Year Million (2017) s01e06 Episode Script
Beyond the Cosmos
1 NARRATOR: So, here we are.
Humanity has merged with artificial intelligence.
We've created a solar system-wide Dyson Sphere that will power our technologically-heavy lives.
And now Oscar and Eva are getting ready to see their friend who left Earth behind to colonize planets in far-flung galaxies.
OSCAR: When will she be here? EVA: Any minute.
OSCAR: How long has it been since we've seen her? EVA: Years.
OSCAR: That's crazy.
NARRATOR: In the deep future, revolutionizing space travel also means we'll have to rethink the human form.
EVA: Sajani.
SAJANI: Eva, you haven't aged a day.
EVA: Oh.
Wow, you look SAJANI: A little different? Yeah.
NARRATOR: Yes, those are gills.
They'll come in handy if we need to breathe underwater on some kind of ocean-covered planet.
They also might be the beginning of the end of the human race as we know it.
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.
I've shown you a version of the future when in the Year Million era humanity as we know it will have undergone such a radical transformation, we can hardly imagine what it will mean to be human.
MICHIO KAKU: By the time we're at the Year Million, we will be a galactic civilization.
We'll be able to roam the galactic space lanes, to play with black holes, and leap through a wormhole.
And you may say, well, why? NARRATOR: Why? Well, because A) it's cool, and B) because we need to find a few spare planets where we can chill for a second in order to survive any sort of extinction event here on Earth.
RANGA-RAM CHARY: All species that have undergone a major boom have also undergone a major bust.
GEORGE DVORSKY: An asteroid hits the planet once every 200,000 years.
So if we're talking about half a million to a million year timescales, we should at least anticipate one, if not several of those events, on the scale that drove the dinosaurs to extinction.
CHUCK NICE: The Earth will continue.
We just won't.
NARRATOR: I understand.
The end of the human race on Earth is tough to think about.
But the good news is that we are a pretty resilient species, and more importantly, we've got a nearly unquenchable lust for exploration baked deep into our collective bones.
KAKU: I think we have a curiosity gene, a gene within us that says, what's on the other side of that hill? So there will always be restless people who will want to go to Mars just for the hell of it.
NARRATOR: So when we find ourselves looking for another rock to park on, that wanderlust, that craving for thrills, chills, and adventure, will ultimately be the saving grace of our species.
Right now, all of our eggs are here in the Earth basket.
If we plan on surviving, we need to scatter those eggs around the galaxy.
ANDERS SANDBERG: If an intelligent species starts spreading between the stars, it's pretty unlikely to go extinct.
NARRATOR: So if we are going to launch ourselves into galaxies far, far away, we've got a little work to do first.
Here's how we human beings will achieve intergalactic travel.
First we'll need to understand the effects of extreme space travel on our bodies.
Because it'll be even harder on us than that little chip shot of a trip to Mars.
That's when our future tech will serve us well, since we will send out artificially intelligent robots.
They will be our advance team, helping us travel deeper into space.
They'll terraform planets for us, and have them all set up before we even leave our atmosphere.
And when we do decide to depart from Earth, we'll need to rethink whatever space bus we'll be driving.
And humanity, through gene manipulation, changes into another species.
One that could withstand the toxic environment of whatever exoplanet we've decided to make our home.
And while we're out rocketing between far-flung stars, we'll probably come face to face with ideas that are now only theoretical.
We may discover parallel universes, where every choice, every possibility, exists in tandem.
And hopefully, we will finally be able to understand the greatest mystery of all dark matter.
The elusive, invisible material that the universe is made of theoretically.
I know, that's millions of light-years of information.
So let's look at how we are going to get ourselves not just to Mars and other planets in our solar system, but farther out, to other galaxies.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Thousands of years from now, whatever we've evolved into, whatever we've become, we're going to look back in time at these next few decades as the moment in time when the human race irreversibly has moved off the planet.
CHARLES SOULE: I'd like to think I'd go up in a rocket and fly into space.
But as far as high-risk occupations, astronaut is pretty, pretty up there.
MAN: The men rose early, ate breakfast, and dressed in their space suits.
NARRATOR: Being an astronaut's pretty much every kid's dream job.
But most kids only think of going to the moon or Mars.
We're talking about traveling for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years.
DVORSKY: The human body was definitely not meant to work and function in space, and it does a very poor job of it.
SYD MEAD: These guys up in orbit, they come down after up there about eight months to a year, they can't walk, they're helpless.
They're like little, little babies.
NARRATOR: When we start talking about intergalactic travel, that's when we need to figure out how to stay strong for a lot more than just a year.
NARRATOR: Here at the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO for short, scientists are figuring out how to keep astronauts in space for extended periods of time.
You heard me right NASA's got a space station 60 feet below sea level.
It's one of the closest things we have on Earth to the no-gravity, or more accurately, microgravity environment of space.
And like space, it is stressful and isolated.
A perfect real-life simulation for deep space astronauts.
DAWN KERNAGIS: It's like a very long scuba dive.
So essentially we are diving for days.
We were actually weighted out to simulate partial microgravity.
The setup was that we were rigged to be like we were walking on the surface of Mars.
NARRATOR: Astronauts live in small, pressurized pods, just like the space station, with daily excursions that mimic space walks.
Here, scientists hope to unlock the secrets of staying healthy in space, no matter how long we need to be out there.
NARRATOR: And they've already got some answers.
KERNAGIS: I study how to help humans work to the best of their abilities in extreme environments.
We were looking at molecular-level changes in response to living with a crew of people in a small environment, and there's changes at the epigenetic level.
NARRATOR: It turns out that the hardships of space travel aren't just limited to the effects of microgravity.
It can affect the very building blocks of who we are.
Space travel can change our genes, maybe even permanently, in what are called epigenetic changes.
KERNAGIS: Things like psychological remoteness, stress, or diet, or exercise, can change how our genes are read.
And we actually can pass those on to our offspring.
What we want to attain eventually is when you see Spock going with the device where it scans you and diagnoses you.
SPOCK: Severe heart damage.
KERNAGIS: That's what we're aiming for.
NARRATOR: So, no problem.
Once genetic engineering becomes an everyday doctor's tool, we can just fix any broken genes before the problem expresses itself in the body.
And that'll be important not only for us, but for future generations that may have to be born out in space.
NICE: To go to Proxima Centauri, which is, you know, our closest neighbor, you would have to send generations into space.
It would have to be, wow, these people are going to be born, the next people are going to be born, the next people are going to be born, those people will die.
And now, I'm out.
Thank you, goodnight.
NARRATOR: If we could travel at the speed of light, that would cut down on our travel time immensely.
But no one is sure that we can ever get around the laws of physics to make that possible.
Luckily, in the future, we'll have designed artificial intelligence who can do our dirty work for us.
While we humans wait in comfort here on Earth, our robot explorers will voyage into space to find a nice parking spot for us, and even set up colonies for us to live on.
At some point, traveling to planets like Mars in our solar system will be like a trip to the park.
Totally last week's news.
Going to deep space will be what all the cool kids are talking about.
But we can't do it alone.
MICHAEL GRAZIANO: Space travel is really hard for humans.
We don't live long enough to go anywhere interesting.
But artificial intelligence is just fundamentally different.
It can live indefinitely, it can be engineered to live in space.
It can swim through space, like fish in water.
NARRATOR: Artificial intelligence is our secret weapon for traveling to other galaxies.
DVORSKY: We will have generation ships, where you create these massive ships, fill them with individuals and robots or whatnot, and send it off into the depths of space.
NARRATOR: Take a look at our future AI daughter, Jess, who clearly took her father's advice to go change the world.
