

Like humans, they have limited life spans.

This is an ordinary star in its death throes

emitting gently its atmosphere out into space.

The remainder of the star, its core,

is so highly energetic that it's emitting enough radiation

to light up this gas in space, almost like a fluorescent tube.

When discovered by telescope in 1820,

the Eye of God appeared only as a fuzzy round shape,

similar to what planets looked like.

Astronomers called it and others like it

"planetary nebulas."

Today's astrophysicists call this the Helix Nebula.

Astronomers used to think that the Helix Nebula

is a coil in space,

and we see it end on,

so it looks like this.

More recent study, though, has revealed a different shape

hidden in the dramatic object.

It turns out that modern observations have shown us

that the Helix Nebula actually has two intersecting rings.

If we could fly around it,

the Eye of God is suddenly transformed

into something dramatically different.

About 3,000 planetary nebulas

like the Eye of God are known in our galaxy.

They come in a kaleidoscopic mix of strange shapes...

Each a different way a dying star

takes its final gasp.

There's the Cat's Eye Nebula.

There's the Lemon Slice Nebula.

There's the Owl Nebula.

One of my favorites is the Eskimo Nebula,

because it really does look like there's a face there,

surrounded by a hood to keep it warm.

Strange shapes also signal the deaths of stars

that end their lives not so gently

but in violent explosions.

About 7,000 light-years away,

odd-looking evidence of such a blast remains.

It was observed in X-rays,

and when we look at the structure of it,

it appears to have these sort of spooky, dark eyes

and then a grinning face, almost like a ghoulish pumpkin.

Consider this a literal blast from the past,

marking a mystery more than 1,000 years old.

In the year 1006,

a bright star was suddenly seen in the sky,

and it lasted for many months.

It was brighter than Venus. It could be seen during the day.

What could this possibly be?

We now know that this object is the remnant,

the expanding gases, of an exploding star,

a supernova.

The most famous of the supernova remnants

is the Crab Nebula,

its shape reminiscent of a crab's shell.

Another is nicknamed the Hand of God

for the form its long fingers of glowing gas

appear to take.

About 300 supernova remnants are visible in some detail

to Earth telescopes,

each one with a different shape.

In supernova remnants, we see a variety of different shapes.

Some look like the "@" sign.

Some look like a Q, the letter Q.

Some look spherical.

There's even one that looks like a manatee.

I don't know how you get the manatee.

That's just crazy.

How can the simple spherical shape of a star explode

to create such bizarre remnants?

To investigate, astronomer Andy Howell

enlisted the help of pyrotechnicians.

Well, a supernova, you know, starts with a star

that's spherical, and then

sometimes the explosions are spherical, sometimes not,

so it'll be interesting to see what we get here.

Sure. Okay, let's go over to the firing box,

- and we'll try one out. - Awesome.

Expecting to see, like, a plunger or something here, but...

Like the old days.

- We ready to go? - Yeah.

All right, three, two, one.

Whoa-ho-ho!

Whoa, whoa. That one was... that looks cool.

Let's run that back and see it at the beginning.

It's exploding in some not completely spherical way,

and we see that in stars sometimes

when you light the star off center,

you can get an aspherical explosion.

And, wow, here we really see this plume of material

coming out, messing up the spherical symmetry,

and sometimes we see that in supernova remnants.

You'll see some little jet that sort of shot out

of the supernova.

So it's not exactly a supernova,

but it's pretty analogous.

Some other stellar explosions,

as well as the planetary nebulas,

are often split personalities.

How can a star possibly start out as a sphere

and then shoot out in two clear directions?

We're trying to demonstrate how some shapes

we see in remnants are bipolar.

Explosions happen, not spherically,

but they come out to the side.

A belt of dense debris

may surround an exploding star in space.

On Earth, a metal barrier between explosive charges

does the same job.

Any time there's an obstruction, of course,

the energy is going to go where it has least resistance.

It's just going to shoot out.

Okay, so let's fire it, see what we get.

