Original subtitles

NARRATOR: So, here we are.

Humanity has merged with artificial intelligence.

We've created a solar system-wide Dyson sphere

that will power our technologically-heavy lives.

And now Oscar and Eva are getting ready

to see their friend who left Earth behind

to colonize planets in far-flung galaxies.

OSCAR: When will she be here?

EVA: Any minute.

OSCAR: How long has it been since we've seen her?

EVA: Years.

OSCAR: That's crazy.

NARRATOR: In the deep future, revolutionizing space travel

also means we'll have to rethink the human form.

EVA: Sajani.

SAJANI: Eva, you haven't aged a day.

EVA: Oh.

Wow, you look...

SAJANI: A little different? Yeah.

NARRATOR: Yes, those are gills.

They'll come in handy if we need to breathe underwater

on some kind of ocean-covered planet.

They also might be the beginning of the end

of the human race as we know it.

It's the deep future.

Your body, gone.

You're all computer, all the time.

Your brain is way more powerful

than even a billion supercomputers.

Jobs, food, language, water, even traditional thought,

all of humanity's building blocks,

all that's done.

And you are immortal.

Squirming in your chair yet?

You should be.

This isn't science fiction.

Today's visionary thinkers say it's a strong probability

that this is what your world is going to look like.

Tonight, they'll guide you toward that spectacular future,

and we'll see how one family navigates it,

one invention at a time.

This is the story of your future.

This is the road to Year Million.

I've shown you a version of the future

when in the Year Million era

humanity as we know it

will have undergone such a radical transformation,

we can hardly imagine what it will mean to be human.

MICHIO KAKU: By the time we're at the Year Million,

we will be a galactic civilization.

We'll be able to roam the galactic space lanes,

to play with black holes, and leap through a wormhole.

And you may say, well, why?

NARRATOR: Why?

Well, because A) it's cool,

and B) because we need to find a few spare planets

where we can chill for a second

in order to survive any sort of extinction event here on Earth.

RANGA-RAM CHARY: All species that have undergone a major boom

have also undergone a major bust.

GEORGE DVORSKY: An asteroid hits the planet

once every 200,000 years.

So if we're talking about

half a million to a million year timescales,

we should at least anticipate one,

if not several of those events,

on the scale that drove the dinosaurs to extinction.

CHUCK NICE: The Earth will continue.

We just won't.

NARRATOR: I understand.

The end of the human race on Earth is tough to think about.

But the good news is that we are a pretty resilient species,

and more importantly, we've got a nearly unquenchable lust

for exploration baked deep into our collective bones.

KAKU: I think we have a curiosity gene,

a gene within us that says,

what's on the other side of that hill?

So there will always be restless people

who will want to go to Mars just for the hell of it.

NARRATOR: So when we find ourselves looking

for another rock to park on,

that wanderlust,

that craving for thrills, chills, and adventure,

will ultimately be the saving grace of our species.

Right now, all of our eggs are here in the Earth basket.

If we plan on surviving,

we need to scatter those eggs around the galaxy.

ANDERS SANDBERG: If an intelligent species

starts spreading between the stars,

it's pretty unlikely to go extinct.

NARRATOR: So if we are going to launch ourselves

into galaxies far, far away,

we've got a little work to do first.

Here's how we human beings will achieve intergalactic travel.

First we'll need to understand the effects

of extreme space travel on our bodies.

Because it'll be even harder on us

than that little chip shot of a trip to Mars.

That's when our future tech will serve us well,

since we will send out artificially intelligent robots.

They will be our advance team,

helping us travel deeper into space.

They'll terraform planets for us,

and have them all set up before we even leave our atmosphere.

And when we do decide to depart from Earth,

we'll need to rethink whatever space bus we'll be driving.

And humanity, through gene manipulation,

changes into another species.

One that could withstand the toxic environment

of whatever exoplanet we've decided to make our home.

And while we're out rocketing between far-flung stars,

we'll probably come face to face with ideas

that are now only theoretical.

We may discover parallel universes,

where every choice, every possibility, exists in tandem.

