Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2020) s01e13 Episode Script

1
TYSON: We all feel the weight
of the shadows on our future.
But in another time, every
bit as ominous as our own,
there were those who could
see a way through the darkness
to find a star to steer by.
Carl Sagan wrote,
"I was a child in
a time of hope
I wanted to be a scientist
from my earliest school days.
The crystallizing moment came
when I first caught on that
the stars are mighty suns
When it first dawned on me
how staggeringly far away they
must be to appear as mere
points of light in the sky
I'm not sure I even knew the
meaning of the word "science" then,
but I wanted somehow to immerse
myself in all that grandeur
I was gripped by the
splendor of the universe
Transfixed by the prospect
of understanding how things
really work, of helping to
uncover deep mysteries
Of exploring new worlds
Maybe even literally.
It has been my good fortune
to have had that dream,
in part, fulfilled
For me, the romance of science
remains as appealing and
new as it was on that day
When I was shown the wonders of
the 1939 New York World's Fair.
This is where the
future became a place."
But, how could
there be hope in 1939?
The angriest voices had
taken the world stage,
preaching hatred
and tribal division.
The most
cataclysmic war in history,
which would take the lives
of 60 million human beings,
was only just beginning.
Yet, even as
darkness descended,
it was possible to awaken
the young Carl Sagan and his
contemporaries with a
thrilling vision of the future.
One that was powerful
enough to inspire many of them
to do the years of
hard work required to
become scientists and engineers.
♪♪
The "miracle" of television
became a reality to the public
at the 1939 World's Fair.
We had learned to manipulate
electrons into what would become a
civilization-altering force.
This working model of a TV
set was transparent to convince
the skeptics that what
they were seeing was not just
motion picture images.
The images on the television
screen were actually live
signals from
across time and space.
A possible world of
revolutionary high technology
was first glimpsed here.
Carl Sagan was the first to
explore space and time on the
Ship of the Imagination.
But we have
something else in common.
We both had life-changing
experiences in this same place
in Flushing Meadow, New York.
When I was about
the same age as Carl,
my family took me to
the 1964 World's Fair.
I'm the little
guy on the left.
It was 25 years later and our world
faced a different set of problems.
The superpowers had rigged
the planet with some tens of
thousands of nuclear weapons.
They were on short fuses that
could be lit at any moment.
Preparing for the coming
apocalypse was a frequent
ritual for
schoolchildren like me.
While we all knew that our
lives could be terminated at
any moment, the 1964 World's
Fair presented a vision of a
boundless future,
one freed of danger,
where science and technology
had been refocused on human
hopes and dreams
I have stunning, indelible
memories of that visit.
My father was a key
administrator for New York City
during the civil
rights movement,
and they named a monorail
car after him for the day
We proudly rode the
Tyson Comet into the fair.
I remember the life-like,
animatronic dinosaurs and
being amazed that we
could know about things that
happened so long ago.
I remember the sense that Earth
was just a place we happened to be.
Even the fair's main symbol,
the Unisphere,
was a vision of Earth in the
larger context of the cosmos.
Remember, this was before
anyone had ever seen the whole
Earth from deep space
It was a time when
everything soared.
Even the buildings
seemed ready for take-off.
You could go on a trip
to a brighter future,
an Earth where
there were no slums,
and no hunger
Some of those
promises remain unfulfilled,
and others have been exceeded beyond
even the wildest dreams of that time
Do me a favor.
Try to forget everything you
take for granted at this moment.
Imagine you've never
seen a laptop, or tablet,
or smart phone,
that you've never
searched for anything online,
or ever received an email
or a text message from anyone.
This was a world where if you
wanted to know something about
the history of life,
or the lyrics to a song,
you had to go to
the nearest library.
(overlapping chatter)
TYSON: Like many
people at that time,
it was here that I had
my very first interaction
with a computer.
WOMAN: The machine on my right is
the IBM Optical Character Reader.
It's a machine which
reads handwritten numbers.
To illustrate its
operation to you,
you will be able to ask for the
news of any date that you'd like.
You simply write a date on a
card and then the IBM Optical
Character Reader reads
your handwritten numbers.
The computer replies
with the news event.
TYSON: Imagine my amazement that a
machine could read the date of my birth,
and spit out the most important events
that took place on that very day.
How could a machine
possibly know that?
Even in this optimistic
dream of the future,
the long shadow cast on
it was inescapable
The very same vehicles that
promised to take us to other
worlds also threatened
to destroy this one.
They could carry explorers,
or they could carry weapons of
mass destruction.
This Project Mercury
spacecraft had recently taken
Scott Carpenter
into Earth orbit
There was a two-man Gemini
spacecraft that wouldn't be
operational for
another year
And the most ambitious of all:
The Apollo command module and
lunar lander were close enough
for me to reach out and touch.
