Original subtitles

[slow suspenseful music]

[music mellows]

[Arthur] It seems absolutely inconceivable.

And I think most astronomers today will go along with me,

that in this gigantic universe,

we are the only living things

and the only intelligent things.

It's far more probable that

there are more races ahead of us than behind us,

and that we may be very low indeed

in the hierarchy of cosmic intelligence.

Ultimately, one of the most important results of space flight

is, I think, going to be the contact with superior civilizations.

- [music fades] - [birds chirping]

[insects trilling]

[slow mysterious music]

[Gentry] I am one of the most fortunate people who ever lived.

You're looking at someone who believes

he has the best job in the world.

And it is ideally suited for me.

I cannot imagine a better place for Gentry Lee

to work than the Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

trying to build spacecraft to explore the planets robotically.

I have maybe 18 to 20 projects under my jurisdiction,

ranging from ideas for things we're gonna do ten years from now

to spacecraft that have been flying for 15 years and, and have a problem.

[indistinct radio chatter]

And I would like to continue to do that

with the productive years that I have left.

[slow atmospheric music]

One of the biggest philosophical questions

that human beings have ever faced...

is the question, "Are we alone in the universe?"

Why is it important whether or not there is life on Mars or ever was?

[suspenseful music]

If we discover

life of any kind anywhere other than on the planet Earth...

it will be the greatest scientific discovery in history.

[tense music]

This search is among the most profound...

of anything that human beings have ever done.

[tense music fades]

[vehicles rumbling]

[indistinct chatter]

[commentator] Joe DiMaggio coming to bat...

[Gentry] I was born in New York City...

and I was fascinated by baseball.

Somewhere between four and five, I became a Brooklyn Dodger fan.

[commentator] Robinson swings... [continues indistinctly]

[Gentry] And I enjoyed computing the batting averages

for all of my favorite Dodgers every day.

- [boy] Is that a real Major League ball? - That sure is.

That's the best one we have. And here's a real

Major League bat just to go with it.

[Gentry] And so,

in the middle of the summer, I was out in the street...

and a man walked by and he said...

"Excuse me. Uh, are, are you

reciting the batting averages of the Brooklyn Dodgers?"

I said yes.

He says, "Well, they're not posted

until the afternoon papers."

And I said... Matter of fact,

you know, I was a five-year-old kid.

I said, "I computed it myself."

He said, "What?"

He said, "How did you do that?"

And I said, "Well, you just have to take the number of bats

and the number of hits, and then you do the division

and you can compute the batting average."

Well, he was freaked out.

I didn't know it at the time, but he was a professor at Columbia.

He went to my parents

and said, "Five-year-olds don't compute batting averages.

Do you mind if I take your son for some tests?"

When I was in the fifth grade and they gave aptitude tests...

my reading level was 11th grade

and my math level was freshman in college.

When I was in the fifth grade.

The, the teachers and the schools had no idea what to do with me.

[gentle music]

I caused a lot of trouble, uh, in, in, in my youth.

I can look back now and say it was because I was bored,

but that's just an excuse.

I was a discipline problem.

School was painful.

Home was painful.

My only escape were books.

Until junior high school.

And I go into...

an eighth grade class with, with a woman, Bertha Casey.

[voice quavering] I really loved that lady.

And I kept in touch with her

until after my first novel was written.

I kept in touch with her all the way through college...

and... I told her that she changed my life...

because she opened the door to it being okay...

to be not like everybody else.

[audience clapping]

[Gentry] I remember, when Carl was on Johnny Carson

and he talked about when he was age 12, he looked up at the skies

and he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

That wasn't me at all. Do you know what at age 12 I wanted to be?

Anything that could possibly be happy.

Because I wasn't.

It was baseball.

Playing baseball and following baseball.

That stabilized me with respect to my peers.

Now I got emotional. I have to blow my nose.

[music fades]

[slow suspenseful music]

[Gentry] I finished my undergraduate work

at the University of Texas in Austin.

I decided to get a master's degree in physics,

mathematics and aerospace engineering at MIT.

Kennedy had made the statement about landing on the moon, and Apollo was underway.

It was clear to me from what I was reading

that what was about to happen was the same thing with respect to the solar system.

[crowd cheering]

Many years ago,

the great British explorer George Mallory,

who was to die on Mount Everest,

was asked why did he want to climb it.

He said, "Because it is there."

Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it.

And the moon and the planets are there.

[Gentry] My 23-year-old mind already grasped

that I could be part of the only generation

that would ever explore the solar system for the first time.

[man] You sense the spirit of adventure

that stimulates hundreds of scientists,

most of them young, all of them bold,

as they set forth on the great intellectual exploration of our century...

Search for life beyond the Earth.

[muted]

[Carl] On these other planets, the physical conditions are different.

The organisms that live there will also be different.

They will, from our point of view, be strange,

and exotic, and bizarre.

We will search them out.

To seek the beings of other worlds is a rare adventure.

All mankind shares the quest.

[slow ominous music]

[slow rumbling]

[Gentry] Once upon a time...

maybe six million years ago...

there started being the development on this planet...

of a species that all of us would say had some intelligence.

And maybe 600,000 years ago...

some early species of humanity...

looked up at the stars...

and wondered what they were...

and perhaps

thought they were campfires in the sky.

