Year Million (2017) s01e05 Episode Script

Narrator: In the deep future you have merged with AI.
You can communicate telepathically.
You can even choose to live inside your computer if you want to.
And while technology will bring extraordinary and unimaginable advances to the evolution of the human body, nanobots won't be what protects you from the consequences of accelerated global warming.
Nor can it protect you from an extinction event like this one.
The only way to truly ensure humanity's survival is to imagine a course where we evolve as an interplanetary species.
This is the story of how we pioneer the tech that will bring us to outer space.
It's the deep future.
Your body, gone.
You're all computer, all the time.
Your brain is way more powerful than even a billion supercomputers.
Jobs, food, language, water, even traditional thought, all of humanity's building blocks, all that's done.
And you are immortal.
Squirming in your chair yet? You should be.
This isn't science fiction.
Today's visionary thinkers say it's a strong probability that this is what your world is going to look like.
Tonight, they'll guide you toward that spectacular future, and we'll see how one family navigates it, one invention at a time.
This is the story of your future.
This is the road to Year Million.
The Year Million: A future period, not exactly a million years from now, but rather a time when man and society will be so technologically advanced, it's nearly impossible to imagine.
Michio Kaku: It stretches the imagination to contemplate what the laws of physics will allow a million years from now.
Narrator: Let me put it to you this way.
Your day-to-day life will surpass anything you've seen on Star Trek.
In this far-off time, earth is just one of the planet's we'll inhabit.
Peter Diamandis: Stephen Hawking said, I don't think humanity has a future unless we go into space.
The danger from nuclear war or asteroid strike, or existential threats of those types, you know, all of our eggs are in one basket.
We need to diversify.
Narrator: And diversify means we must adapt or we will die.
Baratunde Thurston: You know, the planet's kind of falling apart, we're dying, like disease, antibiotics, all this stuff is not going the greatest.
Negin Farsad: There's a bunch of people who have their finger on the nuclear codes and they are very dangerous people so a nuclear holocaust seems like a really like possible reason that we'd have to leave earth.
Narrator: But to get off the planet, we're going to need to get to space and fast.
That is going to require collaboration on a global scale, the likes of which we have never seen before.
With earth buckling under an exploding population and enormous energy demands, take comfort that the seeds of the revolution are sprouting a paradigm shift in how we care for our planet.
We're also looking toward the heavens, breathing new life and a ton of money into an amped up space race led by an adventurous breed of billionaire space pioneers who all want to be the first to plant their flag on Mars and world's beyond.
It's about survival at all costs, whether it's on the planet or off-world.
So let me show you the road to humanity's survival.
First, we'll need to buy time.
Our world is full of stuff, but in the future our stuff will become alive, programmable.
Every single object on the planet will be fully adaptable, and able to fight back against any natural disaster that could imperil us.
But even so, the planet can only sustain us for so long.
So to save the human race, we're not only going to have to find ourselves a new rock to live on, we'll have to terraform it.
As we humans evolve, whether we live forever or we climb into a computer, we are going to need a lot more energy.
So we'll need to build a power soaking megastructure called the Dyson Sphere.
The Dyson Sphere will surround the sun, absorb and store all its energy and power our technology throughout the solar system.
This influx of energy will allow us to launch ourselves into the great beyond, exploring outer space.
And finding resources to live on throughout the galaxies.
And when we voyage out there, you know what that means: We could run into aliens.
Will they be friend or foe? To be honest, we really don't know.
Once we've taken control of all the energy and matter in our solar system, our society will mature even further.
Becoming so advanced, that scientists and Sci-Fi alike can barely bring into focus what our world will look like.
And before we get to that wildest, most far out future scenario, let's start here on earth with the transformation that is happening all around us.
Imagine you are an engineer trying to crack the code for our survival.
You accidentally drop a cup, it shatters.
But then it reforms, into something else, something you need, like the model of the wind turbine you've been sketching.
Then, scale way on up, and you can see how it becomes the tech that will save our coastlines from imminent peril.
Oscar: Did you hear about Manhattan? Eva: Yeah, it washed away in the latest storm surge.
Oscar: Watch.
Solar power.
Enough to power half of the east coast.
Now in bad weather conditions, it becomes a wind turbine.
Which in turn becomes a sea defense, capable of reacting to any force that comes its way.
