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00:00We were hunters and foragers, the frontier was everywhere.
00:30We were bounded only by the earth and the ocean and the sky.
00:50The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.
00:58After all our failings, to spy our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of
01:06greatness.
01:11How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century?
01:19In the next millennium.
01:26Welcome back to the shores of the cosmic ocean, an immensity of space and time.
01:49A vastness still mostly uncharted.
01:55We're bound for the possible worlds revealed by science.
01:59We'll take a ride on the underground worldwide network that no one knew was there.
02:09I'm going to tell you a first contact story that's true.
02:16We'll meet some of the most courageous people who ever lived.
02:21And we're going to venture into the future we can still have.
02:26To the homes of our distant descendants among the stars.
02:32Our ship of the imagination is propelled by twin engines of skepticism and wonder.
02:46We'll be guided by the simple set of rules that define science and make it so powerful.
02:55Test ideas by experiment and observation.
02:59Build on those ideas that pass the test.
03:02Reject the ones that fail.
03:05Follow the evidence wherever it leads and question everything.
03:10Take these rules to heart and the cosmos is yours.
03:16Come with me.
03:40Bye we'll be good.
04:03Bye.
05:07And if you want to see the future, look up.
05:20On this voyage, we're bound for a distant galaxy.
05:37And we'll discover how we, as a species, became explorers of the cosmos.
05:46There. There she is. NASA's Voyager 1.
05:51Launched in 1977, she is the most distant object built by human hands.
05:57She's done some hard traveling since our last encounter.
06:00Logged another billion and a half miles.
06:03Voyagers making for other parts of our Milky Way.
06:06But we have another far more distant destination.
06:10The cosmic ocean is made of space and time.
06:15You can't move in space without also moving in time.
06:19Our voyage will take us a long way from home, a little more than a billion light years.
06:25We're also traveling a billion years into the past to an event so violent it will even shatter time.
06:33Now we're getting close to our destination.
06:47This is what we came for.
06:49These two black holes were born from the collapse of a pair of massive stars.
06:58And they've been doing a gravitational tango ever since, for millions of years.
07:03We're here for the climax.
07:05When those two collide, they will set off a space-time tsunami that will stretch and compress space in all directions.
07:12And it will slow down time itself before speeding it up and slowing it down again.
07:18Gravitational wave.
07:45What does an event that took place more than a billion light years away have to do with us?
08:15Albert Einstein was the first to understand that matter could send ripples across space-time.
08:22He imagined that catastrophic explosions of matter should create something much bigger than ripples.
08:27Great waves.
08:29Gravitational waves.
08:30You are seeing and hearing me right now, on whatever device you have, because we figured out a way to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum.
08:40If we can learn to surf those gravitational waves the way we know how to ride the electromagnetic ones, who knows?
08:47It's as impossible to foresee as our world was to the scientists who experimented with electricity back in the 19th century.
08:57Cosmologists predicted the existence of black holes.
09:00Cosmologists, gravitational waves, gravitational waves, are the first direct evidence that black holes are real.
09:06But they may also provide a new way of knowing and exploring the cosmos.
09:10We can add it to the other senses that science has devised to penetrate the great dark ocean.
09:16All the kinds of light we use, gamma ray, x-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, microwave, radio wave, and visible light.
09:36This 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.
09:51What if we could detect the gravitational waves that were caused by the first moment of creation?
09:58The birth of the cosmos.
10:00What if we could extend our vision to see the whole sweep of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution?
10:22So, how did we get so smart?
10:25We know something about the evolution of our species.
10:28But how did the human mind evolve?
10:33Where did that crazy ambition to climb the ladder to the stars come from?
10:38How did we become a way for the universe to know itself?
10:45It started over there.
10:47The cosmic calendar is a way for us to grasp the vastness of time.
10:59We've taken all of time from the birth of the universe to this very moment and compressed it into a single calendar year.
11:06On this scale, every month represents a little more than a billion years.
11:11Every day represents nearly 40 million years.
11:16Our own story begins with all the other life on our little world.
11:22Every living thing on Earth is descended from a single origin.
11:26It happened in the deep ocean darkness on September 15th, about four billion years ago.
11:35Within this tiny single-celled organism was a kind of chemical ladder.
11:41The DNA double helix.
11:43It's star stuff.
11:48Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen.
11:51Elements cooked in the hearts of distant stars combined with hydrogen from the Big Bang to become alive on this little world.
