Cosmos: Possible Worlds - First Season

We were hunters and foragers.

The frontier was everywhere.

We were bounded only by the earth and the ocean and the sky.

The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten

song of childhood.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and

fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.

How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the

end of the next century?

And the next millennium?

Welcome back to the shores of the cosmic ocean...

An immensity of space and time,

a vastness still mostly uncharted.

We're bound for the possible worlds revealed by science.

We'll take a ride on the underground worldwide network

that no one knew was there.

I'm going to tell you a first contact story that's true.

We'll meet some of the most courageous people who ever lived.

And we're going to venture into the future we can still have,

to the homes of our distant descendants among the starts.

Science can carry us across that vastness.

But without imagination, we go nowhere.

Our Ship of the Imagination is propelled by twin engines

of skepticism and wonder.

It's guided by the simple set of rules that define science

and make it so powerful.

Test ideas by experiment and observation.

Build on those ideas that pass the test.

Reject the ones that fail.

Follow the evidence wherever it leads.

And question everything.

Take these rules to heart, and the cosmos is yours.

Come with me...

Our Ship of the Imagination can take us

anywhere in space and time.

The cosmos is right outside our front window.

If you want to see the past, look down.

And if you want to see the future, look up.

On this voyage, we are bound for a distant galaxy.

And we'll discover how we as a species became

explorers of the cosmos.

There. There she is.

NASA's Voyager 1.

Launched in 1977,

she is the most distant object built by human hands.

She's done some hard traveling since our last encounter,

logged another billion and a half miles.

Voyager's making for other parts of our Milky Way,

but we have another, far more distant destination.

The cosmic ocean is made of space and time.

You can't move in space without also moving in time.

Our voyage will take us a long way from home,

a little more than a billion light-years.

We're also traveling a billion years into the past,

to an event so violent it will even shatter time.

Now, we're getting close to our destination.

This is what we came for.

These two black holes were born from the collapse of a

pair of massive stars.

And they've been doing a gravitational tango ever since

for millions of years.

We're here for the climax.

When those two collide, they will set off a space-time

tsunami that will stretch and compress space

in all directions.

And it will slow down time itself,

before speeding it up and slowing it down again.

Gravitational...

and it will slow down time itself...

Set off a space-time tsunami...

Stretch and compress space in all directions a billion

light-years away.

What does an event that took place more than a billion

light-years away have to do with us?

Albert Einstein was the first to understand that matter

could send ripples across space-time.

He imagined that catastrophic explosions of matter should

create something much bigger than ripples, great waves,

gravitational waves.

You are seeing and hearing me right now,

on whatever device you have, because we figured out a way

to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum.

If we can learn to surf those gravitational waves the

way we know how to ride the electromagnetic ones,

who knows?

It's as impossible to foresee as our world was to the

scientists who experimented with electricity back

in the 19th century.

Cosmologists predicted the existence of black holes.

Gravitational waves are the first direct evidence that

black holes are real.

But they may also provide a new way of knowing and

exploring the cosmos.

We can add it to the other senses that science has

devised to penetrate the great dark ocean,

all the kinds of light we use; gamma ray,

X-ray, ultraviolet,

infrared, microwave,

radio wave and visible light.

This 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.

What if we could detect the gravitational waves that were

caused by the first moment of creation,

the birth of the cosmos?

What if we could extend our vision to see the whole sweep

of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution?

So, how did we get so smart?

We know something about the evolution of our species,

but how did the human mind evolve?

Where did that crazy ambition to climb the ladder to the

stars come from?

How did we become a way for the universe to know itself?

It started over there.

Is a way for us to grasp theCr

vastness of time.

We've taken all of time,

from the birth of the universe to this very moment,

and compressed it into a single calendar year.

On this scale, every month represents a little

more than a billion years.

Every day represents nearly 40 million years.

Our own story begins with all the other life on

our little world.

Every living thing on Earth is descended from

a single origin.

It happened in the deep ocean darkness on September 15,

about four billion years ago.

Within this tiny single-celled organism was a kind of chemical ladder,

the DNA double helix.

Star stuff...

Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen...

Elements cooked in the hearts of distant stars,

combined with hydrogen from the Big Bang to become alive

on this little world.

Through random changes, mutations in the genes,

some of which led to more successful life-forms,

what we call evolution by natural selection.

The ladder grew, adding more and more rungs.

It took another three billion years for life to evolve the

complexity of the plants and animals that you could see

with the naked eye.

If the Cosmic Calendar had holidays,

surely December 26 would be one of them.

Some time on this day, about 200 million years ago,

the first mammals evolved.

They brought a new feature to life on Earth:

the neocortex.

Back in the Triassic,

the odds were against her kind, but the dinosaurs that

terrorized the mammals went extinct.

It was the evolution of the neocortex in small,

furtive creatures such as this one,

that enabled their descendants to take over the planet.

Mammals brought something else that was new.

They suckled their young.

They nurtured them.

And there was love.

Mother's Day on the Cosmic Calendar.

Evolution by natural selection means that those living things

able to better adapt to their environment are more likely to

survive and leave offspring.

Intelligence can be a huge selective advantage.

The fate of this planet was changed forever by an event

involving just 13 atoms.

How small is 13 atoms?

It's a quadrillionth the size of a grain of salt.

A mutation occurred in the DNA of just one of our ancestors.

Every source of self-esteem, everything we've learned,

and built, might come down to nothing more than this.

One base pair of a single gene.

Just a single rung programmed the neocortex to grow larger

still and fold more deeply.

Maybe it was a random zap from a cosmic ray,

or a simple error in transmission from one cell to another.

Whatever it was, it led to a change in our species that

would ultimately affect every other species

of life on Earth.

It happened late on New Year's Eve on this

Cosmic Calendar of ours.

To think that, for good or evil,

our ability to feel loyalty and concern for increasingly

larger groups, our obsession with certain belief systems,

our capacity to imagine the future,

our power to transform the world and to search the cosmos

for answers...

The very name we gave to our own species,

homo sapiens, Latin for "wise persons" all of it

comes down to nothing more than a single rung on our tiny

DNA ladder to the stars.

For much of the last hour on the Cosmic Calendar,

for all but the last minute,

our ancestors were hunters and gatherers,

living in small bands.

You know, when people just shrug and say

"chalk it up to human nature," it puzzles me.

They're usually talking about our greed,

our arrogance, our violence.

But we've been human for at least a couple of