Human Universe (2014–…): Season 1, Episode 5 - What Is Our Future? - full transcript
Brian concludes his exploration by asking, what next for the ape that went to space?
Are you wondering how healthy the food you are eating is? Check it - foodval.com
---
It's been 200,000 years
since humans first emerged
in the Rift Valley of East Africa.
Since then, we've learnt to think,
to dream, to work together.
And today our human civilisation
spans the globe...
and beyond.
But our planet is a tiny fragile
speck of life in a vast,
uncaring universe.
So what next for the apes
who went to space?
LOW VOICES SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE
This cave mouth in northern Spain
has been inhabited
for 150,000 years.
There's basic shelter here
and safety.
But from time to time,
they left the light behind
and headed into the dark.
In these caves you see
the transition from just surviving
to living, to observing the world,
to enjoying it.
There were gatherings here,
people coming together to make art
and not just any old art,
but specific representations
of particular animals
and particular symbols.
So in these caves we see
the beginnings of superstition,
the beginnings of an appreciation
that there's not just a present
but there's a past
and there's a future.
These early artists were leaving
messages to future generations.
And the one that speaks loudest
lies far deeper into the darkness.
This handprint was made by a child
at least 35,000 years ago
and it's thought it was made
by a little girl.
She'd have done the painting by
taking paint and blowing it through
her hand...
...onto the wall of the cave.
Now, she would have had a basic
understanding of her future,
she'd have known
that the seasons pass
and maybe she even looked forward
to coming back to this cave one day.
Leaving her mark upon the wall
suggests she had started down
the road of understanding time
and how it stretched out
into the future.
In 40,000 years, we've learned
to see further ahead than
she could possibly have imagined.
We've walked out into a wider world
and made it our own.
And right now we are
at a crossroads.
Our civilisation holds the power
to shape the future
of the whole planet.
I think we pay far too little
attention to the future
and the ability to illuminate it,
to predict it is unique to us
and our prosperity,
and our very survival
depend very much on what
we glimpse out there in the dark.
Science and reason are the flames
and in this film I want to convince
you that we must use them
to make the darkness visible.
THEY CHAT QUIETLY
In late June, Earth's most northerly
community are preparing
to celebrate an important turning
point of their year.
It's midsummer in the Arctic,
and the people of Svalbard
are approaching the moment when
the sun rides highest in the sky,
the summer solstice.
If I were in Manchester I'd say this
was the longest day,
but that kind of language doesn't
make sense here, 78 degrees north
and midway between northern Norway
and the Arctic Circle
cos this day, summer's day,
began on April the 20th
and it will end on August the 23rd.
We can predict exactly the moment
that the solstice arrives.
So as strange as this long day
feels, there is no mystery
as to why it takes place.
THEY SING
The reason for that long polar night
and the months of midnight sun
is the geometry of the solar system.
Svalbard is quite literally
on top of the world and you feel it
when you're here, it's obvious.
The sun doesn't set, it's somewhere
over there at the moment
and throughout the course of the day
it just moves along the horizon
right round, 360 degrees as the
Earth rotates with the North Pole
pointing directly towards the sun.
And when this place was discovered
back in the 1590s,
people didn't know that,
or at least it wasn't agreed upon,
it was still possible and indeed
argued, back down there towards
the equator in Italy, that the Earth
was at the centre of the universe.
It's obvious that it isn't
when you come up here.
I wonder what would have happened
if Galileo and Copernicus and Bruno
and others had visited Svalbard.
I think that everything would have
got worked out much earlier.
After thousands of years
of observation,
our inquisitive minds began
to develop models of the universe.
The full explanation for the
clockwork of the solar system
came in the 1680s, with Isaac Newton
and his universal law
of gravitation, which is the first
modern law of nature.
What Newton's laws allow you to do
is to predict the future
given a knowledge of the present.
Newton's laws describe
a clockwork universe.
Planets orbiting stars,
stars orbiting galaxies.
And galaxies falling through
a possibly infinite space.
One day, in our own sky,
we'll see the galaxy Andromeda
heading our way.
In four billion years' time, it will
collide with The Milky Way.
For a billion years, our sky will be
filled with cosmic choreography.
And we know that because
we can predict the future.
So the laws of physics, in that
sense, are little time machines.
They allow you to predict
with precision what will happen
in the distant future
given a knowledge of the present.
We even see the sun ends its days
as it swells into a red giant,
some five billion years from now.
So we can be sure that we, along
with all other life on Earth,
will not survive
into the far future.
Extinction is a necessary part
of the evolution of life on Earth.
99.9% of species that have ever
existed have become extinct
and that's a good thing,
because when a species goes, there's
a niche available in the ecosystem
for other species to colonise -
that's how evolution works.
You know, if the dinosaurs
hadn't become extinct,
it's very likely
that we wouldn't exist.
So when considering the ultimate
destiny of our species
the answer seems obvious -
extinction.
But I'd argue this doesn't have
to be the case.
We are different to the other
species on this planet because we're
intelligent. Intelligence matters
and it's extremely rare, in fact
you can argue that intelligence may
be extremely rare in the universe.
It is possible that we're the only
intelligent species in the Milky Way
galaxy amongst 400 billion suns
and countless billions of worlds.
And that makes us extremely valuable
and worth protecting.
I think the way to keep this light
alive is for humans to continue
to venture out.
And explore.
To this end, we've built a ship
large enough for six astronauts
to train in.
This is Aquarius,
which is used by NASA as Nemo,
the Nemo missions. And the reason
this place is extreme,
if you look here...
is because...
we're below the ocean.
The pressure in here is two
and half to three times
atmospheric pressure, which is why
I sound like a Munchkin.
50 metres below the surface,
Aquarius offers a unique
training facility for deep space
exploration.
This is, er, this is brilliant cos
you can play at being an astronaut,
I mean, you'd have six astronauts
in here. The reason that
they use this as a mission simulator
is because the environment
is as close as you can get
to space on Earth, you have
to live here for weeks.
And if you stay here for more
than one hour -
so we've got one hour - you have to
stay here for a further 17 hours
to decompress,
so you can't just run away
if you, you know, psychologically
feel a bit claustrophobic
and you think "I don't like it,"
you can't just leave,
it's one of the few places on Earth
where that would be the case.
CHATTER OVER RADIO
In recent months, Nemo has been
tasked with a very specific type
of deep space exploration.