[intriguing music]

But I believe...

the moment that human beings understood...

that the Earth was a planet

and that there were other planets...

the idea...

of the sphere of influence of the human species

eventually extending beyond the boundaries of the planet Earth

began to develop.

Evolution... has preserved in us

a thirst.

Perhaps it's even stronger than that. A lust

to understand through exploration.

Do you anticipate that we're going to have

any discovery of intelligent life

within the planets in our solar system?

No. I think it's unlikely that, as of now,

there's anything even comparable to us in this solar system,

in this little group of planets around our sun.

And because, uh, it takes even light

four years to get to the nearest star.

We've obviously got to travel at an appreciable fraction

of the speed of light to make interstellar travel possible.

The curious thing is this, that at the very moment,

when we've acquired the ability to go out to the near planets,

we have also, as a result of the same technological development...

acquired the ability to communicate with anybody on the stars,

if there's anybody there to listen to our signals and to send anything back.

[slow suspenseful music]

[Frank] This telescope you see here is by far

the largest radio telescope in the world.

In the near future, when this telescope is improved

and others like it built, we may start serious searches

for other civilizations in space.

[Gentry] In 1960, an astronomer named Frank Drake

wrote down an equation for the likely number of intelligent civilizations

in our galaxy today.

There's a whole bunch of variables in the equation.

But the one that's the most important is a philosophical one.

Perhaps there is something about an advanced civilization

that limits how long it survives.

[Frank] We're seeking the answers of those questions

every human being asks himself at one time.

"Why am I here? Why is there a world?"

We will never understand these things

until we have understood the birth and death of the stars,

where life comes from, what forms it can take, what is its eventual destiny.

[mysterious music]

[thump, crackling]

[Gentry] The universe we now know

was created in a big bang 13.81 billion years ago.

In our galaxy alone, there are 150 billion stars.

It can be well assumed that there may be close to a trillion planets.

That number staggers people.

If the average lifetime

of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization is short,

then it would explain why

we have not been contacted in any way.

[insects trilling]

That was the question Enrico Fermi asked, the famous Fermi Paradox.

Enrico Fermi was a very famous physicist,

and he once asked the following question...

"If there are so many stars and so many planets,

and a likelihood that life is going to emerge,

surely whatever it was that created us

has happened over and over and over again.

[ominous music]

Where are they?"

Imagine that you're sitting in a very large auditorium,

and down on the floor, there are a million light bulbs.

And we're gonna start winding the clock

beginning when the universe was created.

And we're gonna run it forward.

And whenever an extraterrestrial civilization

that is advanced emerges, a light bulb will come on.

[crackling]

But then it dies. The light dies in a very short period of time

compared to this long 13.81 billion years.

Lights would come on over here.

Then a light would come on over there.

But there would never be two lights close enough to each other

that endured long enough that they would be able to interact.

But imagine... if just one civilization

figured out how to survive for a long period of time.

Let's just say as long as the dinosaurs,

which was about 100 million years.

In that case, you would imagine another light

eventually coming on close to that light...

and perhaps, after a certain period of time,

there would be a group of lights in the same region,

all of which were able to survive.

And I don't think it's gonna happen,

but, oh, my goodness, I would jump with jubilation

and I would weep with joy

if there was an unambiguous signal

received from a clearly advanced extraterrestrial species.

[suspenseful music]

Is life everywhere?

Does it have to be the same as us?

Or are we just one example of a vast array

of possible kinds of biochemistries?

Well, there's no way for us ever to answer that question.

No way for us to determine the generality of life on Earth,

except by, uh, by looking for life elsewhere.

And the nearest candidate planet is surely Mars.

[suspenseful music]

[Gentry] When it was decided in the late '60s

that we were going to send a spacecraft to Mars and try to land on the planet...

a man walked into my office and said,

"Gentry, somebody told me that you knew something

about interplanetary navigation.

Could you help us with this proposal?"

Twenty-five years old, and I got to write part of a proposal

that would land the first spacecraft ever on another planet.

For the next seven years of my life,

I lived and breathed that mission.

[gentle music]

[Gentry] Somewhere near 2000 people at one time or another

worked on some major thing associated with Viking.

[indistinct chatter]

One of those people, of course, was Carl Sagan.

And he and I developed a friendship.

This is one of hundreds of little channels.

Channels which look for all the world as if they've been cut by running water.

[Gentry] Hundred and fifty years ago,

an Italian named Giovanni Schiaparelli looked at Mars

and he announced that he saw canali on Mars.

Now,canali is an Italian word that means channels.

But when the word came to the United States and was translated,

The New York Times and The Washington Post both said,

"An Italian astronomer has found canals on Mars."

And, of course, immediately, people started thinking that,

"Wow, there must be advanced life on Mars if they're building canals."

[RJ 1 on radio] We take you now to Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

[RJ 2]Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make.

Those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight

are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.

Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control,

we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grover's Mill...

[Gentry] Many people developed fear of possible life on Mars.

And that can all be ascribed

to a magnificent science fiction work by H.G. Wells

- called The War of the Worlds. - [Phillips]Good Lord, they're turning into flame!

- [man screaming] - [Phillips]Now the whole field's caught fire!

The woods, the barns, the gas tanks,

tanks of the automobiles! It's spreading everywhere!

[tense music]

[Gentry] That basic idea that aliens might be hostile

has permeated many science fiction films,

where the Earth was invaded by Martians,

and they summarily began to wipe us out.