The first actual manned trip to
the Moon was still four years away.
Think of the
audacity of that time:
We were going to
send humans to the Moon
and bring them back safely,
and do it all with computers
whose best trick was to tell
you what happened on
the day you were born
All these decades later,
I can't believe we
really did those things.
But like Carl,
the hope I discovered at the
World's Fair has never left me.
The odds were against us,
but we're still here
more than 50 years later.
And still dreaming of what the
future might hold for us
Come with me to the New
York World's Fair of 2039.
(theme music plays)
♪♪
♪♪
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TYSON: It's the year 2029
and there's a girl somewhere,
imaging how the
future might unfold.
♪♪
♪♪
TYSON: Dreams are maps
Without them, we go nowhere
This new colossus, one
of many erected in each of
the Earth's greatest harbors,
is made of calcium carbonate,
the same material that nature
used to build life's first
home in that ancient
lost city beneath the sea.
Carbon dioxide, the main
driver of climate change,
has been extracted from our
atmosphere and converted into
the mineral used to construct
this monumental Tree of Life.
These new wonders of the world
not only signify that our
species has found a way to
avert the worst consequences
of climate change, but they
also declare our ambition for
the kind of greatness
that lives in harmony
with our fellow earthlings.
Welcome to the 2039
New York World's Fair.
Come with me.
(overlapping chatter)
♪♪
MAN: Hi.
WOMAN: Yes, it's right that way.
(inaudible chatter)
(inaudible chatter)
TYSON: Here, in the
Pavilion of the Searchers,
the greatest heroes in the
history of science come to
virtual life to
recount, one-on-one,
how they deciphered
nature's secrets.
They tirelessly answer every
conceivable question you might have.
And here, there is no such
thing as a dumb question,
no shame in asking anything
you really want to know.
And these aren't just
robots whose heads are filled
with recorded messages.
We have found a way to
reproduce the neural networks
in their brains, their ideas,
memories and associations,
their connectome.
Imagine a world where the
still unfolding story of the
universe was told to every
child as naturally as we tell
them our nursery
rhymes and fairy tales.
WOMAN: Oh, can
they take us now?
TYSON: Two questions: Did
it blow your mind when we
discovered
gravitational waves,
even though you
said we never would?
EINSTEIN: Ja.
TYSON: Second question.
Your hidden variables,
solution to the paradox of
quantum mechanics, now that
we know they don't exist,
what does that say about
the nature of reality?
EINSTEIN: Come with me.
(overlapping chatter)
TYSON: And this is the Pavilion
of the 4th Dimension, time.
It's a place where anyone can set
their coordinates in space and time,
and visit any moment in the 14 billion
year history of cosmic evolution.
Isn't it amazing that we
only started doing science
systematically
four centuries ago?
And yet we've already been
able to reconstruct so much of
what happened billions of
years before we even got here.
(overlapping chatter)
♪♪
TYSON: This Cosmic Calendar,
with all of time compressed
into a single Earth year,
is yours to explore.
What event in the
history of the universe would
you most like to witness?
Not the Big Bang,
everybody wants to see that,
and besides,
you have to be over 14.
But, we could go to that
nanosecond before time began
Or that last perfect
day of the dinosaurs.
Or to spend the afternoon
with the mitochondrial Eve,
the mother of us all, the
woman to whom all humans can
trace their lineage?
Or what about a day trip to
Giza to see the pyramids when
they were new?
Just take your pick
TYSON: Life, the escape artist,
having found
every niche on Earth,
even ventured to the Moon
(radio chatter)
When we first stood
amidst its sterile desolation,
its lifeless dust, a world
painted only in shades of gray,
we began to appreciate
how radically our planet
changed when it was
touched by life's genius.
ARMSTRONG (over radio):
The eagle has landed.
TYSON: What form will
life's genius take hundreds of
millions of
years in the future?
♪♪
TYSON: Behold: This is the
earliest known ancestor we
humans share with almost
every animal who lives now
or ever lived on Earth.
The real Saccorrhytus Coronarius
was actually quite small,
just a black dot to our eyes,
but it looms large in
our personal story.
"Sacco" flourished more
than half a billion years ago.
It's a progenitor of
the animal kingdom.
So how did life, the sculptor,
carve us out of this?
Evolution, given
world enough and time,
makes possible the emergence
of those more complex and
completely unexpected
qualities that can arise from
simpler things.
Life is a thread four
billion years long.
It has survived at least five
mass extinction events and
come back from each of them
stronger than ever before.
Life demonstrates that we are
more than the sum of our parts,
and even when we find ourselves
with our backs to the wall,
life can find a
way into the future
(explosion)
Landmine.
A souvenir of our savagery left over
from conflicts all over the planet.
We've infested our world with
more than 100 million of them.