They're developing methods
to space walk onto asteroids,
where gravity will be a fraction
of that experienced on the moon.
Whilst at times dreaming
of an asteroid encounter is
a lot of fun, the motive behind
the mission is deadly serious.
MAN SPEAKS ON RADIO
In 2013, on a wintry morning
in Russia,
a massive fireball cut the sky.
RUMBLING
TYRES SKID
Seconds later, it exploded,
with 20 to 30 times
more energy than the atomic bomb
detonated at Hiroshima.
EXPLOSION
COMMOTION
Earth had been hit by the largest
asteroid in more than a century.
And no-one had seen it coming.
It seems our powers of prediction
failed us
and that's because, in reality,
nature can be chaotic.
I can demonstrate that with
a simple experiment.
These are magnets, so let's say that
this is an asteroid, then watch
what happens when I set the pendulum
off, let's say from this point here.
So I'm going to release it,
I've got a laser there.
From exactly that point,
I'm just going to let it go.
We see the laser tracing out
the path on this photo paper,
this is asteroid orbiting the solar
system, gravitationally interacting
with the Earth, the sun of course,
let's say a massive planet
like Jupiter.
There you go, it's collided with
the yellow one, the sun.
I can do it again
and what I'm going to try
and do is line it up in exactly
the same way and let it go.
In this case it's radically
different, that's because
this is what is known as a chaotic
system, there you go,
and it's hit the Earth, so that
will be the end of civilisation
as we know it.
The point is that the orbit is
critically dependent on what
we call, what physicists call,
the initial conditions.
That's how precisely did I line this
up, how precisely did I release it,
what precisely happens as it sets
off on its path
through the solar system?
In here are the little air
currents that deflect it
a little bit, all those
infinitesimally small changes
can be amplified in a complicated
system such as this.
And that's why it's not good enough
to just discover the asteroids
that come near to the Earth,
it's not good enough
because one of those tiny nudges
could take something that you
might think was safe, just using
Newton's laws very naively,
and in fact nudging it onto
a collision course with the Earth.
This fundamental feature of nature
means that we may get little
warning when the next one
comes our way.
So we must continue to track
threatening asteroids...
...and develop technologies that will
get us out to them at short notice.
In January 2014, the European Space
Agency's Rosetta spacecraft
awoke from a 31-month period
of hibernation.
It had travelled four billion miles
to intercept a comet.
Throughout August and September,
the tiny spaceship made
a careful approach,
scanning the comet
for a place to land.
And next week, it will deploy
a probe to attach itself
to the surface.
Rosetta will greatly increase
our understanding of comets
and the early solar system.
It also tests our ability to mount
a manned mission to an asteroid
if the need arises.
The problem is that even with
a sophisticated rocket system,
it took Rosetta ten years
to reach its target.
To send astronauts that deep
into space will require
a great leap in our
technical ability
and our ambition.
I had an ambition to be an astronaut
from, you know, as early
as I can remember.
I can't remember thinking
anything else.
The excitement of, you know,
just going way away from Earth.
For the first time in a generation,
new designs of manned spacecraft
are being tested.
Commercial companies
are now developing crafts
to get us into space.
The endeavour is never without risk.
It's not an easy thing to do,
to escape the Earth's gravity
even for a few minutes
takes a lot of energy.
Three, two, one.
Release, release. Quick release.
INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER
The future of human space
exploration faces enormous
challenges and depends on
the bravery of test pilots like
David Mackay, Peter Siebold and
their colleague, Mike Alsbury,
who lost his life last week
in the pursuit of a dream.
A dream that many of us grew up
with as children and never lost.
When I was growing up in the 1970s,
this was one of my favourite books.
I got it, I think it was 1979, it
was about the same time as my first
ABBA album.
And I just read it for years
and years and years.
It's a sort of fictional history
of spacecraft, 2000 to 2100 AD.
It's got things like, "2005 -
work starts on the lunar station."
Then this is one of my favourite
spacecraft, I used to try and build
these out of Lego, it's called the
Martian Queen and it says, "Early in
"2015, fare-paying passengers
stepped aboard
"the first purpose-built
interplanetary spaceliner."
So they imagined that by 2015,
by next year, we'd have spaceliners
taking people
to the Martian colonies.
And what's interesting is my little
boy loves the book as well,
he's got it now, and some of this
stuff is in his past.
This is a list of things that
didn't happen, whereas for me,
back in the '70s, it was a list of
things that I thought would happen.
Breaking free from Earth's bonds is
so difficult that there are only
eight people alive that know what
it's like to walk on another world.
Hi. Charlie.
What's your name? Charlie. Believe
it or not, I'm the other half
of Judy.
Hello, Charlie. How you doing?
Nice to meet you.
Wonderful to meet you.
Pleasure to meet you.
Good to be here with you.
Have a seat.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
Charlie Duke was Lunar Module
pilot for Apollo 16
and the youngest person ever
to walk on the moon.
How about an extension,
you guys? We're feeling good.
Mission objective - to bring back
samples from the lunar highlands
and test drive new technologies.
And here we go. We are really going
up a hill, I'll tell you.
When I was just becoming aware
of Apollo, I thought that
I would be able to go into...
at least into Earth orbit myself.
Yeah, really, my dad was born
in 1907 and so he was just
right after the Wright brothers
and, er, and he could barely believe
that his son went to the moon.
And yet at the time my five-year-old,
Tom, he didn't think it was any
big deal! You know, that everybody
in the neighbourhood
was going to the moon.
Neil Armstrong was a next door
neighbour,
Tom Stafford was in the
neighbourhood, Frank Borman
was in the neighbourhood, the whole
neighbourhood was either NASA engineers
or astronauts, so everybody's...
it's natural,
"Let's go to the moon, Dad,
when you going to do it?"
Hey, John, this is perfect, with
the LM, and the rover, and you,
and Stone Mountain,
and the old flag.
Come on out here and give me
a salute.
Big Navy salute.
Off the ground a bit more.
There we go.
You're most famous probably
for the most famous photograph
involving you, it's not you,
it's the photograph of your family
that you left on the moon.
I asked the boys,
they were five and seven,
I said, "Would you guys like to be
with your dad on the moon?"
They said "Oh, yeah,
that'd be great, Dad."
So on the back of that picture
we had written,
"This is the family of astronaut
Charlie Duke,
"from planet Earth who landed on
the moon in April 1972"
and we all signed it and then
I dropped the picture on the moon.
