Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2014–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Standing Up in the Milky Way - full transcript

CARL SAGAN:
The cosmos is all that is,

or ever was or ever will be.

Come with me.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
A generation ago,

the astronomer Carl Sagan
stood here

and launched hundreds
of millions of us

on a great adventure--

the exploration of the universe
revealed by science.

It's time to get going again.

We're about to begin a journey
that will take us

from the infinitesimal
to the infinite,



from the dawn of time
to the distant future.

We'll explore galaxies
and suns and worlds,

surf the gravity waves
of space-time,

encounter beings that live
in fire and ice,

explore the planets of stars
that never die,

discover atoms
as massive as suns

and universes smaller
than atoms.

Cosmos is also a story about us.

It's the saga of how wandering
bands of hunters and gatherers

found their way to the stars,

one adventure with many heroes.

To make this journey,
we'll need imagination.

But imagination alone
is not enough

because the reality of nature
is far more wondrous



than anything we can imagine.

This adventure is made possible
by generations of searchers

strictly adhering
to a simple set of rules:

test ideas by experiment
and observation,

build on those ideas
that pass the test,

reject the ones that fail,

follow the evidence
wherever it leads

and question everything.

Accept these terms,

and the cosmos is yours.

Now come with me.

free from the shackles
of space and time,

we can go anywhere.

If you want to see
where we are in space,

just look out the front window.

In the dimension of time,
the past lies beneath us.

Here's what Earth looked like
250 million years ago.

If you want
to see the future, look up.

And this is how it could appear
250 million years from now.

If we're going
to be venturing out

into the farthest reaches
of the cosmos,

we need to know
our cosmic address,

and this is the first line
of that address.

We're leaving the Earth,
the only home we've ever known,

for the farthest reaches
of the cosmos.

Our nearest neighbor,
the Moon, has no sky,

no ocean, no life--

just the scars
of cosmic impacts.

Our star powers the wind
and the waves

and all the life on the surface
of our world.

The Sun holds all the worlds
of the solar system

in its gravitational embrace,
starting with Mercury...

...to cloud-covered Venus,
where runaway greenhouse effect

has turned it
into a kind of hell.

Mars...

a world with as much land
as Earth itself.

A belt of rocky asteroids
circles the Sun

between the orbits
of Mars and Jupiter.

With its four giant moons
and dozens of smaller ones,

Jupiter is like
its own little solar system.

It has more mass than all
the other planets combined.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot...

a hurricane three times
the size of our whole planet

that's been raging
for centuries.

The crown jewel
of our solar system, Saturn,

ringed by freeways
of countless orbiting

and slowly tumbling snowballs--

every snowball, a little moon.

Uranus...

and Neptune,

the outermost planets,
unknown to the ancients

and only discovered after
the invention of the telescope.

Beyond the outermost planet,

there's a swarm of tens
of thousands of frozen worlds.

And Pluto is one them.

(whooshing)

Of all our spacecraft,

this is the one that's traveled
farthest from home--

Voyager 1.

She bears a message
to a billion years from now,

something of who we were,

how we felt

and the music we made.

(Blind Willie Johnson's
"Dark Was the Night" playing)

(Blind Willie Johnson humming)

DEGRASSE TYSON:
The deeper waters

of this vast cosmic ocean

and their numberless worlds
lie ahead.

("Dark Was the Night"
continues to play, then fades)

DEGRASSE TYSON:
From out here, the Sun may look
like just another star.

But it still exerts
its gravitational hold

on a trillion frozen comets,

leftovers from the formation
of the solar system

nearly five billion years ago.

It's called the Oort Cloud.

No one has ever seen it before,
nor could they,

because each one
of these little worlds

is as far
from its nearest neighbor

as Earth is from Saturn.

This enormous cloud of comets
encloses the solar system,

which is the second line
of our cosmic address.