And hopefully, we will finally be able to understand

the greatest mystery of all-- dark matter.

The elusive, invisible material that the universe is made of...

theoretically.

I know, that's millions of light-years of information.

So let's look at how we are going to get ourselves

not just to Mars and other planets in our solar system,

but farther out, to other galaxies.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Thousands of years from now,

whatever we've evolved into, whatever we've become,

we're going to look back in time at these next few decades

as the moment in time when the human race

irreversibly has moved off the planet.

CHARLES SOULE: I'd like to think I'd go up in a rocket

and fly into space.

But as far as high-risk occupations,

astronaut is pretty, pretty up there.

MAN: The men rose early, ate breakfast,

and dressed in their space suits.

NARRATOR: Being an astronaut's pretty much

every kid's dream job.

But most kids only think of going to the moon or Mars.

We're talking about traveling

for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years.

DVORSKY: The human body was definitely not meant to work

and function in space, and it does a very poor job of it.

SYD MEAD: These guys up in orbit,

they come down after up there about eight months to a year,

they can't walk, they're helpless.

They're like little, little babies.

NARRATOR: When we start talking about intergalactic travel,

that's when we need to figure out how to stay strong

for a lot more than just a year.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: Here at the NASA

Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO for short,

scientists are figuring out how to keep astronauts in space

for extended periods of time.

You heard me right--

NASA's got a space station 60 feet below sea level.

It's one of the closest things we have on Earth

to the no-gravity, or more accurately, microgravity

environment of space.

And like space, it is stressful and isolated.

A perfect real-life simulation for deep space astronauts.

DAWN KERNAGIS: It's like a very long scuba dive.

So essentially we are diving for days.

We were actually weighted out to simulate partial microgravity.

The setup was that we were rigged

to be like we were walking on the surface of Mars.

NARRATOR: Astronauts live in small, pressurized pods,

just like the space station,

with daily excursions that mimic space walks.

Here, scientists hope to unlock the secrets

of staying healthy in space,

no matter how long we need to be out there.

NARRATOR: And they've already got some answers.

KERNAGIS: I study how to help humans work

to the best of their abilities in extreme environments.

We were looking at molecular-level changes

in response to living with a crew of people

in a small environment,

and there's changes at the epigenetic level.

NARRATOR: It turns out that the hardships of space travel

aren't just limited to the effects of microgravity.

It can affect the very building blocks of who we are.

Space travel can change our genes, maybe even permanently,

in what are called epigenetic changes.

KERNAGIS: Things like psychological remoteness,

stress, or diet, or exercise,

can change how our genes are read.

And we actually can pass those on to our offspring.

What we want to attain eventually

is when you see Spock going with the device

where it scans you and diagnoses you.

SPOCK: Severe heart damage.

KERNAGIS: That's what we're aiming for.

NARRATOR: So, no problem.

Once genetic engineering becomes an everyday doctor's tool,

we can just fix any broken genes

before the problem expresses itself in the body.

And that'll be important not only for us,

but for future generations

that may have to be born out in space.

NICE: To go to Proxima Centauri,

which is, you know, our closest neighbor,

you would have to send generations into space.

It would have to be, wow, these people are going to be born,

the next people are going to be born,

the next people are going to be born, those people will die.

And now, I'm out. Thank you, goodnight.

NARRATOR: If we could travel at the speed of light,

that would cut down on our travel time immensely.

But no one is sure that we can ever get around

the laws of physics to make that possible.

Luckily, in the future,

we'll have designed artificial intelligence

who can do our dirty work for us.

While we humans wait in comfort here on Earth,

our robot explorers will voyage into space

to find a nice parking spot for us,

and even set up colonies for us to live on.

NARRATOR: At some point, traveling to planets like Mars

in our solar system will be like a trip to the park.

Totally last week's news.

Going to deep space will be

what all the cool kids are talking about.

But we can't do it alone.

MICHAEL GRAZIANO: Space travel is really hard for humans.

We don't live long enough to go anywhere interesting.

But artificial intelligence is just fundamentally different.

It can live indefinitely, it can be engineered to live in space.

