Original subtitles

♪ ♪

[wind]

SAGAN: We were hunters and foragers.

The frontier was everywhere.

We were bounded only by the earth and the ocean and the sky.

The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten

song of childhood.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and

fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.

How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the

end of the next century?

And the next millennium?

♪ ♪

TYSON: Welcome back to the shores of the cosmic ocean...

An immensity of space and time,

a vastness still mostly uncharted.

We're bound for the possible worlds revealed by science.

We'll take a ride on the underground worldwide network

that no one knew was there.

I'm going to tell you a first contact story that's true.

We'll meet some of the most courageous people who ever lived.

And we're going to venture into the future we can still have,

to the homes of our distant descendants among the stars.

Science can carry us across that vastness.

But without imagination, we go nowhere.

Our Ship of the Imagination is propelled by twin engines

of skepticism and wonder.

It's guided by the simple set of rules that define science

and make it so powerful.

[splash]

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.

Take these rules to heart, and the cosmos is yours.

Come with me...

[theme music plays].

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

TYSON: Our Ship of the Imagination can take us

anywhere in space and time.

The cosmos is right outside our front window.

If you want to see the past, look down.

And if you want to see the future, look up.

On this voyage, we are bound for a distant galaxy.

And we'll discover how we as a species became

explorers of the cosmos.

There. There she is.

NASA's Voyager 1.

Launched in 1977,

she is the most distant object built by human hands.

She's done some hard traveling since our last encounter,

logged another billion and a half miles.

Voyager's making for other parts of our Milky Way,

but we have another, far more distant destination.

The cosmic ocean is made of space and time.

You can't move in space without also moving in time.

Our voyage will take us a long way from home,

a little more than a billion light-years.

We're also traveling a billion years into the past,

to an event so violent it will even shatter time.

Now, we're getting close to our destination.

This is what we came for.

These two black holes were born from the collapse of a

pair of massive stars.

And they've been doing a gravitational tango ever since

for millions of years.

We're here for the climax.

When those two collide, they will set off a space-time

tsunami that will stretch and compress space

in all directions.

And it will slow down time itself,

before speeding it up and slowing it down again.

[distorted, echoes].

Gravitational...

and it will slow down time itself...

Set off a space-time tsunami...

Stretch and compress space in all directions a billion

light-years away.

[grunts and exhales].

What does an event that took place more than a billion

light-years away have to do with us?

Albert Einstein was the first to understand that matter

could send ripples across space-time.

He imagined that catastrophic explosions of matter should

create something much bigger than ripples, great waves,

gravitational waves.

You are seeing and hearing me right now,

on whatever device you have, because we figured out a way

to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum.

If we can learn to surf those gravitational waves the

way we know how to ride the electromagnetic ones,

who knows?

It's as impossible to foresee as our world was to the

scientists who experimented with electricity back

in the 19th century.

Cosmologists predicted the existence of black holes.

Gravitational waves are the first direct evidence that

black holes are real.

But they may also provide a new way of knowing and

exploring the cosmos.

We can add it to the other senses that science has

devised to penetrate the great dark ocean,

all the kinds of light we use; gamma ray,

X-ray, ultraviolet,

infrared, microwave,

radio wave and visible light.

This newest way to search the cosmos could help us to one

day know what's happening inside those black holes,

and the other hidden places that make up most

of the universe.

What if we could detect the gravitational waves that were

caused by the first moment of creation,

the birth of the cosmos?

What if we could extend our vision to see the whole sweep

of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution?

So, how did we get so smart?

We know something about the evolution of our species,

but how did the human mind evolve?

Where did that crazy ambition to climb the ladder to the

stars come from?

How did we become a way for the universe to know itself?

It started over there.

TYSON: The Cosmic Calendar is a way for us to grasp the

vastness of time.

We've taken all of time,

from the birth of the universe to this very moment,

and compressed it into a single calendar year.

On this scale, every month represents a little

more than a billion years.

Every day represents nearly 40 million years.

Our own story begins with all the other life on

our little world.

Every living thing on Earth is descended from

a single origin.

It happened in the deep ocean darkness on September 15,

about four billion years ago.

