Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World

We are a restless species,

forever driven by dreams of what lies beyond the horizon,

in search of new lands to explore,

new worlds to discover.

It's a spirit which has carried us off the planet,

to new frontiers which one day may make us

a multiplanetary species, but the story

of how we left earth is not what you might expect.

It would take an explosive exorcism in the ancient world,

a leap in technologies for fighting fire,

the mechanization of dairy farms,

a plot to kill the king of England,

oh, and some elaborate Soviet subterfuge

to create a machine with the power to break free

from earth's gravity and hurl us towards other worlds...

The rocket.

These are the inventions that define our age

and have changed our world forever,

that have allowed us to move on the ground and in the air,

to connect to each other, and create miraculous machines,

each a story of ingenuity, of wonder, of breakthrough.

T-minus 20 seconds.

Today we're on the brink of something

that promises to transform civilization.

Igniters have been lit.

A new generation of rockets are being designed

to carry humans back into deep space

for the first time in almost 50 years.

And lift-off, the dawn of Orion

and a new era of American space exploration.

Space began as a binary effort.

There were only two players...

The Soviet union and the United States.

That has changed. The world is different.

A rocket revolution is upon us,

with more companies building and launching their own rockets

than at any other time in human history.

No one doubts that companies like Space X

and blue origin are the future.

We are now absolutely in an innovations race

to help humanity really go beyond

and, you know, be a multiplanet species.

This is the story of humanity's greatest adventure

and our grandest dreams.

It's actually quite difficult to overstate how fast

and how transformative this is going to be.

20 years from now, space travel is gonna be

like air travel today, and then humanity

will have truly become a spacefaring species.

The story of humanity's quest

to leave the earth, in fact, begins deep within it,

in a network of Chinese caves over 1,000 years ago,

where a monk named Li Tian was battling supernatural spirits.

The story goes that Li Tian

is this seventh-century monk, and his emperor has charged him

with finding a way of warding off evil spirits

that are plaguing society with droughts and floods.

Li Tian's search took him deep underground,

to caves where bats were roosting.

On the floors of these passages and chambers,

he finds their droppings, known as guano,

which are rich in potassium nitrate.

Now, this has been used since ancient times

for preserving food and for fertilizing crops,

but Li Tian is interested in guano for other reasons.

A born pioneer with an interest in alchemy,

he begins to collect it to take back home to test.

It was known at the time that by washing away impurities

in the guano and then mixing it with charcoal and sulphur,

it acquired magical properties...

The perfect tool to scare off evil spirits.

What Li Tian has, in effect,

is what we would today call gunpowder,

the first mixture that burns without needing external air.

He's not the first to use it, but, because it'll burn

in confined spaces, Li Tian tries something new,

something that he thinks will create

a much bigger show for his emperor.

He stuffs bamboo shoots with this gunpowder,

and legend has it that when someone

threw them onto the fire, the bamboo tubes

shot out across the ground.

A lot of gas is being produced in this chemical reaction

with a tremendous amount of energy, so if the gunpowder

is confined into a tight place and lit,

the gas that's released provides thrust

that pushes the bamboo shoot, in this case,

in the opposite direction,

and this is the principle of the rocket,

a force in one direction producing a force

in the opposite direction.

In this case, hot gases expelled backwards

pushed the rocket forwards.

In succeeding to scare off evil spirits,

Li Tian had inadvertently discovered

how to turn chemical energy into thrust.

What would eventually become the rocket

had taken its first flight.

Li Tian is credited with the creation

of the firework, a device dreamed up to amaze

and delight an emperor, but sadly,

as would often happen with this particular invention,

others would see darker uses.

The rocket made a fearsome weapon.

It could unleash the fires of hell,

wreaking destruction and intimidating an enemy

more used to Spears and arrows.

Here in the Greek town of Vrontados,

an eerily similar rocket battle

is unleashed every Easter in the strangest of traditions.

Across one highly charged night,

two parishes unleash tens of thousands of homemade rockets,

each trying to hit the other's church tower.

It's a spectacular show, and the participants mean no harm,

but just imagine what it must have looked like

in the first millennium when, instead of being

a festive celebration, these were rockets of war.

The idea that a rocket could be used for more peaceful means

to travel to distant worlds was a ludicrous dream

because for most of history, the idea of distant worlds

was ludicrous, too.

Then a little-known mathematician living in London

made a momentous discovery,

despite being caught up in a plot to kill the king.

The year is 1605, and English polymath scientist

Thomas Harriot is living with the aristocratic Percy family

and tutoring their children in mathematics,

but Harriot's got a problem.

His employers, the Percy family,

have become embroiled in a treasonous plot.

Their associates have stashed 36 barrels of gunpowder

in the vaults beneath the palace of Westminster

to blow up England’s parliament,

killing protestant king James I...

But things don't go to plan, and with just days to go,

the authorities are tipped off.

The gunpowder plotters, including

the famous guy Fawkes, are rounded up and executed.

Their families and associates are captured and imprisoned.

Amongst them is Thomas Harriot.

Harriot pleads for his life and is released 3 weeks later,

but his boss and patron Henry Percy

will spend the next 16 years in jail.

Shaken by these events but relieved to have his freedom,

Harriot throws himself into his studies.

Hidden away and avoiding further trouble,

he devotes all his time to understand the natural world,

and in 1609, he gets his hands on a Dutch spyglass,

one of the first in the world.

6 months before Galileo's famous observations

of the night sky, Harriot points it

at the moon and draws what he sees.

These are the first drawings of the moon

seen through a telescope.

What they show in exquisite detail

are the moon's mountains, valleys, and craters.

It's an astonishing discovery, proving that the moon

is a solid celestial body Ike earth.

Harriot's telescopic observations

of the night sky were the very first in history,

and they were the first to show us

that out there were worlds beyond our own,

worlds to study, to explore, and maybe even to visit.

Harriot's observations marked the start

of a movement which swept Europe.

Within months, Galileo made his own telescopic observations

of the moon and planets,

observations of such profound significance that they inspired

the next generation to look beyond the constraints

of our own physical world and imagine what lay beyond.

In 1634, publishers released what may be

the first piece of science fiction,

a work by German astronomer Johannes Kepler

in which he imagined a trip to the moon propelled

by magical beings, but the story

was simply too outlandish to be taken seriously.

250 years later, however, the idea would resurface

in another capital city, and this time, it would take off.

At 20 years old, a young man traveled to Paris.

His father insisted that he finish

a law degree in the city...

But the city fueled other areas of his imagination.

Instead of studying the humdrum texts of law...

He filled his mind with marvelous tales of derring-do

and fantastical, far-off discoveries,

all found in the thousands of books

in the French national library.

Here, he immersed himself

in the leading scientific ideas of the age,

and they ignited a desire in the young man,

the desire to write,

his name... Jules Verne, and his stories

were the grandest adventures imaginable...

Voyages which crossed Africa in a balloon...

Expeditions which travelled 20,000 leagues under the seas,

and a journey up a volcano

that led to the center of the earth.

His stories were pure fantasy, but they were believable

because the ideas were based in reality,

and they were a huge success, making Verne rich and famous.