[warbling, screeching]

[screaming]

[suspenseful music]

[indistinct chatter]

[Gentry] In 1964, a spacecraft called Mariner

flew by Mars with a primitive camera and took photographs.

People believed at that time

that there was not only life on Mars, but intelligent life on Mars.

But what they saw looked almost exactly like the moon.

[indistinct chatter]

Well, I'll be damned.

And all of a sudden, that probability plummeted.

[man] Nine, eight, seven, six...

[Gentry] On the Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1971,

the first pictures that came back astonished the world.

Why? Because there was clearly water in the atmosphere of Mars

and water in the ice caps at the North Pole.

The presence of water stimulated the idea that perhaps life evolved there.

[Carl] In the Mariner 9 mission, we were able

to look at Mars for the first time close enough.

If there were a civilization on Mars like ours, we would have detected it.

- It isn't there. - [man] Right.

But that doesn't exclude,

uh, uh, plants and animals,

and even big animals, on Mars. There's no evidence for them.

- Right. - But there's nothing to exclude them. And that's

the, the great thing about the Viking mission to Mars,

which goes to Mars in 1976. It's for the first time we'll be able to find out.

We'll have cameras, look around, see if anybody interesting walks by.

[whirring]

[mysterious music]

[Gentry] In 1974, when we were planning to do this,

nobody had ever demonstrated they could land on a planet with an atmosphere.

We had no idea what the terrain was like at all.

All we could see from the Mariner pictures

were pieces roughly the size of LA.

Everyone told us that what we should do

if we were gonna try to land on Mars

was just build a little sphere

that would survive with a window and a camera.

We said, "Nope, we are going to go to Mars,

and we are going to try to figure out

whether or not there is life there."

And so the Viking mission to Mars, which included two landers

and two orbiters, was designed to try to determine

whether or not there was life on Mars.

But we did not have any idea how to look for any kind of life,

except that kind of life that exists on Earth.

And that was what drove the design of our instrumentation.

We were Earth chauvinists.

[slow ominous music]

I saw the Viking launches.

Viking was my first launch.

In 1975, we launched two Viking spacecraft.

We were all so worried about the possibility of a failure.

So, there were two for the very first launch

and landing on the planet Mars.

[men talking indistinctly]

[man] six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.

[whooshing]

[Gentry] In my mind, I was inside the spacecraft,

going through step by step what the sequence was.

[slow pensive music]

Flying to Mars was going to take nine months.

We managed to go into orbit and look at the surface of Mars

with these fantastic new cameras that we had,

which were 20 times better than the ones

that had flown on the Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1971...

to determine the right place to land.

I was responsible for something called Landing Site Certification.

Our pre-selected site

turned out to be filled with gigantic boulders, and is a mess.

Nobody knew the answer.

The best way to solve a problem that nobody's ever solved before

is to get a half a dozen of the smartest people you can possibly find in a room,

and you say, "What should we do now?"

And every one of them is energized

to put his or her best ideas forward.

And if someone in the room says, "This is what I think should be done,"

somebody else might say, "That's ridiculous. It won't work."

And we didn't pull any punches.

Are you gonna commit to a place

in order to land there? You have to fly over...

- Okay, Gerry, a valley. - [man] No, let me get rid

- of the emotional argument. - Okay.

[Gentry] This culture of intellectual confrontation,

and we would go on and on, you know.

At that time, telling somebody else

you didn't think their idea was good...

didn't cause any problems.

All we know is there's an area right here.

Forget the whole emotional argument about canyons...

[Gentry] I remember working 17 hours a day.

I had a cot in my office. And I wasn't the only one.

We would look at a site every two or three days.

Seventeen days later, everybody was completely exhausted.

And I'll never forget a meeting. It was two o'clock in the morning,

and we had found a site that looked better than any of the other sites,

but still not perfect.

And Carl Sagan, and Hal Masursky,

and Jim Martin, and Tom Young and I were,

2:00 a.m. in the morning, looking at the pictures

that had come down and spread them out.

And Hal Masursky plopped his head down on the table, said,

"I can't do this anymore. Let's go here."

And that was it.

[tense music]

From then on, it was a piece of artificial intelligence.

[man on radio] 59,000 feet, coming up. Onboard require pretty soon.

[Gentry] You hit the top of the Martian atmosphere

going 12 to 13,000 miles an hour.

[man talking indistinctly on radio]

[Gentry] It had to burn off a heat shield

to remove the kinetic energy, then pop a parachute.

Then, fire thrusters...

and land softly on the surface.

[man 1 on radio] 177 feet per second.

[man 2 speaking indistinctly]

[man 1] Parachute separation. Roger.

[man 2] Minus 105, 23 g's.

[man 1] 2600 feet, 188 feet per second.

Twenty-six hundred feet! Twenty-six hundred feet!

[Gentry] It's become known as "the seven minutes of terror."

Three sixty-six feet, 73 feet per second.

-Come on. -[man 2 on radio] ACS is close to vertical.

-[man 1 on radio] I have us green for touchdown. -[man 2 on radio]ACS is green,

1.5 degrees per second max.

0.2 g's, eight feet per second.

[man 4 on radio] Touchdown. We have touchdown.

[all cheering]

[suspenseful music]

[man 3 on radio] Yes, we have a touchdown time of 12 hours, 12 minutes...