Jess has volunteered to lead a ship of AI and human explorers who will voyage out far into the universe to find humanity a new home.
JESS: Welcome to the ark.
Now, no matter what your backgrounds, no matter what your beliefs, you are welcome here.
These are tight quarters, and they are probably not as comfortable as what some of you are used to, but we hope that you can make yourselves feel at home here in this safe haven.
Now, if you'll all follow me.
NARRATOR: The human passengers will have the adventure of a lifetime.
But the AI on board could last for millions of years, and they won't need food or doctors.
They could even simply power down until they got to their destination.
And once they got there, they could set up some living pods for us, or just report back on what they found.
If only everything were this easy.
But it's not just about sending up robots in spaceships.
AI will help us travel through space in far more innovative ways.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: That's where space travel gets really interesting.
DIAMANDIS: We're going to be sending avatars, and we're going to transmit our consciousness and not necessarily our meat bodies to go there.
NARRATOR: Meat bodies? Really? That's just creepy.
KAKU: What will space travel look like hundreds of years from now? One possibility is something that I call laserporting.
We're going to be able to beam our consciousness into outer space at the speed of light.
You don't have to worry about accidents with a booster rocket, radiation, weightlessness, none of that, 'cause you're literally riding on a light beam, pure consciousness, going through the heavens.
We put our consciousness on a laser beam, shoot that information to the moon.
On the moon, there's a receiver.
This machine relays that information to a robot, a superhuman robot.
So your consciousness now sees through the eyes of a robot with superhuman capability.
NEGIN FARSAD: I would love to check out the rings on Saturn or Neptune.
Um, I'm just fascinated by the ring.
So, because the universe liked it, so they put a ring on it.
What? Why did I say that? I'm so embarrassed, but that, it's also a valid joke.
NARRATOR: There's another factor to consider once we are spending all of our time flying around the universe.
Spaceships are going to become, for all intents and purposes, our new homes.
According to science fiction, those ships will either be functional, industrial vessels, or flying luxury palaces.
MEAD: 'Alien, ' the first one, in that film, the spaceship was sort of a floating refinery, very mechanical, industrial-looking piece of stuff.
NICE: Me being a huge Star Trek dweeb, what I really would like to see is space travel reach a point where we leave this solar system in comfort.
I would love to see that like where a city is built in space and then that city travels to another solar system or that city moves out to explore the universe with a bunch of Earthlings.
So just imagine all of Manhattan as a floating spaceship.
NARRATOR: But comfort aside, the real issue we've got to take on is how to get those ships to go into what Star Trek called 'warp drive, ' traveling at the speed of light.
Without that, space travel is definitely a lot trickier and infinitely slower.
JON SPAIHTS: To get the kind of travel that you see in the movies, interstellar travel, is simply not possible by extrapolating from the technologies we have.
Getting any massive spacecraft to something approaching the speed of light is a very tricky proposition.
Your gas tank grows bigger and bigger, and your spaceship balloons ludicrously as you try to get close to those speeds.
And of course, it's complicated by the fact that, as you start getting closer to light speed, relativity rears its head.
NEWITZ: I think space travel is still going to be kind of grindy for a while, take a long time, and you know, you might take a vacation on another world once in a while, but it would be kind of like, you know, ship travel was 500 years ago, where you really got to be committed if you want to go across the Atlantic.
FARSAD: I have such motion sickness, like I really just don't think I could make it in a spacecraft, like I would be a nightmare, and like no amount of Dramamine would like help that situation.
NARRATOR: Dramamine probably won't help on a little jaunt to, say, the Andromeda I galaxy, which you could fly to in 2.
5 million years, if you could fly at the speed of light.
Which, right now, you can't, because of that pesky theory of relativity.
So, yes, you get it.
Until we figure out some big physics problems, intergalactic travel could take a very long time.
Which means we might want to consider looking for a shortcut through space.
And that means wormholes.
KAKU: If you could bend the fabric of space and time, and rip it, you might be able to take a shortcut, a wormhole, through the fabric of space and time.
Take a sheet of paper, and then fold it so that two ends meet in the middle, and you punch a hole straight through.
That is a wormhole.
Like the looking glass of Alice.
When Alice stuck her hand in the looking glass, her hand went from the countryside of Oxford to Wonderland.
MATT MIRA: The Lincoln Tunnel is a great example of what a wormhole could be like, but you'd have to think of it as the entrance and the exit of the Lincoln Tunnel being the same point in space.
If we can't figure out warp speed, we'll have to figure out how to create wormholes, because there's going to be no way to travel such a great distance unless we go through the wormhole.
NARRATOR: That means you could get from one point to another, thousands of light-years away as easily as walking through a door.
It's a little too good to be true.
Instead of sitting in Los Angeles traffic, just walk through a wormhole and get to work in about three seconds.
That'd be a huge hit amongst pretty much everyone who has ever taken the 405 freeway.
Maybe that's why Hollywood has had such a long-standing love affair with the wormhole.
ROSE EVELETH: Hollywood loves to use wormholes as kind of like a, oh, we need to get them from one place to another, so we're going to do some, like, cool visual effects, and we're going to send them through the wormhole, and they're going to be wherever they need to be.
MIRA: I do like a wormhole.
They're all over Star Trek.
Deep Space Nine was the guardian of that wormhole and sort of let ships pass through and didn't let ships pass through.
NICE: I got a wormhole, and I can go there.
Hmm.
I'm going to say Detroit.
It's making a comeback! I'm telling you, Detroit's making a comeback.
I would love a wormhole that could get me there and back with no problem.
Mostly back.
NARRATOR: If we could find and use a wormhole, it could be the key to opening up immediate travel to anywhere in the universe we wanted to check out.
NEWITZ: Like, we invent something like jump gates or, you know, portable wormholes or whatever, obviously all bets are off.
BARATUNDE THURSTON: It's a pretty cool idea.
Like, I want a wormhole instead of the New York City subway.
NARRATOR: Oscar even installed a wormhole in his living room to meet Eva at their remote mountain getaway seven galaxies away.
OSCAR: Eva? NARRATOR: We know Oscar is a late adopter to all things future tech, but it looks like his wormhole is something he'll be using more often than not.
EVA: Took you long enough.
NARRATOR: There is, as always, just one issue traveling through a wormhole could destabilize the tunnel, leaving any travelers stranded or dead.
Not exactly how you want an intergalactic trip to turn out.
EVELETH: And we certainly wouldn't send something we cared about into one.
NARRATOR: Right, so let's add 'shoring up wormholes' to our to-do list.
Interstellar and intergalactic travel, where we travel in our, uh, sorry, meat bodies, is going to take a lot of scientific progress before it's a reality.
As we develop technologies to take us around the universe, we'll simultaneously have to figure out how we will exist on other planets.
And that means we'll change our DNA to suit the environment around us, triggering something called speciation.
We'll be able to exist on a planet that has, say, toxic air.
The bad news is that we won't be human anymore, but we'll get to that in a minute.
NARRATOR: Humanity is going to try to explore intergalactic space, whether we do it on board a spaceship, via artificial intelligence, or through a wormhole.
But getting out there beyond our galaxy is only half the battle.
The bigger question is how humans are planning to survive wherever we decide to hang our hats.
KAKU: We will be able to tinker with our genetic heritage.
It's only a matter of time.
NARRATOR: And that's when humanity is going to start looking very different than we do today.
PHIL ROSEDALE: Space travel is going to separate us into separate colonies, you know, that'll never talk to each other again.
DIAMANDIS: We're going to become a multitude of different human species.
