Human Universe

Everlasting Love by Robert Knight

Every day, in every town, there's a moment...

...when, for the first time, we stare into the eyes of Mum and Dad

and are welcomed into the arms of the universe.

# Open up your eyes Then you realise

# Here I stand with my Everlasting love... #

Every human life has to start somewhere, a place in space and time,

and I started here, on March the 3rd, 1968,

in the Royal Oldham Hospital.

In 1971 we moved here to the family home in Chadderton -

it's only about a mile away from the hospital.

I stayed here for the next 18 years.

In 1979 my world expanded a bit cos I came up the hill to this school, Hulme Grammar School.

This was my form room, 3Y, and that was the end of the universe

because the girls' school was through there.

And it wasn't long before I began to wonder how my world

fitted into the wider cosmos.

My grandad used to tell me how he walked up onto this hill

in the summer of 1927 to see a total solar eclipse.

And because of that story, I always wanted to see one, and I finally got to do it 80 years later.

And it was a very powerful experience.

I didn't know what I'd think.

He always spoke of the sky going dark

and everything going quiet and the birds stopping singing.

What I felt was that I was on a ball of rock.

I had a very powerful sense that I was on this... this rocky planet,

orbiting in the blackness of space around a star.

That understanding of where we are is the culmination of a 400-year journey of scientific discovery.

This is the story of how we are measuring with increasing precision our place in space and time.

How we've discovered that we are an infinitesimal speck in a possibly infinite universe,

and, in doing so, just how valuable we are.

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

The only creatures that have developed the ability to ask deep questions about the cosmos.

This curiosity has led us to a profound change in perspective.

From believing we were the most important creatures

in all creation...

...we have uncovered humanity's true place in the cosmos...

...and glimpsed our earliest origins.

TRADITIONAL MUSIC

This is the fortified town of Ait Benhaddou.

It was built in the 17th century on the trade route that winds its way north

across the High Atlas and into the markets of Marrakech.

MUSIC CONTINUES

The indigenous Berber people who built this place

have been in this part of North Africa for well over 10,000 years,

and they're mentioned in Ancient Egyptian texts and in Greek -

both Herodotus and Cicero talk of these people who worship the sun and the moon.

In fact, they tell a story of how they cut off the ears of goats,

threw them over their houses in honour of the moon god, Ayyur.

And the skies are so crystal clear here that you can see why they did it.

Well, not the goat thing, but worshipped those celestial objects in the sky.

High above the village, the summit affords an unobstructed view of the heavens.

The perfect vantage point from which to ponder your place in the universe.

For all of history, or at least, I imagine for as long as people have considered such things,

the Earth has been thought of as being motionless, at the centre of the universe.

And when you think about it, that's obvious - it doesn't feel like we're moving,

and the ground feels solid beneath our feet,

the proverbial mountains move for no-one,

and the sun, moon and stars arc across the sky.

The Earth is motionless at the centre, and the universe rotates around it.

Watching the night sky,

it's natural to think that the stars move around us.

And so, for thousands of years,

this geocentric view of the universe was never questioned.

And it's not just the motion of the stars -

Aristotle and the ancient Greek philosophers thought about these things in detail.

They noticed that when you drop things

they always fall towards the centre of the Earth,

so therefore there must be something special about the Earth,

it must be the centre of the universe.

These arguments are so persuasive that it was millennia before they were overturned.

It was here in Venice that our demotion from the centre of the universe began.

Venice was an independent city-state for well over 1,000 years,

and by the 15th century it was the richest city in Europe.

You see that legacy everywhere - the buildings are spectacular,

you can only imagine what it must have been like in its heyday.

And that pre-eminence put it at the centre of

arguably the greatest intellectual revolution in the history of human civilisation - the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was a period when the rebirth of art and science

transformed how we saw the world.

This is the Scuola Grande di San Rocco,

and everywhere you look, there is masterpiece after masterpiece

from one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance, Tintoretto.

It took him over 20 years, beginning in the 1560s,

to complete this building.

And it's breathtaking.

You see scenes from the Old Testament on the walls,

scenes from the New Testament.

And what's striking, apart from the obvious skill of the painter,

is the realism. And there - The Last Supper.

You could almost walk into that painting,

you could walk across that chequered floor,

up the stairs, turn right and out through that illuminated doorway.