The stronger the wave, the stronger the wall.
Eva: How? Oscar: Programmable matter.
It works.
Eva: This could buy us some time? Narrator: So how do you get from a broken cup to having a world full of objects that can morph at the flick of a switch? Well, Sci-Fi has already imagined it.
Rose Eveleth: The Sci-Fi that I think is actually the closest on this is Big Hero 6.
Where they have all these little tiny nano metal thingies, and then you can tell it to assemble.
George Dvorsky: This matter could basically become super-flexible and take on any form, any shape that it desires.
Anders Sandberg: Normal matter is dumb.
I can't tell a silicon chip to turn into a window or a wall.
But what if it was composed of smart machines that could respond to signals and reorganize themselves.
Well in that case, we might have matter that you could actually program.
Narrator: Welcome to programmable matter.
Charles Soule: At a certain point, when you have these technology levels energy and matter become very fluid things.
Like a rock is not a rock.
A rock is, is raw materials and fuel.
It can become kind of anything you want it to be.
Skylar Tibbits: We know that we have outdated and failing infrastructure, roads, pipes, bridges, and that's going to require an investment in innovation.
Because we don't just want to build it the way it was.
Narrator: At the self assembly lab, scientists are working on creating matter that can transform itself into the shape of anything you need in any given moment.
Skylar Tibbits: Our infrastructure in the future should not just be over-engineered and bulky and static.
We've focused on making materials that can transform physically.
Narrator: You heard that right.
Programmable matter will make our roads and buildings tighten during an earthquake so they won't crumble.
It will make cities able to withstand the strong winds and rising tides of a hurricane.
Once buildings are built, they will never break.
Skylar Tibbits: There's a number of examples that we could imagine.
The roof can transform based on wind or sun or rain and become stronger, flexible, more porous, more waterproof.
You know, adapting materials can adapt to all sorts of crazy climate and weather fluctuations.
Narrator: It's as if all the materials in our world today are asleep and in the future they will wake up.
Yet, while programmable matter will be a game-changer, there is a universe where it becomes just a band-aid.
The fury of mother nature might be too strong, even for an artificially intelligent climate crusader like our future daughter, Jess.
Jess: We ran into some obstacles in the engineering of the new bio-terrains.
We knew we'd have to flood some of this coastline, but, we had to decide between losing the city or losing everything on the peninsula.
Narrator: The problem with resources is that they are finite.
Even in the future, we will never have enough of them to go around.
And when we decide who gets them, there will be casualties.
Jess: You okay, Dad? Oscar: Yeah.
Narrator: Jess was hoping that programmable matter could help stop rising water levels.
But she's finding out the hard way that it can't keep us safe forever.
Whatever we do, at some point, the earth will become uninhabitable and that is when we'll have to leave the earth.
We'll have to find a planet that's kind of a fixer-upper.
A place that humans can terraform.
Which means we will manipulate its ecosystem to make it habitable for us.
But making an entire planet bend to our will is going to be anything but easy.
Narrator: In the far future, natural disasters and some kind of horrific extinction event will make the earth completely uninhabitable.
So we will need a plan "B.
" Michio Kaku: As an insurance policy against asteroid impacts, against super volcanoes and ice ages, I think it's a good idea to have a spare planet out there, in case we have doomsday on the Planet Earth.
Narrator: Good idea.
But after we tackle the challenge of finding a spare planet.
We'll need to bring her up to human specs.
And that my friends will require some next-level engineering, which we call terraforming.
Peter Diamandis: Our toolset for actually engineering is becoming stronger and stronger.
And of course, our toolset 30 years from now will be far more advanced, because we'll have quantum computing that understands how to look at natural systems.
We'll have AI to help us monitor things.
We'll have nanotechnology.
So the idea of actually terraforming a planet is going to be, I don't want to use this term, but you know, quite simple.
Narrator: Simple enough for you to say, but for the rest of us it still feels like we're going to be building a pyramid from scratch, in space.
Chuck Nice: Space is a hostile place, people.
It's a hostile place.
Do I want to go live there? No, I like it right here on earth where over a few billion years it has made things extremely comfortable for me, and that's what I want.
Narrator: If it's comfort you want, it's comfort you'll get.