We've only been able to detect
the planets of other stars

for a few decades,

but we already know
that planets are plentiful--

they outnumber the stars.

Almost all of them will be
very different from Earth,

and hostile
to life as we know it.

But what do we know about life?

We've met only one kind so far:

Earthlife.

See anything?

Just empty space, right?

Human eyes see
only a sliver of the light

that shines in the cosmos.

But science gives us the power
to see what our senses cannot.

Infrared is
the kind of light made visible

by night-vision goggles.

Throw an infrared sensor
across the darkness...

Rogue planet.

World without a sun.

Our galaxy has billions of them,
adrift in perpetual night.

They're orphans, cast away
from their mother stars

during the chaotic birth
of their native star systems.

Rogue planets
are molten at the core

but frozen at the surface.

There may be oceans
of liquid water

in the zone
between those extremes.

Who knows what
might be swimming there?

This is what the Milky Way
looks like in infrared.

Every single dot,
not just the bright ones,

is a star.

How many stars?

How many worlds?

How many ways of being alive?

Where are we in this picture?

See that trailing outer arm?

That's where we live--

about 30,000 light-years
from the center.

The Milky Way Galaxy

is the next line
of our cosmic address.

We're now a hundred thousand
light-years from home.

It would take light,
the fastest thing there is,

a hundred thousand years
to reach us from Earth.

This is the Great Spiral
in Andromeda,

the galaxy next door.

We call our two giant galaxies

and a smattering
of smaller ones

the "local group."

Can't even find our home galaxy
from out here.

It's just one of thousands
in the Virgo Supercluster.

On this scale,

all the objects we see,
including the tiniest dots,

are galaxies.

Each galaxy contains
billions of suns

and countless worlds.

Yet, the entire
Virgo Supercluster itself

forms but a tiny part
of our universe.

This is the cosmos
on the grandest scale we know--

a network
of a hundred billion galaxies.

It's the last line
of our cosmic address...

for now.

Observable universe?!

What does that mean?

Even for us, in our
Ship of the Imagination,

there's a limit to how far
we can see in space-time.

It's our cosmic horizon.

Beyond that horizon
lie parts of the universe

that are too far away.

There hasn't been enough time

in the 13.8 billion year
history of the universe

for their light
to have reached us.

Many of us suspect
that all of this--

all the worlds, stars,
galaxies and clusters

in our observable universe--

is but one tiny bubble
in an infinite ocean

of other universes...

...a multiverse.

Universe upon universe.

Worlds without end.

Feeling a little small?

Well, in the context
of the cosmos, we are small.

We may just be little guys
living on a speck of dust,

afloat in
a staggering immensity,

but we don't think small.

This cosmic perspective
is relatively new.

A mere four centuries ago,
our tiny world was oblivious

to the rest of the cosmos.

There were no telescopes.

The universe was only what you
could see with the naked eye.

Back in 1599,

everyone knew that the Sun,
planets and stars

were just lights in the sky
that revolved around the Earth,

and that we were the center
of a little universe,

a universe made for us.

There was only one man
on the whole planet

who envisioned
an infinitely grander cosmos.

And how was he spending
New Year's Eve

of the year 1600?

Why, in prison, of course.

DEGRASSE TYSON: There comes
a time in our lives

when we first realize we're not
the center of the universe,

that we belong to something
much greater than ourselves.

It's part of growing up.

And as it happens to each of us,

so it began to happen
to our civilization

in the 16th century.

Imagine a world
before telescopes,

when the universe
was only what you could see

with the naked eye.

It was obvious that Earth
was motionless,

and that everything
in the heavens--

the Sun, the Moon,
the stars, the planets--

revolved around us--
and then...

a Polish astronomer and priest
named Copernicus

made a radical proposal:
The Earth was not the center.

It was just one of the planets,
and, like them,

it revolved around the Sun.

Many, like the Protestant
reformer Martin Luther,

took this idea as a scandalous
affront to Scripture.

