Human Universe (2014–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Apeman Spaceman - full transcript
Brian Cox charts our story from apes to the birth of civilization and then to the stars.
Human Universe
Beyond Earth's atmosphere,
life is impossible.
Exposed to the vacuum of space,
you'd be unconscious within 12
seconds...
..and last little more
than two minutes.
And yet, for more than a decade,
we've made this harshest
of environments our home.
Star City
Russia
Today, the journey off our planet
begins here
in the cosmonaut training facility
on the outskirts of Moscow.
I am floating in a spacesuit above
the International Space Station.
It's surely as close as I'm going to
get to being in space.
Astronauts have to do
this for hours at a time,
six, seven, eight-hour spacewalks.
They're going to have to perform
many of them to install this module
when it's taken up into space.
Over there,
that's the Zvezda Module -
the Russian habitation module.
It's where the cosmonauts sleep,
you know, where they eat,
it's their lounge in space.
You can just imagine, can't you?
You can imagine the Earth
stretching out over there,
curving away.
I think it would be wonderful.
So wonderful.
It's kind of one of those things
you always dream of, you know.
I did anyway - doing a spacewalk...
..out in space on the Space Station.
Since 2nd November, 2000,
when the first expedition arrived
the International Space Station
has been continuously occupied...
..humanity's permanent outpost
amongst the stars.
You know, for me, this defines
what it means to be human -
throughout the whole
history of life on Earth,
of all the creatures that have ever
lived in the oceans
and the land or in the sky,
one has ever made it
off its home world.
So why is it that we alone
have ventured out into space?
What is it that makes us special?
As far as we know, we humans
are unique in the universe...
..the only creatures to have
developed the ability to ask
deep questions about the cosmos...
..and ponder our place within it.
Human Universe
Edited By
Perhaps the most fundamental
question we've asked is
how do we become who we are,
a space-faring civilisation?
What drove our ascent
from ape to man...
..and from the
dawn of civilisation...
..to the stars?
Part One
Apeman Spaceman
Guassa Plateau
Ethiopia
It's a story that begins in
Ethiopia, where our story began.
High in the mountains lives
a creature that allows us
to glimpse our origins.
You're not supposed to look
baboons in the eye,
so I'm going to just approach them
carefully.
I think that was a sneeze rather
than a warning cry.
These are gelada baboons -
they're a species of Old World
monkey found only here
in the Ethiopian highlands.
And we and the other great apes
share a common ancestor with them,
around 25 to 30 million years ago,
so, in evolutionary terms,
we belong to the same group -
the higher primates.
So I suppose if you want a simple
answer to the question -
who are we?
It's one of them.
The geladas aren't true baboons.
They are, in fact,
the last remaining species
of a group of primates
that was once one of the most
successful in Africa.
Although they're not our closest
cousins, by any means,
they have the most complex social
system of any non-human primates,
they live in groups of up to 500.
They also have the most
complex vocalisations
of any non-human primate.
They have sounds for attack
and defence,
also reassurance, sounds
for danger, also solicitation.
And they'll string them
together into long sequences.
But for all the similarities
with the other primates,
there is clearly a huge gulf
between them and us.
And whilst you see glimpses
of human-like behaviour,
there's nothing anywhere
near as sophisticated as us.
And, er, gelada, for all
their sophisticated vocalisations,
have nothing that you could even
remotely refer to as language.
So it's obvious that we have
something extra.
Since we split
from our common ancestor
the geladas have
retreated into the highlands.
But our intelligence and way of life
have changed unrecognisably.
We've gone on to colonise
every corner of the Earth...
..and beyond.
Lake Ziway
Ethiopia
My family have lived by this lake
for as long as we can remember
Solomon Tesfay is one of the Oromo
people of central Ethiopia.
They've been fishing
the lake's rich waters
since they arrived
here in the 16th century.
My Father taught me how to fish
There are many skills
and it takes a long time to learn them
You can't just turn up there
and start fishing
Constructing complicated tools,
like boats, nets and spaceships
is a skill unique to the human mind.
And this ability is thought to have
emerged for the very first time
in the hills around the lake.
This area's known as Gademotta,
it's a volcanic ridge pushed
up from the floor of the Rift Valley
to form an ancient caldera.
Over a quarter of a million years
ago, this was home to
a group of early humans,
attracted here by the lake,
but also by this stuff - obsidian.
Obsidian is volcanic glass
formed spontaneously by rapidly
cooling lava.
But some of the fragments that
litter the ground here
are far from natural.
Quite difficult, actually.
You don't want to be working it the
whole day and not produce anything,
so something like this will be
an ideal striking platform.
Right, so you made that look easy.
Ah. What am I looking to do now?
So you first visualise
what you want,
you are looking for a spear
out of this flake.
So you will need to
work around the edge, thin this down
because they're going to be
the edges of the spear point.
'Archaeologists have uncovered
hundreds of obsidian spear points
'at Gademotta, some of which were
made more than 250,000 years ago,
'the oldest of their kind
ever found.'
It's kind of easy to just randomly
knock a piece off. Yeah.
But then when you start actually
crafting the shape... Yeah.
So it's hit the angle, here.
Oh, I see, there. Oh, yeah.
Yes.
I can see that this takes...
takes an intelligent animal to craft
because it takes concentration
and dedication. Yes.
And you need to know exactly
what you're doing. Yes.
And you need to sit here
and do it and have patience,
and be able to visualise the shape.
Yes, definitely.
'But fashioning the spear's point
'is just the first stage
in constructing a weapon
'that would have flown through
the air like a javelin.'
This would have been attached to
a wooden piece by some animal skin
and it's thought some kind of glue.
So this whole weapon
is a complex thing,
you've got to imagine something
that doesn't exist -
a spear made out of all
sorts of different materials.
It's an object that's too
complicated for a single individual
to conceive of
and to build in a single lifetime.
An object like this requires
lots of individuals working together
and also passing information
on from generation to generation,
so, over time,
better spears can be constructed.
That requires some
means of communication,
probably some kind
of primitive language.
So this is the earliest physical
evidence we've found
of minds that think like ours.
What happened here wasn't just
a pivotal moment in human evolution.
It was a turning
point in a grander story.
For the vast majority of the age
of the universe,
the story of the atoms in this rock
was the same
as the story of the atoms
in my body.
They were forged 13.8 billion years
ago, moments after the Big Bang,
the heavier ones were assembled
in hearts of long-dead stars.