We are going to speciate.
NARRATOR: Meaning, we'll deliberately mutate our genetic code to ensure an upgraded version of our species survives what would be the toxic, uninhabitable environment of an exoplanet.
DIAMANDIS: We're going from what has been Darwinism, evolution by natural selection, to something different.
Evolution by intelligent direction, by our own desires.
NEWITZ: People will have modified their DNA to be more resistant to cosmic radiation, or building bodies that are better able to deal with low gravity.
Or even more radically, modifying their respiratory systems to actually be able to process the Martian atmosphere.
SANDBERG: If we go to space, over time, of course, parts of humanity are going to be very separated.
And some people might indeed go for very radical changes.
FARSAD: It just sounds entirely unpleasant to make a genetic modification to myself, to be able to like breathe Mars' air or whatever it is.
I imagine it would involve some sort of a hole in, like, placed in my person, you know what I mean? I imagine some sort of a third arm would need to be attached.
Uh, what kind of clothes would I wear with a third arm? NARRATOR: Totally hear you.
But the need for a third arm may not only be entirely necessary for survival, it may even be fashionable.
But let's not get sidetracked.
The point is, right now, some of the world's brightest minds are examining how extremophiles can survive even the harshest conditions, conditions where life shouldn't survive.
When you think about it, we have already gotten pretty comfortable with drastically modifying our bodies think cochlear implants, heart transplants, and hip replacements.
It's even tough to find someone without a tattoo these days.
But once we start changing our bodies on a much larger level, like our half-fish friend, that's when you start talking about the birth of a new species beyond humanity.
That group will become post-humans.
DVORSKY: A post-human could be a very radically redesigned genetic human.
CHURCH: We could intentionally speciate, we could make ourselves radiation resistant by just changing a handful of genes, maybe as few as four genes.
NARRATOR: That means the next incarnation of humanity will be a little like a pre-fab home We'll design it ourselves and have it built to our specifications to optimize our comfort in life.
But in order to survive on Mars we have to learn how we could survive in a Mars-like environment.
NARRATOR: It was widely believed that the Red Planet look-alike landscape of the Atacama Desert was sterile.
And then Armando discovered something remarkable.
NARRATOR: That's what we call in the business a scientific jackpot.
Life was discovered in a place that, like Mars, no one believed was possible.
NARRATOR: So if there is life here, could there be life up there? And more importantly, could these tiny desert microorganisms show us how our bodies can be adapted to live in the Mars environment? NARRATOR: Even if these little organisms don't crack the code for making us Martians, studying them might help us live on the Red Planet more comfortably.
Okay, so once we're tearing around in space, driving through wormholes from one galaxy to another, that's when we may start to bump into a few things that are truly mind-bending.
For instance, what if every time you made a decision, you didn't just leave behind a road untraveled? What if that road spun off and became a parallel universe? Makes that agonizing decision over what wireless plan to choose kind of moot, doesn't it? As we travel, ever closer, to that Year Million scenario, let's take a quick look and see just how far we've come.
Space is now our playground.
We've sent robots to every nook and cranny of the universe, and we've even mastered wormholes.
We've developed new technologies to transcend huge distances in space, and we've evolved our bodies.
But the real mind-bender? We might find that we don't have to travel beyond our doorstep to find alternative universes.
EVELETH: The way that I imagine like the parallel universe thing, is it's like, you know when you wake up and you're in a dream? You're in your house, but it's not actually your house, but it feels like your house.
OSCAR: Hey, Oscar.
You made it.
EVELETH: You are in this weird state, where you sort of are aware that something is wrong, but everything feels right.
[record scratches.]
Um, you know what? I don't, I have no idea how this works.
NICE: Hmm, let's see.
There are some that see a parallel universe as an infinite number of universes that exist alongside of the one that we live in, where things are pretty much the same, but certain things are different.
OSCAR: I don't know what's real.
OSCAR: It's all real.
NICE: And I don't want to get too much further into that, because I'll start sounding stupid, 'cause I don't know what I'm talking about.
NARRATOR: Looks like we're going to have to turn to the big guns, or at least to someone with a PhD.
BRIAN GREENE: So, in string theory, which is an attempt to realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory of all of nature's forces, we find the mathematics suggests that our universe might be one of a grand collection of realms, each of which would rightly be called a universe of its own.
Perhaps the Big Bang, which gave rise to our universe, was not a unique event.
Maybe there are many big bangs, each giving rise to its own universe.
EVELETH: What, what, what? I have some questions! NARRATOR: I think we all do.
Is there a simpler way to explain it? GREENE: I like to think of it as though we are one bubble in a big cosmic bubble bath, where the other bubbles are other universes.
SPAIHTS: The exciting idea about parallel universes is that in almost exactly the same way, when a human is born, it's possible for an ovum to split and form twins.
It is possible to imagine, in the birth agony of a universe, in that big bang, for that explosion also to split.
That means that there is another universe just like ours, separated from us by the thinnest of walls, if we only can learn how to pierce it and cross over.
THURSTON: Yeah, that's really, that's just My head's kind of spinning.
It's a funky idea.
We could have a world dominated by chimpanzees.
We could have a world where the Hindenburg didn't crash.
NARRATOR: Multiple big bangs isn't the only way to get to parallel universes.
GREENE: The many worlds approach to quantum physics says that the act of observation winds up yielding two universes, one with one outcome where you see one result, and another universe where you see a different result.
So this morning, when you're trying to decide between pancakes and eggs, and you chose eggs.
In another universe, you chose pancakes.
MARTIN REES: Both options are fulfilled, and the universe splits into one way it did happen, one way it didn't.
SPAIHTS: The most extreme notion is that we are forming universes around us at every moment.
That every atomic interaction, every choice we make, every little thing that happens, creates an explosion of universes from that moment.
THURSTON: Maybe it's just this infinite hall of mirrors.
EVELETH: There's this idea that these parallel universes sort of touch us every so often, and they slightly tweak our reality.
One example of this is that there is a large group of people on the Internet who believe that there was a movie at some point made called Shazaam, which starred Sinbad as a genie.
This movie does not exist.
Sinbad has repeatedly been like, I don't know what you're talking about.
But there are all of these people who remember and can describe the plot from a movie called Shazaam.
There is a movie called Kazaam, in which Shaquille O'Neal is a genie.
But that's not the movie they're talking about.
People really, truly believe this thing exists.
And some small subset of those people believe that they actually have crossed over from a parallel universe, in which Shazaam existed.
That's literally, I swear to God, that's literally the theory.
I'm not making this up.
I did not make this up.
NARRATOR: So is this just an Internet conspiracy, or our best documented evidence of a parallel universe? Could there really be multiple universes bumping into one another and shapeshifting around us? N.
K.
JEMISIN: I can't see why it wouldn't exist.
The more that we come to understand our universe, the more we realize it's much more complex.
Things like time are much more complex than we thought that they were.
So why wouldn't the universe be more complex, too? THURSTON: I think the value of many universes theory is that it's a reminder that we can choose to live in different ways, and that the way we exist isn't the way we have to.
NARRATOR: In fact, if there really are parallel universes, then we are all living all possibilities in another universe somewhere else.
KAKU: Many people come up to me and say, 'Professor, if there are parallel universes, then is Elvis Presley still alive in one of these parallel universes?' And the answer is, you can't rule it out.
There could be a certain probability, calculable probability that, yes, the king is still alive.
GREENE: Because all of the possible outcomes of every experiment, every observation, every happening, they all take place, just in their own distinct universe.
SPAIHTS: There may be a literally infinite number of universes.