It sort of shows the human side
of space flight and, you know,
we were family men,
we were dads, husbands,
and so wanted my family
to be a part of it.
They'll sit there for millions of years,
won't they, they won't go anywhere.
And if you look back to those days,
so less than a year from the first
test flight, first manned test
flight to landing on the moon. Yeah.
Would that be possible now? No. Why?
We don't have the, er, the schedule,
the money to build spacecraft
that quickly.
We don't have the, er, the manpower
to do it.
I mean, 400,000 people and unlimited
budget, you can do a lot, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah! And that's what we had.
After Charlie left, only two
men have ever gone back
and there's good reason for that.
The energy required to break free
from Earth's gravitational embrace
is staggering.
This is the spacecraft that took
John Young, Ken Mattingly
and Charlie Duke to the moon.
There's the Service Module
and the Command Module,
that's the engine that fired
to bring them back from the moon
to the Earth, the Lunar Lander
sat inside there
and this piece is essentially
a single rocket motor
that fired to take them from Earth
orbit to the moon.
So this is the 120 tonne moon
spacecraft, if you like.
But from a physics perspective,
the difficulty is getting that
into orbit, and on Saturn V
that was done in two bits
and this is stage two and that
is the stage two fuel tank.
Inside there are 450 tonnes
of rocket fuel.
And this burnt through those
450 tonnes in about 6 minutes,
taking the spacecraft from
an altitude of 200,000 feet,
about 38 miles, up to 114 and a half
miles, that's virtually in orbit.
And it did that by burning
the fuel in five engines.
Now, at the time, that was one
of the most powerful rockets
ever built, but not the most
powerful - that was this,
Stage One of the Saturn V.
There are 2,200 tons of fuel
in here,
and stage one burnt through that
in about two and a half minutes.
To do that they add fuel pumps
that were more powerful than a 747
at lift off to pump 15 tonnes of
fuel a second into these...
...the F1 engines.
Every statistic about these engines
is ridiculous.
In those two and half minutes
when this spacecraft was lifting off
the power generated was more than
the peak electrical power generation
capacity of the United Kingdom.
Building a vehicle powerful enough
to accelerate three men
to escape velocity
was a triumph of human ingenuity.
But the technology at
the heart of any rocket
is essentially ancient technology,
the release of energy by combustion.
We used fire to release energy from
the Sun
stored in the wood from trees.
Then we discovered better things
to burn.
Energy-packed ancient sunlight
buried underground.
Burning that has set us free.
But fire has surely taken us as far
as it can.
The reason we aren't flying to
other planets is the same reason
we're endangering this one.
Every day we burn the equivalent of
all the plants growing on
this planet over a year
to meet our energy needs.
But that's not to say that
energy use is of itself
necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed by many measures
it's an extremely good thing indeed.
In every country where the per
capita energy use is greater than
about half the European average
then adult life expectancy is
greater than 70 years,
literacy rates are greater than 90%,
infant mortality rates are low
and more than one in five of the
population are in higher education.
So the story of energy use
is a complicated one.
On the one hand, obviously, energy
use is important and to be valued,
it's the foundation of our
modern civilisation,
and on the other hand,
if we generate our energy mainly
by burning fossil fuels
then it can be a bad thing.
Now in the short-term of course...
we can increase the efficiency
of our energy usage.
But in the long-term,
if we aspire to continue to advance
as a civilisation,
if we want to give every citizen of
the world a quality of life
that is as good as or even better
than mine,
and if ultimately we want to build a
space-faring generation
and journey to the stars
then we have to find a better way.
In the short-term, we can move to
cleaner electric motors,
but because we burn fossil fuels
in power stations,
that simply moves the problem
upstream.
So what we face is not an
energy crisis
but an energy conversion crisis.
Renewable energy might be part of
the solution,
but I believe there's a far more
promising long-term alternative.
If you could do one thing,
if you could wave a magic wand
and do one thing, what would you do?
If you could produce abundant clean
energy, it would solve many problems.
It's a grand challenge of our time,
and I truly am committed
and proud to be part of it.
Can we for the first time
bring a star to Earth?
Here at the National Ignition
Facility in California
they're trying to create man-made
stars.
It's a big laser.
It's the biggest in the world
by probably a factor of 50,
or maybe even 100,
so in size and in energy.
How much power's in there?
If you look at all the electricity
that's produced in the United States,
this is about a thousand times more
power than that.
But of course only for a fraction of
a second,
a few billionths of a second.
In a star, fusion begins when
the gas cloud that forms the star
collapses under its own gravity,
heating the core to many millions of
degrees.
Here at NIF, it's coaxed into life
in the laser's target chamber
encased in two metre thick walls
and 47 of the biggest glass doors
I've ever seen.
Ah, yeah.
So this is the sharp end of
the whole system, if you like,
this is where the lasers come down
and start to get focused into
the chamber.
And each one of them has to be
synchronised to a few trillionths
of a second to arrive at exactly
the same time
and of course in exactly
the right spot.
It's worth sort of stepping back
and realising what's happening here
cos you said 192 of these laser
beams, which are not small. Indeed.
In the middle of that which is
definitely not small. Absolutely.
What's the target?
It's about that big.
It's about a millimetre wide.
But it's the level of precision and
power that you're able to achieve.
And if you can do it uniformly
then you can create a little star.
It reminds me a little bit of Apollo
in a sense cos you just think,
you know, look what we can do
if we try.
So you see there,
there's a gold cylinder
and in the middle a little red ball,
that's the fusion fuel.
One of those pellets,
when all of the fusion happens
just right,
could power my house for a day.
So you imagine having a little bag
of those pellets,
let's say you three or four hundred
of them,
you could fit them in your pocket,
then that would power your life
for a year.
Thousands of these little pellets
could power a spacecraft to
the Moon.
Hundreds of thousands could power a
spacecraft out to the edge of
the solar system
or perhaps outward to the stars.
And one of the interesting things
about fusion technology is
that there's no waste, right?
What happens when you release all
the energy in that pellet of fuel
is you produce helium,
so you get your electricity
and you get your party balloons,
and that's pretty much it.
So it's an inherently clean, safe
and extremely efficient technology.
ALARM BLARES
TANNOY: May I have your attention.
Preparations for shot operations
in laser bay two are under way.
Leave laser bay two now.
I repeat. Leave laser bay two now.