And 4.8 billion years ago, they
collapsed under their own gravity
to form the solar system - a glowing
ball of gas and some bigger rocks.
And for all we know,
despite all its majesty,
that's all the night sky is -
just a collection of glowing balls
of gas and some rocks.
But then, around 250,000 years ago,
a clump of atoms became aware -
it looked to the rock
and saw a spear.
In one of the universe's
hundred billion galaxies...
..orbiting one of that galaxy's
200 billion stars...
..on a small, seemingly
insignificant, blue-green planet...
..a tiny part
of the cosmos had become conscious.
But how did hydrogen atoms forged
at the beginning of time
come to wake up?
And how was it in only
a quarter of a million years,
that's a thousandth of 1%
of the age of the universe,
those atoms went from building
weapons out of stone
to constructing spacecraft?
The trigger for our transformation
from apeman to spaceman
can be found not on Earth,
but glimpsed in the night sky.
Gulf of Aden
The sea is my first wife
It is my whole life
I can never escape, never escape
For centuries, the seafaring
peoples of East Africa
have relied on the ocean
for their survival.
You have to accept the life of a sailor
It's not good that you travel
away from your family
But it's magnificent to be out
in open air
Sailors like Abdullah Ahmed Mohammed
established trade routes across
the Indian Ocean...
..guided by the light of the stars.
The north star is the star
we generally use
because it's the brightest and
above all the most stable
It never moves
Polaris, the north star, appears
stationary in the night sky because
it's the line directly on the axis
about which the Earth revolves.
But despite its appearance,
it's far from constant.
In 2,000 years, another star,
Gamma Cephei, will sit over the Pole
and Polaris will arc through
the sky like the others.
Because the Earth isn't
a perfect sphere,
the gravitational pull of the moon
and the sun causes
the Earth's axis to wobble.
North is over there, the axis is
pointing, by coincidence,
toward the star that we call
Polaris, the north star.
But in just a few thousand
years, as the axis begins to move,
the Earth's North Pole will point to
a different place in the sky.
The Earth's axis is said to precess,
tracing out a circle in the sky
once every 27,000 years.
But precession doesn't just alter
our view of the stars, it changes
the point in the planet's orbit
at which summer and winter occur.
And that affects the amount of
sunlight that falls on
the Earth in summer and winter,
and that has an effect
on the climate, it makes it vary.
But the solar system is way more
complicated than that.
The Earth is subjected to many
different gravitational pulls
and tugs, not least
from the planet Jupiter.
And that has the effect of changing
the Earth's orbit itself.
Now, the most important change
is over a time period
of around 400,000 years,
where the Earth's orbit,
the ellipse itself,
gets bigger and smaller
and bigger and smaller.
Every 400,000 years, these
variations in the Earth's orbit
conspire to amplify
the effects of precession.
And in one place on Earth,
the planet's geography amplifies
them still further,
to produce periods of rapid
and extreme climate fluctuation.
10 million years ago, this area was
a flat plain covered in thick,
dense forest, which made it
the perfect place for our early,
tree-dwelling ancestors.
But then, around that time, volcanic
activity raised the land up,
in places by over three kilometres,
to form this -
the Great Rift Valley.
During those times when the Earth's
orbit was at its most elliptical,
the Rift Valley would
experience intense rainfall...
..and deep lakes would appear
dotted all over the landscape.
And then, within just a few thousand
years, conditions would change.
It would become dry and arid
and those lakes would disappear.
It's thought that it was
this rapidly-changing environment
that drove our transformation
from ape to man.
And the reason we think that
is because we found the evidence
strewn across the valley floor...
..beginning with
our early ancestors,
who settled
in the newly-formed rift.
Three million years ago,
the homonym species
that could be found in East Africa
was Australopithecus.
It's a kind of a grim-looking chap.
This is really not much more than
a chimpanzee that stands upright,
certainly in brain capacity.
Its brain volume is around 400cc.
But then, 1.8 million years ago,
something spectacular happens.
You get an explosion of homonym
species, including this...
..Homo erectus, with a brain size
that is double Australopithecus.
Then, 800,000 years ago,
this species appears,
Homo heidelbergensis,
accompanied by another rapid
increase in brain size,
from 800cc to around 1,200cc.
Then, we wind forward to
200,000 years ago, this skull,
called Omo II, with a brain
size of around 1,400-1,500cc,
which is close to my brain size.
So this is one of the first skulls
that you can say is a modern human.
Interestingly, each one of these
increases in brain size
occurred at a time when the Earth's
orbit was at its most elliptical...
..and the climate
at its most volatile.
So the theory is
that human intelligence,
our intelligence, is a response
to periods of very rapid and violent
climate change, specifically, here
in the Rift Valley of East Africa.
And that ultimately,
it was the precise geography
of our corner of the universe
that made us who we are.
You know, I find it quite dizzying,
a very powerful thought,
that my existence,
the existence of my brain,
the existence of us,
our species, Homo sapiens,
was a result of changes
in the Earth's orbit,
which depend on the precise
position and orbits
of the other planets
in the solar system,
the way that the Earth's
spin axis moves around,
which depends on the position
and mass of the moon
and the position and mass of the sun
and the influence of those changes
on the climate here on Earth
and, in particular,
that there's a place,
like this, that can amplify those
changes in just such a way
that it makes living things,
my ancestors,
respond by increasing their brain
size, increasing their intelligence.
It's these brains that separate us
from the other primates.
They evolved in response
to rapidly-fluctuating climate,
and now they enable us to colonise
every environment on the planet.
Lac Abbe
Djibouri
At the heart of
the Danakil Depression,
the volcanism that sculpted
the Great Rift is still active...
..creating some of the harshest
conditions on Earth.
Yet, it's here that the Afar people
have made their home.
My name is Aden Ali.
I'm 87 years old.
I've lived here my whole life
Life is hard here, it is very hot
No one can survive here alone
To exist here, the Afar
rely on all the advantages
that large brains
gave those very first humans...
..the ability to club
together in groups...
..develop tools and technologies
to provide food and shelter...
..the ingenuity to adapt
their diet and lifestyle...
..and, perhaps most
crucially of all,
the ability to pass
the secrets of surviving
in this most unforgiving
of environments...
..down the generations.