That is to say that everything that could be possible somewhere is real.
Right next door, through the membrane separating this bubble from that bubble.
NARRATOR: So the big question is, how do we get there? Can we reach other universes? SPAIHTS: How to leap from this bubble to that bubble, is a mystery for future science or for the black arts, or for a science fiction writer to speculate irresponsibly about.
NARRATOR: So, maybe not now, or in the near future, but in Year Million, maybe, just maybe, humanity will discover a way to travel between universes.
Even now, scientists speculate that those massive gravitational fields where light goes to die, may be portals through which we can reach other universes.
DVORSKY: We might be able to exploit black holes, and how that could be a gateway to, you know, another realm that's separate from this current universe.
That holds some promise.
KAKU: The mathematics says that a spinning black hole collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons.
If you stick your hand through the ring of spinning neutrons, you wind up on another universe.
It's bizarre.
It's mind-shattering, if you think about it.
But it's something that we physicists take very seriously.
NARRATOR: Once we are able to pierce the veil and travel from one universe to the other, then there are literally no limits for us.
Even if black holes are our pathway to this final frontier of exploration, there is plenty more to figure out.
Like getting a grip on the most mysterious and pervasive concept of them all, one that has baffled scientists since they first realized it may exist.
Because dark matter is just plain bizarre, and it might be the answer to absolutely everything in the universe.
We've travelled into outer space, through wormholes.
And into parallel universes.
But the biggest, most important discovery of all may actually be all around you.
But you can't see it.
KAKU: Every high school textbook in science says that the universe is mainly made out of atoms.
Wrong.
We now know that most of the universe is not mainly made out of atoms.
NARRATOR: Instead, the universe is made up of something called dark matter.
And it is the holy grail of science.
KAKU: Dark matter is invisible matter that holds the galaxy together.
If I have dark matter in my hand right now, first of all, it would be invisible, but it has gravity.
But it would literally sift right through my fingers, 'cause it has no interactions with atoms, go all the way down to the center of the Earth, all the way down to China.
NARRATOR: We don't know too many concrete facts about dark matter.
We don't even know what it looks like or how it is made.
We just have an idea of what it does.
And this incognito stuff is definitely doing some heavy lifting, universe-wise.
MIRA: No one's ever observed it.
It's not been seen by anybody.
But we just know, based on, you know, the movement of regular matter that it should be there.
You can't scan it, you can't see it, we just have to assume that it's there based on the movements of everything else.
NARRATOR: Okay, but what is it? Is it bigger than a bread basket? Is it hard or soft, black or white or blue? KAKU: I personally think that dark matter is a higher vibration of tiny little strings.
There's another theory, however, and that is dark matter is perhaps ordinary matter hovering in a parallel universe.
DVORSKY: So, dark matter oh, boy.
NICE: So, dark matter is when Lord Voldemort invokes No.
[laughs.]
What is that force? We can't see clearly what it is.
We see darkly what it is.
KAKU: If one of you ever figure this out, what is dark matter, be sure to tell me first, and we can share the Nobel Prize together.
NARRATOR: So we can see how hard dark matter is on the brain.
Here's the thumbnail sketch on dark matter Something is holding the universe together with gravity.
And that something, the theory goes, is dark matter.
We know it is there only because we can see what it does.
GREENE: Stars should be flying off, sort of like water droplets on a bicycle rim.
You spin the rim, the water flies off, but they're not.
We believe that dark matter is what's holding it all together.
Dark matter, we believe, are likely to be particles that are wafting through space, that we believe provide the additional gravitational pull in a spinning galaxy.
NICE: I mean, dark matter, that sounds like my entire life.
I know about 4% of my life.
The other 96%, I am just trying to figure out.
And that's maybe why I like dark matter so much.
NARRATOR: So we can't visualize it or define it, which makes answering any questions about it almost impossible.
But scientists are doing everything they can to make a little bit of this stuff themselves.
Deep underground, at the European Council for Nuclear Research, sits the largest machine on the planet.
This, my friends, is the famed Large Hadron Collider.
This giant tube could reveal all the secrets to the known universe.
GREENE: The Large Hadron Collider has the capacity, at least in principle, to be a dark matter factory.
Because what it does is it slams protons together.
After they cycle around an 18-mile-long tunnel, they slam together near the speed of light.
And we believe that some of the energy from those collisions can go into producing particles of dark matter.
JILL HEINERTH: Smashing particles in the Large Hadron Collider might be the next step to discovering, you know, what's happening in the rest of dark matter, in quantum physics.
NICE: There are certain particles that we are looking for, and the Large Hadron Collider helps us find these particles.
One was the Higgs boson, which we found, and when I say we, I mean me, because I was heading up that project.
Thank you, you're welcome.
[laughs.]
NARRATOR: Thank you for that, Chuck.
Scientists have used the Hadron Collider to essentially recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
That's when dark matter was theoretically born.
The Hadron Collider could potentially generate dark matter so we could poke it and prod it and just maybe understand it.
Because if we comprehend dark matter, we could figure out things about how the universe works that have eluded us.
Dark matter could show us how to bend the laws of physics, and let us travel at the speed of light.
And it could be the answer to, well, everything.
MIRA: Eventually, it could affect all of humanity.
SPAIHTS: If we are trying to reach other stars, then we're going to need something down at the root level of reality to sink our hooks into, to invent that new technology.
And what dark matter tells us is there's something about the makeup of the cosmos that will, when we understand it, tell us something fundamentally new about the world.
GREENE: We're getting close, we think, to understanding the basic laws.
But as I say that, I know that nature loves to just grab us and slap us in the face and say, 'Get rid of that hubris, you don't actually understand anything.
' NARRATOR: To that point, there are a few out there who believe that the Hadron Collider could inadvertently cause a black hole that would swallow up the universe and everything in it.
THURSTON: Yeah, that would suck.
It's like, oops, I destroyed the universe.
We're monkeying around with some powerful forces, and you know, so we're like kids playing with matches.
You know, maybe we'll burn our house down.
NARRATOR: Well, the Swiss are known for their precision, so here's hoping that they keep their Hadron Collider well in line.
Also, you'll be happy to hear that it's an unsubstantiated theory that the Earth will get swallowed by a black hole.
If not, well, you'll be amongst the first to know.
This invisible, mysterious stuff could crack every code that's stumped scientists.
It could show us how to build an intergalactic spaceship or even how to travel through space and time.
And if we figure out how to access and manipulate it earlier, that Year Million era could be happening a hell of a lot sooner.
But once we've mastered dark matter, it's not like our journey will end there.
In our quest for knowledge, we will change humanity's destiny.
Every new discovery leads to another mystery.
Every question inspires some brave soul to set off on a journey to explore the unknown.
It is what has led us every step of the way on our incredible journey to the Year Million.
When we arrive at that future point, we will have built artificial intelligence.
JESS: Hi, Dad.
NARRATOR: We'll communicate telepathically.
[muffled conservation.]
We'll not only reengineer our DNA to resist all life-threatening diseases and viruses, we'll be able to create the ultimate sustainable biological body, designed to our exact specifications.
Then there may be a time when our descendants will choose to discard their physical bodies and live as a giant digital collective inside the metaverse.
We may look totally different, since we've altered ourselves to be able to colonize new planets.
And even beyond mere cosmetics, we could be uploaded into the digital realm, living immortal lives inside the massive Dyson Sphere.
And parallel universes and dark matter all became a reality.
Every step in humanity's maturation has led to a more fantastical leap forward in our technological development and our understanding of the universe.
What will the next million years after that be? Only our imaginations can tell.