They were horrified.

But for one man,
Copernicus didn't go far enough.

His name was Giordano Bruno,

and he was
a natural-born rebel.

He longed to bust out of that
cramped little universe.

Even as a young Dominican monk
in Naples,

he was a misfit.
This was a time

when there was
no freedom of thought in Italy.

But Bruno hungered to know

everything
about God's creation.

He dared to read the books
banned by the Church,

and that was his undoing.

In one of them,

an ancient Roman, a man dead
for more than 1,500 years

whispered to him
of a universe far greater,

one as boundless
as his idea of God.

Lucretius asked the reader

to imagine standing
at the edge of the universe

and shooting an arrow outward.

If the arrow keeps going,
then clearly,

the universe extends beyond
what you thought was the edge.

But if the arrow
doesn't keep going--

say it hits a wall--
then that wall must lie

beyond what you thought
was the edge of the universe.

Now if you stand on that wall
and shoot another arrow,

there are only the same
two possible outcomes:

it either flies forever
out into space,

or it hits some boundary

where you can stand and shoot
yet another arrow.

Either way,
the universe is unbounded.

The cosmos must be infinite.

This made perfect sense
to Bruno.

The God he worshipped
was infinite.

So how, he reasoned, could
Creation be anything less?

(door opens)

(door opens)

It was the last steady job
he ever had.

(wind whistles softly)

And then, when he was 30,

he had the vision
that sealed his fate.

In this dream,
he awakened to a world

enclosed inside
a confining bowl of stars.

This was the cosmos
of Bruno's time.

He experienced
a sickening moment of fear,

as if the bottom of everything

was falling away
beneath his feet.

But he summoned up his courage.

BRUNO: I spread
confident wings to space

and soared toward the infinite,
leaving far behind me

what others strained to see
from a distance.

Here, there was no up,
no down, no edge,

no center.

I saw that the Sun
was just another star,

and the stars were other Suns,
each escorted by other Earths

like our own.

The revelation
of this immensity was like

falling in love.

DEGRASSE TYSON:
Bruno became an evangelist,

spreading the gospel
of infinity throughout Europe.

He assumed that other lovers
of God would naturally embrace

this grander and more glorious
view of Creation.

BRUNO:
What a fool I was.

DEGRASSE TYSON:
He was excommunicated

by the Roman Catholic Church
in his homeland,

expelled by the Calvinists
in Switzerland,

and by the Lutherans
in Germany.

Bruno jumped at an invitation

to lecture at Oxford,
in England.

At last, he thought,

a chance to share his vision
with an audience of his peers.

(laughter)

(laughter continues)

I have come to present
a new vision of the cosmos.

Copernicus was right
to argue that our world

is not the center
of the universe.

The Earth goes around the Sun.

It's a planet,
just like the others.

But Copernicus
was only the dawn.

I bring you the sunrise.

The stars are other fiery suns,

made of the same substance
as the Earth,

and they have
their own watery earths,

with plants and animals
no less noble than our own.

Are you mad or merely ignorant?

Everyone knows
there is only one world.

What everyone knows is wrong.

Our infinite God has created
a boundless universe

with an infinite
number of worlds.

Do they not read Aristotle
where you come from?

Or even the Bible?

I beg you, reject antiquity,
tradition, faith, and authority.

Let us begin anew,

by doubting
everything we assume

has been proven.
Heretic!

Infidel!

Your God is too small.

(scholars shouting angrily)

DEGRASSE TYSON:
A wiser man would have
learned his lesson.

But Bruno was not such a man.

He couldn't keep his soaring
vision of the cosmos to himself,

despite the fact that
the penalty for doing so

in his world
was the most vicious form

of cruel and unusual punishment.

time
when there was no such thing

as the separation
of church and state,

or the notion that freedom
of speech was a sacred right

of every individual.

Expressing an idea that didn't
conform to traditional belief

could land you in deep trouble.