This is the NIF control room,
this is the heart of all operations,
and the reason I have to be quiet is
because they're getting ready for
a shot.
Main laser operation will begin in
approximately one minute.
It's a bit like charging a
flash gun.
Banks and the capacitors
store electric charge,
getting ready to discharge
all this energy into the lasers.
Amplify, amplify, amplify, bang.
WOMAN: It looks like it just turned
green.
Are you comfortable with us going
forward?
I don't see a problem.
OK. We're ready to proceed
if you're OK with it.
There's the countdown.
Start sequence on my mark.
COUNTDOWN BEGINS
255 seconds.
In 255 seconds time,
a thousand times the power
generating capacity of
the United States of America
is going to be fired down into
something a few millimetres across.
It's cool.
Brilliant that we can do this,
isn't it?
By "we" I mean them.
Yeah, "we", it's our civilisation.
Five, four, three, two, one, shot.
That's a bang...
...and that's the future.
Commercial fusion power stations
are still a long way off,
but NIF has proved that it can be
done in principle.
If fusion can be made economically
viable,
it would end the days of fire
and it would do much more than power
our cars and cities,
it would provide a new foundation
for our civilisation,
it would even open up the road to
the stars.
I think we expect, in fact,
we demand that
the future is going to be better
than the past,
but it seems to me that we're not
prepared to pay for it.
So how might things change?
Well, we're fortunate enough to
live in democracies,
and in democracies things change
when people have access to
knowledge,
when they understand facts
and when they can make
informed decisions.
Did you know, for example,
that Americans spend ten times more
money each year on pet grooming
than they do on nuclear fusion?
Now I think that if you said to
someone,
"Well, actually,
why don't you brush your own cat,
"and take the money you were going to
spend having somebody else brush it
"and give it to those people who are
trying to find a way
"of generating unlimited access to
clean energy?"
Then people would say, "Well, yeah,
that's a good deal."
See, in democracies things change
when people like you and me
want them to change.
I'm optimistic about the future.
No matter how deep we keep digging
our hole right now,
I feel like there is hope.
You know, I look at my life
and I think, "it's almost over,"
when in fact with the advances
in healthcare and such
it may not be.
Fundamentally, I think we all want
the same thing,
we want our children and their
children to have a future.
And that requires us to plan for
that future.
Hello. Hello. Nice to meet you.
This place addresses a fundamental
human need that we're going to
face in the future, which is
how are we going to feed ourselves?
The tunnel itself runs about 130
metres downwards on this
gentle gradient, and by the time
we get to the vaults at the end,
it's going to be 160 metres of solid
rock up to the surface.
Buried down here is
a priceless treasure,
and everything about this building
is designed to keep it safe.
This arc that you see,
this curve here, is deliberate,
it's in case there's a blast,
some kind of explosion up
at the surface.
And this is designed to
reflect the blast back.
An extremely precious place...
...covered in ice.
Then we have to go through this
airlock...
...and into the vault.
The treasure in here is not
currency, not gold, not rare jewels
but something important,
it's the future of our food.
Here are the seeds, the food
crops of virtually every
country in the world.
These are from Mexico.
There are India.
There are Nigerian seeds next to
Germany, Australia.
There are over 800,000 different
populations of seeds
collected here from virtually every
country in the world.
These here are from Syria.
These were taken out just before
recent troubles,
so they're out there,
they're protected there in case
the Syrian seed vaults are lost.
And then there are some strangest
of all countries you wouldn't
believe would cooperate in such
an international endeavour.
Look at this here -
box number 5DPR of Korea,
these are North Korean seeds.
And just over there are the
South Korean seeds next to them.
Canada.
Philippines.
This represents,
as a library of life,
just the whole of civilisation
rests with the genetic codes
contained in these boxes.
Our future might just
rest on these seeds
squirreled away in
the Global Seed Vault,
drilled into the top of the world.
The driving force behind its
construction was agriculturist,
Dr Cary Fowler.
So why did you decide to take
this project on?
Well, I've spent all of my life
working on trying to
conserve crop diversity,
and those of us in my field,
we live in a world of wounds.
We see the injuries, we see the
loss of diversity, the extinction.
And at a certain point, you know,
enough is enough,
and you, you try to figure out,
well, what can we do that's
not just stopgap?
Cos we know we're going to need this
crop diversity in the future,
it's the biological
foundation of agriculture.
We're going to need
it as long as we need agriculture.
Which is as long as civilisation
exists, I suppose?
Exactly, after that we're not
worried about it, are we?
Some of the seeds in this vault will
still be viable in 20,000 years.
When you look at this achievement,
how do you see it?
When I walk in here, I see
a history of agriculture,
all the way back to Neolithic days.
So our ancestors, yours and mine,
have been saving these seeds
in a successful, unbroken
line until today.
They're every option that we're going
to have for the future, so any
and everything we want and need -
rice and wheat to be in the future
is represented,
is made possible by this diversity.
Some people call this
The Doomsday Vault. Yeah.
Seems to me to be a rather, er
I don't know, grim... Apocalyptic?
Yeah. Yes. Is that a,
a reasonable description?
For me, when I walk down here I get
this immense feeling of happiness
and frankly, hope that,
OK, here are 800,000 crop varieties
that are not going to become extinct.
So to me, this represents a problem
that didn't happen.
Also seems to me, it's an example
of genuine long-term thinking,
this transcends political cycles,
it transcends lifetimes.
Yeah, when I look at this place,
I see about the only structure
in the world that I know of that's
built essentially for eternity,
for as long as we can imagine,
involving all the countries of the
world in something
that's long-term and positive.
That's hopeful, to me.
I came here to tell
a story of an uncertain future,
but I found something else under
the permafrost of Svalbard...
optimism.
We have the privilege to live
in a very special and unique time,
because for the first time in the
history of life on Earth,
there's a species that at least in
part is masters of its own destiny -
has its survival in its own hands.
It's true to say that
because there's an unbroken
line of life stretching back from me
to the origin of life on earth
3.8 billion years ago, that at any
point in that long history,
something could have happened to
wipe us out,
and something could
happen tomorrow to wipe us out,
but increasingly, we can see those
threats coming.
So, we have a chance,
the possibility,
of prolonging our existence into the
indefinite future,
if we can just find a way of taking
that responsibility seriously.
Today, we are writing our chapter
in the human story.
But as we do so,
we must keep in mind the future and
learn lessons from the past.
