All language subtitles for Cosmos.A.Spacetime.Odyssey.S01E01.720p.BluRay.x264-intothevoid.en

SAGAN: The cosmos is all that is,
or ever was or ever will be.

Come with me.

TYSON: A generation ago, the astronomer
Carl Sagan stood here...

...and launched hundreds of millions of us
on a great adventure.

The exploration of the universe
revealed by science.

It's time to get going again.

We're about to begin a journey
that will take us...

...from the infinitesimal
to the infinite...

...from the dawn of time
to the distant future.

We'll explore galaxies
and suns and worlds...

...surf the gravity waves of space-time...

...encounter beings that
live in fire and ice...

...explore the planets of
stars that never die...

...discover atoms as massive as suns...

...and universes smaller than atoms.

Cosmos is also a story about us.

It's the saga of how wandering bands
of hunters and gatherers...

...found their way to the stars.

One adventure with many heroes.

To make this journey,
we'll need imagination.

But imagination alone is not enough...

...because the reality of nature
is far more wondrous...

...than anything we can imagine.

This adventure is made possible
by generations of searchers...

...strictly adhering to
a simple set of rules:

Test ideas by experiment and observation.

Build on those ideas that pass the test.
Reject the ones that fail.

Follow the evidence wherever it leads...

...and question everything.

Accept these terms,
and the cosmos is yours.

Now come with me.

"Standing Up in the Milky Way"

In this ship of the imagination...

...free from the shackles of space
and time, we can go anywhere.

If you want to see where we are in space,
just look out the front window.

In the dimension of time,
the past lies beneath us.

Here is what Earth looked like
250 million years ago.

If you wanna see the future, look up.

And this is how it could appear
250 million years from now.

If we're going to be venturing out
into the farthest reaches of the cosmos...

...we need to know our cosmic address.

And this is the first line of that address.

We're leaving the Earth,
the only home we've ever known...

...for the farthest reaches of the cosmos.

Our nearest neighbor, the moon,
has no sky...

...no ocean, no life.

Just the scars of cosmic impacts.

Our star powers the wind and the waves...

...and all the life on the
surface of our world.

The sun holds all the worlds
of the solar system...

...in its gravitational embrace,
starting with Mercury...

...to cloud-covered Venus,
where runaway greenhouse effect...

...has turned it into a kind of hell.

Mars.

A world with as much land as Earth itself.

A belt of rocky asteroids circles the sun
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

With its four giant moons
and dozens of smaller ones...

...Jupiter is like its
own little solar system.

It has more mass than all
the other planets combined.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

A hurricane three times
the size of our whole planet...

...that's been raging for centuries.

The crown jewel
of our solar system, Saturn...

...ringed by freeways of
countless orbiting...

...and slowly tumbling snowballs.

Every snowball, a little moon.

Uranus...

...and Neptune.

The outermost planets...

...unknown to the ancients
and only discovered

after the invention
of the telescope.

Beyond the outermost planet...

...there's a swarm of tens
of thousands of frozen worlds.

And Pluto is one of them.

Of all our spacecraft...

...this is the one that's traveled
farthest from home.

Voyager 1.

She bears a message
to a billion years from now...

...something of who we were...

...how we felt and the music we made.

[BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON'S
"DARK WAS THE NIGHT" PLAYING]

TYSON: The deeper waters
of this vast cosmic ocean...

...and their numberless worlds lie ahead.

From out here, the sun may look
like just another star.

But it still exerts its gravitational hold
on a trillion frozen comets...

"leftovers from the formation
of the solar system...

...nearly five billion years ago.

It's called the Oort Cloud.

No one has ever seen it before,
nor could they...

...because each one of
these little worlds...

...is as far from its nearest neighbor
as Earth is from Saturn.

This enormous cloud of comets
encloses the solar system...

...which is the second line
of our cosmic address.

We've only been able to detect the planets
of other stars for a few decades...

...but we already know
that planets are plentiful.

They outnumber the stars.

Almost all of them will be
very different from Earth...

...and hostile to life as we know it.

But what do we know about life?

We've met only one kind so far: Earth life.

See anything? Just empty space, right?

Human eyes see only a sliver of the light
that shines in the cosmos.

But science gives us the power
to see what our senses cannot.

Infrared is the kind of light made visible
by night-vision goggles.

Throw an infrared sensor
across the darkness.

Rogue planet.

World without a sun.

Our galaxy has billions of them,
adrift in perpetual night.

They're orphans,
cast away from their mother stars...

...during the chaotic birth
of their native star systems.

Rogue planets are molten at the core
but frozen at the surface.

There may be oceans of liquid water...