Recklessly, Bruno
returned to Italy.

Maybe he was homesick.

But still, he must have known
that his homeland

was one of the most dangerous
places in Europe

he could possibly go.

The Roman Catholic Church
maintained a system of courts

known as the Inquisition,

and its sole purpose
was to investigate and torment

anyone who dared voice views
that differed from theirs.

It wasn't long before Bruno
fell into the clutches

of the thought police.

This wanderer, who worshipped
an infinite universe,

languished in confinement
for eight years.

Through relentless
interrogations,

he stubbornly refused
to renounce his views.

Why was the Church willing

to go to such lengths
to torment Bruno?

What were they afraid of?

If Bruno was right,
then the sacred books

and the authority of the Church

would be open to question.

Finally, the cardinals
of the Inquisition

rendered their verdict.

CARDINAL BELLARMINE:
You are found guilty

of questioning the Holy Trinity

and the divinity
of Jesus Christ.

Of believing that God's
wrath is not eternal,

that everyone will be saved.

Of asserting the existence
of other worlds.

All of the books
you have written

will be gathered up and burned
in St. Peter's Square.

Reverend Father,
these eight years of confinement

have given me
much time to reflect.

CARDINAL BELLARMINE:
So...

you will recant?

My love and reverence
for the Creator

inspires in me the vision
of an infinite Creation.

You shall be turned over
to the Governor of Rome

to administer
the appropriate punishment

for those who
will not repent.

(crowd jeers)

It may be that you
are more afraid

to deliver this judgment
than I am to hear it.

(crowd shouting)

Ten years
after Bruno's martyrdom,

Galileo first looked
through a telescope,

realizing that Bruno
had been right all along.

The Milky Way was made
of countless stars

invisible to the naked eye,

and some of those lights in the
sky were actually other worlds.

Bruno was no scientist.

His vision of the cosmos
was a lucky guess,

because he had
no evidence to support it.

Like most guesses, it could
well have turned out wrong.

But once the idea
was in the air,

it gave others
a target to aim at.

If only to disprove it.

Bruno glimpsed
the vastness of space.

But he had no inkling of the
staggering immensity of time.

How can we humans, who rarely
live more than a century,

hope to grasp
the vast expanse of time

that is the history
of the cosmos?

The universe is
13.8 thousand million years old.

In order to imagine
all of cosmic time,

let's compress it
into a single calendar year.

Cosmic
Calendar begins on January 1,

with the birth of our universe.

It contains everything that's
happened since then up to now,

which on this calendar
is midnight, December 31.

On this scale, every month

represents about
a billion years.

Every day represents
nearly 40 million years.

Let's go back as far as we can,

to the very first moment
of the universe.

January 1.

The Big Bang.

It's as far back
as we can see in time...

for now.

Our entire universe emerged

from a point smaller
than a single atom.

Space itself exploded
in a cosmic fire,

launching the expansion
of the universe

and giving birth
to all the energy

and all the matter
we know today.

I know that sounds crazy,

but there's strong
observational evidence

to support the Big Bang theory.

And it includes the amount
of helium in the cosmos

and the glow of radio waves
left over from the explosion.

As it expanded,
the universe cooled,

and there was darkness
for about 200 million years.

Gravity was pulling together
clumps of gas and heating them

until the first stars
burst into light

on January 10.

On January 13,
these stars coalesced

into the first small galaxies.

These galaxies merged
to form still larger ones,

including our own Milky Way,

which formed about
11 billion years ago,

on March 15 of the cosmic year.

Hundreds of billions of suns.

Which one is ours?

It's not yet born.

It will rise from the ashes
of other stars.

See those lights
flashing like paparazzi?

Each one is a supernova,

the blazing death
of a giant star.

Stars die and are born
in places like this one--

a stellar nursery.

They condense like raindrops

from giant clouds
of gas and dust.