And if there's one thing I know, it's that the human imagination is thrillingly limitless.
Humanity has merged with artificial intelligence.
We've created a solar system-wide Dyson Sphere that will power our technologically-heavy lives.
And now Oscar and Eva are getting ready to see their friend who left Earth behind to colonize planets in far-flung galaxies.
OSCAR: When will she be here? EVA: Any minute.
OSCAR: How long has it been since we've seen her? EVA: Years.
OSCAR: That's crazy.
NARRATOR: In the deep future, revolutionizing space travel also means we'll have to rethink the human form.
EVA: Sajani.
SAJANI: Eva, you haven't aged a day.
EVA: Oh.
Wow, you look SAJANI: A little different? Yeah.
NARRATOR: Yes, those are gills.
They'll come in handy if we need to breathe underwater on some kind of ocean-covered planet.
They also might be the beginning of the end of the human race as we know it.
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.
I've shown you a version of the future when in the Year Million era humanity as we know it will have undergone such a radical transformation, we can hardly imagine what it will mean to be human.
MICHIO KAKU: By the time we're at the Year Million, we will be a galactic civilization.
We'll be able to roam the galactic space lanes, to play with black holes, and leap through a wormhole.
And you may say, well, why? NARRATOR: Why? Well, because A) it's cool, and B) because we need to find a few spare planets where we can chill for a second in order to survive any sort of extinction event here on Earth.
RANGA-RAM CHARY: All species that have undergone a major boom have also undergone a major bust.
GEORGE DVORSKY: An asteroid hits the planet once every 200,000 years.
So if we're talking about half a million to a million year timescales, we should at least anticipate one, if not several of those events, on the scale that drove the dinosaurs to extinction.
CHUCK NICE: The Earth will continue.
We just won't.
NARRATOR: I understand.
The end of the human race on Earth is tough to think about.
But the good news is that we are a pretty resilient species, and more importantly, we've got a nearly unquenchable lust for exploration baked deep into our collective bones.
KAKU: I think we have a curiosity gene, a gene within us that says, what's on the other side of that hill? So there will always be restless people who will want to go to Mars just for the hell of it.
NARRATOR: So when we find ourselves looking for another rock to park on, that wanderlust, that craving for thrills, chills, and adventure, will ultimately be the saving grace of our species.
Right now, all of our eggs are here in the Earth basket.
If we plan on surviving, we need to scatter those eggs around the galaxy.
ANDERS SANDBERG: If an intelligent species starts spreading between the stars, it's pretty unlikely to go extinct.
NARRATOR: So if we are going to launch ourselves into galaxies far, far away, we've got a little work to do first.
Here's how we human beings will achieve intergalactic travel.
First we'll need to understand the effects of extreme space travel on our bodies.
Because it'll be even harder on us than that little chip shot of a trip to Mars.
That's when our future tech will serve us well, since we will send out artificially intelligent robots.
They will be our advance team, helping us travel deeper into space.
They'll terraform planets for us, and have them all set up before we even leave our atmosphere.
And when we do decide to depart from Earth, we'll need to rethink whatever space bus we'll be driving.
And humanity, through gene manipulation, changes into another species.
One that could withstand the toxic environment of whatever exoplanet we've decided to make our home.
And while we're out rocketing between far-flung stars, we'll probably come face to face with ideas that are now only theoretical.
We may discover parallel universes, where every choice, every possibility, exists in tandem.
And hopefully, we will finally be able to understand the greatest mystery of all dark matter.
The elusive, invisible material that the universe is made of theoretically.
I know, that's millions of light-years of information.
So let's look at how we are going to get ourselves not just to Mars and other planets in our solar system, but farther out, to other galaxies.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Thousands of years from now, whatever we've evolved into, whatever we've become, we're going to look back in time at these next few decades as the moment in time when the human race irreversibly has moved off the planet.
CHARLES SOULE: I'd like to think I'd go up in a rocket and fly into space.
But as far as high-risk occupations, astronaut is pretty, pretty up there.
MAN: The men rose early, ate breakfast, and dressed in their space suits.
NARRATOR: Being an astronaut's pretty much every kid's dream job.
But most kids only think of going to the moon or Mars.
We're talking about traveling for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years.
DVORSKY: The human body was definitely not meant to work and function in space, and it does a very poor job of it.
SYD MEAD: These guys up in orbit, they come down after up there about eight months to a year, they can't walk, they're helpless.
They're like little, little babies.
NARRATOR: When we start talking about intergalactic travel, that's when we need to figure out how to stay strong for a lot more than just a year.
NARRATOR: Here at the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO for short, scientists are figuring out how to keep astronauts in space for extended periods of time.
You heard me right NASA's got a space station 60 feet below sea level.
It's one of the closest things we have on Earth to the no-gravity, or more accurately, microgravity environment of space.
And like space, it is stressful and isolated.
A perfect real-life simulation for deep space astronauts.
DAWN KERNAGIS: It's like a very long scuba dive.
So essentially we are diving for days.
We were actually weighted out to simulate partial microgravity.
The setup was that we were rigged to be like we were walking on the surface of Mars.
NARRATOR: Astronauts live in small, pressurized pods, just like the space station, with daily excursions that mimic space walks.
Here, scientists hope to unlock the secrets of staying healthy in space, no matter how long we need to be out there.
NARRATOR: And they've already got some answers.
KERNAGIS: I study how to help humans work to the best of their abilities in extreme environments.
We were looking at molecular-level changes in response to living with a crew of people in a small environment, and there's changes at the epigenetic level.
NARRATOR: It turns out that the hardships of space travel aren't just limited to the effects of microgravity.
It can affect the very building blocks of who we are.
Space travel can change our genes, maybe even permanently, in what are called epigenetic changes.
KERNAGIS: Things like psychological remoteness, stress, or diet, or exercise, can change how our genes are read.
And we actually can pass those on to our offspring.
What we want to attain eventually is when you see Spock going with the device where it scans you and diagnoses you.
SPOCK: Severe heart damage.
KERNAGIS: That's what we're aiming for.
NARRATOR: So, no problem.
Once genetic engineering becomes an everyday doctor's tool, we can just fix any broken genes before the problem expresses itself in the body.
And that'll be important not only for us, but for future generations that may have to be born out in space.
NICE: To go to Proxima Centauri, which is, you know, our closest neighbor, you would have to send generations into space.
It would have to be, wow, these people are going to be born, the next people are going to be born, the next people are going to be born, those people will die.
And now, I'm out.
Thank you, goodnight.
NARRATOR: If we could travel at the speed of light, that would cut down on our travel time immensely.
But no one is sure that we can ever get around the laws of physics to make that possible.
Luckily, in the future, we'll have designed artificial intelligence who can do our dirty work for us.
While we humans wait in comfort here on Earth, our robot explorers will voyage into space to find a nice parking spot for us, and even set up colonies for us to live on.
At some point, traveling to planets like Mars in our solar system will be like a trip to the park.
Totally last week's news.
Going to deep space will be what all the cool kids are talking about.
But we can't do it alone.
MICHAEL GRAZIANO: Space travel is really hard for humans.
We don't live long enough to go anywhere interesting.
But artificial intelligence is just fundamentally different.
It can live indefinitely, it can be engineered to live in space.
It can swim through space, like fish in water.
NARRATOR: Artificial intelligence is our secret weapon for traveling to other galaxies.
DVORSKY: We will have generation ships, where you create these massive ships, fill them with individuals and robots or whatnot, and send it off into the depths of space.
NARRATOR: Take a look at our future AI daughter, Jess, who clearly took her father's advice to go change the world.