Within this tiny single-celled organism was a kind of chemical ladder,

the DNA double helix.

Star stuff...

Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen...

Elements cooked in the hearts of distant stars,

combined with hydrogen from the Big Bang to become alive

on this little world.

Through random changes, mutations in the genes,

some of which led to more successful life-forms,

what we call evolution by natural selection.

The ladder grew, adding more and more rungs.

It took another three billion years for life to evolve the

complexity of the plants and animals that you could see

with the naked eye.

If the Cosmic Calendar had holidays,

surely December 26 would be one of them.

Some time on this day, about 200 million years ago,

the first mammals evolved.

They brought a new feature to life on Earth:

the neocortex.

Back in the Triassic,

the odds were against her kind, but the dinosaurs that

terrorized the mammals went extinct.

It was the evolution of the neocortex in small,

furtive creatures such as this one,

that enabled their descendants to take over the planet.

Mammals brought something else that was new.

They suckled their young.

They nurtured them.

And there was love.

Mother's Day on the Cosmic Calendar.

Evolution by natural selection means that those living things

able to better adapt to their environment are more likely to

survive and leave offspring.

Intelligence can be a huge selective advantage.

The fate of this planet was changed forever by an event

involving just 13 atoms.

How small is 13 atoms?

It's a quadrillionth the size of a grain of salt.

A mutation occurred in the DNA of just one of our ancestors.

Every source of self-esteem, everything we've learned,

and built, might come down to nothing more than this.

One base pair of a single gene.

Just a single rung programmed the neocortex to grow larger

still and fold more deeply.

Maybe it was a random zap from a cosmic ray,

or a simple error in transmission from one cell to another.

Whatever it was, it led to a change in our species that

would ultimately affect every other species

of life on Earth.

It happened late on New Year's Eve on this

Cosmic Calendar of ours.

To think that, for good or evil,

our ability to feel loyalty and concern for increasingly

larger groups, our obsession with certain belief systems,

our capacity to imagine the future,

our power to transform the world and to search the cosmos

for answers...

The very name we gave to our own species,

homo sapiens, Latin for "wise persons" all of it

comes down to nothing more than a single rung on our tiny

DNA ladder to the stars.

For much of the last hour on the Cosmic Calendar,

for all but the last minute,

our ancestors were hunters and gatherers,

living in small bands.

You know, when people just shrug and say

"chalk it up to human nature," it puzzles me.

They're usually talking about our greed,

our arrogance, our violence.

But we've been human for at least a couple of

hundred thousand years.

For most of that time we weren't that way at all.

How do we know?

From the accounts of explorers and anthropologists

encountering surviving hunter-gatherer societies

across four centuries.

There are, of course, exceptions, especially in

the circumstances of extreme scarcity.

But the overwhelming consensus paints a picture of humans

who lived in relative harmony with each other

and the environment.

We shared the little we had because we knew that our

survival depended on the group.

We didn't prize wealth beyond our needs because possessions

would just weigh us down as we wandered.

We were different from our non-human primate ancestors

with their alpha-males bullying their way to dominance.

And where was God?

Everywhere.

In the rocks and in the rivers,

in the trees, in the birds and every living thing.

And that was human nature for a couple of

hundred thousand years.

I'm standing on the southern tip of Africa and imagining

what it was like some time in the last hundreds

of thousands of years.

Back then, Africa was home to all the world's homo sapiens...

All 10,000 of them.

If you were an extra-terrestrial on a survey mission,

you might have thought we were an endangered species.

Someday soon there will be ten billion of us.

What happened?

How did we become the globe-girdling,

space-traveling species that we are today?

Welcome to the first laboratory on Earth.

We're in Blombos Cave where the evolution of the mind

made a great leap.

Our ancestors were conducting chemistry experiments

here with a mineral rich in iron, ocher.

They used it to decorate objects with bits of red color,

but it may have also had other uses,

to preserve animal hides or as a medicine,

or as a way to sharpen their tools,

or maybe as an insect repellent.

And they engraved the ocher with symbols.

Something completely new on the planet Earth, art.