[Gentry] We're standing there, looking at a screen

of the first photograph ever to be taken

from the surface of another planet.

[narrator] Mars, from the surface.

Man's age-old dream of a close-up look

at what it's like on another planet,

and of searching for life there, today became a reality.

[man]This is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,

where scientists are jubilant over the successful landing

of the Viking 1 spaceship on the planet Mars this morning.

They are starting to get a picture from Mars, 212 million miles away,

and we are seeing now the first close-up view of the Red Planet.

[gentle music]

[Gerald Ford] My very best wishes for a great job.

We're all very proud of you.

- Good luck. - Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you.

[muted]

[Gentry] Joy. It's indescribable.

[excited chatter]

There was party after party, after the Viking landings,

and such science fiction luminaries as Robert Heinlein,

Gene Roddenberry, Ray Bradbury, Nichelle Nichols,

these people understood

that there is a connection between science fiction...

...and engineering.

From this moment on, life is on Mars.

An extension of our sensibilities, of our eyeballs,

of our sense of touch, of our scientific intuition.

That, to me, is the important thing about the last few minutes,

that man has reached out across space

and is really touching this planet.

And so our life is on Mars as of this hour.

[Gentry] One of the most important

attributes associated with the human species

is the ability to be amazed,

to feel inside yourself an incredible rush.

Look at that!

[slow atmospheric music]

[man] What about the ages-old question of life on the planet Mars?

From the photograph that we are now viewing, is there any indication of it?

Now the boom will azimuth over and move out of the way.

We will take the final picture.

This is being done at 2:30, uh, our time here on Mars.

The first information will be down between 5:30 and 6:30 tonight.

We should have the data analyzed by around eight o'clock.

We thought we were building a suite of instruments

that would go there and would unambiguously answer the question,

"Is there life on Mars?"

We did not prepare for ambiguity.

Latest data from the Viking 2 lander vehicle

still shows no signs of life on Mars,

but the scientists haven't given up hope.

[Gentry] Today, the sense that Viking found no life on Mars

is very much in question.

Gil Levin, who was the principal investigator

or the lead scientist, if you prefer, has contended...

for the rest of his life... He died last year at the age of 97.

That what his instrument saw could only be interpreted

as a sign of life.

[Gentry] We have two competing ideas,

one of which suggests that we found biology

and the other one of which suggests

that everything we have seen is chemistry.

I think it's fair to say...

[Gentry] When it was all over...

we discovered that the American press in 1976

did not fully understand the significance of landing on Mars.

If you find any organisms, will they be brought back to the Earth?

No. All the equipment we send to Mars will stay at Mars.

So, then there won't be any little green monsters attacking our cities?

No. All the tests we make will be made...

[Gentry] It was apparent

both in what was written in the newspapers...

...and also from the questions that they asked us at the press conference.

I would like to start explaining now. Is that all right?

- [man] Yeah. - Okay. First of all...

[Gentry] They struggled to even comprehend

what it is we're trying to do,

much less why it's important.

The study of climatic change on Mars

should illuminate our understanding of climatic change on Earth.

Let me now show what we found with the mass spectrometer on the lander.

[Gentry] Most scientists and engineers

cannot easily explain,

and don't even want to, the emotions associated with what they have done.

Mike, do you wanna add to that?

[Gentry] And they're much more comfortable

working inside the technology that they understand...

Because the escape process let's me... let's us, I believe, extrapolate backwards...

[Gentry] which is incomprehensible to the person on the street.

[Mike] Uh, I'm still confused. Where exactly do we stand

on whether there could be life in this region?

There is nothing in this analysis that says there is life on Mars.

[indistinct chatter]

[Gentry] After a couple of weeks, the interest in the media

- was starting to wane a little bit. - [indistinct]

[Gentry] And then, one morning, my executive assistant

came into my office and said, "Gentry,

ABC's on line 1.

NBC's on line 2.

CBS is on line 3.

And the National Enquirer is on line 4."

I said, "What for?"

"Because of the writing on the rocks on Mars."

Those remarkably vivid pictures that we've been receiving from Mars

created a flurry of excitement across the country last night,

when one of them seemed to form the letters B and G on rocks.

Is there any meaning at all to this?

[man 1] This picture, with a letter B apparently written on a rock,

produced a brief flurry of excitement.

[man 2] For a while, it looked like there was graffiti

left by someone or something on Mars.

[Gentry] So I went to the press conference.

There were a hundred people there,

including all the reporters

from the local Los Angeles television stations.

So we went through.

"My name is Bert Gentry Lee,

and my initials are BGL."

And what someone thought they saw

on the rocks on Mars was a B and a G.

And so everybody thought it was my initials on a rock on Mars.

So I said, "It is conceivable

that at some time in the dim, dark, distant past,

there was life on Mars. And there may even be life today.

And it is remotely possible, with a very, very low probability

that intelligence might have emerged.

And that intelligence might desire to communicate

with intelligence somewhere else.

But there is no number small enough to define the probability

that any intelligent life that ever lived on Mars

would choose to communicate with the rest of the universe

using Latin letters!"

[slow suspenseful music]

Why were more people

not astonished by Apollo and Viking?

Why did the scale of those accomplishments

not reverberate throughout the entire country, or maybe the entire species...

as gigantic events?