The Afar say your eyes have your age
but your ears have your fatheris age
Your eyes see the present
but your ears hear the past
St Paul's Hospital
Addis Ababa
This is it, the human brain
and it might not look like it,
but it's the most complex
physical structure we know of,
anywhere in the universe.
There are over 80 billion neurons
in the average human brain.
That's comparable to the number
of stars in a galaxy.
That doesn't even begin
to describe its complexity.
Those neurons form connections
between 10,000
and 100,000 connections
to other neurons
and it's from that complex circuitry
that the human condition emerges.
Everything that makes us who we are comes from this kilogram and a half of
matter that resides in the skull of every human that has ever walked the Earth.
So who are we?
Well, a possible answer is that
we are something that emerges from electrical activity
inside this impossibly complex blob of matter.
You know, I love Ethiopia
and not just because
it's a beautiful country
but because of an idea.
It's impossible to sit here
and not catch a glimpse out of
your peripheral vision
of a line of ghosts stretching
back 10,000 generations
because we are all related
to someone who lived here
200,000 years ago.
And those first Homo sapiens
weren't that different to us -
in many ways they were the same.
So if you could bring a newborn
baby from the Rift Valley
all those years ago
to the 21st century
and subject it
to a 21st-century education,
then there's no reason
why it couldn't achieve anything
that a modern child could achieve.
It could even be an astronaut.
The brains that take us
off our planet...
..that build spacecraft...
..and enable us to live in
the vacuum of space...
..are the same brains that
once fashioned spear points
on the plains of Africa
a quarter of a million years ago.
But if those brains have barely
changed since we first evolved,
what was it that took us
from the Rift Valley
to living amongst the stars?
The road to civilisation
began 60,000 years ago
when modern humans first
left Africa.
Wadi Rum
Jordan
They moved north through the deserts
of the Middle East,
forging the routes the Bedouin
still use to this day.
2,000 years ago, this part
of the Jordanian desert was home
to the Nabataeans and,
for millennia,
they lived a nomadic lifestyle,
so living under canvas and
driving their camel trains along
the ancient trade routes
that snaked across the desert.
But some time around 150 BC, they
decided to try something different.
This is the Nabataeans'
great capital, Petra.
It stands testament to
the moment they abandoned
their traditional way of life and
built a civilisation in the desert.
This is probably the
most famous building in Petra,
it's called Al Khazneh, which means
treasure box, after a Bedouin legend
that a Pharaoh hid an urn
of treasure there.
Although its precise function
is lost beneath the sands of time,
the sheer scale of these buildings
serves a far deeper purpose.
Monumental architecture is a key
feature of human civilisation -
a statement of power and grandeur.
It cements the place of the rulers
and therefore provides
stability and security.
And this is one of the main
ceremonial routes into Petra,
but this isn't the tradesmen's
entrance, you know,
dignitaries, important people
from across the ancient world,
from Mesopotamia, from Rome and
Egypt would have entered Petra here.
Just imagine what it would
have been like.
The city sat on a trade route
which brought wood and spices
and incense and dyes
up from Africa and India
and into the Mediterranean,
black pepper alone
fetched 40 times its own weight
in gold in a Roman market,
and this city controlled all that
trade and they taxed it.
Every rock you see on every hillside
right across the city
is not actually a rock,
it's a brick
because these hillsides
would have been covered
with houses and temples and palaces.
And then all these stone facades
would have been covered
in white plaster
and painted bright colours
and not only the temples and houses
but every tomb
on every mountainside - this city
would have been a magnificent sight.
At its peak, Petra had
a population of 30,000...
..but today it lies
empty and abandoned,
as it has for nearly 1,500 years.
Its only occupants
a handful of Bedouin tribespeople
who've made their home
amongst the ruins.
So what was it that enabled
the ancient Nabataeans to support
a metropolis here in the desert?
The Nabataeans were masters of
fluid engineering
and virtually every drop of
rainwater
that fell on this landscape
was captured
and channelled in grooves
that they cut into the rock
and stored in giant reservoirs
and cisterns like this one.
They were better at plumbing
than the Romans,
they had the first ever
pressurised water system
and they used it to deliver 12 million gallons
of water every day into the city of Petra.
By carefully managing
this precious resource,
the Nabataeans sustained their city
and flourished here
for seven centuries...
..because with water came the thing
that underpins all civilisation.
When I'm at the farm in the morning. I'm happy
It brings life, the biggest benefit to mankind
If labour and equipment are available
and you have water
man can cultivate anything
Ali Abdullah is part of the farming
tradition that
goes back further than
anywhere in the world...
..because it was here in the
fertile crescent 11,500 years ago
that the first
agriculture emerged...
..closely followed by
the first civilisations.
The reason agriculture
is so important
for the development of civilisation
is because it supports large
numbers of people in one place.
It also frees up people's time -
they don't need to spend all
their day toiling in the fields,
so at least some of them
can do other things like think,
or become experts and, ultimately,
build that civilisation.
The human brain is what separates us
from the other primates,
but building civilisations
requires not just one
but many brains working together.
And it was this coming together
of minds
that led to an innovation
that changed who we are for ever.
In 1993, archaeologists discovered a
set of around 150 Nabataean scrolls.
Now they date from
the last days of Petra
as an occupied city around 550 AD.
And the most intact
documents a court case
between two priests
who lived together.
And one of the priests
decided to run away
and he stole from the house,
according to the scroll,
a key to one of the upstairs rooms,
two wooden beams
that presumably held the roof up,
six birds and a table.
So he's a bit like
a Nabataean Father Ted.
Now, mundane as it may seem,
this is probably how writing began -
the greatest invention in
the history of human civilisation
probably arose for admin purposes.
With writing came literature,
science,
mathematics and engineering.
And, as time passed, so the
information held in the written word
grew and evolved.
Writing was such
an important innovation
because it freed the acquisition
of knowledge from
the limits of the human memory.
Once we could write things down,
an almost unlimited amount of
information could be passed, not
only from generation to generation,
but from city to city,
from country to country,
across oceans, across the world.
Knowledge became widespread
accessible and permanent,
never lost and always added to.
Writing created a cultural ratchet,
an exponentiation of the known,
which ultimately
led us to the stars.
Star City
Russia
In the world of space exploration,
this room is hallowed ground because
every astronaut that flies to the
International Space Station today,
and, indeed, pretty much every
astronaut that's ever flown into space,
first American,
then Russian and European,
have sat at this table
and signed this book.