In the future we'll be able to modify a planet's atmosphere, temperature, and ecology, and we'll also change ourselves to ensure that we not only survive, but adapt and thrive.
Negin Farsad: I'm going to be honest with you.
In terms of traveling to other planets, I'm not a huge fan of the idea because to put on a mask to breathe just doesn't sound like a fun vacation to me.
Narrator: The early days of adjusting to a partially terraformed planet will probably be a bit uncomfortable.
The first steps usually are; Just look at our series, "Mars" or "The Martian".
But believe it or not, the Red Planet is one of the closest to being move-in ready.
George Dvorsky: What's exciting about Mars is that it's within this happy zone in terms of its distance from the sun.
It has critical ingredients on there that we can work with in terms of water and oxygen.
Matt Mira: And it only takes 19 minutes for a radio signal to get back to earth so I would never feel too disconnected from humanity and where it started, and it seems like a good size and it seems like a good place to start so I would get my ass to Mars.
Narrator: Great.
But how are we going to get Matt to Mars? Let me take you a step further and show you one path to terraforming the Red Planet.
First, we will beam energy at Mars' polar ice caps, heating the planet, and melting the ice.
The melted ice will flow along the surface, and evaporate into the air.
This will create a greenhouse effect, warming the atmosphere.
And it needs to warm a lot.
The average temperature currently on the planet is minus 80 fahrenheit.
Not exactly balmy.
But eventually, the climate will heat up and the first colonists will use the water to irrigate crops.
We'll have food, water, energy, and land, a foundation for sustaining future human life.
Rose Eveleth: It would be a huge endeavor, right? Just the engineering question of getting.
I mean, we don't send that many people to space, right? Um, the idea of taking humans, plural, up into space, I mean that is just an incredible amount of energy and resources and planning, and all of that.
Narrator: Thinking about re-programming a whole planet seems impossible.
But mankind has been moving into hostile environments and making them habitable for thousands of years.
Look what happened to a small barren rock in the middle of the Atlantic ocean after the father of evolution made a pit stop.
Sam Weber: It's like another world.
When you come from the UK or some other green nation, you land in the airfield amongst the lava and the cinders, I've never been anywhere quite like it before.
In the 1830s, Charles Darwin visited ascension on his voyage around the world on the Beagle.
It was very young, lots of barren, volcanic lava flows.
There was no natural running fresh water.
Narrator: When Darwin arrived, Ascension Island might as well have been Mars.
He could breathe air there, but there was no edible food, and no fresh water.
It was not habitable for humans in the long term.
Sam Weber: Obviously, when Darwin would visit this issue of trying to get water and get food was the chief concern of the time, for the military that were based here.
Darwin would have seen that himself.
And after he returned to the UK, the idea of vegetating green mountain to try and increase the water supply, was gradually put together with his great friend, Joseph Hooker, who later became the director of the royal botanic gardens at Kew.
And over the latter part of the 19th century, they began bringing in hundreds of species of plants, to vegetate the island.
Narrator: Darwin and Hooker sent a Noah's ark of plants and trees, chosen to transform the island, and to create fresh water.
And we'll have to send a similar care package in order to terraform a place like Mars.
Sam Weber: Some species were brought in to create pasture for cows, uh, and sheep.
Other species were brought in as wind breaks.
And some, like this huge ficus tree we can see behind us, were brought in to strip the moisture out of these mists blowing across the mountain, uh, which is dripping down on us now.
And uh, increase the water supply in the wells that they dug.
Narrator: After two centuries, Ascension Island has been transformed, and Darwin and Hooker's attempt at proto-terraforming the island for humans was a success.
But, we can't ignore the flipside to terraforming a barren rock, with its own native ecology.
Sam Weber: Well this area where we are now in, in the mid-elevation regions would have been incredibly barren when, when Hooker and Darwin first visited the island.
Uh, much of the low-lying plain around, around coastal regions were coated in lava and ash fields.
The introductions that Darwin and Hooker and others carried out fundamentally changed the ecology of Ascension Island.
Introduced species, by their nature, they, they lack the normal controls that were keeping them in check in their native habitats.
So once they arrive, they often run amok, uh, and can't exist in balance with the ecosystems they invade.
Narrator: On Mars or Ascension or anywhere, really, when you change an ecosystem, there will be winners and losers.
On Ascension, humans made the island livable, but at the expense of the natural habitat.