This bothered me a great deal, and it also bothered Carl Sagan.

But we have to understand what we're talking about when we say...

[Gentry] So Carl said to me...

"Somebody ought to do something about it."

And I said, "That somebody could be us."

And he said, "How do we do that?"

"We make a television series."

He said, "We don't know a thing about making a television series."

And I looked at him straight in the eye, I said,

"Ten years ago, I didn't know anything about landing on Mars."

And that was the beginning of Cosmos.

- [indistinct chatter] - [clapper claps]

[suspenseful music]

[Gentry] Carl, at that point,

was the preeminent expositor of everything in space.

He had just begun his regular times on Johnny Carson.

[Johnny] Would you welcome Dr. Carl Sagan?

- [audience applauding] - [Gentry]So he was known.

Carl was a magnificent science writer.

When Carl would write pieces,

oh, my gosh, I would get tears in my eyes.

They were beautiful.

We're made of star stuff.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

[man]Cosmos takes you on an epic journey through space and time.

[Gentry] Cosmos was successful beyond our wildest belief.

We were bringing the sense of excitement and wonder

that makes people of a scientific bent

believe that what they're doing is so important.

Magical, almost.

[indistinct chatter]

[indistinct conversation]

[Gentry] One of the most wonderful attributes

about some of the really clever and innovative engineers that I have known in my life

is that they become genuinely excited when confronted by a problem

that appears to be impossible to solve.

[suspenseful music]

[Gentry] In 1964,

a professor of astronomy visiting Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

a man named Gary Flandreau, discovered that the planets in our solar system

would be aligned in such a way for a short period of time

that a spacecraft leaving the Earth could fly by Jupiter,

get a gravity assist from Jupiter, fly by Saturn,

get a gravity assist from Saturn, and go on to Uranus and Neptune.

Four bodies that all we knew about

were little tiny pictures on cameras

that had been taken from telescopes on the planet Earth.

And I remember, at the time, as a young man...

Remember, I started my background

in celestial mechanics and navigation.

I was thrilled with the idea.

Could we possibly build a spacecraft that could do that?

My role on Voyager was to be a member of the review board

to determine whether or not what the project is doing makes sense.

[man] Three, two, one...

We have ignition and we have lift-off.

We have lift-off of the Titan Centaur

carrying the first of two Voyager spacecraft

to extend man's senses farther into the solar system than ever before.

[somber music]

[somber vocalizing]

[Gentry] As the first Voyager spacecraft sped toward Jupiter...

the four large moons were still just blips.

We knew virtually nothing about them.

And little by little, these moons began to bloom.

And I will never forget,

this young woman in her twenties

was part of the navigation team and was looking at the photographs

as they came in for the first time,

and she saw this flare on the moon, Io.

[vocalizing continues]

Linda Morabito discovered

that Io was indeed exploding with volcanoes all over its surface.

The next one was Europa,

a moon of Jupiter, which we are almost certain

contains a vast liquid water ocean underneath its ice shell.

So much water. Maybe ten to 100 times

as much water as there is on the planet Earth.

And life could have formed.

Such a thing had never even been imagined.

[vocalizing continues]

There is a moon of Saturn called Enceladus.

Material spewing out of what appears to be

a liquid water ocean underneath the ice that covers Enceladus.

Thirty years later, Cassini would discover

that Enceladus had valleys cut into the surface,

out of which geysers are pouring.

And then, Titan, the largest moon in the solar system,

another moon of Saturn, it's larger than our moon, has an atmosphere.

And that atmosphere is mostly nitrogen

and is rich in organic material.

I mean, there are all the amino acids that make up our DNA.

You can find them in the atmosphere of Titan.

And so Voyager went on.

New world after new world.

These are real places.

They don't look like anything we've ever seen before.

What does that say about the place where we live?

[vocalizing continues]

From the very beginning, it was understood that the Grand Tour

would eventually accelerate the two Voyager spacecraft

so that they would leave the solar system altogether.

[vocalizing fades]

[slow atmospheric music]

This piqued the interests of many of the broadest minds on the planet.

And, of course, Carl Sagan was fascinated by this.

- [muted conversation] - [Gentry]So, Carl went to work with a team of people,

including Frank Drake, to design something called the Voyager Record...

with the imaginative idea that suppose some intelligent extraterrestrial

somewhere out in space, somewhere hundreds of thousands of years from now, perhaps,

would grab the Voyager spacecraft and would see this record.

It is a record, and there's information on the side of it

that tells you how to play it.

[boy] Hello from the children of planet Earth.

[flute music]

[Kurt] As the Secretary General of the United Nations,

I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.

- [David]Shalom. - [Erik speaks Spanish]

[Stella speaks Cantonese]

[Salma speaks Arabic]

[Saul speaks Nyanja]

[Frederick speaks Greek]

[jungle sounds]

[thunder rumbling]

[woman vocalizing]

[Gentry] The exercise

of defining what sounds of Earth to put on that record

was a fascinating Rorschach test of the human species.

[whimsical music]

What is on that record is a digest of some of the broadest and best

sounds that human beings have ever produced in music.

["Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67" by Beethoven]

There is an absolutely widespread set of music

from all the different cultures on the planet.

[string instrument playing]

So it is possible that there are extraterrestrials out there somewhere.

- And it is possible... - [music playing on record]

that they will understand how to play that record.