This is so precious.
It's a tradition that began in
1969 with three Soyuz crews,
Soyuz 6, 7 and 8.
And, as you flick through the pages,
you just turn through
the history of space exploration.
And here on a visit,
1st June 1970,
is Neil Armstrong.
And the reason every astronaut
wants to come here
and sit at this table
is because this table,
and all the furniture in the office,
everything you see in the office,
belonged to Yuri Gagarin.
I don't have to tell you what I felt
When it was suggested that
I sould make this flight
The first in history
Was it joy?
No, something more than joy
Pride? No
Not just pride
I felt great happiness,
to be the first in space
To engage in an unprecedented
duel with nature
Could anyone dream of anything
greater than that?
You know, it's easy to
characterise the early astronauts,
the pioneering test pilot
astronauts, as emotionless people,
you know, people who were just
interested in flying the vehicles.
But you only need to listen to Yuri
Gagarin's words to realise that
he knew precisely the significance
of what he was about to do.
But then I thought of the
tremendous reponsibility
of being the first to accomplish
what generations of people
had dreamed of
the first to show humanity
the way into cosmos
On 12th April, 1961, we
became a space-faring civilisation.
And in 48 hours, the latest
humans to sign Gagarin's book
are due to make the long journey
back to their home world.
Karaganda
Kazakhstan
This is Kazakhstan,
and certainly at this time of year,
in mid March,
it's a massed, icy wilderness, and
it's just flat as far as the eye can
see, and for around 800,000 square
kilometres, which is basically the
reason that we're here because we're
part of a search and rescue mission.
Tomorrow morning we're going
to meet three astronauts
out there in the snow, because we're going to
rendezvous with a Soyuz spacecraft as it returns
from the International
Space Station.
The technology that will bring
those three humans back to Earth
and the physics that will guide them
home is the culmination of
hundreds of years of knowledge.
Now, even I, just knowing
a bit of physics in my head,
can calculate exactly
what the astronauts have to do
to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere -
all you need are the two laws
written down first
by Isaac Newton, F = MA and
the universal law of gravitation.
Now, what you can show
from those, really simply, is
that, for a circular orbit, which is
what the International Space Station
is basically in, the velocity
flying along there is given
by the square root of GM over R,
where M's the mass of the Earth,
and R is the distance
from the centre of the Earth.
And the equations tell you
that to return to Earth,
all the astronauts need
to do is reduce that velocity
by 128 metres per second,
and gravity will do the rest.
And here is the important thing.
I can do that because I know those
two equations. Why do I know them?
Because I read them in a textbook
that was based on Newton's work
and published in 1687.
But if I had to do
that from scratch,
if I had to come up with those
two equations, it'd never happen.
Newton was a genius, he worked
for decades on those equations -
I would have no chance.
Newton famously said that
he built his knowledge,
his great laws, on the shoulders
of giants, and indeed he did.
It was Euclid, it was Descartes,
it was the great mathematicians
and geometers, not only of
Newton's time and before Galileo,
but stretching all the way back
to Euclid and the Ancient Greeks,
and he got that knowledge
from the written word, from books.
Soyuz Landing Site
19:56
So, this is the place where
it's going to hit the snow,
hopefully tomorrow, although
apparently the wind is quite high,
so it's possible...
possible they'll cancel the landing
and move it 24 hours
into the future.
We're just waiting for a phone call
from the Russian Space Agency
to tell us whether the Soyuz
undocked from the Space Station.
So, fingers crossed we're
going to get that phone call,
and otherwise we've got enough
vodka for about a month.
Right here you can see
in the foreground the three
departing crew members,
that's Sergey Ryazansky on the left
there, Oleg Kotov in the middle,
and just floating to the back, in
the grey jumpsuit, is Mike Hopkins.
There are Kotov and Ryazansky,
giving the final wave goodbye.
Once the hatches are closed,
the Soyuz, containing its
three human passengers, undocks...
Physical separation confirmed.
Confirmed at 7.02pm central time.
..and the tiny craft
gently drifts away.
'Separation. Copying, looking good.'
Soyuz Landing Site
08:29
This is the GPS system in the car,
and it's just ticked over to 08.30
now, so that means now, this moment,
the Soyuz is firing its rockets -
that's going to change its orbit,
it's going to slow it down
in its orbit.
So instead of following the
International Space Station
and orbiting around the Earth,
it takes a more elliptical orbit
and drops towards
the Earth's atmosphere.
This view from external cameras
on the International Space Station
showing the entry
of the Soyuz vehicle
as it barrels through
the Earth's atmosphere.
The capsule glows white hot
as it slowed from 26,000
to just 800 kilometres per hour
by the time its parachutes open.
A rare view of the Soyuz,
streaking towards the
central steppe of Kazakhstan.
I've got to say this is one of the
most exciting things I've ever done,
waiting for a spaceship to return
from the International Space
Station, it's just...
Go.
Nobody can see it at the moment,
but it should be there.
There it is, there it is.
We're right there,
I can see the parachutes.
We're the first there, we're
the first vehicle there, actually,
although there's one after.
It's quite remarkable.
You can smell a faint...
..faint burning smell,
not surprisingly -
you see the, yeah, damage.
Well, the sacrificial heat shield
that's burnt away to protect it
on its way to re-entry.
This is incredible -
I can't believe you can
just stand next to a spacecraft.
But the... If you turn around now,
the first astronaut's
going to come out,
I think it's going to be
the captain first.
You can see what a physical
experience it must be -
not only the re-entry, which
is, you know, ONLY an hour
and it probably pulls
four or five g,
but after living on the space
station for six months,
to feel Earth's gravity,
to feel this cold air again, er,
it... They look very happy,
they're all smiling, but
they look absolutely knackered.
A single human lifetime ago,
60 or 70 years,
this journey would have been
unthinkable, but now,
in the 21st century, it's routine -
four times a year astronauts
make the journey from our permanent
home in space back to planet Earth.
But, to me, it's much more than
that, because this space travel,
the exploration of the universe,
is the ultimate expression
of a much grander journey.
After almost 14 billion years
of cosmic evolution...
..and some four billion years
of life on Earth...
..the universe became conscious.
And in just 200,000 years,
we humans have transformed
ourselves beyond all recognition.
We've built great civilisations...
..accumulated knowledge
and technology...
until, finally, apeman...
..became spaceman.