Not to be eaten.

Not to provide shelter.

But to symbolize something...

Or just to be.

It looks a little bit like a ladder,

or a double helix.

Whatever it was supposed to be,

it's the earliest remnant we have of human culture.

We had found a way to leave behind something distinctly human.

A means to communicate, however enigmatically,

to you and me 100,000 years away.

A great power was discovered here in Blombos Cave.

At 25 cosmic seconds-to-midnight,

between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago,

humans discovered another great power.

Instead of foraging for food,

we learned how to grow it in the earth.

This changed everything.

Our ancestors did something else they had

never done before.

They invented new tools, technology,

to plant and pull food out of the earth.

They settled down and moved indoors.

Our relationship to nature, and to one another,

would never be the same.

This agricultural revolution,

the domestication of plants and animals,

is the mother of all revolutions because all

others trace back to it.

Its consequences reach far beyond even our

own moment in time.

Like most revolutions,

this one brought change that was both great,

and horrifying.

There was a new concept in the world, "Home."

A specific place on the planet where your ancestors,

and you, were born and lived.

And over time these settlements grew larger,

until about 20 cosmic seconds ago or around 7000 BCE.

Welcome to Catalhoyuk,

a community on the Anatolian plain.

It's about 9,000 years ago and everyone has settled

in for the evening.

Tonight, roughly the same number of people who once

populated all of Africa are living together

in this proto-city.

The city is such a new idea,

they haven't invented the street yet,

or the window.

So the only way you can get into your apartment is to walk

along the rooftops till you arrive at the opening

to your dwelling.

Catalhoyuk lacked something much more significant than

streets and windows.

There is no palace here.

The bitter price that the invention of agriculture cost

human society had yet to be paid.

Here, there was no dominance of the few over the many.

There was no 1% attaining lavish wealth,

while most everyone else merely subsisted.

Forensic analysis of the women, men, and children

who lived here show a remarkable similarity in diet.

They still cherished the hunter-gatherer ethos of sharing.

Catalhoyuk was egalitarian.

The weakest ate the same food that the strongest did,

and everyone lived in the same kind of home.

But, man, it was anything but drab.

Come on. I'll show you.

TYSON: This was a typical apartment in one of the first cities,

Catalhoyuk, in what is now Turkey,

as it looked about 9,000 years ago.

They were a lot like us.

This bit of volcanic glass,

called obsidian, made an excellent mirror.

If we could only find a way to see all the things

that were once reflected here.

This apartment was home for an extended family of

seven to ten people.

Every apartment had a similar floor plan.

Bedroom. Living room. Kitchen.

Plaster auroch head.

The people of Catalhoyuk had a passion for decorating.

Apartments were richly appointed with the teeth and

bones and skins of animals.

The ocher that our ancestors picked up in Africa,

about 100,000 years before, was now the medium of choice

for the interior decorators of Catalhoyuk.

And the red ocher had yet another profound application.

They used it to create an entirely new art form:

the map.

For the first time ever, humans created a

two-dimensional representation of their location

in space and time.

"This is where my home is in relation to the volcano."

And with a few magical strokes,

the artist sent a message across 9,000 years...

"I was here when the volcano awakened."

The experiment at Catalhoyuk was a success,

and within a few thousand years there were cities everywhere.

♪ ♪

TYSON: When different kinds of people congregate

in a single place,

ideas are exchanged and new possibilities arise.

The city is a kind of brain,

creating and processing new ideas.

Here, in the city of Amsterdam,

in the 17th century, citizens of the old and

new worlds mingled as they never had before,

and there was an unprecedented freedom of thought.

These conditions produced a golden age of science and art.

In Italy, Giordano Bruno had proclaimed the existence

of other worlds.

For this he had been made to suffer.

But a mere 50 years later in Holland,

the astronomer Christiaan Huygens,

who held the same belief, was showered with honors.

Light was the central theme of the age:

The enlightenment of human curiosity set free,

and the light shed by Europe's first look at

the once hidden realms of the planet.

The light that permeated the paintings of the time,

particularly the work of Vermeer.

And light as an object of scientific inquiry.