It can swim through space, like fish in water.

NARRATOR: Artificial intelligence

is our secret weapon for traveling to other galaxies.

DVORSKY: We will have generation ships,

where you create these massive ships,

fill them with individuals and robots or whatnot,

and send it off into the depths of space.

NARRATOR: Take a look at our future AI daughter, Jess,

who clearly took her father's advice to go change the world.

Jess has volunteered to lead a ship of AI and human explorers

who will voyage out far into the universe

to find humanity a new home.

JESS: Welcome to the ark.

Now, no matter what your backgrounds,

no matter what your beliefs, you are welcome here.

These are tight quarters,

and they are probably not as comfortable

as what some of you are used to,

but we hope that you can make yourselves feel at home

here in this safe haven.

Now, if you'll all follow me.

NARRATOR: The human passengers will have

the adventure of a lifetime.

But the AI on board could last for millions of years,

and they won't need food or doctors.

They could even simply power down

until they got to their destination.

And once they got there,

they could set up some living pods for us,

or just report back on what they found.

If only everything were this easy.

But it's not just about sending up robots in spaceships.

AI will help us travel through space

in far more innovative ways.

ANNALEE NEWITZ: That's where space travel

gets really interesting.

DIAMANDIS: We're going to be sending avatars,

and we're going to transmit our consciousness

and not necessarily our meat bodies to go there.

NARRATOR: Meat bodies? Really?

That's just creepy.

KAKU: What will space travel look like

hundreds of years from now?

One possibility is something that I call laserporting.

We're going to be able to beam our consciousness

into outer space at the speed of light.

You don't have to worry about accidents with a booster rocket,

radiation, weightlessness, none of that,

'cause you're literally riding on a light beam,

pure consciousness, going through the heavens.

We put our consciousness on a laser beam,

shoot that information to the moon.

On the moon, there's a receiver.

This machine relays that information to a robot,

a superhuman robot.

So your consciousness now sees through the eyes of a robot

with superhuman capability.

NEGIN FARSAD: I would love to check out

the rings on Saturn or Neptune.

Um, I'm just fascinated by the ring.

So, because the universe liked it, so they put a ring on it.

What? Why did I say that?

I'm so embarrassed, but that, it's also a valid joke.

NARRATOR: There's another factor to consider

once we are spending all of our time flying around the universe.

Spaceships are going to become,

for all intents and purposes, our new homes.

According to science fiction,

those ships will either be functional, industrial vessels,

or flying luxury palaces.

MEAD: 'Alien,' the first one, in that film,

the spaceship was sort of a floating refinery,

very mechanical,

industrial-looking piece of stuff.

NICE: Me being a huge Star Trek dweeb,

what I really would like to see is space travel reach a point

where we leave this solar system in comfort.

I would love to see that like where a city is built in space

and then that city travels to another solar system

or that city moves out to explore the universe

with a bunch of Earthlings.

So just imagine all of Manhattan as a floating spaceship.

NARRATOR: But comfort aside, the real issue we've got to take on

is how to get those ships

to go into what Star Trek called 'warp drive,'

traveling at the speed of light.

Without that, space travel is definitely a lot trickier

and infinitely slower.

JON SPAIHTS: To get the kind of travel

that you see in the movies, interstellar travel,

is simply not possible

by extrapolating from the technologies we have.

Getting any massive spacecraft

to something approaching the speed of light

is a very tricky proposition.

Your gas tank grows bigger and bigger,

and your spaceship balloons ludicrously

as you try to get close to those speeds.

And of course, it's complicated by the fact that,

as you start getting closer to light speed,

relativity rears its head.

NEWITZ: I think space travel is still going to be

kind of grindy for a while, take a long time,

and, you know, you might take a vacation on another world

once in a while,

but it would be kind of like, you know,

ship travel was 500 years ago,

where you really got to be committed

if you want to go across the Atlantic.

FARSAD: I have such motion sickness,

like I really just don't think I could make it in a spacecraft,

like I would be a nightmare,

and like no amount of Dramamine would like help that situation.