- All right, ready to go? - Ready to go.

All right, three, two, one.

Whoa!

When we made an explosion with a barrier in the middle,

we get these beautiful lobes go out on either side.

We see that in a lot of astrophysical contexts

where you have a ring or a disc of material,

and it obstructs the explosion, or the mass lost from the star,

and you see stuff flying out in these lobes.

Of all the bipolar shapes in the cosmos,

there's one that's attracting special attention.

The double cloud of glowing gas hides a giant star,

now thought to be an ultra powerful supernova

in the making.

What makes it so different?

And why do some think

it could wipe out millions of species on Earth?

In searching space for its strangest shapes,

a certain spot near the Southern Cross constellation

stands out.

There, our ancestors were once perplexed by a sudden mystery

from an ancient star named Eta Carinae.

Eta Carinae is a star

that was relatively obscure for a long time,

but in the early 1840s, it brightened

to become the second brightest star in the sky.

A century later, another layer of mystery

enveloped the strange star.

In the 1940s, telescopic observations of Eta Carinae

showed that it wasn't just a point-like star,

but rather, it had a nebula, a cloud of gas, around it.

And in fact, the shape reminded people of a little man

with stubby arms and feet and kind of a pointy head.

The nebula was nicknamed the "Homunculus,"

for the humanlike creature alchemists were once said

to have created in their laboratory flasks.

Today's telescopes give us a very clear view

of the gas cloud.

What forces were at work to carve out this strange shape?

To explore the answer, astronomer Laura Danly

wants to bring the nebula down to Earth.

- Bryan. - Hey, Laura.

Nice to see you.

Cutting-edge 3-D printing

will allow her to hold the Homunculus

in the palm of her hand.

It actually breaks it up,

layer by layer, into essentially the path

that's going to get traced out by the 3-D printer.

Wow, that's not too different from what the scientists did

when they observed it.

In 2014, astronomers took about a hundred telescope slices

of the Homunculus,

essentially scanning it in 3-D.

Now the printer uses the data to deposit plastic filament

onto a platform,

where, over the span of eight hours,

the telescope slices take solid form.

It's amazing to be able to hold in my hand

the Homunculus Nebula.

I observed this myself as a grad student,

but to be able to look at it

and see things you can't see from Earth

is really an amazing thing.

For a long time, we thought that Eta Carinae

was just a single star,

so we now know that there is a binary pair.

What we didn't know is, did the binary pair

have any influence on the shape of this Homunculus Nebula?

Now with this 3-D model, we know that it did.

Dimples and ridges on each end of the nebula,

plus two distinctive protrusions are the key clues.

Inside the nebula, the binary stars circle each other...

One 30 times the mass of the sun, the other 90.

Each one emits intense outflows of particles

called stellar winds.

The smaller star whips around the larger one,

carving a tunnel through its stellar winds,

leaving physical imprints on the nebula's cloud.

The story of Eta Carinae, however, is far from over.

In the future, we know that Eta Carinae

will actually undergo a final explosive death,

and at that point when it does explode,

it'll crash into these gases that it had previously ejected,

and this will cause it to become enormously more powerful

than just a typical, run-of-the-mill supernova.

Some believe it may produce a gamma ray burst,

a deadly beam of radiation that could cause a mass extinction

here on Earth.

Most astronomers, however, say it's too far away

and the beam wouldn't be a direct hit,

so we're safe for now.

Humanlike shapes such as the odd Homunculus

are actually everywhere in the cosmos.

Could the universe be trying to get our attention?

When we look around us and see

these incredible shapes in nature,

we map them into things we're familiar with on Earth,

like a butterfly or a face or an eye,

and that's this phenomenon called pareidolia.

It just means our monkey brains evolved to recognize

things that would be of interest to us as people.

Faces in particular jump out at us everywhere.

Like the ancients, we still see the man in the moon.

The sun recently had surface activity looking like a face,

and if you look carefully on Saturn's moon, Dione,

you'll see a face there too.