They get so hot
that the nuclei of the atoms

fuse together deep within them

to make the oxygen we breathe,
the carbon in our muscles,

the calcium in our bones,
the iron in our blood,

all of it was cooked

in the fiery hearts
of long-vanished stars.

You, me, everyone--

we are made of star stuff.

This star stuff
is recycled and enriched,

again and again,

through succeeding
generations of stars.

How much longer until
the birth of our Sun?

A long time.

It won't begin to shine

for another six billion years.

Our Sun's birthday is August 31

on the Cosmic Calendar...

...four and a half
billion years ago.

As with the other worlds
of our solar system,

Earth was formed
from a disk of gas and dust

orbiting the newborn Sun.

Repeated collisions produced
a growing ball of debris.

See that asteroid?

No, not that one.

The one over there.

We exist because the gravity
of that one next to it

just nudged it
an inch to the left.

What difference
could an inch make

on the scale the solar system?

Just wait, you'll see.

The Earth took
one hell of a beating

in its first billion years.

Fragments of orbiting debris
collided and coalesced,

until they snowballed
to form our Moon.

The Moon is a souvenir
of that violent epoch.

If you stood on the surface
of that long ago Earth,

the Moon would have looked
a hundred times brighter.

It was ten times
closer back then,

locked in a much more intimate
gravitational embrace.

As the Earth cooled,
seas began to form.

The tides were
a thousand times higher then.

Over the eons,
tidal friction within Earth

pushed the Moon away.

Life began
somewhere around here,

September 21,

three and a half billion
years ago on our little world.

We still don't know
how life got started.

For all we know,

it may have come from
another part of the Milky Way.

The origin of life

is one of the greatest
unsolved mysteries of science.

That's life cooking,

evolving all
the biochemical recipes

for its incredibly
complex activities.

By November 9,
life was breathing, moving,

eating, responding to
its environment.

We owe a lot
to those pioneering microbes.

Oh, yeah-- one other thing.

They also invented sex.

December 17 was quite a day.

Life in the sea really took off,

it was exploding
with a diversity

of larger plants and animals.

Tiktaalik was one of the first
animals to venture onto land.

It must have felt
like visiting another planet.

Forests, dinosaurs,

birds, insects,

they all evolved
in the final week of December.

The first flower...

bloomed on December 28.

As these ancient forests
grew and died

and sank beneath the surface,

their remains transformed
into coal.

300 million years later,

we humans are burning
most of that coal to power

and imperil our civilization.

(whooshing)

Remember that asteroid
back in the formation

of the solar system--

the one that got nudged
a little to the left?

Well, here it comes.

It's 6:24 a.m.

on December 30
on the Cosmic Calendar.

(impact thundering)

For more than
a hundred million years,

the dinosaurs were lords
of the Earth,

while our ancestors,
small mammals,

scurried fearfully underfoot.

The asteroid changed all that.

Suppose it hadn't
been nudged at all.

It would have missed
the Earth entirely,

and for all we know, the
dinosaurs might still be here

but we wouldn't.

This is a good example
of the extreme contingency,

the chance nature, of existence.

The universe is already
more than 13 and a half

billion years old.

Still no sign of us.

In the vast ocean of time
that this calendar represents,

we humans only evolved
within the last hour

of the last day
of the cosmic year.

11:59 and 46 seconds.

All of recorded history occupies
only the last 14 seconds,

and every person
you've ever heard of

lived somewhere in there.

All those kings and battles,
migrations and inventions,

wars and loves,
everything in the history books

happened here,
in the last seconds

of the Cosmic Calendar.

But if we want to explore

such a brief moment
of cosmic time...

...we'll have to change scale.

We are newcomers to the cosmos.

Our own story only begins on the
last night of the cosmic year.

It's 9:45 on New Year's Eve.

Three and a half
million years ago,

our ancestors, yours and mine,
left these traces.

We stood up,
and parted ways from them.