And if they have any limbs, they will move in rhythm

when they listen to Chuck Berry singing "Johnny B. Goode."

["Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry]

[song fades]

[indistinct chatter]

[Gentry] I get asked often, "Would you like to go into space?"

And my answer is, "I already have.

Many times."

The part of me that is uniquely human

was there.

The best part of me.

Not my body, but my mind.

[dull, droning music]

[Gentry] If what we are trying to do in exploring space

is to add to the knowledge of the human species,

a much more effective way to do it

is to do it with robots instead of people.

Why?

It's very simple.

We have to make sure the humans stay alive,

which means that wherever we send them, we have to bring them back.

Now...

someone might say, "Gentry Lee, I thought you were imaginative,

and it's clear that you have a failure of the imagination."

[slow atmospheric music]

No good scientist, engineer or futurist

ever makes a categorical statement that something is impossible.

However...

our technology today

does not allow us to mount

an instrumented expedition to a planet

around another star with a flight time less than,

listen carefully, 10,000 years.

[slow warbling]

[mysterious music]

[gentry] When I first started thinking about the exploration of space,

I said, "Well, what's the end point of all this?

Are we gonna meet some aliens?"

So I did a lot of work. Research, study, reading and so forth.

And I first realized that, that all alien discussions

fall into these three categories that are well known in... within that genre,

which is, there's close encounters of the first kind,

which is, "Wow, did you see that?"

[narrator] This is a UFO, Unidentified Flying Object,

- popularly called a flying saucer. - [camera clicking]

[Gentry]When I was very young, I was fascinated by this entire subject.

[Donald] We are being observed

by some type of device which is ahead of us,

far ahead of us, and is probably controlled

by a highly-advanced, superior civilization.

I saw two red lights and I saw what looked to be shaped like a pie.

I saw a flying object that was not manufactured, in my opinion, on this Earth,

that was metallic, and it was an aircraft.

I was not that interested in either

close encounters of the first kind or the second.

But the ones that were close encounters of the third kind,

those definitely piqued my imagination.

And, of course, at that time, the Betty and Barney Hill story

about being abducted was big news,

and everybody was talking about it.

[interviewer] What language did you speak to them?

[Betty] I spoke in English, and I don't know

what language they spoke in, but I understood them in English.

[interviewer] Well, how tall were these men?

[Barney] I estimate about four and a half to five feet.

- [Betty]I'm five feet. - [Barney]Five feet. Yes.

I have talked face to face...

to people who say they have been abducted by aliens.

There were a couple of brothers from Louisiana

who said that they regularly had contact with aliens.

They just carried me right up to the craft and, and we just

seemed, seemed to glide right through the door.

Well, they took him in first, and I was right behind.

You know, when I got to the door, when I passed out, and...

That's how scared I was.

[man] I didn't see any neck. It looked like

it just sit down on a, on a body,

if you call it a body.

And they had arms,

and they didn't have hands as we have.

They, they had more or less like pinchers or, or claws

or something like that.

[Gentry] It does not matter

whether or not they have any physical proof...

because to them, the experience is real.

[slow suspenseful music]

There is nothing in Air Force files, in either the classified files

or the unclassified files, that come to a conclusion

that spaceships have visited the Earth.

[Gentry] Do I believe that there are unidentified flying objects?

Absolutely.

Do I believe that they are being piloted by aliens from another world?

Well, not exactly.

[tense music]

- [indistinct radio chatter] - [man]Oh, got it!

[Gentry] If you cannot explain what you have found,

invoke the least unlikely hypothesis to explain it.

It's called Occam's Razor.

[indistinct radio chatter]

[Gentry] It is a giant step

from those photographs, videos, whatever you want to call them,

to there are aliens that are here.

Do you believe our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials?

You said that the government has alien bodies or alien species.

Have you seen, have you, have you seen the spacecraft?

The American people largely believe that the government

has actively covered up the truth about UAPs.

[Gentry] This general lack of scientific literacy

hurts us in a very significant way as a society.

The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability.

Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?

[somber music]

[Gentry] The probability that any alien creature

would look anything at all like us is so close to zero,

you can't possibly calculate it.

- Go back to your station. - [Gentry] Even with some of

the very best science fiction movies.

And I think Arrival is one of them, representing extraterrestrials

as being dramatically different from us.

Whenever we talk about communication

with an extraterrestrial intelligence, we have to ask ourselves

what common ground would we have with them?

[pensive music]

On the planet Earth, we have recognized

how difficult it is to communicate

with even an obviously intelligent species

when the whole framework of their existence is foreign to us.

Octopuses are the most interesting, because their connection to us

is 600 million years of evolution away.

That means that the intelligence that has developed in octopuses

is altogether different than anything we can imagine.

Now, I am asked often,

"Do you believe that intelligence exists beyond the planet Earth?"

And I always say, "Yes, I do believe that."

There could be, right now, alien machines all over the Earth.

They could be hidden inside atoms, inside protons or electrons.

"What? How would that happen?"

My colleague, Arthur C. Clarke... [clears throat]

once made the following statement...

"The technology of an extraterrestrial civilization

will be indistinguishable from magic."

[slow dramatic music]

[Arthur] The idea of contact with extraterrestrial beings

is something that's always fascinated me,

and has been a main theme of my stories.

I'm sure it will happen one day. I think it's possible

it may have happened in the remote past.