In the art of the medieval period and before, you don't see

this depiction of real space, the paintings are flat.

From the 14th century,

with the rediscovery of the geometry of the Greeks,

then you see a genuine intellectual shift,

you see the desire to paint the world as it really is,

you see paintings with perspective and depth.

And that was a change in perspective.

And we got our first hints of our planet's true place in the cosmos

when this desire to see things as they are

was combined with the city's most valuable commodity.

TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN

During the Renaissance, these craftsmen were so valuable to Venice

that they were barred from leaving the city on pain of death.

Murano glass was so prized because its clarity allowed it

to be fashioned into optics, into mirrors and lenses.

And it was precisely that property that caught the eye

of one of the period's most renowned figures,

Galileo Galilei.

Now, in 1609, Galileo came here to Venice

to commission lenses for his new telescope -

this was the world centre of glass production -

and he immediately put that telescope to good use

by turning it towards the moon and sketching what he saw.

In the 1600s, most people thought that anything in the heavens

was perfect, perfectly round, perfectly smooth,

but Galileo depicted the lunar surface as we know it to be today,

the sunlight bouncing off mountains, disappearing into valleys,

its shaded rims of craters.

Galileo didn't just observe the moon with his telescope,

he turned it to the planets

and also in 1610 he made this series of sketches of Venus and he noticed

that, different times of the year, Venus can appear as a full circle

in the sky or as a slim crescent and as everything in-between.

When Venus is on the other side of the sun from the Earth,

we see the whole planet.

But as it moves around in its orbit,

less and less sunlight is seen to strike its surface

until it crosses the sun in silhouette.

The only credible explanation for these phases of Venus

is that Venus is a planet, it's orbiting the sun

inside the orbit of the Earth, which is also orbiting the sun.

So, this is the first confirmation of a sun-centred solar system.

Galileo had seen evidence that the sun, not the Earth,

was the centre of the solar system...

...and began our scientific exploration of the universe in earnest.

TYRES SCREECH

'In the last 50 years,

'we've done more than simply look out from Earth,

'we've sent unmanned spacecraft to every corner of the solar system...'

No, no, no!

HORNS BLARE Tram!

'..Many not much bigger and not much more advanced than this car.'

Oops, sorry.

It's a beautiful piece of engineering,

but it's essentially got no brakes.

'We sent Mariner 10 and Messenger to Mercury,

'the closest planet to the sun...'

It's got no acceleration.

I don't know what these sticks do here.

2.43 missions to Venus...

'..and 51 to Mars.'

HORNS BLARE

Wa-hey!

'But only a handful have made it

'into the solar system's outermost reaches.'

In 1977, a chance alignment of the planets meant that it was possible,

at least in principle, to launch a spacecraft

to all four of the outer gas giants.

So, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyagers 1 and 2.

And just 18 months later, they reached the largest planet

in the solar system, aptly named after

the Roman king of the gods, Jupiter.

They explored Saturn...

...before separating, with Voyager 2 going on to visit Uranus.

And then, in 1989, after travelling for 12 years...

...it reached Neptune...

...the most distant planet in the solar system.

BIRDSONG

But perhaps the most dramatic change in perspective

came on the 21st of December 1968...

...when we left the Earth for ourselves

and set out for another world.

When you're up flying on a beautiful day, you're certainly free,

like a bird, and I just enjoy the scenery and the solitude of it.

I've probably got over 13,000 hours in the air.

But as a fighter pilot, one of the things I pride myself in

is more landings than I have hours.

Of all the flights Major General Bill Anders has taken,

he'll be remembered for the one he made when he was just 35.

In the 8th year of manned flight into space,

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration prepared

men and equipment for the most advanced manned mission to date.

Together with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell,

Bill climbed aboard the most powerful machine ever built by man.

When the rocket ignited, the giant 5F1 engines

putting out a total of 7½ million pounds of thrust,

the racket was unbelievable.

We have lift-off, lift-off at 7:51am Eastern Standard Time.

The sideways forces, as those rockets gimballed to try to keep us

pointed straight up, threw us around in the spacecraft.

If we hadn't been strapped in, we'd be bouncing off the walls.

We flew out of the noise and echo from the Earth

and we knew we were on our way.

This is Houston, you're looking good.

We hear you loud and clear, boys.

OK, the first stage was very smooth and this one is smoother.