And, like all journeys,
like all great adventures,
our journey just began
with a moment.
END
Beyond Earth's atmosphere,
life is impossible.
Exposed to the vacuum of space,
you'd be unconscious within 12
seconds...
..and last little more
than two minutes.
And yet, for more than a decade,
we've made this harshest
of environments our home.
Star City
Russia
Today, the journey off our planet
begins here
in the cosmonaut training facility
on the outskirts of Moscow.
I am floating in a spacesuit above
the International Space Station.
It's surely as close as I'm going to
get to being in space.
Astronauts have to do
this for hours at a time,
six, seven, eight-hour spacewalks.
They're going to have to perform
many of them to install this module
when it's taken up into space.
Over there,
that's the Zvezda Module -
the Russian habitation module.
It's where the cosmonauts sleep,
you know, where they eat,
it's their lounge in space.
You can just imagine, can't you?
You can imagine the Earth
stretching out over there,
curving away.
I think it would be wonderful.
So wonderful.
It's kind of one of those things
you always dream of, you know.
I did anyway - doing a spacewalk...
..out in space on the Space Station.
Since 2nd November, 2000,
when the first expedition arrived
the International Space Station
has been continuously occupied...
..humanity's permanent outpost
amongst the stars.
You know, for me, this defines
what it means to be human -
throughout the whole
history of life on Earth,
of all the creatures that have ever
lived in the oceans
and the land or in the sky,
one has ever made it
off its home world.
So why is it that we alone
have ventured out into space?
What is it that makes us special?
As far as we know, we humans
are unique in the universe...
..the only creatures to have
developed the ability to ask
deep questions about the cosmos...
..and ponder our place within it.
Human Universe
Edited By
Perhaps the most fundamental
question we've asked is
how do we become who we are,
a space-faring civilisation?
What drove our ascent
from ape to man...
..and from the
dawn of civilisation...
..to the stars?
Part One
Apeman Spaceman
Guassa Plateau
Ethiopia
It's a story that begins in
Ethiopia, where our story began.
High in the mountains lives
a creature that allows us
to glimpse our origins.
You're not supposed to look
baboons in the eye,
so I'm going to just approach them
carefully.
I think that was a sneeze rather
than a warning cry.
These are gelada baboons -
they're a species of Old World
monkey found only here
in the Ethiopian highlands.
And we and the other great apes
share a common ancestor with them,
around 25 to 30 million years ago,
so, in evolutionary terms,
we belong to the same group -
the higher primates.
So I suppose if you want a simple
answer to the question -
who are we?
It's one of them.
The geladas aren't true baboons.
They are, in fact,
the last remaining species
of a group of primates
that was once one of the most
successful in Africa.
Although they're not our closest
cousins, by any means,
they have the most complex social
system of any non-human primates,
they live in groups of up to 500.
They also have the most
complex vocalisations
of any non-human primate.
They have sounds for attack
and defence,
also reassurance, sounds
for danger, also solicitation.
And they'll string them
together into long sequences.
But for all the similarities
with the other primates,
there is clearly a huge gulf
between them and us.
And whilst you see glimpses
of human-like behaviour,
there's nothing anywhere
near as sophisticated as us.
And, er, gelada, for all
their sophisticated vocalisations,
have nothing that you could even
remotely refer to as language.
So it's obvious that we have
something extra.
Since we split
from our common ancestor
the geladas have
retreated into the highlands.
But our intelligence and way of life
have changed unrecognisably.
We've gone on to colonise
every corner of the Earth...
..and beyond.
Lake Ziway
Ethiopia
My family have lived by this lake
for as long as we can remember
Solomon Tesfay is one of the Oromo
people of central Ethiopia.
They've been fishing
the lake's rich waters
since they arrived
here in the 16th century.
My Father taught me how to fish
There are many skills
and it takes a long time to learn them
You can't just turn up there
and start fishing
Constructing complicated tools,
like boats, nets and spaceships
is a skill unique to the human mind.
And this ability is thought to have
emerged for the very first time
in the hills around the lake.
This area's known as Gademotta,
it's a volcanic ridge pushed
up from the floor of the Rift Valley
to form an ancient caldera.
Over a quarter of a million years
ago, this was home to
a group of early humans,
attracted here by the lake,
but also by this stuff - obsidian.
Obsidian is volcanic glass
formed spontaneously by rapidly
cooling lava.
But some of the fragments that
litter the ground here
are far from natural.
Quite difficult, actually.
You don't want to be working it the
whole day and not produce anything,
so something like this will be
an ideal striking platform.
Right, so you made that look easy.
Ah. What am I looking to do now?
So you first visualise
what you want,
you are looking for a spear
out of this flake.
So you will need to
work around the edge, thin this down
because they're going to be
the edges of the spear point.
'Archaeologists have uncovered
hundreds of obsidian spear points
'at Gademotta, some of which were
made more than 250,000 years ago,
'the oldest of their kind
ever found.'
It's kind of easy to just randomly
knock a piece off. Yeah.
But then when you start actually
crafting the shape... Yeah.
So it's hit the angle, here.
Oh, I see, there. Oh, yeah.
Yes.
I can see that this takes...
takes an intelligent animal to craft
because it takes concentration
and dedication. Yes.
And you need to know exactly
what you're doing. Yes.
And you need to sit here
and do it and have patience,
and be able to visualise the shape.
Yes, definitely.
'But fashioning the spear's point
'is just the first stage
in constructing a weapon
'that would have flown through
the air like a javelin.'
This would have been attached to
a wooden piece by some animal skin
and it's thought some kind of glue.
So this whole weapon
is a complex thing,
you've got to imagine something
that doesn't exist -
a spear made out of all
sorts of different materials.
It's an object that's too
complicated for a single individual
to conceive of
and to build in a single lifetime.
An object like this requires
lots of individuals working together
and also passing information
on from generation to generation,
so, over time,
better spears can be constructed.
That requires some
means of communication,
probably some kind
of primitive language.
So this is the earliest physical
evidence we've found
of minds that think like ours.
What happened here wasn't just
a pivotal moment in human evolution.
It was a turning
point in a grander story.
For the vast majority of the age
of the universe,
the story of the atoms in this rock
was the same
as the story of the atoms
in my body.
They were forged 13.8 billion years
ago, moments after the Big Bang,
the heavier ones were assembled
in hearts of long-dead stars.