If we are exploring space now,

then obviously, superior intelligences

must have been doing this for millions of years.

[Gentry] I was an Arthur C. Clarke fan from very early in my life.

When I read Childhood's End,

which is a truly amazing book about alien contact,

I said, "This man's mind is absolutely fantastic."

[indistinct chatter]

[Gentry] Arthur C. Clarke is widely regarded

as one of the most

complete and imaginative minds that existed

in the second part of the 20th century.

[Arthur] I wish I could sign with both hands.

- [laughter] - [Gentry]He rose to fame early

on two different fronts...

A science fiction front, and at virtually the same time in his life,

he wrote a paper for the British Interplanetary Society in 1948

that would lead to the ability to have satellite communications.

You've been honored for your pioneer work

in suggesting the communications satellite, which was purely your idea.

[Arthur] In the very near future,

communication satellites are, are going to multiply

the channels of communication, uh, to the man in the street.

[Gentry] Nobody had ever conceived of that before.

So, here is a British person

who had a tremendous scientific mind and a tremendous imagination.

[man] Our next speaker really needs no introduction at all.

Arthur C. Clarke.

[Gentry] Arthur's name became much wider spread

throughout the media and the popular vernacular...

Mr. Arthur C. Clarke.

[Gentry] because of 2001.

["The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss]

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, produced in 1968.

All of a sudden, Arthur became famous.

[Arthur] The success of 2001 was a great surprise to me,

and I suspect, to Stanley Kubrick.

Of course, we thought it... we hoped it would be successful,

but we never imagined it would become a, a cult movie

and have such tremendous sustaining power.

[Gentry] I know of no person who went to that movie

that didn't come out absolutely flabbergasted.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

[Hal] I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

[Gentry] So, as I was growing up, he was revered.

[interviewer] Is it correct to refer to you as a scientist? Because, really,

you decided to be a writer, didn't you,

even though you're qualified in science?

I have a science degree, but it's more accurate

to call me a science writer.

[song fades]

[slow suspenseful music]

[birds chirping]

[Gentry] Arthur came to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This was around 1980.

I made certain that I was going to be his guide.

I just went crazy talking about Space Odyssey,

and about his discovery of communication satellites,

and about Childhood's End and all that sort of stuff.

And he was gracious, and he smiled, and that was that.

So, years went by,

and he and I developed a partnership.

[birds chirping]

Arthur lived in the capital city of Sri Lanka,

which is called Colombo, in this wonderful house.

[chattering]

Oh, no, don't. Come on, love. Come on. Come on. Come on.

[Gentry] I will never forget, Arthur and I went to dinner

and Arthur said to me, "I like the way you think.

Have you ever thought about doing any writing?"

And I said, "Yes, sir. I have thought about writing all my life."

And he said, "Have you ever thought about writing any science fiction?"

Oh, boy.

The science fiction grand master of the world is asking me,

an engineer, if I've ever thought about writing any science fiction?

I said, "Yes, sir." He says, "I don't want to promise you anything,

but I would like to offer you a chance to write a novel with me.

The book is going to be by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee.

But you're going to write it, I'm going to edit it."

The Rama books are very simple.

Sometime in the future,

a gigantic cylindrical spaceship

suddenly appears in our solar system,

obviously having come from another star.

[slow suspenseful music]

The greatest value of science fiction

is the way it opens your mind to possibilities.

[man] Captain's log, stardate 1513.4.

[Gentry]When Arthur C. Clarke and I were talking about writing together,

we spent a lot of time talking about Star Trek

before we concluded that to us,

the difference between fantasy and real science fiction

is that in fantasy, it doesn't have to be plausible.

It doesn't have to obey the laws of physics.

Message, Captain.

Starship based on Current Four

requesting explanation of our delay here, sir.

[Gentry] For Arthur and for me,

science fiction writing, to be good, must be not implausible.

Doesn't have to be plausible.

It has to be not implausible.

[Arthur] One of the important roles of science fiction

is to develop flexibility

and to make people realize that these possibilities exist,

and to construct in their own minds sort of, scenarios,

say, "Well, wouldn't it be nice if we can do so-and-so?"

And then, "Well, can we? What are the problems?

What should we do to aim towards this particular future

which seems an attractive one?"

[intriguing music]

Technology is what's made us human.

Uh, from the, uh, ape-man who picked up the first bone

as we tried to show in 2001.

Everything that distinguishes us from the animals is our technology.

Spirituality will always remain because the universe will always be full of mystery.

There will always be things we don't know.

And one of the most important reasons for going into space

is to encounter other races that's perhaps been thinking about this sort of thing for

not a few thousand years, as we have, but for millions of years.

[music continues]

[Gentry] We know today

there are close to a trillion planets.

From the beginning,

we have postulated those planets existed.

Now we know they are there.

This discovery has kicked off

many, many other missions to try to understand...

if out there somewhere

there might be another place

like the Earth

in orbit, in a region around a stable star

where water can be liquid, where life could have evolved.

We can't say today what technological advances will occur

that will someday allow

a human imprint.

Not physical, necessarily, but at least mental or spiritual,

on another star system.

[music continues]

[music fades]

However...

our desires for exploration

must always be balanced

by the need to make certain

that what is happening in the already explored world

is not unstable.