...in the zone between those extremes.

Who knows what might be swimming there?

This is what the Milky Way looks like
in infrared.

Every single dot, not just the bright ones,
is a star.

How many stars?

How many worlds?

How many ways of being alive?

Where are we in this picture?
See that trailing outer arm?

That's where we live.

About 30,000 light-years
from the center.

The Milky Way Galaxy
is the next line of our cosmic address.

We're now a hundred thousand
light-years from home.

It would take light,
the fastest thing there is...

...a hundred thousand years
to reach us from Earth.

This is the great spiral in Andromeda.
The galaxy next door.

We call our two giant galaxies
and a smattering of smaller ones...

...the Local Group.

Can't even find our home galaxy
from out here.

It's just one of thousands
in the Virgo Supercluster.

On this scale, all the objects we see,
including the tiniest dots...

...are galaxies.

Each galaxy contains billions of suns
and countless worlds.

Yet, the entire Virgo
Supercluster itself...

...forms but a tiny part of our universe.

This is the cosmos
on the grandest scale we know...

...a network of a hundred billion galaxies.

It's the last line of our cosmic address.
For now.

Observable universe?
What does that mean?

Even for us, in our ship
of the imagination...

...there's a limit
to how far we can see in space-time.

It's our cosmic horizon.

Beyond that horizon lie parts of the
universe that are too far away.

There hasn't been enough time...

...in the 13.8 billion year history
of the universe...

...for their light to have reached us.

Many of us suspect that all of this...

...all the worlds, stars, galaxies
and clusters...

...in our observable universe...

...is but one tiny bubble in an
infinite ocean of other universes.

A multiverse.

Universe upon universe.

Worlds without end.

Feeling a little small?

Well, in the context of the cosmos,
we are small.

We may just be little guys
living on a speck of dust...

...afloat in a staggering immensity...

...but we don't think small.

This cosmic perspective is relatively new.

A mere four centuries ago,
our tiny world was oblivious...

...to the rest of the cosmos.

There were no telescopes.

The universe was only what you could see
with the naked eye.

Back in 1599, everyone knew that the sun,
planets and stars...

...were just lights in the sky
that revolved around the Earth...

...and that we were the center
of a little universe.

A universe made for us.

There was only one man
on the whole planet...

...who envisioned
an infinitely grander cosmos.

And how was he spending
New Year's Eve...

...of the year 1600?

Why, in prison, of course.

There comes a time in
our lives when we first

realize we're not the
center of the universe...

...that we belong to something
much greater than ourselves.

It's part of growing up.

And as it happens to each of us, so it
began to happen to our civilization...

...in the 16th century.

Imagine a world before telescopes...

...when the universe was only
what you could see with the naked eye.

It was obvious that Earth was motionless...

...and that everything in the heavens, the
sun, the moon, the stars, the planets...

...revolved around us.

And then a Polish astronomer and priest
named Copernicus made a radical proposal:

The Earth was not the center.

It was just one of the planets,
and like them, it revolved around the sun.

Many, like the Protestant reformer
Martin Luther...

...took this idea as a scandalous affront
to scripture.

They were horrified.

But for one man,
Copernicus didn't go far enough.

His name was Giordano Bruno
and he was a natural-born rebel.

He longed to bust out
of that cramped little universe.

Even as a young Dominican monk
in Naples...

...he was a misfit.

This was a time when there was
no freedom of thought in Italy.

But Bruno hungered to know everything
about God's creation.

He dared to read the books
banned by the church...

...and that was his undoing.

In one of them, an ancient Roman,
a man dead for more than 1500 years...

...whispered to him
of a universe far

greater, one as boundless
as his idea of God.

Lucretius asked the reader...

...to imagine standing
at the edge of the universe...

...and shooting an arrow outward.

If the arrow keeps going,
then clearly the universe extends...

...beyond what you thought was the edge.

But if the arrow doesn't keep going...

...say it hits a wall,
then that wall must lie...

...beyond what you thought
was the edge of the universe.

Now if you stand on that wall
and shoot another arrow...

...there are only the same
two possible outcomes:

It either flies forever out into space...

...or it hits some boundary...

...where you can stand and shoot
yet another arrow.

Either way, the universe is unbounded.

The cosmos must be infinite.

This made perfect sense to Bruno.

The God he worshiped was infinite.

So how, he reasoned,
could creation be anything less?

[DOOR OPENS]

It was the last steady job he ever had.

And then, when he was 30,
he had the vision that sealed his fate.

In this dream, he awakened to a world...

...enclosed inside a
confining bowl of stars.

This was the cosmos of Bruno's time.

He experienced a sickening
moment of fear...