For generations, textile merchants had used a lens to

examine the thread count of finely stitched fabrics.

In the Amsterdam of that time,

there lived three men whose passion for

light inspired them to use that ancient device in a completely new way.

They aimed the textile merchants' lens at objects no

one had ever thought to examine closely before.

It became a window, an aperture for finding and

exploring new worlds.

Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek used a single lens to reveal

the teeming microcosm in a drop of water.

His friend,

Christiaan Huygens used two lenses to bring the stars,

planets, and moons close enough to

reveal their features.

Huygens became the first to see that Saturn's rings did not

touch the planet, and the first to understand what they really were.

He also discovered Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Huygens, like Bruno,

believed that the stars were other suns,

orbited by their own systems of planets and moons.

But why was there no hint of those other worlds and

their living things in the sacred books?

Whatever disquiet this contradiction may have stirred

in the hearts and minds of the leaders of the Enlightenment,

there was only one man who dared to address it head-on.

He was another wizard of light.

Baruch Spinoza had been a member of the Jewish

congregation of Amsterdam through his teenage years.

But in his early 20s, he began to speak publicly of

a new vision of God.

Spinoza's God was the physical laws of the universe.

His sacred text, the book of nature.

The Jews of Amsterdam were mostly refugees from

the vicious Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal,

where so many of them had been tortured and murdered.

Amsterdam had offered the Jews a refuge,

and they must have seen Spinoza's radical ideas as a

threat to their hard-won security in Holland.

They excommunicated the young rebel,

and decreed that he must be forever shunned.

Spinoza accepted their punishment with dignity,

but without a trace of submission.

He moved nearby, to The Hague.

Where he went even further, daring to write that the Bible

was not dictated by God, but written by human beings.

Spinoza wrote:

"Do not look for God in miracles.

Miracles are violations of the laws of nature.

God is best apprehended in the study of those laws."

No one had ever said these things aloud before.

Spinoza knew that he was testing the limits of free thought,

even for Holland.

To him, an official state religion was more than

spiritual coercion of the individual.

Spinoza regarded the miraculous events of the major

religious traditions as organized superstition.

In his view, magical thinking posed a danger to

the future citizens of a rational, free society.

There could be no such thing as democracy without the

separation of church and state.

He wrote a book that introduced the ideas at the

heart of the American and many another revolution.

Then, as now, there were those who were threatened

by this view of God.

[grunting].

Spinoza continued to write and speak about his

revolutionary view of God,

always wearing the slashed cape as a badge of honor.

He died at 44, possibly from inhaling particles of dust

during his years of grinding lenses for

microscopes and telescopes.

250 years later, another man with a passion for light made

a pilgrimage to the humble workroom that had been

preserved as a testament to the vast influence of

Spinoza's philosophy.

This man, world famous for finding a new law of nature,

was often asked if he believed in God.

Albert Einstein replied:

"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists."

Our understanding of nature's laws has advanced far beyond

Spinoza's, and even Einstein's wildest dreams.

But there is one law of nature we cannot seem to grasp.

Inscribed in the book of nature is a parable about an

ancient alliance between two kingdoms.

And those who would tear it apart.

TYSON: Long ago, there were two kingdoms.

An alliance was formed between them,

one that would bring them both riches beyond measure.

A partnership lasting more than a 100 million years.

And then a new kind of being evolved in one of the two kingdoms.

Its descendants plundered the riches and violated the alliance.

In their arrogance, they became a mortal danger to both

kingdoms and to themselves.

This parable is true.

It's the story of two of the half dozen realms of life on Earth,

the plant and animal kingdoms.

It's not easy being green.

Sex is challenging when you're stuck in one place.

There's no dating.

You just sit there and cast your seed to the winds.

Literally.

You just wait for the wind to blow.

If you get lucky, some of your pollen will

be carried away and land on the sexual reproductive part

of another plant.

The plants played this hit-or-miss game of chance for

a couple of hundred million years,

until insects evolved to play cupid.

What resulted was one of the great co-evolution marriages

in the history of life.

The insect would visit a flower for a dinner of

protein-rich pollen.