NARRATOR: Dramamine probably won't help on a little jaunt

to, say, the Andromeda I galaxy,

which you could fly to in 2.5 million years,

if you could fly at the speed of light.

Which, right now, you can't,

because of that pesky theory of relativity.

So, yes, you get it.

Until we figure out some big physics problems,

intergalactic travel could take a very long time.

Which means we might want to consider

looking for a shortcut through space.

And that means wormholes.

KAKU: If you could bend the fabric of space and time,

and rip it, you might be able to take a shortcut, a wormhole,

through the fabric of space and time.

Take a sheet of paper, and then fold it

so that two ends meet in the middle,

and you punch a hole straight through.

That is a wormhole.

Like the looking glass of Alice.

When Alice stuck her hand in the looking glass,

her hand went from the countryside of Oxford

to Wonderland.

MATT MIRA: The Lincoln Tunnel is a great example

of what a wormhole could be like,

but you'd have to think of it as the entrance and the exit

of the Lincoln Tunnel being the same point in space.

If we can't figure out warp speed,

we'll have to figure out how to create wormholes,

because there's going to be no way to travel

such a great distance unless we go through the wormhole.

NARRATOR: That means you could get from one point to another,

thousands of light-years away

as easily as walking through a door.

It's a little too good to be true.

Instead of sitting in Los Angeles traffic,

just walk through a wormhole

and get to work in about three seconds.

That'd be a huge hit amongst pretty much everyone

who has ever taken the 405 freeway.

Maybe that's why Hollywood has had

such a long-standing love affair with the wormhole.

ROSE EVELETH: Hollywood loves to use wormholes as kind of like

a, oh, we need to get them from one place to another,

so we're going to do some, like, cool visual effects,

and we're going to send them through the wormhole,

and they're going to be wherever they need to be.

MIRA: I do like a wormhole.

They're all over Star Trek.

Deep Space Nine was the guardian of that wormhole

and sort of let ships pass through

and didn't let ships pass through.

NICE: I got a wormhole, and I can go there.

Hmm. I'm going to say Detroit.

It's making a comeback!

I'm telling you, Detroit's making a comeback.

I would love a wormhole that could get me there and back

with no problem.

Mostly back.

NARRATOR: If we could find and use a wormhole,

it could be the key to opening up immediate travel

to anywhere in the universe we wanted to check out.

NEWITZ: Like, we invent something like jump gates

or, you know, portable wormholes or whatever,

obviously all bets are off.

BARATUNDE THURSTON: It's a pretty cool idea.

Like, I want a wormhole instead of the New York City subway.

NARRATOR: Oscar even installed a wormhole in his living room

to meet Eva at their remote mountain getaway

seven galaxies away.

OSCAR: Eva?

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: We know Oscar is a late adopter

to all things future tech,

but it looks like his wormhole is something

he'll be using more often than not.

EVA: Took you long enough.

NARRATOR: There is, as always, just one issue--

traveling through a wormhole could destabilize the tunnel,

leaving any travelers stranded or dead.

Not exactly how you want an intergalactic trip to turn out.

EVELETH: And we certainly wouldn't send

something we cared about into one.

NARRATOR: Right, so let's add 'shoring up wormholes'

to our to-do list.

Interstellar and intergalactic travel,

where we travel in our, uh, sorry, meat bodies,

is going to take a lot of scientific progress

before it's a reality.

As we develop technologies to take us around the universe,

we'll simultaneously have to figure out

how we will exist on other planets.

And that means we'll change our DNA

to suit the environment around us,

triggering something called speciation.

We'll be able to exist on a planet that has, say, toxic air.

The bad news is that we won't be human anymore,

but we'll get to that in a minute.

NARRATOR: Humanity is going to try to explore

intergalactic space,

whether we do it on board a spaceship,

via artificial intelligence, or through a wormhole.

But getting out there beyond our galaxy is only half the battle.

The bigger question is how humans are planning to survive

wherever we decide to hang our hats.

KAKU: We will be able to tinker with our genetic heritage.

It's only a matter of time.

NARRATOR: And that's when humanity is going to start

looking very different than we do today.