And 4.8 billion years ago, they
collapsed under their own gravity
to form the solar system - a glowing
ball of gas and some bigger rocks.
And for all we know,
despite all its majesty,
that's all the night sky is -
just a collection of glowing balls
of gas and some rocks.
But then, around 250,000 years ago,
a clump of atoms became aware -
it looked to the rock
and saw a spear.
In one of the universe's
hundred billion galaxies...
..orbiting one of that galaxy's
200 billion stars...
..on a small, seemingly
insignificant, blue-green planet...
..a tiny part
of the cosmos had become conscious.
But how did hydrogen atoms forged
at the beginning of time
come to wake up?
And how was it in only
a quarter of a million years,
that's a thousandth of 1%
of the age of the universe,
those atoms went from building
weapons out of stone
to constructing spacecraft?
The trigger for our transformation
from apeman to spaceman
can be found not on Earth,
but glimpsed in the night sky.
Gulf of Aden
The sea is my first wife
It is my whole life
I can never escape, never escape
For centuries, the seafaring
peoples of East Africa
have relied on the ocean
for their survival.
You have to accept the life of a sailor
It's not good that you travel
away from your family
But it's magnificent to be out
in open air
Sailors like Abdullah Ahmed Mohammed
established trade routes across
the Indian Ocean...
..guided by the light of the stars.
The north star is the star
we generally use
because it's the brightest and
above all the most stable
It never moves
Polaris, the north star, appears
stationary in the night sky because
it's the line directly on the axis
about which the Earth revolves.
But despite its appearance,
it's far from constant.
In 2,000 years, another star,
Gamma Cephei, will sit over the Pole
and Polaris will arc through
the sky like the others.
Because the Earth isn't
a perfect sphere,
the gravitational pull of the moon
and the sun causes
the Earth's axis to wobble.
North is over there, the axis is
pointing, by coincidence,
toward the star that we call
Polaris, the north star.
But in just a few thousand
years, as the axis begins to move,
the Earth's North Pole will point to
a different place in the sky.
The Earth's axis is said to precess,
tracing out a circle in the sky
once every 27,000 years.
But precession doesn't just alter
our view of the stars, it changes
the point in the planet's orbit
at which summer and winter occur.
And that affects the amount of
sunlight that falls on
the Earth in summer and winter,
and that has an effect
on the climate, it makes it vary.
But the solar system is way more
complicated than that.
The Earth is subjected to many
different gravitational pulls
and tugs, not least
from the planet Jupiter.
And that has the effect of changing
the Earth's orbit itself.
Now, the most important change
is over a time period
of around 400,000 years,
where the Earth's orbit,
the ellipse itself,
gets bigger and smaller
and bigger and smaller.
Every 400,000 years, these
variations in the Earth's orbit
conspire to amplify
the effects of precession.
And in one place on Earth,
the planet's geography amplifies
them still further,
to produce periods of rapid
and extreme climate fluctuation.
10 million years ago, this area was
a flat plain covered in thick,
dense forest, which made it
the perfect place for our early,
tree-dwelling ancestors.
But then, around that time, volcanic
activity raised the land up,
in places by over three kilometres,
to form this -
the Great Rift Valley.
During those times when the Earth's
orbit was at its most elliptical,
the Rift Valley would
experience intense rainfall...
..and deep lakes would appear
dotted all over the landscape.
And then, within just a few thousand
years, conditions would change.
It would become dry and arid
and those lakes would disappear.
It's thought that it was
this rapidly-changing environment
that drove our transformation
from ape to man.
And the reason we think that
is because we found the evidence
strewn across the valley floor...
..beginning with
our early ancestors,
who settled
in the newly-formed rift.
Three million years ago,
the homonym species
that could be found in East Africa
was Australopithecus.
It's a kind of a grim-looking chap.
This is really not much more than
a chimpanzee that stands upright,
certainly in brain capacity.
Its brain volume is around 400cc.
But then, 1.8 million years ago,
something spectacular happens.
You get an explosion of homonym
species, including this...
..Homo erectus, with a brain size
that is double Australopithecus.
Then, 800,000 years ago,
this species appears,
Homo heidelbergensis,
accompanied by another rapid
increase in brain size,
from 800cc to around 1,200cc.
Then, we wind forward to
200,000 years ago, this skull,
called Omo II, with a brain
size of around 1,400-1,500cc,
which is close to my brain size.
So this is one of the first skulls
that you can say is a modern human.
Interestingly, each one of these
increases in brain size
occurred at a time when the Earth's
orbit was at its most elliptical...
..and the climate
at its most volatile.
So the theory is
that human intelligence,
our intelligence, is a response
to periods of very rapid and violent
climate change, specifically, here
in the Rift Valley of East Africa.
And that ultimately,
it was the precise geography
of our corner of the universe
that made us who we are.
You know, I find it quite dizzying,
a very powerful thought,
that my existence,
the existence of my brain,
the existence of us,
our species, Homo sapiens,
was a result of changes
in the Earth's orbit,
which depend on the precise
position and orbits
of the other planets
in the solar system,
the way that the Earth's
spin axis moves around,
which depends on the position
and mass of the moon
and the position and mass of the sun
and the influence of those changes
on the climate here on Earth
and, in particular,
that there's a place,
like this, that can amplify those
changes in just such a way
that it makes living things,
my ancestors,
respond by increasing their brain
size, increasing their intelligence.
It's these brains that separate us
from the other primates.
They evolved in response
to rapidly-fluctuating climate,
and now they enable us to colonise
every environment on the planet.
Lac Abbe
Djibouri
At the heart of
the Danakil Depression,
the volcanism that sculpted
the Great Rift is still active...
..creating some of the harshest
conditions on Earth.
Yet, it's here that the Afar people
have made their home.
My name is Aden Ali.
I'm 87 years old.
I've lived here my whole life
Life is hard here, it is very hot
No one can survive here alone
To exist here, the Afar
rely on all the advantages
that large brains
gave those very first humans...
..the ability to club
together in groups...
..develop tools and technologies
to provide food and shelter...
..the ingenuity to adapt
their diet and lifestyle...
..and, perhaps most
crucially of all,
the ability to pass
the secrets of surviving
in this most unforgiving
of environments...
..down the generations.
The Afar say your eyes have your age
but your ears have your fatheris age
Your eyes see the present
but your ears hear the past
St Paul's Hospital
Addis Ababa
This is it, the human brain
and it might not look like it,
but it's the most complex
physical structure we know of,
anywhere in the universe.