...as if the bottom of everything
was falling away beneath his feet.

But he summoned up his courage.

BRUNO:
I spread confident wings to space...

...and soared toward the infinite,
leaving far behind me...

...what others strained to see
from a distance.

Here, there was no up, no down, no edge...

...no center.

I saw that the sun was just another star...

...and the stars were other suns,
each escorted by other earths...

...like our own.

The revelation of this immensity
was like falling in love.

TYSON".
Bruno became an evangelist...

...spreading the gospel of infinity
throughout Europe.

He assumed that other lovers of God
would naturally embrace...

...this grander and more glorious view
of creation.

BRUNO:
What a fool I was.

TYSON: He was excommunicated by the
Roman Catholic Church in his homeland...

...expelled by the
Calvinists in Switzerland...

...and by the Lutherans in Germany.

Bruno jumped at an invitation
to lecture at Oxford in England.

At last, he thought...

...a chance to share his vision
with an audience of his peers.

[ALL CHUCKLING]

I have come to present
a new vision of the cosmos.

Copernicus was right to argue that our
world is not the center of the universe.

The Earth goes around the sun.

It's a planet, just like the others.

But Copernicus was only the dawn.
I bring you the sunrise.

MAN 1: Outrageous.
The stars are other fiery suns...

...made of the same substance as the Earth,
and they have their own watery earths...

...with plants and animals
no less noble than our own.

Are you mad or merely ignorant?

Everyone knows there is only one world.
What everyone knows is wrong.

Our infinite God
has created a boundless universe...

...with an infinite number of worlds.

Do they not read Aristotle
where you come from?

Or even the Bible?

I beg you, reject antiquity,
tradition, faith, and authority.

Let us begin anew, by doubting
everything we assume has been proven.

MAN 2: Heretic.
MAN 3: Infidel!

Your God is too small.

[CROWD SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY]

TYSON". A wiser man
would have learned his lesson.

But Bruno was not such a man.

He couldn't keep his soaring vision
of the cosmos to himself...

...despite the fact that the penalty
for doing so in his world...

...was the most vicious form
of cruel and unusual punishment.

Giordano Bruno lived at a time...

...when there was no such thing
as the separation of church and state...

...or the notion that freedom of speech
was a sacred right of every individual.

Expressing an idea that didn't
conform to traditional belief...

...could land you in deep trouble.

Recklessly, Bruno returned to Italy.

Maybe he was homesick.

But still, he must have known
that his homeland...

...was one of the most dangerous places
in Europe he could possibly go.

The Roman Catholic Church
maintained a system of courts...

...known as the Inquisition...

...and its sole purpose
was to investigate and torment...

...anyone who dared voice views
that differed from theirs.

It wasn't long before Bruno fell into
the clutches of the thought police.

This wanderer,
who worshiped an infinite universe...

...languished in confinement
for eight years.

Through relentless interrogations...

...he stubbornly refused
to renounce his views.

Why was the church willing
to go to such lengths to torment Bruno?

What were they afraid of?

If Bruno was right, then the sacred books
and the authority of the church...

...would be open to question.

Finally, the cardinals of the Inquisition
rendered their verdict.

You are found guilty
of questioning the Holy Trinity...

...and the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Of believing that God's
wrath is not eternal...

...that everyone will be saved.

Of asserting the existence of other worlds.

MAN:
Throw him in his cell.

All of the books you have written...

...will be gathered up and burned
in St. Peter's Square.

Reverend Father,
these eight years of confinement...

...have given me much time to reflect.
So you will recant?

My love and reverence for the creator...

...inspires in me the vision
of an infinite creation.

You shall be turned over
to the governor of Rome...

...to administer
the appropriate punishment...

...for those who will not repent.

MAN:
Back to prison.

It may be that you are more afraid
to deliver this judgment...

...than I am to hear it.

[CROWD SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY]

[SHOUTING CONTINUES]

Ten years after Bruno's martyrdom...

...Galileo first looked
through a telescope...

...realizing that Bruno
had been right all along.

The Milky Way was made of countless
stars invisible to the naked eye...

...and some of those lights in the sky
were actually other worlds.

Bruno was no scientist.

His vision of the cosmos
was a lucky guess...

...because he had no
evidence to support it.

Like most guesses,
it could well have turned out wrong.

But once the idea was in the air,
it gave others a target to aim at.

If only to disprove it.

Bruno glimpsed the vastness of space...

...but he had no inkling of the
staggering immensity of time.

How can we humans,
who rarely live more than a century...

...hope to grasp the
vast expanse of time...

...that is the history of the cosmos?

The universe
is 13.8 thousand million years old.