PHIL ROSEDALE: Space travel is going to separate us

into separate colonies,

you know, that'll never talk to each other again.

DIAMANDIS: We're going to become

a multitude of different human species.

We are going to speciate.

NARRATOR: Meaning, we'll deliberately mutate

our genetic code

to ensure an upgraded version of our species survives

what would be the toxic, uninhabitable environment

of an exoplanet.

DIAMANDIS: We're going from what has been Darwinism,

evolution by natural selection, to something different.

Evolution by intelligent direction, by our own desires.

NEWITZ: People will have modified their DNA

to be more resistant to cosmic radiation,

or building bodies that are better able

to deal with low gravity.

Or even more radically,

modifying their respiratory systems

to actually be able to process the Martian atmosphere.

SANDBERG: If we go to space, over time, of course,

parts of humanity are going to be very separated.

And some people might indeed go for very radical changes.

FARSAD: It just sounds entirely unpleasant

to make a genetic modification to myself,

to be able to like breathe Mars' air or whatever it is.

I imagine it would involve some sort of a hole

in, like, placed in my person, you know what I mean?

I imagine some sort of a third arm would need to be attached.

Uh, what kind of clothes would I wear with a third arm?

NARRATOR: Totally hear you.

But the need for a third arm may not only be entirely necessary

for survival, it may even be fashionable.

But let's not get sidetracked.

The point is, right now, some of the world's brightest minds

are examining how extremophiles

can survive even the harshest conditions,

conditions where life shouldn't survive.

When you think about it,

we have already gotten pretty comfortable

with drastically modifying our bodies--

think cochlear implants, heart transplants,

and hip replacements.

It's even tough to find someone without a tattoo these days.

But once we start changing our bodies on a much larger level,

like our half-fish friend,

that's when you start talking about

the birth of a new species beyond humanity.

That group will become post-humans.

DVORSKY: A post-human could be

a very radically redesigned genetic human.

CHURCH: We could intentionally speciate,

we could make ourselves radiation resistant

by just changing a handful of genes,

maybe as few as four genes.

NARRATOR: That means the next incarnation of humanity

will be a little like a pre-fab home--

we'll design it ourselves

and have it built to our specifications

to optimize our comfort in life.

♪ ♪

But in order to survive on Mars we have to learn

how we could survive in a Mars-like environment.

NARRATOR: It was widely believed

that the Red Planet look-alike landscape of the Atacama Desert

was sterile.

And then Armando Bustos discovered something remarkable.

NARRATOR: That's what we call in the business

a scientific jackpot.

Life was discovered in a place

that, like Mars, no one believed was possible.

NARRATOR: So if there is life here,

could there be life up there?

And more importantly, could these tiny desert microorganisms

show us how our bodies can be adapted

to live in the Mars environment?

NARRATOR: Even if these little organisms don't crack the code

for making us Martians,

studying them might help us

live on the Red Planet more comfortably.

Okay, so once we're tearing around in space,

driving through wormholes from one galaxy to another,

that's when we may start to bump into a few things

that are truly mind-bending.

For instance, what if every time you made a decision,

you didn't just leave behind a road untraveled?

What if that road spun off and became a parallel universe?

Makes that agonizing decision

over what wireless plan to choose kind of moot, doesn't it?

NARRATOR: As we travel ever closer

to that Year Million scenario,

let's take a quick look and see just how far we've come.

Space is now our playground.

We've sent robots to every nook and cranny of the universe,

and we've even mastered wormholes.

We've developed new technologies

to transcend huge distances in space,

and we've evolved our bodies.

But the real mind-bender?

We might find that we don't have to travel beyond our doorstep

to find alternative universes.

EVELETH: The way that I imagine

like the parallel universe thing,

is it's like, you know when you wake up and you're in a dream?

You're in your house, but it's not actually your house,

but it feels like your house.

OSCAR: Hey, Oscar. You made it.

EVELETH: You are in this weird state,

where you sort of are aware that something is wrong,

but everything feels right.

[record scratches]

Um, you know what? I don't, I have no idea how this works.