Sam Weber: Hooker knew what the consequences of his actions were likely to be, but Hooker obviously made a value judgment at that time, securing water and food was far more important than any kind of modern conservation imperative.
So he pressed ahead.
It's always going to be a problem when, when people's needs come into conflict with wildlife.
Narrator: What's the extinction of a few plants compared with the extinction of humanity? Right? Well, not really.
That's too short sighted.
What creature was eating those ferns? And what predator was eating the creature that was eating those ferns? Will they all go extinct? And in the end, will those extinctions lead to our own? This likely won't be a problem on Mars.
As far as we know, there are no lifeforms there.
But what if we need to terraform someplace else? Some futurists think option "B" might be Jupiter's moon, Europa.
Why? Because it looks like it could be covered in water and water means the possibility of life.
Eva's scientific colleagues are getting ready to set up a colony there, and they're putting the hard sell on her to join them.
If Europa is incubating life in its waters, shouldn't Eva, a geneticist by trade, be rushing to work there? Eva: Why not just port there? It's not exactly welcoming to biological life.
Well, apart from the biological forms in its oceans.
Woman: Exactly.
This is a geneticist's dream.
Man: This is the only other non-terrestrial life we've found in our galaxy so far.
Man: We've been fantasizing about this for decades.
Eva: But what, what about the radiation on Europa, and the temperatures? Woman: We're not saying there aren't risks.
Man: We're saying, it's worth it.
Eva: I need to be here.
Man: We'll call you when we get there.
Woman: Bye.
Narrator: If we've learned anything from Ascension Island, colonizing a place that has existing life forms raises a lot of challenges both practical and ethical.
In another echo of Ascension Island, when we terraform Europa, we run the risk of potentially destroying mirco-organisms that could eventually evolve into intelligent life.
Annalee Newitz: We're creatures that evolved in the water, and that's why Europa seems so interesting, because we're fairly certain that there is a massive ocean underneath a crust of ice.
Unfortunately, the only way we can find life is by drilling through the ice and putting a robot in the water.
So you know, uh, what could go wrong? N.
K.
Jemisin: We're going to this other world, and even with the best of intentions, we might end up doing kind of tremendous harm.
Annalee Newitz: In the movie 2010, the sequel to 2001, there's an often-quoted moment where the aliens say to the humans, all these worlds are yours except Europa.
Attempt no landings there.
Narrator: Not only could we end life on Europa, one wrong move and Europa could end us.
A planet with life means biological hazards left and right.
Forget little green men with ray guns, what we should really fear is a virus or germ that our bodies can't handle, an invasive species that invades us.
Martin Rees: If we found life, even simple life, we ought to not let it contaminate us on earth.
So we would treat any planet which turned out to have life on it, rather as we treat the Antarctic, as a sort of natural wilderness.
Annalee Newitz: One of my hopes is that, as we move to other planets or moons, that we always consider our work to be not turning it into Earth, but creating little pockets of habitable space for humans, and huge areas that are just the natural habitat.
Because we don't want to make the mistake that we've made on earth so many times, where we go into a habitat that doesn't contain humans, and just wreck all of the creatures that live there.
Narrator: And Europa is the most likely place we would run into that life.
And like any colonial civilization, keeping the settlers safe is critical to our survival as a species.
Eva's been examining the genes of Europa's settler remotely, since they landed.
And it looks like there's a problem.
Eva: Oh, stop.
Oscar: What? Eva: It's mutated.
- Oscar: Is that bad? - Eva: That's catastrophic.
It's an extremely delicate ecosystem which we're trying to leave unscathed.
And if we don't contain it, we.
Okay, compose message to the Europa colony.
Status, urgent.
Please implement, stat.
For your safety and the well-being of Europa.
Stay safe, guys.
Who knew it would be this easy to change the world, huh? Narrator: survival deeper and deeper into tSe cosmos won't always be welcoming.
Even though the human race will ultimately thrive, there may be casualties along the way.
Space, it's dangerous out there! We've left earth, terraformed Mars, and encountered life in the depth's of Europa's crust.
All that space exploration and travel doesn't come without a cost.
And much of that cost will likely need to be paid in energy! And we'll get that energy from a huge megastructure called a Dyson Sphere That we will build around the sun.