11:59Through random changes, mutations in the genes, some of which led to more successful life forms, what we call evolution by natural selection, the latter grew, adding more and more rungs.
12:15It took another three billion years for life to evolve the complexity of the plants and animals that you could see with the naked eye.
12:29If the cosmic calendar had holidays, surely December 26th would be one of them.
12:38Sometime on this day, about 200 million years ago, the first mammals evolved.
12:45They brought a new feature to life on Earth, the neocortex.
12:51Back in the Triassic, the odds were against her kind.
12:55But the dinosaurs that terrorized the mammals went extinct.
13:00It was the evolution of the neocortex and small, furtive creatures such as this one that enabled their descendants to take over the planet.
13:10Mammals brought something else that was new.
13:13They suckled their young.
13:16They nurtured them.
13:18And there was love.
13:19Mother's Day on the Cosmic Calendar.
13:28Evolution by natural selection means that those living things able to better adapt to their environment are more likely to survive and leave offspring.
13:39Intelligence can be a huge selective advantage.
13:42The fate of this planet was changed forever by an event involving just 13 atoms.
13:49How small is 13 atoms?
13:51It's a quadrillionth the size of a grain of salt.
13:56A mutation occurred in the DNA of just one of our ancestors.
14:00Every source of self-esteem, everything we've learned and built, might come down to nothing more than this.
14:10One base pair of a single gene.
14:13Just a single rung programmed the neocortex to grow larger still and fold more deeply.
14:20Maybe it was a random zap from a cosmic ray or a simple error in transmission from one cell to another.
14:28Whatever it was, it led to a change in our species that would ultimately affect every other species of life on Earth.
14:38It happened late on New Year's Eve on this cosmic calendar of ours.
14:43To think that, for good or evil, our ability to feel loyalty and concern for increasingly larger groups,
14:57our obsession with certain belief systems, our capacity to imagine the future,
15:02our power to transform the world and to search the cosmos for answers.
15:07The very name we gave to our own species, Homo sapiens, Latin for wise persons,
15:15all of it comes down to nothing more than a single rung on our tiny DNA ladder to the stars.
15:26For much of the last hour of the cosmic calendar, for all but the last minute,
15:31our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, living in small bands.
15:45You know, when people just shrug and say, chalk it up to human nature, it puzzles me.
15:52They're usually talking about our greed, our arrogance, our violence.
15:57But we've been human for at least a couple hundred thousand years.
16:01For most of that time, we weren't that way at all.
16:05How do we know?
16:07From the accounts of explorers and anthropologists
16:10encountering surviving hunter-gatherer societies across four centuries.
16:15There are, of course, exceptions, especially in the circumstances of extreme scarcity.
16:20But the overwhelming consensus paints a picture of humans who lived in relative harmony with each other
16:27and the environment.
16:29We shared the little we had because we knew that our survival depended on the group.
16:35We didn't prize wealth beyond our needs because possessions would just weigh us down as we wandered.
16:41We were different from our non-human primate ancestors
16:44with their alpha males bullying their way to dominance.
16:48And where was God?
17:02Everywhere.
17:03In the rocks and in the rivers, in the trees and the birds and every living thing.
17:10That was human nature for a couple of hundred thousand years.
17:13I'm standing on the southern tip of Africa
17:17and imagining what it was like sometime in the last hundreds of thousands of years.
17:22Back then, Africa was home to all the world's Homo sapiens.
17:28All 10,000 of them.
17:30If you were an extraterrestrial on a survey mission,
17:34you might have thought we were an endangered species.
17:36Some day soon, there will be 10 billion of us.
17:41What happened?
17:43How did we become the globe-girdling, space-traveling species that we are today?
17:48Welcome to the first laboratory on Earth.
18:00We're in Blumbo's cave, where the evolution of the mind made a great leap.
18:06Our ancestors were conducting chemistry experiments here
18:09with a mineral rich in iron, ochre.
18:13They used it to decorate objects with bits of red color.
18:17But it may have also had other uses.
18:19To preserve animal hives, or as a medicine.
18:22Or as a way to sharpen their tools.
18:26Or maybe as an insect repellent.
18:30And they engraved the ochre with symbols.
18:33Something completely new on the planet Earth.
18:36Art.
18:37Not to be eaten, not to provide shelter, but to symbolize something.
18:45Or just to be.
18:48Looks a little bit like a ladder, or a double helix.