Every year they kill or
maim thousands of civilians,
among them children at
play with their friends.
Think of a global effort that
would be required to find and
defuse more than 100
million explosive devices
buried in the earth.
Hopeless, right?
But botanists have devised
an ingenious way to reveal
the presence of dangerous
explosives beneath our feet.
They have bioengineered the
thale cress plant whose roots
can detect the nitrogen
dioxide gas that these
landmines and IEDs emit.
If the plant puts
out red leaves, beware.
But if its leaves are green,
then you can play there in
peace with your friends.
We can use our understanding
of nature to spring the traps
that we've set for ourselves.
Let's take the
subway to New Jersey.
We're riding the mycelium,
that underground network that
connects 90% of the
world's trees and plants.
It's an ancient co-production
of four kingdoms of life,
plants, bacteria,
fungi and animals.
New Jersey was once a state
with the highest number of
dangerously polluted
areas in the country,
shameful artifacts of our
technological adolescence.
But then, we partnered with
the trees and the plants
Poplars naturally
transform trichloroethylenes,
known as TCEs, carcinogenic
solvents that are common
by-products of industry,
into harmless chloride ions.
Simple salts.
Microbiologists discovered
that they could crossbreed two
different species of poplar
trees to enhance their power
to neutralize TCEs.
The extensive planting of
these trees not only rid this
area of its poisonous threats
to human and other life,
but also added to the number
of trees that turn the most
prevalent greenhouse gas,
carbon dioxide, into oxygen.
With our wars
and our lifestyle,
we dumped a lot
garbage on this world.
Not just landmines and IEDs,
but the toxins
from our fossil fuels,
the waste from
our consumer civilization,
nuclear power
plants and weapons.
And the electronic toys that
we discarded at an alarming
rate laden with
lethal heavy metals, lead,
cadmium, beryllium
and other e-wastes.
I have moments of
despair when I try to wrap
my mind around the
enormity of the problem
But life even provides a
way out of this nightmare.
It's called bioremediation
See that node at
the intersection?
That's yeast.
Without it, no bread, no beer.
But in this future, we
have used it to clean up
the whole world.
It was a means to
neutralize the most dangerous
garbage we produced.
Yeast captures these
poisons and prevents them from
contaminating the water supply
and the rest of the environment.
Think of it.
Nature offered us
a second chance,
a shot at undoing
the damage done
But how do we keep
from doing it again?
(inaudible chatter)
What on Earth is designed by humans
to protect the distant future?
We don't have a single
institution that even
acknowledges the long-term
danger we pose to ourselves,
let alone one
designed to plan for it.
Our time horizon looms
three months from now,
or four years, the
corporate balance sheet,
the next election.
But science is telling us that
life's time scale measures in
the billions of years.
How do we maintain
awareness of the continuity
of life's past,
and our personal role
in being a link to its future,
so that it has
operational consequences?
Science, as of now, has no means
of making us wise and far-sighted.
That's up to us.
How many have lost the
battle that we fight now?
How many worlds lie buried
beneath the surface of this one?
Maybe we'll never know.
But here at this fair, there's
a pavilion where long-dead
civilizations come
roaring back to life
I know of one lost
world that flourished for
thousands of years.
Their accomplishments were many.
They left behind a written
language that no one has ever
been able to decipher.
We have yet to discover
a clue that could explain
why they vanished.
They are just one of
the mysteries of the
Pavilion of Lost Worlds
TYSON: In 5th century
B.C.E. Greece,
Herodotus,
the father of history,
wrote of the opulent lifestyle of the
Tartessians on the Iberian Peninsula.
Their wealth came from the silver and
gold they extracted from the earth.
They had their own
language, culture, dances,
music, and yet
very little survives of them
besides a handful of
trinkets of marvelous design.
Theirs is one of the lost
worlds of planet Earth
As are the nameless people,
who lived in what is now
Nigeria, in a
place called "Nok."
For 1,500 years, their
engineers were on the cutting
edge of technology, forging
new ways to work with iron.
Just as with the Tartessians,
they had their own
unique civilization.
All that remains of them
are some ceramic statues in a
style unlike any other and
an inscription on this wall.
Everything else about them
has been devoured by time
But inside this pavilion,
these lost civilizations live,
they breathe,
they dance again
Of them all, which one to
bring back to life tonight?
I know
the Indus Valley civilization
at its high point
in 2,500 B.C.E.,
when it was a vast network of cities
with a population of five million.
Come with me to
their most famous city,
Mohenjo Daro
(clucking)
(chanting in native language)
We don't know how this pool
called the "great bath" was used,
but we do know that this
city was planned and laid out,
while the Greeks
wandered in small tribes,
just a band of
itinerant merchants
(running water)
Wait
Do you hear that?