Narrator: If we've learned anything so far, it's that making the solar system habitable for future humans is no small feat.
Our existence will become so advanced and complex that we are going to need energy on a level that our brains have only begun to imagine.
Brian Greene: As we look at technological growth, we find that it's increasing exponentially.
But of course, then the power needs are going up exponentially, too.
So you can look into the future and say, where are we ever going to muster the kind of power that we'll need in the far future? We can't get it just on planet earth.
So you go to a nearby object that has enough power to meet your needs, which would be the sun.
Charles Soule: Every star is potentially a source of energy, every star in the sky is something that we could use within our civilization to advance ourselves.
Rose Eveleth: If we had the ability to get all of the energy of our sun and use it, we would solve so many conflicts that are existing right now.
There wouldn't be the need to drill for oil, there wouldn't be the need to burn coal.
Narrator: Drilling for oil and burning coal will seem like the stuff of cave men.
When we harness the power of the sun, the once limited resource of energy will now become near unlimited.
We'll have one less thing to fight wars over, and our ever-expanding populace will always be able to keep the lights on, indefinitely.
Enter the Dyson Sphere.
Brian Greene: A Dyson Sphere is an idea that Freeman Dyson put forward a long time ago.
And the idea simply is, you've got a star out there, this big, burning nuclear furnace, 150 million kilometers away.
Why not encase it in a big sphere, if you will, that can capture all the energy that otherwise would just stream off into space.
Annalee Newitz: So you literally build a shell around the sun, and live on the inside of the shell.
And that way, you can suck up every single possible photon and convert it into energy for your civilization.
Baratunde Thurston: Our creativity, married to technology, will find new sources of energy, and we'll be able to harness power from the sun in a way that we couldn't imagine yet.
Chuck Nice: So fear not, people.
It's okay.
I'm lying.
I'm scared to death.
Narrator: Building something as big and complicated as the Dyson Sphere is a little scary.
But what will our solar powered civilization look like? Will we even still have human forms? Some futurists thinks the Dyson Sphere will be used to power up the metaverse, the real life matrix computer world we may all eventually live inside of.
Charles Soule: And we're living inside this box, orbiting the sun, all of human consciousness, all of us put together in this beautiful puddle of minds.
It sounds like, it's magic, right? It's when magic and science become kind of the same thing.
Narrator: Whether we will be human bodies or human code we're going to need big energy, and big science to make a Dyson Sphere because it's just so big.
Current human life uses about 15 trillion watts of power.
A Dyson Sphere could be able to extract 4 times 10 to the 26 Watts of power.
That's 26 zeros after the one.
Think about that for a moment.
26.
Still going.
Rose Eveleth: I mean, just like the scale at which this exists, right.
The, if, this is bigger than a death star.
This is bigger than like, you know, like that's no moon, no, that's no sun, like it's huge.
Narrator: The Dyson Sphere would be enormous, a gigantic globe that would include not only the earth, but every planet between us and the sun.
The Dyson Sphere would be capable of powering all of the tech inside of it, and even outside of it.
Remember that colony we set up on Europa? It may be outside the Dyson Sphere, but it's still using it as a giant super battery.
So how are we going to start the biggest construction job ever attempted in the history of the known universe? The Dyson Sphere is 600 million times bigger than the surface of earth, so that means we need more matter than we have on this planet.
We will have to find what we need out in space, from other planets and on asteroids, which are chock full of iron and other metals.
Rose Eveleth: Asteroid mining is the next big thing in space.
I mean, they're already, NASA is building big nets to catch asteroids, to mine them.
Charles Soule: If we can just, like, bring, like, asteroid mining online and, and can just access all of that stuff out there, then we could build an entirely new society.
Narrator: But there's a potential wrinkle with mining asteroids: Who owns these huge, potentially lucrative gold mines? Whoever gets there first.
Peter Diamandis: And some of the asteroids we have targeted are half a kilometer in size, and they're on the open market, trillion-dollar assets.
Rose Eveleth: We've already had a couple of political fights about the moon, right.
We need the moon.
If somebody messes up the moon, it's a big problem.
So there's already sort of treaties about how the moon is kind of off-limits.
But asteroids are not.
And so I think that we're going to see some really interesting geopolitical conflicts over asteroids.
Narrator: Besides asteroids, we can also plunder the resources of a few planets.