But Saturn itself is the epitome of strange shapes.

It's said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder,

but I know few people who don't think

that Saturn is beautiful.

The ancients assumed the planet was a simple sphere,

but when Galileo first saw it through his telescope in 1610,

the fuzzy image opened up a new celestial mystery.

When Galileo originally observed Saturn,

he had really a rudimentary telescope

and not great eyesight.

So what he saw was a planetary body

or something that appeared to be a planetary body

with lobes off of the side of it,

and so he drew, in his notebook,

a planet that had these lobes and arcs

off of the side of the planet.

As Saturn and the Earth each revolve around the sun,

Saturn's angle, as we look at it, is always changing.

For early telescopes, it was a challenge.

One of the additional difficulties would be

the fact that that fuzzy shape with the two ends

would actually be changing, and that's because, of course,

the rings are changing their tilt one way or the other

as we look at them.

When they're edge-on, they would actually almost disappear,

so it would've been very confusing

as to what could make that shape change.

When astronomers concluded Saturn had rings,

the problem was solved,

but it took some 17th-century out-of-the-box thinking.

It was really an amazing insight.

No one had ever seen or even thought about something like it.

They had seen planets through telescopes,

and they were all round, but to imagine a planet

with rings around it was really a leap of imagination.

But the rings aren't the only strange shapes circling Saturn.

The planet is surrounded by a mysterious array

of weird objects,

among them 62 known moons.

My favorite Saturn moon is Mimas

'cause it looks like the Death Star.

It looks just like the Death Star!

In fact, in Star Wars, they say,

"That's no moon. That's a space station."

And that's what it looks like,

but we know that the laser death ray on Mimas

is actually just a crater.

There was some giant impact in its past.

But the most mysterious shape in the Saturn system

is on the ringed planet itself.

Centered on its pole is a bizarre shape

that seems impossible in nature.

Could it be a sign of intelligent life?

Have mystified mankind for thousands of years.

While modern science can explain many of the phenomena

that baffled the ancients,

it has also uncovered new mysteries

that we're only beginning to understand.

The rings of Saturn once puzzled our ancestors.

But recent close-ups reveal a shape

that seems to defy explanation:

a hexagon at Saturn's north pole.

When I first saw these pictures of Saturn...

At one of the poles, there's this hexagon shape...

I thought, "How the hell do you get that?"

The clouds making up the hexagon form six straight sides,

each 8,600 miles long.

Four planet Earths would fit inside of it.

How can nature create this seemingly impossible shape?

It's thought that the hexagon is formed

when winds of differing speeds next to each other

are actually creating vortices or rotations in the atmosphere.

But rotations in an atmosphere speed up to become storms.

It happens that way on Earth,

where swirling storms produce hurricanes or tornados,

all more or less circular in shape.

The same is true for the other gas giants in the solar system.

How can something round

end up creating something with six straight sides?

This laboratory simulation in a tank of rotating fluids

may reveal the secret.

Six swirling vortexes around the edge

work together to create the familiar shape.

The vortexes on the ringed planet

are thought to be atmospheric cyclones,

large storms the size of Earth that are not visible from space.

Most of the action is apparently below the surface.

The very sharp corners of the hexagon

are the places where there are pinch points

between two cyclones,

so it looks like it's kind of an unnatural shape in nature,

but in fact, it's very naturally shaped by those storms.

The extreme winds and chemical clouds of the gas giants

create strange shapes in a realm of wild, fluid motions.

But on the rocky planets of the inner solar system,

other forces are at work.

The planet Mars is especially rich

in weirdly shaped rocks and landscapes.

We see a lot of strange shapes on Mars,

because now we have so many satellites and robots on Mars

that we're seeing so much of the planet.

There's just a lot more chance to see cool stuff.

The mysteries of Mars began in ancient times.

Its red color led the Chinese to call it "the fire star"

and the Romans to name it for their god of war.

19th-century astronomers thought they saw canals

built by aliens on a Mars rich with vegetation.