Back in the darkness
of the El Castillo caves,
there may be a stark reminder of
life's perilous existence.
More accurate dating of the
paintings suggests that the
story of our young artist
might have a sting in its tail.
If this art is not
just around 40,000 years old,
but over 43,000 years old,
not much of a difference,
then this is not human.
Because there were no humans in this
area of Europe 43,000 years ago.
If that's the case, this art was
created by Neanderthals,
a completely different species.
Just think about that.
Neanderthals were pretty much as
capable, mentally, as we are.
So if they'd been given enough time,
given the pressures that
we humans felt,
then there's no reason why they
couldn't have developed a
civilisation.
But they didn't have time.
Instead they disappeared,
they became extinct,
leaving perhaps, these signs of the
beginnings of their culture on the
roof of a cave.
But our species didn't die out -
we worked together,
held on and then flourished.
Should we send these up to Grandad?
Yeah, let's send them up to Grandad.
In the face of adversity,
we adapted and used our brains to
develop technologies.
In time, we built mighty
civilizations
with science as their foundation.
And then, within the
blink of a cosmic eye,
we journeyed to other worlds...
...and we glimpsed the very
nature of reality itself.
Right, let's send these to Grandad.
Going to put them in the envelope.
LOUD RUMBLING
We even have an outpost of our
civilisation living beyond Earth.
Science is unreasonably effective,
it's generated knowledge
beyond all expectation.
It's also delivered perspective.
Yes, we are an insignificant
speck in an infinite universe,
but we're also rare.
And because we're rare,
we're valuable.
So what are we to do to
secure our future?
Well, we must learn to value
the acquisition of knowledge
for its own sake, and not just
because it grows our economy
or allows us to build better bombs.
We must also learn to
value the human race
and take responsibility
for our own survival.
Why? Because there's nobody
else out there
to value us or to look after us.
And finally, most important of all,
we must educate the
next generation in
the great discoveries of science and
we must teach them to use the light
of reason to banish the
darkness of superstition,
cos if we do that,
then at least there's a chance that
this universe will remain
a human one.
There's a card in here.
It's got "Grandad"
written on it.
Are you a grandad?
I'm not a grandad.
Hey, Alex, you a grandad?
No, not that I know of.
I guess it's me.
---
It's been 200,000 years
since humans first emerged
in the Rift Valley of East Africa.
Since then, we've learnt to think,
to dream, to work together.
And today our human civilisation
spans the globe...
and beyond.
But our planet is a tiny fragile
speck of life in a vast,
uncaring universe.
So what next for the apes
who went to space?
LOW VOICES SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE
This cave mouth in northern Spain
has been inhabited
for 150,000 years.
There's basic shelter here
and safety.
But from time to time,
they left the light behind
and headed into the dark.
In these caves you see
the transition from just surviving
to living, to observing the world,
to enjoying it.
There were gatherings here,
people coming together to make art
and not just any old art,
but specific representations
of particular animals
and particular symbols.
So in these caves we see
the beginnings of superstition,
the beginnings of an appreciation
that there's not just a present
but there's a past
and there's a future.
These early artists were leaving
messages to future generations.
And the one that speaks loudest
lies far deeper into the darkness.
This handprint was made by a child
at least 35,000 years ago
and it's thought it was made
by a little girl.
She'd have done the painting by
taking paint and blowing it through
her hand...
...onto the wall of the cave.
Now, she would have had a basic
understanding of her future,
she'd have known
that the seasons pass
and maybe she even looked forward
to coming back to this cave one day.
Leaving her mark upon the wall
suggests she had started down
the road of understanding time
and how it stretched out
into the future.
In 40,000 years, we've learned
to see further ahead than
she could possibly have imagined.
We've walked out into a wider world
and made it our own.
And right now we are
at a crossroads.
Our civilisation holds the power
to shape the future
of the whole planet.
I think we pay far too little
attention to the future
and the ability to illuminate it,
to predict it is unique to us
and our prosperity,
and our very survival
depend very much on what
we glimpse out there in the dark.
Science and reason are the flames
and in this film I want to convince
you that we must use them
to make the darkness visible.
THEY CHAT QUIETLY
In late June, Earth's most northerly
community are preparing
to celebrate an important turning
point of their year.
It's midsummer in the Arctic,
and the people of Svalbard
are approaching the moment when
the sun rides highest in the sky,
the summer solstice.
If I were in Manchester I'd say this
was the longest day,
but that kind of language doesn't
make sense here, 78 degrees north
and midway between northern Norway
and the Arctic Circle
cos this day, summer's day,
began on April the 20th
and it will end on August the 23rd.
We can predict exactly the moment
that the solstice arrives.
So as strange as this long day
feels, there is no mystery
as to why it takes place.
THEY SING
The reason for that long polar night
and the months of midnight sun
is the geometry of the solar system.
Svalbard is quite literally
on top of the world and you feel it
when you're here, it's obvious.
The sun doesn't set, it's somewhere
over there at the moment
and throughout the course of the day
it just moves along the horizon
right round, 360 degrees as the
Earth rotates with the North Pole
pointing directly towards the sun.
And when this place was discovered
back in the 1590s,
people didn't know that,
or at least it wasn't agreed upon,
it was still possible and indeed
argued, back down there towards
the equator in Italy, that the Earth
was at the centre of the universe.
It's obvious that it isn't
when you come up here.
I wonder what would have happened
if Galileo and Copernicus and Bruno
and others had visited Svalbard.
I think that everything would have
got worked out much earlier.
After thousands of years
of observation,
our inquisitive minds began
to develop models of the universe.
The full explanation for the
clockwork of the solar system
came in the 1680s, with Isaac Newton
and his universal law
of gravitation, which is the first
modern law of nature.
What Newton's laws allow you to do
is to predict the future
given a knowledge of the present.
Newton's laws describe
a clockwork universe.
Planets orbiting stars,
stars orbiting galaxies.
And galaxies falling through
a possibly infinite space.
One day, in our own sky,
we'll see the galaxy Andromeda
heading our way.
In four billion years' time, it will
collide with The Milky Way.
For a billion years, our sky will be
filled with cosmic choreography.
And we know that because
we can predict the future.
So the laws of physics, in that
sense, are little time machines.
They allow you to predict
with precision what will happen
in the distant future
given a knowledge of the present.
We even see the sun ends its days
as it swells into a red giant,
some five billion years from now.
So we can be sure that we, along
with all other life on Earth,
will not survive
into the far future.