There are over 80 billion neurons
in the average human brain.
That's comparable to the number
of stars in a galaxy.
That doesn't even begin
to describe its complexity.
Those neurons form connections
between 10,000
and 100,000 connections
to other neurons
and it's from that complex circuitry
that the human condition emerges.
Everything that makes us who we are comes from this kilogram and a half of
matter that resides in the skull of every human that has ever walked the Earth.
So who are we?
Well, a possible answer is that
we are something that emerges from electrical activity
inside this impossibly complex blob of matter.
You know, I love Ethiopia
and not just because
it's a beautiful country
but because of an idea.
It's impossible to sit here
and not catch a glimpse out of
your peripheral vision
of a line of ghosts stretching
back 10,000 generations
because we are all related
to someone who lived here
200,000 years ago.
And those first Homo sapiens
weren't that different to us -
in many ways they were the same.
So if you could bring a newborn
baby from the Rift Valley
all those years ago
to the 21st century
and subject it
to a 21st-century education,
then there's no reason
why it couldn't achieve anything
that a modern child could achieve.
It could even be an astronaut.
The brains that take us
off our planet...
..that build spacecraft...
..and enable us to live in
the vacuum of space...
..are the same brains that
once fashioned spear points
on the plains of Africa
a quarter of a million years ago.
But if those brains have barely
changed since we first evolved,
what was it that took us
from the Rift Valley
to living amongst the stars?
The road to civilisation
began 60,000 years ago
when modern humans first
left Africa.
Wadi Rum
Jordan
They moved north through the deserts
of the Middle East,
forging the routes the Bedouin
still use to this day.
2,000 years ago, this part
of the Jordanian desert was home
to the Nabataeans and,
for millennia,
they lived a nomadic lifestyle,
so living under canvas and
driving their camel trains along
the ancient trade routes
that snaked across the desert.
But some time around 150 BC, they
decided to try something different.
This is the Nabataeans'
great capital, Petra.
It stands testament to
the moment they abandoned
their traditional way of life and
built a civilisation in the desert.
This is probably the
most famous building in Petra,
it's called Al Khazneh, which means
treasure box, after a Bedouin legend
that a Pharaoh hid an urn
of treasure there.
Although its precise function
is lost beneath the sands of time,
the sheer scale of these buildings
serves a far deeper purpose.
Monumental architecture is a key
feature of human civilisation -
a statement of power and grandeur.
It cements the place of the rulers
and therefore provides
stability and security.
And this is one of the main
ceremonial routes into Petra,
but this isn't the tradesmen's
entrance, you know,
dignitaries, important people
from across the ancient world,
from Mesopotamia, from Rome and
Egypt would have entered Petra here.
Just imagine what it would
have been like.
The city sat on a trade route
which brought wood and spices
and incense and dyes
up from Africa and India
and into the Mediterranean,
black pepper alone
fetched 40 times its own weight
in gold in a Roman market,
and this city controlled all that
trade and they taxed it.
Every rock you see on every hillside
right across the city
is not actually a rock,
it's a brick
because these hillsides
would have been covered
with houses and temples and palaces.
And then all these stone facades
would have been covered
in white plaster
and painted bright colours
and not only the temples and houses
but every tomb
on every mountainside - this city
would have been a magnificent sight.
At its peak, Petra had
a population of 30,000...
..but today it lies
empty and abandoned,
as it has for nearly 1,500 years.
Its only occupants
a handful of Bedouin tribespeople
who've made their home
amongst the ruins.
So what was it that enabled
the ancient Nabataeans to support
a metropolis here in the desert?
The Nabataeans were masters of
fluid engineering
and virtually every drop of
rainwater
that fell on this landscape
was captured
and channelled in grooves
that they cut into the rock
and stored in giant reservoirs
and cisterns like this one.
They were better at plumbing
than the Romans,
they had the first ever
pressurised water system
and they used it to deliver 12 million gallons
of water every day into the city of Petra.
By carefully managing
this precious resource,
the Nabataeans sustained their city
and flourished here
for seven centuries...
..because with water came the thing
that underpins all civilisation.
When I'm at the farm in the morning. I'm happy
It brings life, the biggest benefit to mankind
If labour and equipment are available
and you have water
man can cultivate anything
Ali Abdullah is part of the farming
tradition that
goes back further than
anywhere in the world...
..because it was here in the
fertile crescent 11,500 years ago
that the first
agriculture emerged...
..closely followed by
the first civilisations.
The reason agriculture
is so important
for the development of civilisation
is because it supports large
numbers of people in one place.
It also frees up people's time -
they don't need to spend all
their day toiling in the fields,
so at least some of them
can do other things like think,
or become experts and, ultimately,
build that civilisation.
The human brain is what separates us
from the other primates,
but building civilisations
requires not just one
but many brains working together.
And it was this coming together
of minds
that led to an innovation
that changed who we are for ever.
In 1993, archaeologists discovered a
set of around 150 Nabataean scrolls.
Now they date from
the last days of Petra
as an occupied city around 550 AD.
And the most intact
documents a court case
between two priests
who lived together.
And one of the priests
decided to run away
and he stole from the house,
according to the scroll,
a key to one of the upstairs rooms,
two wooden beams
that presumably held the roof up,
six birds and a table.
So he's a bit like
a Nabataean Father Ted.
Now, mundane as it may seem,
this is probably how writing began -
the greatest invention in
the history of human civilisation
probably arose for admin purposes.
With writing came literature,
science,
mathematics and engineering.
And, as time passed, so the
information held in the written word
grew and evolved.
Writing was such
an important innovation
because it freed the acquisition
of knowledge from
the limits of the human memory.
Once we could write things down,
an almost unlimited amount of
information could be passed, not
only from generation to generation,
but from city to city,
from country to country,
across oceans, across the world.
Knowledge became widespread
accessible and permanent,
never lost and always added to.
Writing created a cultural ratchet,
an exponentiation of the known,
which ultimately
led us to the stars.
Star City
Russia
In the world of space exploration,
this room is hallowed ground because
every astronaut that flies to the
International Space Station today,
and, indeed, pretty much every
astronaut that's ever flown into space,
first American,
then Russian and European,
have sat at this table
and signed this book.
This is so precious.