George Dvorsky: Mercury and Venus.
These planets are dead, there's no life on it, they really serve no purpose and it'll be exceptionally difficult to terraform them.
Mercury, in particular.
So why not use that mass for our needs? Narrator: It's a solar system-wide renovation.
Here's how it will work.
First we'll build a factory on the surface of Mercury.
Robots will melt and manufacture materials for solar panels, that will help power even more and more production.
Next, we launch these solar panels into space, position them in place around the sun to form the massive Dyson Sphere.
Anders Sandberg: So you would start by putting an automated factory on the surface.
Solar powered, it churns out robots to dig up material, melt it together to make more solar panels and more robots and more mining equipment.
After a while, you've covered much of the surface of Mercury with these factories.
Then we start making launch devices to launch solar panels into space.
Narrator: We'll have access to nearly unlimited energy and this floating sphere will allow production to speed up exponentially.
George Dvorsky: You'll start to see the entire sun enveloped by this massive bubble of solar panels.
And, from an outside observer, the sun will largely have been extinguished, because now, inside that zone, we're capturing all of the solar energy available, through the Dyson Sphere, to be able to power it and supply, you know, our civilization with its energy needs.
Chuck Nice: Hopefully we will have, I'm going to say it, flying cars.
Narrator: I know, it does seem like this giant sphere is just as fantastical as a flying car.
But it's the most logical and efficient use of a star's power that humanity has dreamed up.
And, in 2015, researchers at SETI noticed a star whose light flickers mysteriously.
Some theorize that the light pattern indicates that the star is surrounded by a Dyson Sphere.
That's how much some members of the scientific community believe an advance civilization would depend on this kind of megastructure.
But with anything this big, it's likely we may have to do a little troubleshooting along the way.
Brian Greene: One of the issues with a Dyson Sphere is that it will warm up, because it's surrounding the sun, and then it will start to radiate energy in its own right.
Do you just let that energy itself now go off into space and be wasted, or do you have another sphere that captures the waste energy of the first sphere, and make use of it.
Narrator: So we'll have a sphere outside the Dyson Sphere that will suck up every last bit of energy.
And we'll need it once we are so technologically advanced that every bit of power will count.
But at some point the sun's energy not going to be enough energy.
Mars and Mercury will run out of resources.
And all of us, include Eva and Oscar, who have digitally uploaded to the metaverse, will have to make the hardest of choices and abandon earth once and for all.
Eva: We must maximize our energy efficiency.
We don't have the materials.
Mercury will be gone by the time we're done here.
Oscar: We can move onto Venus.
Mine it, too.
And then, after? Eva: Are you sure? Oscar: Well, if we don't have enough resources, we might have to.
Eva: But, that's our home.
Oscar: It was.
But we've moved on.
And those who haven't, we can relocate.
Narrator: It will be a sad moment when we have to leave our planet behind.
But since we'll all be digital, we don't really need it to exist.
So where does humanity go from here? How do you level up when you have colonised solar system and become post-human? Brian Greene: The natural next step, beyond Dyson Spheres, if we're able to harness the energy of individual stars, would be to harness the energy of the Galaxy.
Narrator: One of the reasons we fight over resources is because of the question of ownership.
One country has oil, the other country wants it.
But once we start looking beyond our solar system for resources, the question of who owns what gets a little more interesting.
Annalee Newitz: Say we use up our whole solar system, and then we say, alright, well, we used up the whole solar system, let's go over to, you know, the next solar system.
Eventually, we are going to run into a civilization, or even just lifeforms, that are actually using that matter.
N.
K.
Jemisin: If we decide, as a species, yeah, alright, let's, let's turn Mercury into a lawn, I don't think that's a huge problem.
It's when we go somewhere else, where there are other people, where we're like, hey, let's turn their Mercury into a lawn.
And they're like, "no, we actually really" like that Mercury.
"Could you not?" Narrator: We've left our planet.
We've claimed and mined others.
We've harnessed the complete energy of the sun.
But we've done it alone, and on our own terms.
But eventually, we're not going to be alone.
Once we expand our reach as a civilization, who will we meet? And will they be happy to see us? Narrator: Earth has become unlivable because of a disaster or just wear and tear and we now live somewhere in outer space.
So far, it's just us humans out there, but it might not always be so.