18:51Whatever it was supposed to be, it's the earliest remnant we have of human culture.
18:56We had found a way to leave behind something distinctly human.
19:00A means to communicate, however enigmatically, to you and me, 100,000 years away.
19:10A great power was discovered here, in Blumbo's cave.
19:13At 25 cosmic seconds to midnight, between 10 and 12,000 years ago, humans discovered another great power.
19:33Instead of foraging for food, we learned how to grow it in the Earth.
19:38Our ancestors did something else they had never done before.
19:47They invented new tools, technology, to plant and pull food out of the Earth.
19:54They settled down and moved indoors.
19:57Our relationship to nature and to one another would never be the same.
20:04This agricultural revolution, the domestication of plants and animals, is the mother of all revolutions.
20:12Because all others trace back to it.
20:15Its consequences reach far beyond even our own moment in time.
20:19Like most revolutions, this one brought change that was both great and horrifying.
20:27There was a new concept in the world.
20:31Home.
20:32A specific place on the planet where your ancestors and you were born and lived.
20:39And over time, these settlements grew larger.
20:42Until about 20 cosmic seconds ago, or around 7,000 BCE.
20:49Welcome to Chateau Hoyoc, a community on the Anatolian Plain.
20:59It's about 9,000 years ago, and everyone has settled in for the evening.
21:05Tonight, roughly the same number of people who once populated all of Africa are living together in this proto-city.
21:13The city is such a new idea, they haven't invented the street yet, or the window.
21:21So the only way you can get into your apartment is to walk along the rooftops till you arrive at the opening to your dwelling.
21:31Chateau Hoyoc lacked something much more significant than streets and windows.
21:35There is no palace here.
21:40The bitter price that the invention of agriculture cost human society had yet to be paid.
21:47Here, there was no dominance of the few over the many.
21:51There was no 1% attaining lavish wealth while most everyone else merely subsisted.
21:56Forensic analysis of the women, men, and children who lived here show a remarkable similarity in diet.
22:05They still cherished the hunter-gatherer ethos of sharing.
22:10Chateau Hoyoc was egalitarian.
22:13The weakest ate the same food that the strongest did.
22:18And everyone lived in the same kind of home.
22:20But man, it was anything but drab.
22:24Come on, I'll show you.
22:41This was a typical apartment in one of the first cities.
22:46Chateau Hoyoc, in what is now Turkey.
22:48As it looked, about 9,000 years ago.
22:52They were a lot like us.
22:56This bit of volcanic glass, called obsidian, made an excellent mirror.
23:05If we could only find a way to see all the things that were once reflected here.
23:10This apartment was home for an extended family of 7 to 10 people.
23:19Every apartment had a similar floor plan.
23:22Bedroom.
23:24Living room.
23:27Kitchen.
23:30Plastered auroch head.
23:31The people of Chateau Hoyoc had a passion for decorating.
23:36Apartments were richly appointed with the teeth and bones and skins of animals.
23:42The ochre that our ancestors picked up in Africa about 100,000 years before was now the medium of choice for the interior decorators of Chateau Hoyoc.
23:52And the red ochre had yet another profound application.
24:01They used it to create an entirely new art form.
24:05The map.
24:07For the first time ever, humans created a two-dimensional representation of their location in space.
24:14And time.
24:15This is where my home is, in relation to the volcano.
24:22And with a few magical strokes, the artist sent a message across 9,000 years.
24:28I was here when the volcano awakened.
24:32The experiment at Chateau Hoyoc was a success.
24:44And within a few thousand years, there were cities everywhere.
24:47When different kinds of people congregate in a single place, ideas are exchanged and new possibilities arise.
25:11The city is a kind of brain, creating and processing new ideas.
25:20Here, in the city of Amsterdam in the 17th century, citizens of the old and new worlds mingled as they never had before.
25:29And there was an unprecedented freedom of thought.
25:32These conditions produced a golden age of science and art.
25:36In Italy, Giordano Bruno had proclaimed the existence of other worlds.
25:42For this, he had been made to suffer.
25:46But a mere 50 years later, in Holland, the astronomer Christian Huygens, who held the same belief, was showered with honors.
25:56Light was the central theme of the age.
25:59The enlightenment of human curiosity set free.
26:05And the light shed by Europe's first look at the once hidden realms of the planet.
26:11The light that permeated the paintings of the time, particularly the work of Vermeer.