♪ ♪

The notion of a powerful Martian civilization

lasted well into modern times,

when space probes revealed the truth.

From our spacecraft that we have observing Mars today,

we know that Mars is not a rich, lush environment

that has life and plants on it.

From the photos from Mars,

there are just a host of strange shapes that we can see,

either from orbit or from the surface.

Things like smiley faces in craters,

the man on Mars,

footprint-shaped craters, heart-shaped craters,

and on the surface, we see rocks that look like rodents,

frogs, blueberries, bones, traffic lights...

Just a whole host of different things that we can see.

And those shapes can change.

In 1976, a Mars orbiter

saw the infamous face on Mars,

but in 2001, a more advanced orbiter saw the same feature.

With different lighting and higher resolution,

the face virtually disappears.

Nevertheless, we have an innate human tendency

to see familiar forms in all kinds of objects,

even here on Earth.

At the top of this crest right here,

I see what looks like a toad or a frog.

And if we turn behind us and tilt our heads slightly,

we can see the facial features of something

that looks almost like a troll or a goblin,

so it really demonstrates how you can take

very unfamiliar-looking terrain

and find features in it that look very familiar to us.

The shapes on Mars teach us

about the environment that formed them.

Today, Mars is a very dry, windy place,

and so the only forces that are really acting upon rocks

today on Mars are the wind and impacts.

Earlier in Mars' history, if Mars was a much wetter place

than it is today, water would have also contributed

to the shape and appearance of the rocks on the surface.

Wind and weather may explain

how the rocks of Mars take on so many different shapes,

but what explains the even more bizarre shapes

hurtling towards us through the far reaches of space?

Among the glistening stars fixed permanently in ancient skies,

an occasional misbehaving intruder would strike fear

into the hearts of the earliest astronomers.

Today we call them comets,

from the Greek word for "long hair,"

an allusion to their glowing tails.

To our ancestors, they were invariably bad news.

Comets were terrifying to our ancestors.

They didn't know what they were.

They didn't know where they came from.

They just appeared, and they were unlike anything

they had ever seen before.

Records of comet sightings

go back at least as far as 1600 B.C. in China,

where they were known as "vile stars."

Other cultures blamed them for various calamities:

the murder of Julius Caesar in Rome,

the Black Death in England,

the arrival of the conquistadors in South America.

Modern science tells us comets are dirty snowballs,

collections of ice and dust,

left over from the solar system's formation.

The sun heats them up,

and jets of matter stream out to form their spectacular tails.

But the closer you look, the stranger comets become.

Even through a telescope, we didn't really know

what the true shape of a comet was,

until we were able to send spacecraft out to visit them

and look up close.

The spacecraft Giotto made the first flyby in 1985,

revealing a close-up of Halley's Comet.

It proved that comets are lumpy objects

in the strangest of shapes.

And now that we've gotten up-close views,

we see that they don't look anything like we thought.

There are a handful of them that are sort of roundish,

but the majority of those we've seen

have a double-lobed shape.

In 2004, the Rosetta mission was launched

on a ten-year journey to orbit and place a lander

on a comet more than 300 million miles from Earth.

Prior to the launch, the Hubble space telescopes

snapped 61 grainy photos of the comet.

By analyzing tiny fluctuations in its brightness,

astronomers calculated its approximate form...

An irregular lump, tumbling through space

at two revolutions per day.

But in late 2014, the probe finally approached the comet,

and scientists were shocked at the bizarre shape they saw.

The very recent Rosetta mission

took exquisite photographs of Comet 67P,

showing that it actually resembles a rubber ducky.

It would have been awesome if it was a real rubber ducky,

but it's just a bunch of rocks that look like a rubber ducky.

The thing is, we don't really know

how you make a comet that is this shape.

It's extremely complicated,

and we didn't really expect to see something

that was that shape to begin with.

There are a couple of different ways in which comets

could get that double-lobed shape.

One is, indeed, two objects that sort of stick together

that, when they collide, they don't collide with enough force

to bounce off each other or shatter each other

but just to sort of stick to one another.