Jess has volunteered to lead a ship of AI and human explorers who will voyage out far into the universe to find humanity a new home.
JESS: Welcome to the ark.
Now, no matter what your backgrounds, no matter what your beliefs, you are welcome here.
These are tight quarters, and they are probably not as comfortable as what some of you are used to, but we hope that you can make yourselves feel at home here in this safe haven.
Now, if you'll all follow me.
NARRATOR: The human passengers will have the adventure of a lifetime.
But the AI on board could last for millions of years, and they won't need food or doctors.
They could even simply power down until they got to their destination.
And once they got there, they could set up some living pods for us, or just report back on what they found.
If only everything were this easy.
But it's not just about sending up robots in spaceships.
AI will help us travel through space in far more innovative ways.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: That's where space travel gets really interesting.
DIAMANDIS: We're going to be sending avatars, and we're going to transmit our consciousness and not necessarily our meat bodies to go there.
NARRATOR: Meat bodies? Really? That's just creepy.
KAKU: What will space travel look like hundreds of years from now? One possibility is something that I call laserporting.
We're going to be able to beam our consciousness into outer space at the speed of light.
You don't have to worry about accidents with a booster rocket, radiation, weightlessness, none of that, 'cause you're literally riding on a light beam, pure consciousness, going through the heavens.
We put our consciousness on a laser beam, shoot that information to the moon.
On the moon, there's a receiver.
This machine relays that information to a robot, a superhuman robot.
So your consciousness now sees through the eyes of a robot with superhuman capability.
NEGIN FARSAD: I would love to check out the rings on Saturn or Neptune.
Um, I'm just fascinated by the ring.
So, because the universe liked it, so they put a ring on it.
What? Why did I say that? I'm so embarrassed, but that, it's also a valid joke.
NARRATOR: There's another factor to consider once we are spending all of our time flying around the universe.
Spaceships are going to become, for all intents and purposes, our new homes.
According to science fiction, those ships will either be functional, industrial vessels, or flying luxury palaces.
MEAD: 'Alien, ' the first one, in that film, the spaceship was sort of a floating refinery, very mechanical, industrial-looking piece of stuff.
NICE: Me being a huge Star Trek dweeb, what I really would like to see is space travel reach a point where we leave this solar system in comfort.
I would love to see that like where a city is built in space and then that city travels to another solar system or that city moves out to explore the universe with a bunch of Earthlings.
So just imagine all of Manhattan as a floating spaceship.
NARRATOR: But comfort aside, the real issue we've got to take on is how to get those ships to go into what Star Trek called 'warp drive, ' traveling at the speed of light.
Without that, space travel is definitely a lot trickier and infinitely slower.
JON SPAIHTS: To get the kind of travel that you see in the movies, interstellar travel, is simply not possible by extrapolating from the technologies we have.
Getting any massive spacecraft to something approaching the speed of light is a very tricky proposition.
Your gas tank grows bigger and bigger, and your spaceship balloons ludicrously as you try to get close to those speeds.
And of course, it's complicated by the fact that, as you start getting closer to light speed, relativity rears its head.
NEWITZ: I think space travel is still going to be kind of grindy for a while, take a long time, and you know, you might take a vacation on another world once in a while, but it would be kind of like, you know, ship travel was 500 years ago, where you really got to be committed if you want to go across the Atlantic.
FARSAD: I have such motion sickness, like I really just don't think I could make it in a spacecraft, like I would be a nightmare, and like no amount of Dramamine would like help that situation.
NARRATOR: Dramamine probably won't help on a little jaunt to, say, the Andromeda I galaxy, which you could fly to in 2.
5 million years, if you could fly at the speed of light.
Which, right now, you can't, because of that pesky theory of relativity.
So, yes, you get it.
Until we figure out some big physics problems, intergalactic travel could take a very long time.
Which means we might want to consider looking for a shortcut through space.
And that means wormholes.
KAKU: If you could bend the fabric of space and time, and rip it, you might be able to take a shortcut, a wormhole, through the fabric of space and time.
Take a sheet of paper, and then fold it so that two ends meet in the middle, and you punch a hole straight through.
That is a wormhole.
Like the looking glass of Alice.
When Alice stuck her hand in the looking glass, her hand went from the countryside of Oxford to Wonderland.
MATT MIRA: The Lincoln Tunnel is a great example of what a wormhole could be like, but you'd have to think of it as the entrance and the exit of the Lincoln Tunnel being the same point in space.
If we can't figure out warp speed, we'll have to figure out how to create wormholes, because there's going to be no way to travel such a great distance unless we go through the wormhole.
NARRATOR: That means you could get from one point to another, thousands of light-years away as easily as walking through a door.
It's a little too good to be true.
Instead of sitting in Los Angeles traffic, just walk through a wormhole and get to work in about three seconds.
That'd be a huge hit amongst pretty much everyone who has ever taken the 405 freeway.
Maybe that's why Hollywood has had such a long-standing love affair with the wormhole.
ROSE EVELETH: Hollywood loves to use wormholes as kind of like a, oh, we need to get them from one place to another, so we're going to do some, like, cool visual effects, and we're going to send them through the wormhole, and they're going to be wherever they need to be.
MIRA: I do like a wormhole.
They're all over Star Trek.
Deep Space Nine was the guardian of that wormhole and sort of let ships pass through and didn't let ships pass through.
NICE: I got a wormhole, and I can go there.
Hmm.
I'm going to say Detroit.
It's making a comeback! I'm telling you, Detroit's making a comeback.
I would love a wormhole that could get me there and back with no problem.
Mostly back.
NARRATOR: If we could find and use a wormhole, it could be the key to opening up immediate travel to anywhere in the universe we wanted to check out.
NEWITZ: Like, we invent something like jump gates or, you know, portable wormholes or whatever, obviously all bets are off.
BARATUNDE THURSTON: It's a pretty cool idea.
Like, I want a wormhole instead of the New York City subway.
NARRATOR: Oscar even installed a wormhole in his living room to meet Eva at their remote mountain getaway seven galaxies away.
OSCAR: Eva? NARRATOR: We know Oscar is a late adopter to all things future tech, but it looks like his wormhole is something he'll be using more often than not.
EVA: Took you long enough.
NARRATOR: There is, as always, just one issue traveling through a wormhole could destabilize the tunnel, leaving any travelers stranded or dead.
Not exactly how you want an intergalactic trip to turn out.
EVELETH: And we certainly wouldn't send something we cared about into one.
NARRATOR: Right, so let's add 'shoring up wormholes' to our to-do list.
Interstellar and intergalactic travel, where we travel in our, uh, sorry, meat bodies, is going to take a lot of scientific progress before it's a reality.
As we develop technologies to take us around the universe, we'll simultaneously have to figure out how we will exist on other planets.
And that means we'll change our DNA to suit the environment around us, triggering something called speciation.
We'll be able to exist on a planet that has, say, toxic air.
The bad news is that we won't be human anymore, but we'll get to that in a minute.
NARRATOR: Humanity is going to try to explore intergalactic space, whether we do it on board a spaceship, via artificial intelligence, or through a wormhole.
But getting out there beyond our galaxy is only half the battle.
The bigger question is how humans are planning to survive wherever we decide to hang our hats.
KAKU: We will be able to tinker with our genetic heritage.
It's only a matter of time.
NARRATOR: And that's when humanity is going to start looking very different than we do today.
PHIL ROSEDALE: Space travel is going to separate us into separate colonies, you know, that'll never talk to each other again.
DIAMANDIS: We're going to become a multitude of different human species.
We are going to speciate.