NICE: Hmm, let's see.

There are some that see a parallel universe

as an infinite number of universes

that exist alongside of the one that we live in,

where things are pretty much the same,

but certain things are different.

OSCAR: I don't know what's real.

OSCAR: It's all real.

NICE: And I don't want to get too much further into that,

because I'll start sounding stupid,

'cause I don't know what I'm talking about.

NARRATOR: Looks like we're going to have to turn to the big guns,

or at least to someone with a PhD.

BRIAN GREENE: So, in string theory,

which is an attempt to realize Einstein's dream

of a unified theory of all of nature's forces,

we find the mathematics suggests that our universe might be one

of a grand collection of realms,

each of which would rightly be called a universe of its own.

Perhaps the Big Bang, which gave rise to our universe,

was not a unique event.

Maybe there are many big bangs,

each giving rise to its own universe.

EVELETH: What, what, what? I have some questions!

NARRATOR: I think we all do.

Is there a simpler way to explain it?

GREENE: I like to think of it as though we are one bubble

in a big cosmic bubble bath,

where the other bubbles are other universes.

SPAIHTS: The exciting idea about parallel universes

is that in almost exactly the same way, when a human is born,

it's possible for an ovum to split and form twins.

It is possible to imagine, in the birth agony of a universe,

in that big bang, for that explosion also to split.

That means that there is another universe just like ours,

separated from us by the thinnest of walls,

if we only can learn how to pierce it and cross over.

THURSTON: Yeah, that's really, that's just...

My head's kind of spinning. It's a funky idea.

We could have a world dominated by chimpanzees.

We could have a world where the Hindenburg didn't crash.

NARRATOR: Multiple big bangs isn't the only way

to get to parallel universes.

GREENE: The many worlds approach to quantum physics

says that the act of observation winds up yielding two universes,

one with one outcome where you see one result,

and another universe where you see a different result.

So this morning, when you're trying to decide

between pancakes and eggs, and you chose eggs.

In another universe, you chose pancakes.

MARTIN REES: Both options are fulfilled,

and the universe splits into one way it did happen,

one way it didn't.

SPAIHTS: The most extreme notion

is that we are forming universes around us at every moment.

That every atomic interaction, every choice we make,

every little thing that happens,

creates an explosion of universes from that moment.

THURSTON: Maybe it's just this infinite hall of mirrors.

EVELETH: There's this idea that these parallel universes

sort of touch us every so often,

and they slightly tweak our reality.

One example of this is that there is a large group of people

on the Internet who believe that there was a movie

at some point made called Shazaam,

which starred Sinbad as a genie.

This movie does not exist.

Sinbad has repeatedly been like,

I don't know what you're talking about.

But there are all of these people who remember

and can describe the plot from a movie called Shazaam.

There is a movie called Kazaam,

in which Shaquille O'Neal is a genie.

But that's not the movie they're talking about.

People really, truly believe this thing exists.

And some small subset of those people

believe that they actually have crossed over

from a parallel universe, in which Shazaam existed.

That's literally, I swear to God,

that's literally the theory.

I'm not making this up. I did not make this up.

NARRATOR: So is this just an Internet conspiracy,

or our best documented evidence of a parallel universe?

Could there really be multiple universes

bumping into one another and shapeshifting around us?

N.K. JEMISIN: I can't see why it wouldn't exist.

The more that we come to understand our universe,

the more we realize it's much more complex.

Things like time are much more complex

than we thought that they were.

So why wouldn't the universe be more complex, too?

THURSTON: I think the value of many universes theory

is that it's a reminder

that we can choose to live in different ways,

and that the way we exist isn't the way we have to.

NARRATOR: In fact, if there really are parallel universes,

then we are all living all possibilities

in another universe somewhere else.

KAKU: Many people come up to me and say, 'Professor,

if there are parallel universes,

then is Elvis Presley still alive

in one of these parallel universes?'

And the answer is, you can't rule it out.

There could be a certain probability,

calculable probability that, yes, the king is still alive.

GREENE: Because all of the possible outcomes

of every experiment, every observation, every happening,

they all take place, just in their own distinct universe.