Extinction is a necessary part
of the evolution of life on Earth.
99.9% of species that have ever
existed have become extinct
and that's a good thing,
because when a species goes, there's
a niche available in the ecosystem
for other species to colonise -
that's how evolution works.
You know, if the dinosaurs
hadn't become extinct,
it's very likely
that we wouldn't exist.
So when considering the ultimate
destiny of our species
the answer seems obvious -
extinction.
But I'd argue this doesn't have
to be the case.
We are different to the other
species on this planet because we're
intelligent. Intelligence matters
and it's extremely rare, in fact
you can argue that intelligence may
be extremely rare in the universe.
It is possible that we're the only
intelligent species in the Milky Way
galaxy amongst 400 billion suns
and countless billions of worlds.
And that makes us extremely valuable
and worth protecting.
I think the way to keep this light
alive is for humans to continue
to venture out.
And explore.
To this end, we've built a ship
large enough for six astronauts
to train in.
This is Aquarius,
which is used by NASA as Nemo,
the Nemo missions. And the reason
this place is extreme,
if you look here...
is because...
we're below the ocean.
The pressure in here is two
and half to three times
atmospheric pressure, which is why
I sound like a Munchkin.
50 metres below the surface,
Aquarius offers a unique
training facility for deep space
exploration.
This is, er, this is brilliant cos
you can play at being an astronaut,
I mean, you'd have six astronauts
in here. The reason that
they use this as a mission simulator
is because the environment
is as close as you can get
to space on Earth, you have
to live here for weeks.
And if you stay here for more
than one hour -
so we've got one hour - you have to
stay here for a further 17 hours
to decompress,
so you can't just run away
if you, you know, psychologically
feel a bit claustrophobic
and you think "I don't like it,"
you can't just leave,
it's one of the few places on Earth
where that would be the case.
CHATTER OVER RADIO
In recent months, Nemo has been
tasked with a very specific type
of deep space exploration.
They're developing methods
to space walk onto asteroids,
where gravity will be a fraction
of that experienced on the moon.
Whilst at times dreaming
of an asteroid encounter is
a lot of fun, the motive behind
the mission is deadly serious.
MAN SPEAKS ON RADIO
In 2013, on a wintry morning
in Russia,
a massive fireball cut the sky.
RUMBLING
TYRES SKID
Seconds later, it exploded,
with 20 to 30 times
more energy than the atomic bomb
detonated at Hiroshima.
EXPLOSION
COMMOTION
Earth had been hit by the largest
asteroid in more than a century.
And no-one had seen it coming.
It seems our powers of prediction
failed us
and that's because, in reality,
nature can be chaotic.
I can demonstrate that with
a simple experiment.
These are magnets, so let's say that
this is an asteroid, then watch
what happens when I set the pendulum
off, let's say from this point here.
So I'm going to release it,
I've got a laser there.
From exactly that point,
I'm just going to let it go.
We see the laser tracing out
the path on this photo paper,
this is asteroid orbiting the solar
system, gravitationally interacting
with the Earth, the sun of course,
let's say a massive planet
like Jupiter.
There you go, it's collided with
the yellow one, the sun.
I can do it again
and what I'm going to try
and do is line it up in exactly
the same way and let it go.
In this case it's radically
different, that's because
this is what is known as a chaotic
system, there you go,
and it's hit the Earth, so that
will be the end of civilisation
as we know it.
The point is that the orbit is
critically dependent on what
we call, what physicists call,
the initial conditions.
That's how precisely did I line this
up, how precisely did I release it,
what precisely happens as it sets
off on its path
through the solar system?
In here are the little air
currents that deflect it
a little bit, all those
infinitesimally small changes
can be amplified in a complicated
system such as this.
And that's why it's not good enough
to just discover the asteroids
that come near to the Earth,
it's not good enough
because one of those tiny nudges
could take something that you
might think was safe, just using
Newton's laws very naively,
and in fact nudging it onto
a collision course with the Earth.
This fundamental feature of nature
means that we may get little
warning when the next one
comes our way.
So we must continue to track
threatening asteroids...
...and develop technologies that will
get us out to them at short notice.
In January 2014, the European Space
Agency's Rosetta spacecraft
awoke from a 31-month period
of hibernation.
It had travelled four billion miles
to intercept a comet.
Throughout August and September,
the tiny spaceship made
a careful approach,
scanning the comet
for a place to land.
And next week, it will deploy
a probe to attach itself
to the surface.
Rosetta will greatly increase
our understanding of comets
and the early solar system.
It also tests our ability to mount
a manned mission to an asteroid
if the need arises.
The problem is that even with
a sophisticated rocket system,
it took Rosetta ten years
to reach its target.
To send astronauts that deep
into space will require
a great leap in our
technical ability
and our ambition.
I had an ambition to be an astronaut
from, you know, as early
as I can remember.
I can't remember thinking
anything else.
The excitement of, you know,
just going way away from Earth.
For the first time in a generation,
new designs of manned spacecraft
are being tested.
Commercial companies
are now developing crafts
to get us into space.
The endeavour is never without risk.
It's not an easy thing to do,
to escape the Earth's gravity
even for a few minutes
takes a lot of energy.
Three, two, one.
Release, release. Quick release.
INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER
The future of human space
exploration faces enormous
challenges and depends on
the bravery of test pilots like
David Mackay, Peter Siebold and
their colleague, Mike Alsbury,
who lost his life last week
in the pursuit of a dream.
A dream that many of us grew up
with as children and never lost.
When I was growing up in the 1970s,
this was one of my favourite books.
I got it, I think it was 1979, it
was about the same time as my first
ABBA album.
And I just read it for years
and years and years.
It's a sort of fictional history
of spacecraft, 2000 to 2100 AD.
It's got things like, "2005 -
work starts on the lunar station."
Then this is one of my favourite
spacecraft, I used to try and build
these out of Lego, it's called the
Martian Queen and it says, "Early in
"2015, fare-paying passengers
stepped aboard
"the first purpose-built
interplanetary spaceliner."
So they imagined that by 2015,
by next year, we'd have spaceliners
taking people
to the Martian colonies.
And what's interesting is my little
boy loves the book as well,
he's got it now, and some of this
stuff is in his past.
This is a list of things that
didn't happen, whereas for me,
back in the '70s, it was a list of
things that I thought would happen.