We're bound to run into some weird-looking alien creatures on one planet or another, right? Martin Rees: It's such a fascinating question.
It's the question I'm most often asked, when people know I'm an astronomer.
The question, whether we are alone in the universe, or whether there's other intelligence.
There are billions of earth-like planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy.
And many of them could harbor life.
Narrator: Billions of earth-like planets? Well, then it does seem likely that we are not alone.
Imagining what the aliens look like out here has practically become a cottage industry for Sci-Fi.
Matt Mira: Nothing terrified me more as a kid than those gray aliens that I would see on "unsolved mysteries".
Where people would get abducted, you know? "Unsolved Mysteries", you play the music and if you are my age you're terrified of either being abducted by step parents or being abducted by aliens.
Negin Farsad: I saw the movie "Arrival" and I like I liked the idea of aliens just sort of like forming in your face.
Like, they're not like, "Hello, shake my hand, I'm an alien.
" Chuck Nice: I like The Alien alien with the mouth out of the mouth and his like little teeny mouth that comes, and why do you need that, honestly? That's just a little gratuitous, but who cares? It's awesome.
Narrator: So why hasn't Mr.
Spock, or Alf, or Chewbacca come down here to have a drink with us at the cantina? Futurists all have different theories! Matt Mira: I don't know if there's any alien life out there.
The numbers tell us it should be, but if there is intelligent life, then where is it? We should have seen it by now.
It should have contacted us.
Anders Sandberg: A disturbing possibility might be that intelligence is actually fairly common, but it just doesn't last very long.
The Milky Way is literally more than 10 billion years old.
There could have been intelligence, billions of years ago, and we would not be able to see the traces.
Charles Soule: But the odds of that our civilization is going to have started roughly around the same time as theirs did and it's going to be close enough for us to sort of, like, get in contact with each other, to me the odds seem extraordinarily high against it.
Rose Eveleth: It's just such a huge universe.
Of course it's hard to find other things.
Maybe they're having this exact same conversation, right, where they're saying, where is everybody else, like what's going on? Narrator: Either we've missed each other by a few billion years or a few billion light years.
And there are other possibilities.
Oscar and Eva have decided to live in the metaverse.
Who's to say that other alien species haven't decided to do the same themselves? Could that be the eventual end point for all intelligent life? Philip Rosedale: Maybe, as soon as everybody becomes smart enough, they just build virtual worlds, and they don't spend that much time flying around, looking at all these other worlds.
If virtual worlds folded up inside of computers represent such a vast space of possibilities, then logically speaking, the aliens wouldn't necessarily hang out here that much, because here is a kind of an almost empty desert, where there's very little life at all.
Maybe we're about to start doing the same thing.
Maybe we'll never go that far into space, or that many of us, because we just kind of go inside the computers.
Narrator: So maybe aliens are living on a computer cloud millions and millions of miles away, living their best virtual lives.
But who's to say we would even recognize alien life if we saw it? And who's to say that alien life would even recognize us? Martin Rees: I do worry about the extent to which we are limited by the capacity of our own brain.
We have to bear in mind that there could be some aspects of reality which our brains will never understand.
Matt Mira: There's the theory that it has contacted us, and we were too dumb to understand what it was saying.
Narrator: It's possible aliens just don't want to hang out with us.
Do they not think we're cool enough? We have iPhones and we're on our way to having a Dyson Sphere, so what gives? Brian Greene: You know, when we walk by an ant hill, we don't feel compelled to go have dinner with the ants.
They're not that interesting to us.
And if there is this advanced civilization out there, we're like the ants.
Why would they come? For what reason? Not enough pull.
Nothing compelling here for them to come and visit.
Narrator: Well, even if the aliens don't find us compelling, I am not too offended.
I'd say we've grown exponentially as a civilization.
We've even made our entire solar system our home.
We may or may not have met aliens, but we have definitely harnessed or used up every bit of power and matter we have available to us.
But when we've done these incredible things, what next? Turns out advanced civilization can, in the immortal words of "Spinal Tap", 'go to 11.
' it's up to us to imagine how.
Narrator: So, we've arrived.
Humankind is now a solar-system-spanning civilization, with colonies across multiple planets and moons.
We've colonized space and prolonged the human race.