26:18And light as an object of scientific inquiry.
26:22For generations, textile merchants had used a lens to examine the thread count of finely stitched fabrics.
26:30In 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.
26:40They aimed the textile merchant's lens at objects no one had ever thought to examine closely before.
26:46It became a window, an aperture for finding and exploring new worlds.
26:53Antony von Liewenhoek used a single lens to reveal the teeming microcosm in a drop of water.
27:06His friend, Christian Huygens, used two lenses to bring the stars, planets, and moons close enough to reveal their features.
27:16Huygens became the first to see that Saturn's rings did not touch the planet.
27:21And the first to understand what they really were.
27:25He also discovered Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
27:30Huygens, like Bruno, believed that the stars were other suns, orbited by their own systems of planets and moons.
27:38But why was there no hint of those other worlds and their living things in the sacred books?
27:43Whatever disquiet this contradiction may have stirred in the hearts and minds of the leaders of the Enlightenment,
27:52there was only one man who dared to address it head on.
27:56He was another wizard of light.
27:59Baruch Spinoza had been a member of the Jewish congregation of Amsterdam through his teenage years.
28:05But in his early 20s, he began to speak publicly of a new vision of God.
28:12Spinoza's God was the physical laws of the universe.
28:17His sacred text, the Book of Nature.
28:19The Jews of Amsterdam were mostly refugees from the vicious inquisitions in Spain and Portugal,
28:28where so many of them had been tortured and murdered.
28:33Amsterdam had offered the Jews a refuge,
28:36and they must have seen Spinoza's radical ideas as a threat to their hard-won security in Holland.
28:41They excommunicated the young rebel and decreed that he must be forever shunned.
28:48Spinoza accepted their punishment with dignity, but without a trace of submission.
28:54He moved nearby to The Hague, where he went even further,
28:58daring to write that the Bible was not dictated by God, but written by human beings.
29:04Spinoza wrote,
29:05Do not look for God in miracles.
29:08Miracles are violations of the laws of nature.
29:11God is best apprehended in the study of those laws.
29:15No one had ever said these things aloud before.
29:19Spinoza knew that he was testing the limits of free thought, even for Holland.
29:27To him, an official state religion was more than spiritual coercion of the individual.
29:35Spinoza regarded the miraculous events of the major religious traditions as organized superstition.
29:43In his view, magical thinking posed a danger to the future citizens of a rational, free society.
29:51There could be no such thing as democracy without the separation of church and state.
29:57He wrote a book that introduced the ideas at the heart of the American and many another revolution.
30:05Then, as now, there were those who were threatened by this view of God.
30:21Spinoza continued to write and speak about his revolutionary view of God,
30:26always wearing the slashed cape as a badge of honor.
30:31He died at 44, possibly from inhaling particles of dust during his years of grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes.
30:39250 years later, another man with a passion for light made a pilgrimage to the humble workroom
30:47that had been preserved as a testament to the vast influence of Spinoza's philosophy.
30:53This man, world famous for finding a new law of nature, was often asked if he believed in God.
30:59Our understanding of nature's laws has advanced far beyond Spinoza's and even Einstein's wildest dreams.
31:19But there is one law of nature we cannot seem to grasp.
31:25Inscribed in the Book of Nature is a parable about an ancient alliance between two kingdoms
31:30and those who would tear it apart.
31:34Long ago, there were two kingdoms.
31:49An alliance was formed between them.
31:52One that would bring them both riches beyond measure.
31:55A partnership lasting more than a hundred million years.
31:59And then, a new kind of being evolved in one of the two kingdoms.
32:04Its descendants plundered the riches and violated the alliance.
32:09In their arrogance, they became a mortal danger to both kingdoms and to themselves.
32:15This parable is true.
32:29It's the story of two of the half-dozen realms of life on earth.
32:34The plant and animal kingdoms.
32:37It's not easy being green.
32:41Sex is challenging when you're stuck in one place.
32:44Sex, there's no dating.
32:46You just sit there and cast your seed to the winds.
32:50Literally.
32:52You just wait for the wind to blow.
32:54If you get lucky, some of your pollen will be carried away and land on the sexual reproductive part of another plant.
33:02The plants play this hit-or-miss game of chance for a couple of hundred million years.
33:06Until insects evolve to play Cupid.
33:11What resulted was one of the great co-evolution marriages in the history of life.
33:20The insect would visit a flower for a dinner of protein-rich pollen.