Breaking free from Earth's bonds is
so difficult that there are only
eight people alive that know what
it's like to walk on another world.
Hi. Charlie.
What's your name? Charlie. Believe
it or not, I'm the other half
of Judy.
Hello, Charlie. How you doing?
Nice to meet you.
Wonderful to meet you.
Pleasure to meet you.
Good to be here with you.
Have a seat.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
Charlie Duke was Lunar Module
pilot for Apollo 16
and the youngest person ever
to walk on the moon.
How about an extension,
you guys? We're feeling good.
Mission objective - to bring back
samples from the lunar highlands
and test drive new technologies.
And here we go. We are really going
up a hill, I'll tell you.
When I was just becoming aware
of Apollo, I thought that
I would be able to go into...
at least into Earth orbit myself.
Yeah, really, my dad was born
in 1907 and so he was just
right after the Wright brothers
and, er, and he could barely believe
that his son went to the moon.
And yet at the time my five-year-old,
Tom, he didn't think it was any
big deal! You know, that everybody
in the neighbourhood
was going to the moon.
Neil Armstrong was a next door
neighbour,
Tom Stafford was in the
neighbourhood, Frank Borman
was in the neighbourhood, the whole
neighbourhood was either NASA engineers
or astronauts, so everybody's...
it's natural,
"Let's go to the moon, Dad,
when you going to do it?"
Hey, John, this is perfect, with
the LM, and the rover, and you,
and Stone Mountain,
and the old flag.
Come on out here and give me
a salute.
Big Navy salute.
Off the ground a bit more.
There we go.
You're most famous probably
for the most famous photograph
involving you, it's not you,
it's the photograph of your family
that you left on the moon.
I asked the boys,
they were five and seven,
I said, "Would you guys like to be
with your dad on the moon?"
They said "Oh, yeah,
that'd be great, Dad."
So on the back of that picture
we had written,
"This is the family of astronaut
Charlie Duke,
"from planet Earth who landed on
the moon in April 1972"
and we all signed it and then
I dropped the picture on the moon.
It sort of shows the human side
of space flight and, you know,
we were family men,
we were dads, husbands,
and so wanted my family
to be a part of it.
They'll sit there for millions of years,
won't they, they won't go anywhere.
And if you look back to those days,
so less than a year from the first
test flight, first manned test
flight to landing on the moon. Yeah.
Would that be possible now? No. Why?
We don't have the, er, the schedule,
the money to build spacecraft
that quickly.
We don't have the, er, the manpower
to do it.
I mean, 400,000 people and unlimited
budget, you can do a lot, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah! And that's what we had.
After Charlie left, only two
men have ever gone back
and there's good reason for that.
The energy required to break free
from Earth's gravitational embrace
is staggering.
This is the spacecraft that took
John Young, Ken Mattingly
and Charlie Duke to the moon.
There's the Service Module
and the Command Module,
that's the engine that fired
to bring them back from the moon
to the Earth, the Lunar Lander
sat inside there
and this piece is essentially
a single rocket motor
that fired to take them from Earth
orbit to the moon.
So this is the 120 tonne moon
spacecraft, if you like.
But from a physics perspective,
the difficulty is getting that
into orbit, and on Saturn V
that was done in two bits
and this is stage two and that
is the stage two fuel tank.
Inside there are 450 tonnes
of rocket fuel.
And this burnt through those
450 tonnes in about 6 minutes,
taking the spacecraft from
an altitude of 200,000 feet,
about 38 miles, up to 114 and a half
miles, that's virtually in orbit.
And it did that by burning
the fuel in five engines.
Now, at the time, that was one
of the most powerful rockets
ever built, but not the most
powerful - that was this,
Stage One of the Saturn V.
There are 2,200 tons of fuel
in here,
and stage one burnt through that
in about two and a half minutes.
To do that they add fuel pumps
that were more powerful than a 747
at lift off to pump 15 tonnes of
fuel a second into these...
...the F1 engines.
Every statistic about these engines
is ridiculous.
In those two and half minutes
when this spacecraft was lifting off
the power generated was more than
the peak electrical power generation
capacity of the United Kingdom.
Building a vehicle powerful enough
to accelerate three men
to escape velocity
was a triumph of human ingenuity.
But the technology at
the heart of any rocket
is essentially ancient technology,
the release of energy by combustion.
We used fire to release energy from
the Sun
stored in the wood from trees.
Then we discovered better things
to burn.
Energy-packed ancient sunlight
buried underground.
Burning that has set us free.
But fire has surely taken us as far
as it can.
The reason we aren't flying to
other planets is the same reason
we're endangering this one.
Every day we burn the equivalent of
all the plants growing on
this planet over a year
to meet our energy needs.
But that's not to say that
energy use is of itself
necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed by many measures
it's an extremely good thing indeed.
In every country where the per
capita energy use is greater than
about half the European average
then adult life expectancy is
greater than 70 years,
literacy rates are greater than 90%,
infant mortality rates are low
and more than one in five of the
population are in higher education.
So the story of energy use
is a complicated one.
On the one hand, obviously, energy
use is important and to be valued,
it's the foundation of our
modern civilisation,
and on the other hand,
if we generate our energy mainly
by burning fossil fuels
then it can be a bad thing.
Now in the short-term of course...
we can increase the efficiency
of our energy usage.
But in the long-term,
if we aspire to continue to advance
as a civilisation,
if we want to give every citizen of
the world a quality of life
that is as good as or even better
than mine,
and if ultimately we want to build a
space-faring generation
and journey to the stars
then we have to find a better way.
In the short-term, we can move to
cleaner electric motors,
but because we burn fossil fuels
in power stations,
that simply moves the problem
upstream.
So what we face is not an
energy crisis
but an energy conversion crisis.
Renewable energy might be part of
the solution,
but I believe there's a far more
promising long-term alternative.
If you could do one thing,
if you could wave a magic wand
and do one thing, what would you do?
If you could produce abundant clean
energy, it would solve many problems.
It's a grand challenge of our time,
and I truly am committed
and proud to be part of it.
Can we for the first time
bring a star to Earth?
Here at the National Ignition
Facility in California
they're trying to create man-made
stars.
It's a big laser.
It's the biggest in the world
by probably a factor of 50,
or maybe even 100,
so in size and in energy.
How much power's in there?
If you look at all the electricity
that's produced in the United States,
this is about a thousand times more
power than that.
But of course only for a fraction of
a second,
a few billionths of a second.