But could Comet 67P have formed as a single object,

getting its curious shape later on?

Now, you could also imagine that the cometary physics is at work

in sculpting this particular odd shape.

As the comet comes into our inner solar system,

gases start to stream off from it as it gets heated up

by the light from our sun.

You can think of these a little bit

as though they were like geysers on our planet,

geologic activity where warmer material

starts to stream out of the comet,

possibly causing cracking and reshaping of the surface.

Could Rosetta's up-close view tell us which of the scenarios

is the right one?

Recent observations show that the composition

of the two lobes of 67P are very similar.

That suggests they came from the same body.

We also see that most of the outgassing

comes right at the neck of the rubber ducky,

right at the thinnest part,

so it wears it away and leaves two big lobes on either end.

Comets are the lightweights in nearby space.

The asteroids and dwarf planets are their big cousins,

heavier, denser, and in many respects, stranger.

What forces mold these planetary mavericks,

and why, in their midst, is there a place in space

where X marks the spot?

A giant impact may killed off the dinosaurs

about 65 million years ago.

And ancient mythology is filled

with legends of rocks from the sky.

The Greek deity Kronos is said to have cast a meteor to Earth

landing at Delphi, where it was worshipped as sacred.

This brings the search for strange shapes in the universe

to the space between Mars and Jupiter,

where the oddly formed asteroids are found.

Most meteorites come from the asteroid belt.

They're little chunks of asteroid that,

through collisions, got knocked off their orbits

and fell to Earth.

♪ ♪

Austria, 1492.

The 250-pound Thunderstone of Ensisheim

falls in a fiery streak.

A thunderclap is heard for hundreds of miles around.

Like comets, meteorites were bad news.

Emperor Maximilian was so worried about the meteorite,

he had it chained to the church floor

because only by securing it to holy ground

could he neutralize the evil influence.

Mysteries among these space rocks persist today.

An eerily ominous shape appeared in the asteroid belt in 2010.

Why did an X suddenly appear there,

with a trail of debris lagging behind it?

Here we have a very unusual asteroid that has a tail

and looks like a comet, but further observation showed

that it has no gas in the tail like a comet would.

Instead, the tail is made of dust.

Scientists believe the mysterious debris tail

resulted from a small asteroid striking a much larger one,

but why the cloud of dust in the shape of an X?

One possible explanation for the X shape

is that it's caused by a collision.

The two asteroids were not symmetrical,

and so the crash is not symmetrical.

Imagine a pool of water.

If you drop a single drop into it,

you get perfectly round, smooth ripples,

but if you drop something else,

like ice cubes with square edges,

you'll get a ragged splash,

kind of like the ragged X in the asteroid crash.

Collisions help make the asteroid belt

an astronomical sideshow

made up of a fantastic variety of misshapen freaks.

Asteroid Eros may look like a ballet slipper to some,

but other asteroids are grotesque figures

that defy description.

The lumpy, irregular shapes of asteroids

are basically pretty random.

There's no favored shape.

In fact, irregular shapes

are found throughout the solar system.

But why are some moons or asteroids round

while others are such bizarre lumps?

The largest objects in our solar system,

and even some very large asteroids,

can have their shape be dominated mostly

by gravitational forces

pulling things into a spherical shape.

In the solar system,

everything above about 400 miles in diameter is spherical,

because at that size,

gravity is strong enough to crush rock.

It presses from all sides toward the center.

It's something like someone's hands

pressing on a lump of snow to make a spherical snowball.

♪ ♪

Gravity has done its work on Ceres,

the most massive object in the asteroid belt.

The Dawn spacecraft began orbiting the asteroid

in March 2015,

revealing it to be fully spherical in shape.

Because its shape is dominated by gravity,

it conforms to the definition of a dwarf planet.

Pluto and other dwarf planets in the outer solar system

follow the same rule and are also spherical in shape.

The one exception to this in our solar system

is the dwarf planet Haumea,

which has a very elongated shape.