Listen
(toilet flush)
Yes, the Indus Valley people
of nearly 5,000 years ago
installed modern
plumbing in their homes!
Something most people didn't
have until the late 20th century.
And, they mastered other
forms of hydro-engineering,
underground pipes,
sewage management,
kitchens with running water.
They had dentistry, and
standardized measures for the
tiniest quantities.
They were great sculptors
who introduced natural reality
into the three dimensional
depiction of the human form.
They had writing, and
hung signs on buildings,
but we have yet to
understand their meaning.
They used dice to play games
of chance and wiled away their
evenings with board games.
And there's something
curious about them.
They left no depictions
of war in their art,
nor large caches of weapons.
There's no evidence that their
meticulously planned cities
were ever burned to the
ground by enemy invaders.
In the study of
their contemporaries,
and human history generally,
this is most unusual.
This figurine is one of the only
surviving remnants of their civilization.
And yet, they were
as real as we are.
Their moment as
real as ours
♪♪
Just beyond the
Pavilion of Lost Worlds,
there's another one
The pavilion of
worlds still to come
We've launched five
ships to the stars.
They are backward
and primitive craft, moving,
compared to the immense
interstellar distances,
with the
slowness of a race in a dream.
But in the future
we will do better.
We've located and begun to
study thousands of worlds that
orbit other suns, all this
from our remote confinement in
the suburbs of the galaxy, all
this in just 400 years since
Galileo's first look
through a telescope.
The Milky Way has
hundreds of billions of stars,
and likely even more worlds.
Somewhere in the vastness,
there may be an
Encyclopedia Galactica,
a reference work that includes
all the worlds of all the stars.
♪♪
TYSON: Our vague perceptions
and inferences of thousands of
exoplanets have given way
to a more intimate degree of
knowledge of some
half a million worlds.
Imagine a huge
galactic database,
a Library of Alexandria
for the whole universe
a means for our small world to attain
some measure of cosmic citizenship
Imagine an
Encyclopedia Galactica
that is constantly
evolving and growing,
an open
source where the knowledge of
the worlds of the universe
would be available to all.
These guys, who call
themselves "We Who Survived,"
are only a little more
advanced than we are.
If we could only
communicate with them,
maybe they could tell us how they
got through their stormy adolescence.
And these guys, too
"We Who Flower in Darkness."
What about a civilization far
more advanced than ours?
There may be worlds with
engineering on a scale that
dwarfs our
proudest achievements.
There may be cultures that
disassemble other planets in
their system and reassemble
them around their world to
make a ring, buying them
more room and more resources.
Well, their
future looks bright.
But the poor beings of these
worlds have only a 1 in 3 chance
of making it through.
What is that?
Could this be their attempt to solve
a solar system-wide energy crisis?
They depend on solar power,
but their star is
only a feeble red dwarf,
incapable of
providing direct energy
for their
multi-planetary civilization.
Maybe, they've used
up all their fuel.
So, they're building a
shell to surround their star
and harvest every
photon of sunlight.
How would we frame
our own entry in the
Cosmic Encyclopedia
of Possible Worlds?
Perhaps, even now,
someone has written it for us,
a planetary dossier garnered
from our television broadcasts
or from some
discreet survey mission.
They might summon up the index
of blue worlds in our province
of the Milky Way, until they
came to the listing for Earth.
What would they think of us?
We have long watched the stars
and mused about whether there
are other beings who
think and wonder about us.
In a cosmic setting vast
and old beyond ordinary human
understanding,
we're a little lonely.
50%, huh? That's all?
I know a way we
can up those odds
It's about taking what science
is telling us to heart.
(overlapping chatter)
This is the dream of Cosmos.
And this is the story that
science is telling us
Our universe began,
some 14 billion years ago,
when matter, energy, time
and space burst forth
And the darkness was cold,
and the light was hot and the
union of these extremes
gave shape to matter and
there was structure
There were great stars,
hundreds of times the mass of
our Sun and these
stars exploded,
sending oxygen and carbon
to the worlds to come and
adorning them with
gold and silver
And in their deaths, the stars
became darkness and the weight
of their darkness
vanquished the light
And new stars were born from
their death shrouds and they
began to dance with each other.
And now there were galaxies
Galaxies make stars
(gasping)
(cheering and applause)
TYSON: Stars make worlds
And a world made life
And there came a time when
heat shot out from the molten
heart of this world, and it
warmed the waters and the
matter that had rained
down from the stars came
alive and that star stuff
became aware
And that life was
sculpted by the Earth,
and its struggles with
the other living things
And a great tree grew up,
one with many branches,
and six times it
was almost felled
But still, it grows and we
are but one small branch
One that cannot
live without its tree.
And slowly, we learned to
read the book of nature
To learn her laws
To nurture the tree
To become a way for
the cosmos to know itself
and to return to the stars.