In order to imagine all of cosmic time...

...let's compress it
into a single calendar year.

The cosmic calendar begins on January 1st
with the birth of our universe.

It contains everything that's happened
since then up to now...

...which on this calendar is midnight,
December 31 st.

On this scale, every month
represents about a billion years.

Every day represents
nearly 40 million years.

Let's go back as far as we can...

...to the very first
moment of the universe.

January 1st. The Big Bang.

It's as far back as we can see in time.

For now.

Our entire universe emerged
from a point smaller than a single atom.

Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire...

...launching the expansion
of the universe...

...and giving birth to all the energy
and all the matter we know today.

I know that sounds crazy, but there's
strong observational evidence...

...to support the Big Bang theory.

And it includes the amount of helium
in the cosmos...

...and the glow of radio waves
left over from the explosion.

As it expanded, the universe cooled...

...and there was darkness
for about 200 million years.

Gravity was pulling together
clumps of gas and heating them...

...until the first stars burst into light
on January 10th.

On January 13th, these stars coalesced
into the first small galaxies.

These galaxies merged
to form still larger ones...

...including our own Milky Way...

...which formed about
11 billion years ago...

...on March 15 of the cosmic year.

Hundreds of billions of suns.

Which one is ours?

It's not yet born.
It will rise from the ashes of other stars.

See those lights flashing like paparazzi?

Each one is a supernova...

...the blazing death of a giant star.

Stars die and are born
in places like this one...

...a stellar nursery.

They condense like raindrops
from giant clouds of gas and dust.

They get so hot that the nuclei of the
atoms fuse together deep within them...

...to make the oxygen we breathe,
the carbon in our muscles...

...the calcium in our bones,
the iron in our blood.

All of it was cooked
in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars.

You, me, everyone.

We are made of star stuff.

This star stuff is recycled and enriched...

...again and again,
through succeeding generations of stars.

How much longer until the birth
of our sun?

A long time.

It won't begin to shine
for another six billion years.

Our sun's birthday is August 31 st
on the cosmic calendar...

...four and a half billion years ago.

As with the other worlds
of our solar system...

...Earth was formed
from a disk of gas and dust...

...orbiting the newborn sun.

Repeated collisions
produced a growing ball of debris.

See that asteroid? No, not that one.

The one over there.

We exist because the gravity
of that one next to it...

...just nudged it an inch to the left.

What difference could an inch make
on the scale of the solar system?

Just wait, you'll see.

The Earth took one hell of a beating
in its first billion years.

Fragments of orbiting debris
collided and coalesced...

...until they snowballed to form our moon.

The moon is a souvenir
of that violent epoch.

If you stood on the surface
of that long ago Earth...

...the moon would have looked
a hundred times brighter.

It was ten times closer back then...

...locked in a much more intimate
gravitational embrace.

As the Earth cooled, seas began to form.

The tides
were a thousand times higher then.

Over the eons, tidal friction within
the Earth pushed the moon away.

Life began somewhere around here,
September 21 st...

...three and a half billion years ago
on our little world.

We still don't know how life got started.

For all we know, it may have come
from another part of the Milky Way.

The origin of life is one of the greatest
unsolved mysteries of science.

That's life cooking,
evolving all the biochemical recipes...

...for its incredibly complex activities.

By November 9th, life was breathing...

...moving, eating,
responding to its environment.

We owe a lot to those pioneering microbes.

Oh, yeah, one other thing.

They also invented sex.

December 17th was quite a day.

Life in the sea really took off.

It was exploding with a diversity
of larger plants and animals.

Tiktaalik was one of the first animals
to venture onto land.

It must have felt like
visiting another planet.

Forests, dinosaurs, birds, insects...

...all evolved in the
final week of December.

The first flower...

...bloomed on December 28th.

As these ancient forests grew and died
and sank beneath the surface...

...their remains transformed into coal.

Three hundred million years later...

...we humans are burning most
of that coal to power...

...and imperil our civilization.

Remember that asteroid back
in the formation of the solar system?

The one that got nudged
a little to the left?

Well, here it comes.

It's 6:24 a.m. on December 30th
on the Cosmic Calendar.

[EXPLOSION]

For more than a hundred million years,
the dinosaurs were lords of the Earth...

...while our ancestors, small mammals,
scurried fearfully underfoot.

The asteroid changed all that.

Suppose it hadn't been nudged at all.
It would have missed the Earth entirely...

...and for all we know, the dinosaurs
might still be here, but we wouldn't.

This is a good example
of the extreme contingency...

...the chance nature of existence.

The universe is already more
than 13 and half billion years old.

Still no sign of us.

In the vast ocean of time
that this calendar represents...