SPAIHTS: There may be

a literally infinite number of universes.

That is to say that everything that could be possible

somewhere is real.

Right next door, through the membrane

separating this bubble from that bubble.

NARRATOR: So the big question is, how do we get there?

Can we reach other universes?

SPAIHTS: How to leap from this bubble to that bubble,

is a mystery for future science or for the black arts,

or for a science fiction writer

to speculate irresponsibly about.

NARRATOR: So, maybe not now, or in the near future,

but in Year Million, maybe, just maybe,

humanity will discover a way to travel between universes.

Even now, scientists speculate

that those massive gravitational fields where light goes to die,

may be portals through which we can reach other universes.

DVORSKY: We might be able to exploit black holes,

and how that could be a gateway to, you know, another realm

that's separate from this current universe.

That holds some promise.

KAKU: The mathematics says that a spinning black hole

collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons.

If you stick your hand through the ring of spinning neutrons,

you wind up on another universe.

It's bizarre.

It's mind-shattering, if you think about it.

But it's something that we physicists take very seriously.

NARRATOR: Once we are able to pierce the veil

and travel from one universe to the other,

then there are literally no limits for us.

Even if black holes are our pathway

to this final frontier of exploration,

there is plenty more to figure out.

Like getting a grip on the most mysterious and pervasive

concept of them all,

one that has baffled scientists

since they first realized it may exist.

Because dark matter is just plain bizarre,

and it might be the answer

to absolutely everything in the universe.

NARRATOR: We've traveled into outer space, through wormholes,

and into parallel universes.

But the biggest, most important discovery of all

may actually be all around you.

But you can't see it.

KAKU: Every high school textbook in science

says that the universe is mainly made out of atoms.

Wrong.

We now know that most of the universe

is not mainly made out of atoms.

NARRATOR: Instead, the universe is made up

of something called dark matter.

And it is the holy grail of science.

KAKU: Dark matter is invisible matter

that holds the galaxy together.

If I have dark matter in my hand right now,

first of all, it would be invisible, but it has gravity.

But it would literally sift right through my fingers,

'cause it has no interactions with atoms,

go all the way down to the center of the Earth,

all the way down to China.

NARRATOR: We don't know too many concrete facts

about dark matter.

We don't even know what it looks like or how it is made.

We just have an idea of what it does.

And this incognito stuff is definitely doing

some heavy lifting, universe-wise.

MIRA: No one's ever observed it.

It's not been seen by anybody.

But we just know,

based on, you know, the movement of regular matter

that it should be there.

You can't scan it, you can't see it,

we just have to assume that it's there

based on the movements of everything else.

NARRATOR: Okay, but what is it?

Is it bigger than a bread basket?

Is it hard or soft, black or white or blue?

KAKU: I personally think that dark matter

is a higher vibration of tiny little strings.

There's another theory, however, and that is dark matter

is perhaps ordinary matter hovering in a parallel universe.

DVORSKY: So, dark matter... oh, boy.

NICE: So, dark matter is when Lord Voldemort invokes...

No. [laughs]

What is that force?

We can't see clearly what it is.

We see darkly what it is.

KAKU: If one of you ever figure this out, what is dark matter,

be sure to tell me first,

and we can share the Nobel Prize together.

NARRATOR: So we can see how hard dark matter is on the brain.

Here's the thumbnail sketch on dark matter--

something is holding the universe together with gravity.

And that something, the theory goes, is dark matter.

We know it is there only because we can see what it does.

GREENE: Stars should be flying off,

sort of like water droplets on a bicycle rim.

You spin the rim, the water flies off, but they're not.

We believe that dark matter is what's holding it all together.

Dark matter, we believe, are likely to be particles

that are wafting through space,

that we believe provide the additional gravitational pull

in a spinning galaxy.

NICE: I mean, dark matter, that sounds like my entire life.

I know about 4% of my life.

The other 96%, I am just trying to figure out.

And that's maybe why I like dark matter so much.

NARRATOR: So we can't visualize it or define it,

which makes answering any questions about it

almost impossible.

