Original subtitles

I've been lucky.

I have lived an extraordinary life,

Exploring the universe and attending the odd party or two.

But imagine I could go anywhere and see anything,

That would be the most amazing opportunity of all.

Join me on a fantastical trip to my favorite places.

After all, why should astronauts have all the fun?

Every journey has a beginning,

And my own had a very difficult start.

At age 21, I received a life-changing diagnosis.

Doctor said a disease would steal my independence,

And then my life.

So I decided to devote with time I had left

To studying something truly worthwhile.

We've all seen computer animations of the big bang.

The big explosion, the flying galaxies, and then us,

But that's not right.

It was far more elegant and strange.

To see what really happened,

I'm going to wind back time.

As we go back, everything converges.

Space itself is shrinking,

Unwinding the work of 200 million lifetimes,

Until finally we reach a point of infinite density,

The beginning of not just space,

But time as well.

This is my life's obsession,

The big bang.

There are no fireworks.

Light won't exist for hundreds of thousands of years.

Our universe begins in darkness, not in light.

And time has began to flow forwards,

So the big bang must had caused itself,

Because without time, nothing can had come before it.

All around us,

Heat and energy are spreading at incredible speed.

There are slight imperfections,

Some parts hotter than others.

In a billionth of a second,

It's grown from smaller than an atom

To a billion kilometers.

This rapid inflation can't last forever.

The universe is settling into steadier growth and cooling.

380,000 years after the big bang,

The light switch of the universe is thrown.

A flash so brightly we'll still be able to detect

In 14 billion years.

I predicted that this flash will contain fluctuations

Preserved from the big bang.

Our universe,

A magnified version of its earlier tiny self.

The tiny imperfections present then

Are now causing the universe to expand at different rates.

Everything that exists, planets, stars, galaxies,

And even us, are formed from these imperfections.

I am still on the same journey I began years ago.

Just as the expanding universe slowed,

So did the progress of my disease.

I have been lucky to live

To see some of my predictions confirmed.

That first flash of light we saw

Is now called the cosmic microwave background.

You hear it in the crackle of a radio,

And see it in the static of a television.

It reveals wrinkles in the beginning of time,

Which is why I believe perfection is overrated.

Nothing in nature is perfect.

If it were, we wouldn't exist at all.

Any good adventure means taking a few risks

Even if your reputation is at stake.

Years ago, I made a very public bet

With fellow scientist Kip Thorne

About one of the most mind-boggling phenomenon

In the universe.

It was a bet I would live to regret.

People always ask me what would happen

If you fell in a black hole.

Well, there is only one way to find out.

Hidden in the center of our galaxy by thick dust clouds

Lies one of the more extra ordinary things in the universe.

Sagittarius A Star,

A black hole with the mass of 4 million suns.

It bends light around itself like a cosmic lens.

So massive and dense that it warps space time

Into an infinitely deep well.

Its gravity is so strong,

Not even light can escape.

My bet was about what happens to things

Sucked into the warp touch of reality.

The nearer we get, the stronger gravity pulls.

Harder on our front than our back.

Too strong and it will stretch us out like spaghetti.

Hopefully, we won't get turned into pasta.

I'm going to need some serious power

To fight a tide of gravity.

Go any deeper, cross the event horizon,

And it'll be the last trip I ever make.

Nothing escapes out of a black hole,

Or does it?

Eventually, I realized something could.

It became known as Hawking radiation.

You see, space isn't actually empty.

Virtual particles and antiparticles

Are popping into existence all of the time,

And cancelling each other out.

At the edge of a black hole, one particle might fall in,

But the other could escape out into space.

This would bring energy from the black hole,

And eventually cause it totally disappear.

So, I bet that everything

That had ever fallen into the black hole

Would be lost for good,

But that causes a huge problem.

You see, you can think of the universe

As a giant data file which constantly changes

As one event follows the next.

But if black holes can destroy part of this data,

Then the entire file becomes corrupted,

And both the past and the future of the universe

Becomes uncertain.

Eventually, I realized this must be impossible,

So I lost the bet.

My latest theory is that the data is not lost,

But preserved in turbulence around the black hole

Like a finger print,

So the universe is safe for now.

But if you ever find yourself heading

For your own personal black hole,

Keep an open mind and take your chances.

You will find a way out of it in the end.

Our next destination reminds me of being a young child,

Full of wonder.

Gazing at the stars,

I always imagine there was someone up there

Looking back.

As I grow older, I am more convinced than ever

That we are not alone.

After a lifetime of wondering,

I am helping to lead a new global effort to find out.

The Breakthrough Listen Project

Will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life.

But I know just a place to start looking.

In recent years,

We found thousands of planets outside of our solar system,

Some are burning hellscapes of fire and lava.

Others are solid diamond,

Bathed in deadly X-rays from a dying star,

But some are more like home.

Incredibly, we found one only 16 light years away,

Right on our doorstep.

Gliese 832C, one of my favorites,

And one of the closest habitable world candidates

Discovered so far.

It's a breathtaking sight,

A super Earth five times more massive than ours.

Here, a year last only 36 days.

Its atmosphere could be thick,

Smothering the surface in super-heated smog.