The crazy part is: We're only halfway to achieving the full imagined potential of any race.
Rose Eveleth: A civilization can sometimes be judged by how efficient it uses its energy, and there is this concept that sort of ranks civilizations based on how much energy they can get from their sun or suns around it.
Narrator: According to Soviet astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, civilizations can be ranked according to how much energy they have at their disposal.
He created a three-tiered scale to define and measure how advanced a society is.
Anders Sandberg: The Kardashev scale is a kind of shorthand for looking at the sizes or powers of civilizations.
So a level I civilization uses all the energy on the planet.
Brian Greene: The next step would be hey, can you go further and harness all of the sun's energy.
That's what a Dyson Sphere ultimately would be.
They'd be a, a billion times more efficient at grabbing the sun's energy than we can possibly do here on our lonely planet Earth.
Narrator: And the third level would be beyond the Dyson Sphere, where we'd figure out how to suck up all the energy in the galaxy.
Right now, humans aren't even at a level one.
And we've only imagined up to level two in science fiction.
Anders Sandberg: One could compare the Kardashev scale to some pop culture references.
So imagine Coruscant, a city that covers an entire planet in "Star Wars".
That would be a level I civilization.
A level II civilization would be a Dyson shell surrounding a star.
It shows up in some episodes of Star Trek, but Kardashev level III civilizations very rarely show up in pop culture, because it's so hard to even depict what it means to harness an entire galaxy.
Narrator: That's right, Hollywood can't even imagine what a type III civilization will look like.
It's just too big for our limited 21st century minds.
But if we can't even begin to imagine what a level III Kardashev race looks like, how can we ever achieve it? And more importantly, before we start on this future-forward journey, can we make sure that when we fan out across the universe, we won't make the same mistakes we made on earth that will force us to leave the planet? Annalee Newitz: All of the outer planets would've been converted into the Dyson sphere, to build it.
So, the Dyson Sphere could be kind of an ecological disaster at a solar system level.
Rose Eveleth: Space exploration is colonization, and I think that's an important thing to think about, because if we decide we want to colonize something, that often means that we are killing and stealing.
Baratunde Thurston: Part of what we have happening with the way technology is unleashed on the world, is that people just do it.
And then the consequences be damned.
They come later.
We don't care what it does to the environment.
I mean, the automobile is a great example of like a super-awesome invention that is killing the planet.
Narrator: In other words, if we do get to level two, the Dyson Sphere, we may screw up the universe the way we did up our planet.
And that means humankind won't last until level 3.
If we're going to leave the planet, we need to do so consciously and carefully.
Greenhouse gas emissions and global warming didn't worry Henry Ford a century ago when he was inventing the Model T.
And now we can cross the country by car in a week, but we won't have a polar ice cap.
Chuck Nice: So my suggestion is, why don't we just take care of this planet? How about we do that? You know, it's kind of like, yeah, why don't we throw away the dishes cause I don't feel like washing them? Like that's the idea that we have towards this earth and I don't think it's realistic.
Negin Farsad: Like we should spend all that money on making sure earth is awesome and like literally none of it on Mars.
Narrator: What if we decide that instead of finding new ways to explore the outer reaches of space, we make the earth work for us? It'd certainly be a lot more comfortable here.
Chuck Nice: The kind of space travel that we need to do right now, you have to sacrifice pretty much everything in order to do it.
Like, I couldn't go to space.
If you told me right now I had the opportunity to go, even to like the Kuiper Belt and back, I wouldn't do it.
Charles Soule: I like traveling to places, right, but I also like coming home to my own place where, like, I have my own Netflix and I've got my own, you know, the food that I'm familiar with and all those things.
Like, there's a reason we don't live in Antarctica.
I mean, humans can survive there, but it sucks.
Narrator: It's true.
Space is cool on "Star Trek", but in reality, it would indeed be very difficult.
And that's why keeping earth alive as long as possible is our most logical course of action.
For now.
The future will bring exploration: Mankind has been charting new and more difficult paths since the birth of civilization.
It doesn't seem like we're going to stop now.
Let's just hope we have learned from our mistakes, and that we'll treat our galaxy better than we've treated our forests and our oceans.
After all, outer space is the last great uncharted territory, filled with substances and structures we can only imagine.
So get ready for Dark Matter, Wormholes, and Parallel Universes.