Once we were standing
on two feet,

our eyes were no longer
fixated on the ground.

Now we were free
to look up in wonder.

For the longest part
of human existence,

say the last 40,000 generations,

we were wanderers,

living in small bands
of hunters and gatherers,

making tools, controlling fire,

naming things,

all within the last hour
of the Cosmic Calendar.

To find out what happens next,
we'll have to change scale

to see the last minute
of the last night

of the cosmic year.

11:59.

We're so very young on
the time scale of the universe

that we didn't start painting
our first pictures

until the last 60 seconds
of the cosmic year,

a mere 30,000 years ago.

This is when
we invented astronomy.

In fact, we're all descended
from astronomers.

Our survival depended on
knowing how to read the stars

in order to predict
the coming of the winter

and the migration
of the wild herds.

And then,
around 10,000 years ago,

there began a revolution
in the way we lived.

Our ancestors learned
how to shape their environment,

taming wild plants and animals,

cultivating land
and settling down.

This changed everything.

For the first time
in our history,

we had more stuff
than we could carry.

We needed a way
to keep track of it.

At 14 seconds to midnight,

or about 6,000 years ago,
we invented writing.

And it wasn't long
before we started recording

more than bushels of grain.

Writing allowed us
to save our thoughts

and send them much further
in space and time.

Tiny markings on a clay tablet

became a means for us
to vanquish mortality.

It shook the world.

Moses was born
seven seconds ago.

Buddha, six seconds ago.

Jesus, five seconds ago.

Mohammed, three seconds ago.

It was not even two seconds ago
that, for better or worse,

the two halves of the Earth
discovered each other.

And it was only
in the very last second

of the Cosmic Calendar
that we began to use science

to reveal nature's secrets
and her laws.

The scientific method
is so powerful

that in a mere four centuries,

it has taken us from Galileo's
first look through a telescope

at another world to leaving
our footprints on the Moon.

It allowed us to look out
across space and time

to discover where
and when we are in the cosmos.

SAGAN:
We are a way for the cosmos
to know itself.

Carl Sagan guided
the maiden voyage of Cosmos

a generation ago.

He was the most successful
science communicator

of the 20th century,

but he was first and foremost
a scientist.

Carl contributed enormously

to our knowledge
of the planets.

He correctly predicted
the existence of methane lakes

on Saturn's giant moon Titan.

He showed that the atmosphere
of the early Earth

must have contained
powerful greenhouse gases.

He was the first to understand
that seasonal changes on Mars

were due to windblown dust.

Carl was a pioneer

in the search
for extraterrestrial life

and intelligence.

He played a leading role in
every major spacecraft mission

to explore the solar system
during the first 40 years

of the Space Age.

But that's not all he did.

This is Carl Sagan's
own calendar from 1975.

Who was I back then?

I was just a 17-year-old kid
from the Bronx

with dreams
of becoming a scientist,

and somehow the world's most
famous astronomer found time

to invite me to Ithaca,
in upstate New York,

and spend a Saturday with him.

I remember that snowy day
like it was yesterday.

He met me at the bus stop

and showed me his laboratory
at Cornell University.

Carl reached behind his desk
and inscribed this book for me.

"For Neil, a future astronomer.

Carl."

At the end of the day, he drove
me back to the bus station.

The snow was falling harder.

He wrote his phone number--
his home phone number--

on a scrap of paper and he said,
"If the bus can't get through,

call me and spend the night
at my home with my family."

I already knew I wanted
to become a scientist,

but that afternoon,
I learned from Carl

the kind of person
I wanted to become.

He reached out to me
and to countless others,

inspiring so many of us
to study, teach and do science.

Science is
a cooperative enterprise,

spanning the generations.

It's the passing of a torch from
teacher to student to teacher,

a community of minds
reaching back to antiquity

and forward to the stars.

Now, come with me.

Our journey is just beginning.