Haumea lies out beyond the orbit of Pluto

and is actually spinning so rapidly

that the centrifugal forces that it experiences

are enough to stretch Haumea to a much more elongated shape.

But beyond Haumea, beyond the solar system,

beyond the galaxy, the search for strange shapes

extends into the depths of space.

There, the ancients viewed a fuzzy patch among the stars

of the constellation Andromeda.

They were perplexed by what it was,

scarcely knowing it would one day

help solve a fundamental mystery

to reveal the ultimate true size of the universe.

Darkness reigns.

Polar bears are common here.

So, too, are elk

and other dangerous creatures

that serve as both predator and prey

for the hearty few who make this land their home.

It is dark and scary

and potentially deadly.

Suddenly, a man out hunting sees it,

a threat known to his people since ancient times.

So he does what comes naturally,

what generations of native Alaskans have done before him.

He draws his weapon

and prepares to defend himself

from the swirling electrical madness

he sees in the skies.

Blazing lights.

A mysterious and ever-changing symphony of color.

Today, we know this phenomenon as the aurora borealis,

the Northern Lights.

And for many cultures, like the Eskimos

living near Barrow, Alaska,

the aurora is a bad omen.

Auroras, the northern or southern lights,

have often been seen as bad omens because

there are these ghostly lights in the sky

and they're flickering and they're of unknown origin

to the people watching them.

Are the gods angry or something?

So what causes this sparkling show in the sky?

Aurorae are fascinating examples

of the interaction between

the sun and us here on Earth.

The sun has what we call space weather.

These are solar flares or other phenomena associated with

the sun's magnetic activity

that shower our planet with not only high energy radiation

but also energetic particles.

Earth has a magnetic field.

Now, if that magnetic field was in isolation,

it would look sort of like a cored apple.

But it's not in isolation.

The solar wind charged particles streaming out of the sun

impinges upon Earth,

flattening the nearside and extending the farside

of that field.

It also has holes at

the north and the south

called polar cusps.

Solar wind can flow into the polar cusps,

creating the aurora borealis

and the aurora australis.

As they excite the gases in our atmosphere,

depending upon the gases that get excited,

you get different colors.

These different gases are exactly what are used to make

the neon signs that we see down at the deli.

When you see that green palm tree or that red open sign,

those are different gases being energized

and it's the light escaping

as the electrons change energy levels

that we perceive as these different colors.

The spectacular light show an aurora provides

isn't the only way to experience one.

As it turns out, you can actually hear an aurora too.

There have always been stories of people hearing sounds

associated with the aurora.

Popping and whistling noises.

But it was unclear if these were just stories

or real, until recently

when scientists were finally able to record

that, under very certain circumstances,

you can hear whistling and popping noises

associated with the sun's energy interacting with

our own Earth's atmosphere.

What causes the sound is still a bit of a mystery.

Researchers think the same solar energy waves

that generate the spectacular lights in the sky

are also responsible for the sounds closer to the ground.

The phenomenon of auroras is an ancient mystery

that stretches across the cosmos.

Jupiter has amazing aurorae that we see on a regular basis.

Saturn has aurorae.

And even Venus.

Omens, portents, and signs

are how ancient people made sense of their universe.

Today, astronomers are making remarkable discoveries

that help explain the science behind

these once terrifying events.

One of the things that's really amazing about

the time that we live in, is that all of these things

that were very scary for our ancestors

we now understand through the lens of science.

Humans always want to know about the future.

Whether you're an ancient Roman, an ancient Chinese,

a person living in America in the 21st century,

we want to look for signs in nature, signs in the heavens,

that can help us understand things,

can reassure us that we know

what will happen in the future.

As we learn more about the universe,

knowledge is replacing fear.

People go north to see the aurora.

They take eclipse cruises.

Yesterday's bad omens are today's tourist attractions.

This, then, is humanity at the dawn of the 21st century,

striving to understand and experience first hand

what men and women through the millennia

formerly saw as bad omens.