NARRATOR: Meaning, we'll deliberately mutate our genetic code to ensure an upgraded version of our species survives what would be the toxic, uninhabitable environment of an exoplanet.
DIAMANDIS: We're going from what has been Darwinism, evolution by natural selection, to something different.
Evolution by intelligent direction, by our own desires.
NEWITZ: People will have modified their DNA to be more resistant to cosmic radiation, or building bodies that are better able to deal with low gravity.
Or even more radically, modifying their respiratory systems to actually be able to process the Martian atmosphere.
SANDBERG: If we go to space, over time, of course, parts of humanity are going to be very separated.
And some people might indeed go for very radical changes.
FARSAD: It just sounds entirely unpleasant to make a genetic modification to myself, to be able to like breathe Mars' air or whatever it is.
I imagine it would involve some sort of a hole in, like, placed in my person, you know what I mean? I imagine some sort of a third arm would need to be attached.
Uh, what kind of clothes would I wear with a third arm? NARRATOR: Totally hear you.
But the need for a third arm may not only be entirely necessary for survival, it may even be fashionable.
But let's not get sidetracked.
The point is, right now, some of the world's brightest minds are examining how extremophiles can survive even the harshest conditions, conditions where life shouldn't survive.
When you think about it, we have already gotten pretty comfortable with drastically modifying our bodies think cochlear implants, heart transplants, and hip replacements.
It's even tough to find someone without a tattoo these days.
But once we start changing our bodies on a much larger level, like our half-fish friend, that's when you start talking about the birth of a new species beyond humanity.
That group will become post-humans.
DVORSKY: A post-human could be a very radically redesigned genetic human.
CHURCH: We could intentionally speciate, we could make ourselves radiation resistant by just changing a handful of genes, maybe as few as four genes.
NARRATOR: That means the next incarnation of humanity will be a little like a pre-fab home We'll design it ourselves and have it built to our specifications to optimize our comfort in life.
But in order to survive on Mars we have to learn how we could survive in a Mars-like environment.
NARRATOR: It was widely believed that the Red Planet look-alike landscape of the Atacama Desert was sterile.
And then Armando discovered something remarkable.
NARRATOR: That's what we call in the business a scientific jackpot.
Life was discovered in a place that, like Mars, no one believed was possible.
NARRATOR: So if there is life here, could there be life up there? And more importantly, could these tiny desert microorganisms show us how our bodies can be adapted to live in the Mars environment? NARRATOR: Even if these little organisms don't crack the code for making us Martians, studying them might help us live on the Red Planet more comfortably.
Okay, so once we're tearing around in space, driving through wormholes from one galaxy to another, that's when we may start to bump into a few things that are truly mind-bending.
For instance, what if every time you made a decision, you didn't just leave behind a road untraveled? What if that road spun off and became a parallel universe? Makes that agonizing decision over what wireless plan to choose kind of moot, doesn't it? As we travel, ever closer, to that Year Million scenario, let's take a quick look and see just how far we've come.
Space is now our playground.
We've sent robots to every nook and cranny of the universe, and we've even mastered wormholes.
We've developed new technologies to transcend huge distances in space, and we've evolved our bodies.
But the real mind-bender? We might find that we don't have to travel beyond our doorstep to find alternative universes.
EVELETH: The way that I imagine like the parallel universe thing, is it's like, you know when you wake up and you're in a dream? You're in your house, but it's not actually your house, but it feels like your house.
OSCAR: Hey, Oscar.
You made it.
EVELETH: You are in this weird state, where you sort of are aware that something is wrong, but everything feels right.
[record scratches.]
Um, you know what? I don't, I have no idea how this works.
NICE: Hmm, let's see.
There are some that see a parallel universe as an infinite number of universes that exist alongside of the one that we live in, where things are pretty much the same, but certain things are different.
OSCAR: I don't know what's real.
OSCAR: It's all real.
NICE: And I don't want to get too much further into that, because I'll start sounding stupid, 'cause I don't know what I'm talking about.
NARRATOR: Looks like we're going to have to turn to the big guns, or at least to someone with a PhD.
BRIAN GREENE: So, in string theory, which is an attempt to realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory of all of nature's forces, we find the mathematics suggests that our universe might be one of a grand collection of realms, each of which would rightly be called a universe of its own.
Perhaps the Big Bang, which gave rise to our universe, was not a unique event.
Maybe there are many big bangs, each giving rise to its own universe.
EVELETH: What, what, what? I have some questions! NARRATOR: I think we all do.
Is there a simpler way to explain it? GREENE: I like to think of it as though we are one bubble in a big cosmic bubble bath, where the other bubbles are other universes.
SPAIHTS: The exciting idea about parallel universes is that in almost exactly the same way, when a human is born, it's possible for an ovum to split and form twins.
It is possible to imagine, in the birth agony of a universe, in that big bang, for that explosion also to split.
That means that there is another universe just like ours, separated from us by the thinnest of walls, if we only can learn how to pierce it and cross over.
THURSTON: Yeah, that's really, that's just My head's kind of spinning.
It's a funky idea.
We could have a world dominated by chimpanzees.
We could have a world where the Hindenburg didn't crash.
NARRATOR: Multiple big bangs isn't the only way to get to parallel universes.
GREENE: The many worlds approach to quantum physics says that the act of observation winds up yielding two universes, one with one outcome where you see one result, and another universe where you see a different result.
So this morning, when you're trying to decide between pancakes and eggs, and you chose eggs.
In another universe, you chose pancakes.
MARTIN REES: Both options are fulfilled, and the universe splits into one way it did happen, one way it didn't.
SPAIHTS: The most extreme notion is that we are forming universes around us at every moment.
That every atomic interaction, every choice we make, every little thing that happens, creates an explosion of universes from that moment.
THURSTON: Maybe it's just this infinite hall of mirrors.
EVELETH: There's this idea that these parallel universes sort of touch us every so often, and they slightly tweak our reality.
One example of this is that there is a large group of people on the Internet who believe that there was a movie at some point made called Shazaam, which starred Sinbad as a genie.
This movie does not exist.
Sinbad has repeatedly been like, I don't know what you're talking about.
But there are all of these people who remember and can describe the plot from a movie called Shazaam.
There is a movie called Kazaam, in which Shaquille O'Neal is a genie.
But that's not the movie they're talking about.
People really, truly believe this thing exists.
And some small subset of those people believe that they actually have crossed over from a parallel universe, in which Shazaam existed.
That's literally, I swear to God, that's literally the theory.
I'm not making this up.
I did not make this up.
NARRATOR: So is this just an Internet conspiracy, or our best documented evidence of a parallel universe? Could there really be multiple universes bumping into one another and shapeshifting around us? N.
K.
JEMISIN: I can't see why it wouldn't exist.
The more that we come to understand our universe, the more we realize it's much more complex.
Things like time are much more complex than we thought that they were.
So why wouldn't the universe be more complex, too? THURSTON: I think the value of many universes theory is that it's a reminder that we can choose to live in different ways, and that the way we exist isn't the way we have to.
NARRATOR: In fact, if there really are parallel universes, then we are all living all possibilities in another universe somewhere else.
KAKU: Many people come up to me and say, 'Professor, if there are parallel universes, then is Elvis Presley still alive in one of these parallel universes?' And the answer is, you can't rule it out.
There could be a certain probability, calculable probability that, yes, the king is still alive.
GREENE: Because all of the possible outcomes of every experiment, every observation, every happening, they all take place, just in their own distinct universe.
SPAIHTS: There may be a literally infinite number of universes.
That is to say that everything that could be possible somewhere is real.