...we humans only evolved
within the last hour...

...of the last day of the cosmic year.

11:59 and 46 seconds.

All of recorded history occupies
only the last 14 seconds...

...and every person you've ever heard of
lived somewhere in there.

All those kings and battles,
migrations and inventions...

...wars and loves,
everything in the history books...

...happened here,
in the last seconds of the cosmic calendar.

But if we want to explore
such a brief moment of cosmic time...

...we'll have to change scale.

We are newcomers to the cosmos.

Our own story only begins
on the last night of the cosmic year.

It's 9:45 on New Year's Eve.

Three and a half million years ago...

...our ancestors, yours and mine,
left these traces.

We stood up and parted ways from them.

Once we were standing on two feet...

...our eyes were no longer fixated
on the ground.

Now we were free to look up and wonder.

For the longest part of human existence,
say the last 40,000 generations...

...we were Wanderers, living in small bands
of hunters and gatherers...

...making tools, controlling fire,
naming things...

...all within the last hour
of the cosmic calendar.

To find out what happens next,
we'll have to change scale...

...to see the last minute of the last night
of the cosmic year.

11:59. We're so very young
on the time scale of the universe...

...that we didn't start painting
our first pictures...

...until the last 60 seconds
of the cosmic year...

...a mere 30,000 years ago.

[ANIMALS GRUNTING]

This is when we invented astronomy.

In fact, we're all descended
from astronomers.

Our survival depended
on knowing how to read the stars...

...in order to predict
the coming of the winter...

...and the migration of the wild herds.

And then, around 10,000 years ago...

...there began a revolution
in the way we lived.

Our ancestors learned
how to shape their environment...

...taming wild plants and animals...

...cultivating land and settling down.

This changed everything.

For the first time in our history,
we had more stuff than we could carry.

We needed a way to keep track of it.

At 14 seconds to midnight...

...or about 6000 years ago,
we invented writing.

And it wasn't long before we started
recording more than bushels of grain.

Writing allowed us to save our thoughts...

...and send them much further
in space and time.

Tiny markings on a clay tablet...

...became a means for us
to vanquish mortality.

It shook the world.

Moses was born seven seconds ago.

Buddha, six seconds ago.

Jesus, five seconds ago.

Mohammed, three seconds ago.

It was not even two seconds ago that,
for better or worse...

...the two halves of the Earth
discovered each other.

And it was only in the very last second...

...of the cosmic calendar
that we began to use science...

...to reveal nature's secrets and her laws.

The scientific method is so powerful
that in a mere four centuries...

...it has taken us from
Galileo's first look

through a telescope
at another world...

...to leaving our footprints on the moon.

It allowed us to look out
across space and time...

...to discover where
and when we are in the cosmos.

SAGAN:
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Carl Sagan guided the maiden voyage
of Cosmos...

...a generation ago.

He was the most successful
science communicator of the 20th century...

...but he was first and
foremost a scientist.

Carl contributed enormously
to our knowledge of the planets.

He correctly predicted
the existence of methane lakes...

...on Saturn's giant moon Titan.

He showed that the atmosphere
of the early Earth...

...must have contained
powerful greenhouse gases.

He was the first to understand
that seasonal changes on Mars...

...were due to windblown dust.

Carl was a pioneer in the search
for extraterrestrial life...

...and intelligence.

He played a leading role
in every major spacecraft mission...

...to explore the solar system
during the first 40 years of the Space Age.

But that's not all he did.

This is Carl Sagan's
own calendar from 1975.

Who was I back then?

I was just a 17-year-old
kid from the Bronx...

...with dreams of becoming a scientist...

...and somehow the world's most
famous astronomer found time...

...to invite me to Ithaca,
in upstate New York...

...and spend a Saturday with him.

I remember that snowy day
like it was yesterday.

He met me at the bus stop...

...and showed me his laboratory
at Cornell University.

Carl reached behind his desk
and inscribed this book for me.

"For Neil, a future astronomer. Carl."

At the end of the day,
he drove me back to the bus station.

The snow was falling harder.

He wrote his phone number, his home
phone number, on a scrap of paper...

...and he said, "if the
bus can't get through...

...call me and spend the night at my home
with my family."

I already knew
I wanted to become a scientist...

...but that afternoon I
learned from Carl...

...the kind of person I wanted to become.

He reached out to me
and to countless others...

...inspiring so many of us to study, teach
and do science.

Science is a cooperative enterprise,
spanning the generations.

It's the passing of a torch
from teacher to student to teacher.

A community of minds
reaching back to antiquity...

...and forward to the stars.

Now, come with me.

Our journey is just beginning.