Inevitably, some of the pollen would stick to the body

of the insect.

The insect would visit another flower,

bringing along the leftovers on its body.

That pollen fertilized the next flower,

allowing it to reproduce.

It was a win-win deal for both the flowers and the insects,

causing a series of delightful evolutionary developments.

A new plant arose that produced sugary nectar in

addition to the pollen.

Now, the insects came not just for their basic meal of pollen,

but also for dessert.

The insects got chubbier, evolved furry bodies and even

little pouches on their legs to snag more pollen on their

daily rounds in the flowers.

Now there were bees.

This was a bonus for yet another species of

the animal kingdom...

Us.

We are indebted to the bees and their fellow pollinators

for something even more vital to our survival.

Every third bite of food you take-and this is even true for

those of us who are omnivores, was made possible by them.

35% of the world's crops depend on their cooperation.

The plants eat starlight...

And we, and the animals, we eat plants.

And they don't just increase the quantity of available food.

We owe them for much of the biodiversity that has made our

food supply so dependable.

But we're working them to death.

And for the first time ever,

many kinds of bees are on the endangered species list.

I think you know where this is headed.

The blessing and the curse of the invention of agriculture

has brought us here, to the Halls of Extinction.

A memorial to all the living things lost in the mass

extinction events in Earth's history.

It's a monument to the broken branches on the tree of life.

Five times in the history of life,

cataclysmic geological, and astronomical events,

have threatened to extinguish life itself.

The sixth one is different.

The last time we were here together this hallway

had no name.

Why?

Because back then a scientific consensus had yet

to be reached that we were in the midst of a mass extinction event.

That's changed.

Now, this hallway has a name.

It's ours.

The Anthropocene.

"Anthropo" from the Greek word for "human" and "Cene."

the Greek word for "recent."

TYSON: These are the species we hunted to extinction back

when we were wanderers.

Including our own cousins, the Neanderthals.

What is it about us, as a species,

that wherever we go, we bring death?

Beyond here lies the future.

Even now it's not too late to keep this corridor from lengthening.

If we fail...

[children playing].

But if we succeed...

Come with me.

TYSON: In a possible future only decades away,

project Starshot, a flotilla of 1,000 spacecraft,

will depart from Earth.

This part of the Atacama Desert west of the Andes Mountains,

is so dry that it hasn't rained in recorded history.

And that's great for us because we're going to need

the clearest of skies.

There were no witnesses when the first life left the

water for the land.

There was nobody to file a report when the first birds

took to the skies.

But this is one great leap that will be documented in

every conceivable way.

The whole world is watching.

We are, after all, sending our first craft directly to the

planets of another sun: the Alpha Centauri system.

These are the ships that will carry our senses there.

These are interstellar sailing ships propelled by light.

Their hulls weigh but a gram, and they are no larger than a

pea, and yet they're equipped with all that NASA's Voyagers

have and more.

When the first light blasts forth from this phased array

of lasers, the spacecraft will accelerate from zero to 20% of

the speed of light in mere minutes.

Inside each nanocraft is everything needed to perform

the preliminary reconnaissance of the worlds of another star

and return that visual and scientific information

back to Earth.

Space is mostly empty,

but there are tiny dust particles that could

wreak havoc if they were to collide with nanocraft

traveling at such high speeds.

That's one of the reasons we need to send so many of them.

Voyager 1 is traveling at 38,000 miles per hour.

It left home more than 40 years ago.

It will take these nanocraft only four days

to overtake her.

That's pretty fast,

but still only 20% of the speed of light.

Proxima Centauri is four light-years away.

That's a 20 year one-way trip.

Orbiting Proxima Centauri, there is a world in the

habitable zone where we think life might flourish.

Our robotic emissaries will send accounts from

these new worlds.

Their messages will race back to us on radio waves

at the speed of light.

They'll take four years to reach us: 20 years one-way,

four years back.

That's a 24-year round-trip.

Many of you will be there then to read and to write those new

pages in the book of nature,

and to chart our future course of wandering...

♪ ♪

No longer bounded by the earth,

the ocean,

or the sky.

♪ ♪

Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.