Human Universe

Human Universe

Beyond Earth's atmosphere, life is impossible.

Exposed to the vacuum of space,

you'd be unconscious within 12 seconds...

..and last little more than two minutes.

And yet, for more than a decade,

we've made this harshest of environments our home.

Star City Russia

Today, the journey off our planet begins here

in the cosmonaut training facility on the outskirts of Moscow.

I am floating in a spacesuit above the International Space Station.

It's surely as close as I'm going to get to being in space.

Astronauts have to do this for hours at a time,

six, seven, eight-hour spacewalks.

They're going to have to perform many of them to install this module

when it's taken up into space.

Over there, that's the Zvezda Module -

the Russian habitation module.

It's where the cosmonauts sleep, you know, where they eat,

it's their lounge in space.

You can just imagine, can't you?

You can imagine the Earth stretching out over there,

curving away.

I think it would be wonderful.

So wonderful.

It's kind of one of those things you always dream of, you know.

I did anyway - doing a spacewalk...

..out in space on the Space Station.

Since 2nd November, 2000, when the first expedition arrived

the International Space Station has been continuously occupied...

..humanity's permanent outpost amongst the stars.

You know, for me, this defines what it means to be human -

throughout the whole history of life on Earth,

of all the creatures that have ever lived in the oceans

and the land or in the sky,

one has ever made it off its home world.

So why is it that we alone have ventured out into space?

What is it that makes us special?

As far as we know, we humans are unique in the universe...

..the only creatures to have developed the ability to ask

deep questions about the cosmos...

..and ponder our place within it.

Human Universe

Edited By

Perhaps the most fundamental question we've asked is

how do we become who we are,

a space-faring civilisation?

What drove our ascent from ape to man...

..and from the dawn of civilisation...

..to the stars?

Part One Apeman Spaceman

Guassa Plateau Ethiopia

It's a story that begins in Ethiopia, where our story began.

High in the mountains lives a creature that allows us

to glimpse our origins.

You're not supposed to look baboons in the eye,

so I'm going to just approach them carefully.

I think that was a sneeze rather than a warning cry.

These are gelada baboons -

they're a species of Old World monkey found only here

in the Ethiopian highlands.

And we and the other great apes share a common ancestor with them,

around 25 to 30 million years ago, so, in evolutionary terms,

we belong to the same group - the higher primates.

So I suppose if you want a simple answer to the question -

who are we?

It's one of them.

The geladas aren't true baboons.

They are, in fact, the last remaining species

of a group of primates

that was once one of the most successful in Africa.

Although they're not our closest cousins, by any means,

they have the most complex social system of any non-human primates,

they live in groups of up to 500.

They also have the most complex vocalisations

of any non-human primate.

They have sounds for attack and defence,

also reassurance, sounds for danger, also solicitation.

And they'll string them together into long sequences.

But for all the similarities with the other primates,

there is clearly a huge gulf between them and us.

And whilst you see glimpses of human-like behaviour,

there's nothing anywhere near as sophisticated as us.

And, er, gelada, for all their sophisticated vocalisations,

have nothing that you could even remotely refer to as language.

So it's obvious that we have something extra.

Since we split from our common ancestor

the geladas have retreated into the highlands.

But our intelligence and way of life have changed unrecognisably.

We've gone on to colonise every corner of the Earth...

..and beyond.

Lake Ziway Ethiopia

My family have lived by this lake

for as long as we can remember

Solomon Tesfay is one of the Oromo people of central Ethiopia.

They've been fishing the lake's rich waters

since they arrived here in the 16th century.

My Father taught me how to fish

There are many skills

and it takes a long time to learn them

You can't just turn up there and start fishing

Constructing complicated tools, like boats, nets and spaceships

is a skill unique to the human mind.

And this ability is thought to have emerged for the very first time

in the hills around the lake.

This area's known as Gademotta,

it's a volcanic ridge pushed up from the floor of the Rift Valley

to form an ancient caldera.

Over a quarter of a million years ago, this was home to

a group of early humans, attracted here by the lake,

but also by this stuff - obsidian.

Obsidian is volcanic glass

formed spontaneously by rapidly cooling lava.

But some of the fragments that litter the ground here

are far from natural.

Quite difficult, actually.

You don't want to be working it the whole day and not produce anything,

so something like this will be an ideal striking platform.

Right, so you made that look easy.

Ah. What am I looking to do now?

So you first visualise what you want,

you are looking for a spear out of this flake.

So you will need to work around the edge, thin this down

because they're going to be the edges of the spear point.

'Archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of obsidian spear points

'at Gademotta, some of which were made more than 250,000 years ago,

'the oldest of their kind ever found.'

It's kind of easy to just randomly knock a piece off. Yeah.

But then when you start actually crafting the shape... Yeah.

So it's hit the angle, here.

Oh, I see, there. Oh, yeah.

Yes.

I can see that this takes... takes an intelligent animal to craft

because it takes concentration and dedication. Yes.

And you need to know exactly what you're doing. Yes.

And you need to sit here and do it and have patience,

and be able to visualise the shape. Yes, definitely.

'But fashioning the spear's point

'is just the first stage in constructing a weapon

'that would have flown through the air like a javelin.'

This would have been attached to a wooden piece by some animal skin

and it's thought some kind of glue.

So this whole weapon is a complex thing,

you've got to imagine something that doesn't exist -

a spear made out of all sorts of different materials.

It's an object that's too complicated for a single individual

to conceive of and to build in a single lifetime.

An object like this requires lots of individuals working together

and also passing information on from generation to generation,

so, over time, better spears can be constructed.

That requires some means of communication,

probably some kind of primitive language.

So this is the earliest physical evidence we've found

of minds that think like ours.

What happened here wasn't just a pivotal moment in human evolution.

It was a turning point in a grander story.

For the vast majority of the age of the universe,

the story of the atoms in this rock was the same

as the story of the atoms in my body.

They were forged 13.8 billion years ago, moments after the Big Bang,

the heavier ones were assembled in hearts of long-dead stars.

And 4.8 billion years ago, they collapsed under their own gravity

to form the solar system - a glowing ball of gas and some bigger rocks.

And for all we know, despite all its majesty,

that's all the night sky is -

just a collection of glowing balls of gas and some rocks.

But then, around 250,000 years ago, a clump of atoms became aware -

it looked to the rock and saw a spear.

In one of the universe's hundred billion galaxies...

..orbiting one of that galaxy's 200 billion stars...

..on a small, seemingly insignificant, blue-green planet...

..a tiny part of the cosmos had become conscious.

But how did hydrogen atoms forged at the beginning of time

come to wake up?

And how was it in only a quarter of a million years,

that's a thousandth of 1% of the age of the universe,

those atoms went from building weapons out of stone

to constructing spacecraft?

The trigger for our transformation from apeman to spaceman

can be found not on Earth,

but glimpsed in the night sky.

Gulf of Aden

The sea is my first wife

It is my whole life

I can never escape, never escape

For centuries, the seafaring peoples of East Africa

have relied on the ocean for their survival.

You have to accept the life of a sailor

It's not good that you travel away from your family

But it's magnificent to be out in open air

Sailors like Abdullah Ahmed Mohammed established trade routes across

the Indian Ocean...

..guided by the light of the stars.

The north star is the star we generally use

because it's the brightest and above all the most stable

It never moves

Polaris, the north star, appears stationary in the night sky because

it's the line directly on the axis about which the Earth revolves.

But despite its appearance, it's far from constant.

In 2,000 years, another star, Gamma Cephei, will sit over the Pole