Right next door, through the membrane separating this bubble from that bubble.
NARRATOR: So the big question is, how do we get there? Can we reach other universes? SPAIHTS: How to leap from this bubble to that bubble, is a mystery for future science or for the black arts, or for a science fiction writer to speculate irresponsibly about.
NARRATOR: So, maybe not now, or in the near future, but in Year Million, maybe, just maybe, humanity will discover a way to travel between universes.
Even now, scientists speculate that those massive gravitational fields where light goes to die, may be portals through which we can reach other universes.
DVORSKY: We might be able to exploit black holes, and how that could be a gateway to, you know, another realm that's separate from this current universe.
That holds some promise.
KAKU: The mathematics says that a spinning black hole collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons.
If you stick your hand through the ring of spinning neutrons, you wind up on another universe.
It's bizarre.
It's mind-shattering, if you think about it.
But it's something that we physicists take very seriously.
NARRATOR: Once we are able to pierce the veil and travel from one universe to the other, then there are literally no limits for us.
Even if black holes are our pathway to this final frontier of exploration, there is plenty more to figure out.
Like getting a grip on the most mysterious and pervasive concept of them all, one that has baffled scientists since they first realized it may exist.
Because dark matter is just plain bizarre, and it might be the answer to absolutely everything in the universe.
We've travelled into outer space, through wormholes.
And into parallel universes.
But the biggest, most important discovery of all may actually be all around you.
But you can't see it.
KAKU: Every high school textbook in science says that the universe is mainly made out of atoms.
Wrong.
We now know that most of the universe is not mainly made out of atoms.
NARRATOR: Instead, the universe is made up of something called dark matter.
And it is the holy grail of science.
KAKU: Dark matter is invisible matter that holds the galaxy together.
If I have dark matter in my hand right now, first of all, it would be invisible, but it has gravity.
But it would literally sift right through my fingers, 'cause it has no interactions with atoms, go all the way down to the center of the Earth, all the way down to China.
NARRATOR: We don't know too many concrete facts about dark matter.
We don't even know what it looks like or how it is made.
We just have an idea of what it does.
And this incognito stuff is definitely doing some heavy lifting, universe-wise.
MIRA: No one's ever observed it.
It's not been seen by anybody.
But we just know, based on, you know, the movement of regular matter that it should be there.
You can't scan it, you can't see it, we just have to assume that it's there based on the movements of everything else.
NARRATOR: Okay, but what is it? Is it bigger than a bread basket? Is it hard or soft, black or white or blue? KAKU: I personally think that dark matter is a higher vibration of tiny little strings.
There's another theory, however, and that is dark matter is perhaps ordinary matter hovering in a parallel universe.
DVORSKY: So, dark matter oh, boy.
NICE: So, dark matter is when Lord Voldemort invokes No.
[laughs.]
What is that force? We can't see clearly what it is.
We see darkly what it is.
KAKU: If one of you ever figure this out, what is dark matter, be sure to tell me first, and we can share the Nobel Prize together.
NARRATOR: So we can see how hard dark matter is on the brain.
Here's the thumbnail sketch on dark matter Something is holding the universe together with gravity.
And that something, the theory goes, is dark matter.
We know it is there only because we can see what it does.
GREENE: Stars should be flying off, sort of like water droplets on a bicycle rim.
You spin the rim, the water flies off, but they're not.
We believe that dark matter is what's holding it all together.
Dark matter, we believe, are likely to be particles that are wafting through space, that we believe provide the additional gravitational pull in a spinning galaxy.
NICE: I mean, dark matter, that sounds like my entire life.
I know about 4% of my life.
The other 96%, I am just trying to figure out.
And that's maybe why I like dark matter so much.
NARRATOR: So we can't visualize it or define it, which makes answering any questions about it almost impossible.
But scientists are doing everything they can to make a little bit of this stuff themselves.
Deep underground, at the European Council for Nuclear Research, sits the largest machine on the planet.
This, my friends, is the famed Large Hadron Collider.
This giant tube could reveal all the secrets to the known universe.
GREENE: The Large Hadron Collider has the capacity, at least in principle, to be a dark matter factory.
Because what it does is it slams protons together.
After they cycle around an 18-mile-long tunnel, they slam together near the speed of light.
And we believe that some of the energy from those collisions can go into producing particles of dark matter.
JILL HEINERTH: Smashing particles in the Large Hadron Collider might be the next step to discovering, you know, what's happening in the rest of dark matter, in quantum physics.
NICE: There are certain particles that we are looking for, and the Large Hadron Collider helps us find these particles.
One was the Higgs boson, which we found, and when I say we, I mean me, because I was heading up that project.
Thank you, you're welcome.
[laughs.]
NARRATOR: Thank you for that, Chuck.
Scientists have used the Hadron Collider to essentially recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
That's when dark matter was theoretically born.
The Hadron Collider could potentially generate dark matter so we could poke it and prod it and just maybe understand it.
Because if we comprehend dark matter, we could figure out things about how the universe works that have eluded us.
Dark matter could show us how to bend the laws of physics, and let us travel at the speed of light.
And it could be the answer to, well, everything.
MIRA: Eventually, it could affect all of humanity.
SPAIHTS: If we are trying to reach other stars, then we're going to need something down at the root level of reality to sink our hooks into, to invent that new technology.
And what dark matter tells us is there's something about the makeup of the cosmos that will, when we understand it, tell us something fundamentally new about the world.
GREENE: We're getting close, we think, to understanding the basic laws.
But as I say that, I know that nature loves to just grab us and slap us in the face and say, 'Get rid of that hubris, you don't actually understand anything.
' NARRATOR: To that point, there are a few out there who believe that the Hadron Collider could inadvertently cause a black hole that would swallow up the universe and everything in it.
THURSTON: Yeah, that would suck.
It's like, oops, I destroyed the universe.
We're monkeying around with some powerful forces, and you know, so we're like kids playing with matches.
You know, maybe we'll burn our house down.
NARRATOR: Well, the Swiss are known for their precision, so here's hoping that they keep their Hadron Collider well in line.
Also, you'll be happy to hear that it's an unsubstantiated theory that the Earth will get swallowed by a black hole.
If not, well, you'll be amongst the first to know.
This invisible, mysterious stuff could crack every code that's stumped scientists.
It could show us how to build an intergalactic spaceship or even how to travel through space and time.
And if we figure out how to access and manipulate it earlier, that Year Million era could be happening a hell of a lot sooner.
But once we've mastered dark matter, it's not like our journey will end there.
In our quest for knowledge, we will change humanity's destiny.
Every new discovery leads to another mystery.
Every question inspires some brave soul to set off on a journey to explore the unknown.
It is what has led us every step of the way on our incredible journey to the Year Million.
When we arrive at that future point, we will have built artificial intelligence.
JESS: Hi, Dad.
NARRATOR: We'll communicate telepathically.
[muffled conservation.]
We'll not only reengineer our DNA to resist all life-threatening diseases and viruses, we'll be able to create the ultimate sustainable biological body, designed to our exact specifications.
Then there may be a time when our descendants will choose to discard their physical bodies and live as a giant digital collective inside the metaverse.
We may look totally different, since we've altered ourselves to be able to colonize new planets.
And even beyond mere cosmetics, we could be uploaded into the digital realm, living immortal lives inside the massive Dyson Sphere.
And parallel universes and dark matter all became a reality.
Every step in humanity's maturation has led to a more fantastical leap forward in our technological development and our understanding of the universe.
What will the next million years after that be? Only our imaginations can tell.
And if there's one thing I know, it's that the human imagination is thrillingly limitless.