33:25Inevitably, some of the pollen would stick to the body of the insect.
33:29The insect would visit another flower, bringing along the leftovers on its body.
33:34It was a win-win deal for both the flowers and the insects, causing a series of delightful evolutionary developments.
33:49A new plant arose that produced sugary nectar in addition to the pollen.
33:54Now, the insects came not just for their basic meal of pollen, but also for dessert.
34:00The insects got chubbier, evolved furry bodies, and even little pouches on their legs to snag more pollen on their daily rounds of the flowers.
34:10Now, there were bees.
34:15This was a bonus for yet another species of the animal kingdom.
34:21Us.
34:26We are indebted to the bees and their fellow pollinators for something even more vital to our survival.
34:31Every third bite of food you take, and this is even true for those of us who are omnivores, was made possible by them.
34:40Thirty-five percent of the world's crops depend on their cooperation.
34:45The plants eat starlight, and we and the animals, we eat plants.
34:52And they don't just increase the quantity of available food.
34:55We owe them for much of the biodiversity that has made our food supply so dependable.
35:01But we're working them to death.
35:04And for the first time ever, many kinds of bees are on the endangered species list.
35:22I think you know where this is headed.
35:31The blessing and the curse of the invention of agriculture has brought us here, to the halls of extinction.
35:41A memorial to all the living things lost in the mass extinction events in Earth's history.
35:58It's a monument to the broken branches on the tree of life.
36:04Five times in the history of life, cataclysmic geological and astronomical events have threatened to extinguish life itself.
36:15The sixth one is different.
36:20The last time we were here together, this hallway had no name.
36:26Why?
36:27Because back then, a scientific consensus had yet to be reached that we were in the midst of a mass extinction event.
36:35That's changed.
36:37Now, this hallway has a name.
36:40It's ours, the Anthropocene.
36:47Anthropo, from the Greek word for human.
36:52And scene, the Greek word for recent.
36:56These are the species we hunted to extinction back when we were wanderers, including our own cousins, the Neanderthals.
37:24What is it about us, as a species, that wherever we go, we bring death?
37:45Beyond here lies the future.
37:53Even now, it's not too late to keep this corridor from lengthening.
37:58If we fail...
38:00But if we succeed, come with me.
38:16In a possible future, only decades away, Project Starshot, a flotilla of a thousand spacecraft, will depart from Earth.
38:41This part of the Atacama Desert, west of the Andes Mountains, is so dry that it hasn't rained in recorded history.
38:49And that's great for us, because we're going to need the clearest of skies.
38:54And that's great for us.
39:24There were no witnesses when the first life left the water for the land.
39:32There was nobody to file a report when the first birds took to the skies.
39:37But this is one great leap that will be documented in every conceivable way.
39:43The whole world is watching.
39:44We are, after all, sending our first craft directly to the planets of another sun, the Alpha Centauri system.
39:53These are the ships that will carry our senses there.
40:00These are interstellar sailing ships, propelled by light.
40:04Their hulls weigh but a gram.
40:06And they are no larger than a pea.
40:09And yet, they're equipped with all that NASA's Voyagers have.
40:13And more.
40:13When 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.
40:33Inside 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.
40:46Space 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.
41:09That's one of the reasons we need to send so many of them.
41:16Voyager 1 is traveling at 38,000 miles per hour.
41:23It left home more than 40 years ago.
41:27It will take these nanocraft only four days to overtake her.
41:31That's pretty fast.
41:33But still only 20% of the speed of light.
41:36Proxima Centauri is four light years away.
41:39That's a 20-year one-way trip.
41:41Orbiting Proxima Centauri, there is a world in the habitable zone where we think life might flourish.
41:51Our robotic emissaries will send accounts from these new worlds.
41:59Their messages will race back to us on radio waves at the speed of light.
42:04They will take four years to reach us.
42:0720 years one way, four years back.
42:10That's a 24-year round trip.
42:13Many of you will be there then to read and to write those new pages in the Book of Nature
42:20and to chart our future course of wandering.
42:23No longer bounded by the Earth.
42:50The ocean or the sky.
42:54The ocean or the sky.
43:20The ocean if you can't reach those new pages
43:24as we can.
43:26The ocean or the sky.
43:29The ocean or the sky.
43:31The sea.
43:33The sea.
43:36The ocean.
43:37The ocean.
43:38The ocean.
43:41The ocean.
43:48The ocean.