[whooshes]

If our future world will be unstable,

there will be no exploration of interstellar space.

What kind of damage are we...

[Dan] Damage?

Total, sir.

It's what we call a global killer.

The end of mankind.

- Doesn't matter... - [Gentry]There are many themes in science fiction...

My God.

What do we do?

In which the Earth becomes

essentially unlivable.

[dramatic music]

[man] High on a mountaintop, an army of scientists

work desperately to build this giant rocket

to carry a few picked survivors of our doomed civilization

to a new life on another world.

[Gentry] And there is a yearning to go somewhere else,

to start anew.

[tense music]

The idea that we can escape

the problems we create on this planet

without understanding how we created them,

and go to someplace else and not make the same mistakes,

in my opinion, is a logical fallacy.

[man] Mr. Musk, kind of talk us through your thought process.

[Gentry] I've actually had this conversation with Elon Musk.

The idea of human beings living on Mars.

It's easy to imagine.

But I would not put that as high

in my goal of things for the human species to think about,

as I put doing something about climate change.

[humming]

[Carl] Every planet with an atmosphere

has some degree of a greenhouse effect.

The most spectacular case by far is the greenhouse effect of Venus.

The surface temperature is about 470 degrees centigrade, 900 Fahrenheit.

[Gentry] Studying the climate on Venus and Mars

makes it very clear

that climate is not a stable thing.

[birds chirping]

Did Venus go from being Earth-like at one time

to a runaway greenhouse effect because of climate change?

That's a terrifying idea.

At the beginning of the evolution of the solar system...

Mars had liquid water.

It was wet and warm at a time

when the Earth was inhospitable to life.

Our scientific investigations on the planet Earth have allowed us to construct

a fairly accurate historical representation of the atmosphere of the Earth,

all the way back to two or three billion years ago.

There was a time when the entire surface of the Earth

was covered with snow.

There have been times in our history

when there was not a smidgen of ice or snow anywhere on the planet.

[humming continues]

We now have predictions on what the climate on the planet Earth

will be like in the future...

as a function of what we do.

- [tense music] - [crackling]

We are here today after an incredible

and fantastic multiple billion years of evolution,

during which time there have been five different events

that have wiped out almost all of the species on the planet.

[growling, sniffing]

[Gentry] If that particular set of events...

- [growling] - did not happen,

the Earth would still be populated by dinosaurs.

And what motivation would the dinosaurs ever have to develop radio,

to understand the electromagnetic spectrum?

Possibly none.

What we have concluded...

is that the emergence of life might not be that difficult,

but the emergence of intelligence will not happen

unless the life is threatened in some way,

and there becomes a premium on developing those skills

- that are necessary to survive. - [crackling]

[pensive music]

One of the by-products of my lifelong engagement in the exploration of space

has been a deep realization of how wonderful this Earth is,

and what marvels there are here that

we can enjoy and derive pleasure from.

[somber vocalizing]

I am a passionate environmentalist.

[birds chirping]

If I have free time, I'm out in nature.

I go to Park City every year.

As soon as I am 15 minutes into the hike,

I am alone with the trees,

with the occasional moose who goes across the path.

And this last trip, I broke into tears

because all I could think about is...

how is it possible...

that something so natural,

with which we didn't have anything to do with,

can be so beautiful?

[rustling]

[birds chirping]

[woman] Make sure to have your tickets ready to go.

[gentle music]

[indistinct chatter]

[Gentry] When you start to think...

[yells indistinctly]

[Gentry] that perhaps...

we are a singularity,

a rarity...

it makes you suddenly become aware

of things that you never thought about before.

Like making certain that we survive.

Making sure that we understand

what are the characteristics that we have that will

lift us up...

and those that will cause us...

to wipe ourselves out.

This struggle...

between what I consider to be the good in human beings

and the bad in human beings...

...was a subject that Arthur C. Clarke and I discussed at great detail.

[Klaatu] Your choice is simple.

Join us and live in peace,

or pursue your present course and face obliteration.

We shall be waiting for your answer.

The decision rests with you.

[Gentry] Before the first planetary explorations took place...

I never thought

that each one of these worlds we would explore

would be so vastly different than the planet Earth.

And what happened as I matured in my life

and I realized...

how different...

and inhospitable all these places were...

I came to say, "Oh, my gosh...

we live in paradise

and we don't even know it."

["Starman" by David Bowie]

♪ Hey, now, now ♪

♪ Goodbye, love ♪

♪ Didn't know what time it was ♪

♪ The lights were low-o-o ♪

♪ I leaned back On my radio-o-o ♪

♪ Some cat was laying down Some rock and roll ♪

♪ "Lotta soul," he said ♪

♪ Then the loud sound It seemed to fade ♪

♪ Came back Like a slow voice ♪

♪ On a wave of phase ♪

♪ That was no deejay ♪

♪ That was hazy cosmic jive ♪

♪ There's a starman Waiting in the sky ♪

♪ He'd like to come And meet us ♪

♪ But he thinks He'd blow our minds ♪

♪ There's a starman Waiting in the sky ♪

♪ He's told us not to blow it ♪

♪ 'Cause he knows It's all worthwhile ♪

♪ He told me ♪

♪ Let the children lose it ♪

♪ Let the children use it ♪

♪ Let all the children boogie ♪

♪ La, la, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

♪ La, la, la, la ♪

[song fades]