It's a tradition that began in
1969 with three Soyuz crews,
Soyuz 6, 7 and 8.
And, as you flick through the pages,
you just turn through
the history of space exploration.
And here on a visit,
1st June 1970,
is Neil Armstrong.
And the reason every astronaut
wants to come here
and sit at this table
is because this table,
and all the furniture in the office,
everything you see in the office,
belonged to Yuri Gagarin.
I don't have to tell you what I felt
When it was suggested that
I sould make this flight
The first in history
Was it joy?
No, something more than joy
Pride? No
Not just pride
I felt great happiness,
to be the first in space
To engage in an unprecedented
duel with nature
Could anyone dream of anything
greater than that?
You know, it's easy to
characterise the early astronauts,
the pioneering test pilot
astronauts, as emotionless people,
you know, people who were just
interested in flying the vehicles.
But you only need to listen to Yuri
Gagarin's words to realise that
he knew precisely the significance
of what he was about to do.
But then I thought of the
tremendous reponsibility
of being the first to accomplish
what generations of people
had dreamed of
the first to show humanity
the way into cosmos
On 12th April, 1961, we
became a space-faring civilisation.
And in 48 hours, the latest
humans to sign Gagarin's book
are due to make the long journey
back to their home world.
Karaganda
Kazakhstan
This is Kazakhstan,
and certainly at this time of year,
in mid March,
it's a massed, icy wilderness, and
it's just flat as far as the eye can
see, and for around 800,000 square
kilometres, which is basically the
reason that we're here because we're
part of a search and rescue mission.
Tomorrow morning we're going
to meet three astronauts
out there in the snow, because we're going to
rendezvous with a Soyuz spacecraft as it returns
from the International
Space Station.
The technology that will bring
those three humans back to Earth
and the physics that will guide them
home is the culmination of
hundreds of years of knowledge.
Now, even I, just knowing
a bit of physics in my head,
can calculate exactly
what the astronauts have to do
to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere -
all you need are the two laws
written down first
by Isaac Newton, F = MA and
the universal law of gravitation.
Now, what you can show
from those, really simply, is
that, for a circular orbit, which is
what the International Space Station
is basically in, the velocity
flying along there is given
by the square root of GM over R,
where M's the mass of the Earth,
and R is the distance
from the centre of the Earth.
And the equations tell you
that to return to Earth,
all the astronauts need
to do is reduce that velocity
by 128 metres per second,
and gravity will do the rest.
And here is the important thing.
I can do that because I know those
two equations. Why do I know them?
Because I read them in a textbook
that was based on Newton's work
and published in 1687.
But if I had to do
that from scratch,
if I had to come up with those
two equations, it'd never happen.
Newton was a genius, he worked
for decades on those equations -
I would have no chance.
Newton famously said that
he built his knowledge,
his great laws, on the shoulders
of giants, and indeed he did.
It was Euclid, it was Descartes,
it was the great mathematicians
and geometers, not only of
Newton's time and before Galileo,
but stretching all the way back
to Euclid and the Ancient Greeks,
and he got that knowledge
from the written word, from books.
Soyuz Landing Site
19:56
So, this is the place where
it's going to hit the snow,
hopefully tomorrow, although
apparently the wind is quite high,
so it's possible...
possible they'll cancel the landing
and move it 24 hours
into the future.
We're just waiting for a phone call
from the Russian Space Agency
to tell us whether the Soyuz
undocked from the Space Station.
So, fingers crossed we're
going to get that phone call,
and otherwise we've got enough
vodka for about a month.
Right here you can see
in the foreground the three
departing crew members,
that's Sergey Ryazansky on the left
there, Oleg Kotov in the middle,
and just floating to the back, in
the grey jumpsuit, is Mike Hopkins.
There are Kotov and Ryazansky,
giving the final wave goodbye.
Once the hatches are closed,
the Soyuz, containing its
three human passengers, undocks...
Physical separation confirmed.
Confirmed at 7.02pm central time.
..and the tiny craft
gently drifts away.
'Separation. Copying, looking good.'
Soyuz Landing Site
08:29
This is the GPS system in the car,
and it's just ticked over to 08.30
now, so that means now, this moment,
the Soyuz is firing its rockets -
that's going to change its orbit,
it's going to slow it down
in its orbit.
So instead of following the
International Space Station
and orbiting around the Earth,
it takes a more elliptical orbit
and drops towards
the Earth's atmosphere.
This view from external cameras
on the International Space Station
showing the entry
of the Soyuz vehicle
as it barrels through
the Earth's atmosphere.
The capsule glows white hot
as it slowed from 26,000
to just 800 kilometres per hour
by the time its parachutes open.
A rare view of the Soyuz,
streaking towards the
central steppe of Kazakhstan.
I've got to say this is one of the
most exciting things I've ever done,
waiting for a spaceship to return
from the International Space
Station, it's just...
Go.
Nobody can see it at the moment,
but it should be there.
There it is, there it is.
We're right there,
I can see the parachutes.
We're the first there, we're
the first vehicle there, actually,
although there's one after.
It's quite remarkable.
You can smell a faint...
..faint burning smell,
not surprisingly -
you see the, yeah, damage.
Well, the sacrificial heat shield
that's burnt away to protect it
on its way to re-entry.
This is incredible -
I can't believe you can
just stand next to a spacecraft.
But the... If you turn around now,
the first astronaut's
going to come out,
I think it's going to be
the captain first.
You can see what a physical
experience it must be -
not only the re-entry, which
is, you know, ONLY an hour
and it probably pulls
four or five g,
but after living on the space
station for six months,
to feel Earth's gravity,
to feel this cold air again, er,
it... They look very happy,
they're all smiling, but
they look absolutely knackered.
A single human lifetime ago,
60 or 70 years,
this journey would have been
unthinkable, but now,
in the 21st century, it's routine -
four times a year astronauts
make the journey from our permanent
home in space back to planet Earth.
But, to me, it's much more than
that, because this space travel,
the exploration of the universe,
is the ultimate expression
of a much grander journey.
After almost 14 billion years
of cosmic evolution...
..and some four billion years
of life on Earth...
..the universe became conscious.
And in just 200,000 years,
we humans have transformed
ourselves beyond all recognition.
We've built great civilisations...
..accumulated knowledge
and technology...
until, finally, apeman...
..became spaceman.
And, like all journeys,
like all great adventures,
our journey just began
with a moment.
END