But scientists are doing everything they can

to make a little bit of this stuff themselves.

Deep underground,

at the European Council for Nuclear Research,

sits the largest machine on the planet.

This, my friends, is the famed Large Hadron Collider.

This giant tube could reveal

all the secrets to the known universe.

GREENE: The Large Hadron Collider has the capacity,

at least in principle, to be a dark matter factory.

Because what it does is it slams protons together.

After they cycle around an 18-mile-long tunnel,

they slam together near the speed of light.

And we believe that some of the energy from those collisions

can go into producing particles of dark matter.

JILL HEINERTH: Smashing particles

in the Large Hadron Collider might be the next step

to discovering, you know, what's happening

in the rest of dark matter, in quantum physics.

NICE: There are certain particles

that we are looking for,

and the Large Hadron Collider helps us find these particles.

One was the Higgs boson, which we found,

and when I say we, I mean me,

because I was heading up that project.

Thank you, you're welcome.

[laughs]

NARRATOR: Thank you for that, Chuck.

Scientists have used the Hadron Collider

to essentially recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.

That's when dark matter was theoretically born.

The Hadron Collider could potentially generate dark matter

so we could poke it and prod it and just maybe understand it.

Because if we comprehend dark matter,

we could figure out things

about how the universe works that have eluded us.

Dark matter could show us how to bend the laws of physics,

and let us travel at the speed of light.

And it could be the answer to, well, everything.

MIRA: Eventually, it could affect all of humanity.

SPAIHTS: If we are trying to reach other stars,

then we're going to need something

down at the root level of reality to sink our hooks into,

to invent that new technology.

And what dark matter tells us is

there's something about the makeup of the cosmos

that will, when we understand it,

tell us something fundamentally new about the world.

GREENE: We're getting close, we think,

to understanding the basic laws.

But as I say that, I know that nature loves to just grab us

and slap us in the face and say, 'Get rid of that hubris,

you don't actually understand anything.'

NARRATOR: To that point, there are a few out there who believe

that the Hadron Collider could inadvertently cause a black hole

that would swallow up the universe and everything in it.

THURSTON: Yeah, that would suck.

It's like, oops, I destroyed the universe.

We're monkeying around with some powerful forces,

and you know, so we're like kids playing with matches.

You know, maybe we'll burn our house down.

NARRATOR: Well, the Swiss are known for their precision,

so here's hoping that they keep

their Hadron Collider well in line.

Also, you'll be happy to hear

that it's an unsubstantiated theory

that the Earth will get swallowed by a black hole.

If not, well, you'll be amongst the first to know.

This invisible, mysterious stuff could crack every code

that's stumped scientists.

It could show us how to build an intergalactic spaceship

or even how to travel through space and time.

And if we figure out how to access

and manipulate it earlier,

that Year Million era could be happening

a hell of a lot sooner.

But once we've mastered dark matter,

it's not like our journey will end there.

In our quest for knowledge, we will change humanity's destiny.

Every new discovery leads to another mystery.

Every question inspires some brave soul

to set off on a journey to explore the unknown.

It is what has led us every step of the way

on our incredible journey to the Year Million.

When we arrive at that future point,

we will have built artificial intelligence.

JESS: Hi, Dad.

NARRATOR: We'll communicate telepathically.

[muffled conservation]

We'll not only reengineer our DNA

to resist all life-threatening diseases and viruses,

we'll be able to create

the ultimate sustainable biological body,

designed to our exact specifications.

Then there may be a time when our descendants will choose

to discard their physical bodies

and live as a giant digital collective

inside the metaverse.

We may look totally different,

since we've altered ourselves to be able to colonize new planets.

And even beyond mere cosmetics,

we could be uploaded into the digital realm,

living immortal lives inside the massive Dyson sphere.

And parallel universes and dark matter

all became a reality.

Every step in humanity's maturation

has led to a more fantastical leap forward

in our technological development

and our understanding of the universe.

What will the next million years after that be?

Only our imaginations can tell.

And if there's one thing I know,

it's that the human imagination is thrillingly limitless.