In a star, fusion begins when
the gas cloud that forms the star
collapses under its own gravity,
heating the core to many millions of
degrees.
Here at NIF, it's coaxed into life
in the laser's target chamber
encased in two metre thick walls
and 47 of the biggest glass doors
I've ever seen.
Ah, yeah.
So this is the sharp end of
the whole system, if you like,
this is where the lasers come down
and start to get focused into
the chamber.
And each one of them has to be
synchronised to a few trillionths
of a second to arrive at exactly
the same time
and of course in exactly
the right spot.
It's worth sort of stepping back
and realising what's happening here
cos you said 192 of these laser
beams, which are not small. Indeed.
In the middle of that which is
definitely not small. Absolutely.
What's the target?
It's about that big.
It's about a millimetre wide.
But it's the level of precision and
power that you're able to achieve.
And if you can do it uniformly
then you can create a little star.
It reminds me a little bit of Apollo
in a sense cos you just think,
you know, look what we can do
if we try.
So you see there,
there's a gold cylinder
and in the middle a little red ball,
that's the fusion fuel.
One of those pellets,
when all of the fusion happens
just right,
could power my house for a day.
So you imagine having a little bag
of those pellets,
let's say you three or four hundred
of them,
you could fit them in your pocket,
then that would power your life
for a year.
Thousands of these little pellets
could power a spacecraft to
the Moon.
Hundreds of thousands could power a
spacecraft out to the edge of
the solar system
or perhaps outward to the stars.
And one of the interesting things
about fusion technology is
that there's no waste, right?
What happens when you release all
the energy in that pellet of fuel
is you produce helium,
so you get your electricity
and you get your party balloons,
and that's pretty much it.
So it's an inherently clean, safe
and extremely efficient technology.
ALARM BLARES
TANNOY: May I have your attention.
Preparations for shot operations
in laser bay two are under way.
Leave laser bay two now.
I repeat. Leave laser bay two now.
This is the NIF control room,
this is the heart of all operations,
and the reason I have to be quiet is
because they're getting ready for
a shot.
Main laser operation will begin in
approximately one minute.
It's a bit like charging a
flash gun.
Banks and the capacitors
store electric charge,
getting ready to discharge
all this energy into the lasers.
Amplify, amplify, amplify, bang.
WOMAN: It looks like it just turned
green.
Are you comfortable with us going
forward?
I don't see a problem.
OK. We're ready to proceed
if you're OK with it.
There's the countdown.
Start sequence on my mark.
COUNTDOWN BEGINS
255 seconds.
In 255 seconds time,
a thousand times the power
generating capacity of
the United States of America
is going to be fired down into
something a few millimetres across.
It's cool.
Brilliant that we can do this,
isn't it?
By "we" I mean them.
Yeah, "we", it's our civilisation.
Five, four, three, two, one, shot.
That's a bang...
...and that's the future.
Commercial fusion power stations
are still a long way off,
but NIF has proved that it can be
done in principle.
If fusion can be made economically
viable,
it would end the days of fire
and it would do much more than power
our cars and cities,
it would provide a new foundation
for our civilisation,
it would even open up the road to
the stars.
I think we expect, in fact,
we demand that
the future is going to be better
than the past,
but it seems to me that we're not
prepared to pay for it.
So how might things change?
Well, we're fortunate enough to
live in democracies,
and in democracies things change
when people have access to
knowledge,
when they understand facts
and when they can make
informed decisions.
Did you know, for example,
that Americans spend ten times more
money each year on pet grooming
than they do on nuclear fusion?
Now I think that if you said to
someone,
"Well, actually,
why don't you brush your own cat,
"and take the money you were going to
spend having somebody else brush it
"and give it to those people who are
trying to find a way
"of generating unlimited access to
clean energy?"
Then people would say, "Well, yeah,
that's a good deal."
See, in democracies things change
when people like you and me
want them to change.
I'm optimistic about the future.
No matter how deep we keep digging
our hole right now,
I feel like there is hope.
You know, I look at my life
and I think, "it's almost over,"
when in fact with the advances
in healthcare and such
it may not be.
Fundamentally, I think we all want
the same thing,
we want our children and their
children to have a future.
And that requires us to plan for
that future.
Hello. Hello. Nice to meet you.
This place addresses a fundamental
human need that we're going to
face in the future, which is
how are we going to feed ourselves?
The tunnel itself runs about 130
metres downwards on this
gentle gradient, and by the time
we get to the vaults at the end,
it's going to be 160 metres of solid
rock up to the surface.
Buried down here is
a priceless treasure,
and everything about this building
is designed to keep it safe.
This arc that you see,
this curve here, is deliberate,
it's in case there's a blast,
some kind of explosion up
at the surface.
And this is designed to
reflect the blast back.
An extremely precious place...
...covered in ice.
Then we have to go through this
airlock...
...and into the vault.
The treasure in here is not
currency, not gold, not rare jewels
but something important,
it's the future of our food.
Here are the seeds, the food
crops of virtually every
country in the world.
These are from Mexico.
There are India.
There are Nigerian seeds next to
Germany, Australia.
There are over 800,000 different
populations of seeds
collected here from virtually every
country in the world.
These here are from Syria.
These were taken out just before
recent troubles,
so they're out there,
they're protected there in case
the Syrian seed vaults are lost.
And then there are some strangest
of all countries you wouldn't
believe would cooperate in such
an international endeavour.
Look at this here -
box number 5DPR of Korea,
these are North Korean seeds.
And just over there are the
South Korean seeds next to them.
Canada.
Philippines.
This represents,
as a library of life,
just the whole of civilisation
rests with the genetic codes
contained in these boxes.
Our future might just
rest on these seeds
squirreled away in
the Global Seed Vault,
drilled into the top of the world.
The driving force behind its
construction was agriculturist,
Dr Cary Fowler.
So why did you decide to take
this project on?
Well, I've spent all of my life
working on trying to
conserve crop diversity,
and those of us in my field,
we live in a world of wounds.
We see the injuries, we see the
loss of diversity, the extinction.
And at a certain point, you know,
enough is enough,
and you, you try to figure out,
well, what can we do that's
not just stopgap?
Cos we know we're going to need this
crop diversity in the future,
it's the biological
foundation of agriculture.
We're going to need
it as long as we need agriculture.
Which is as long as civilisation
exists, I suppose?
Exactly, after that we're not
worried about it, are we?
Some of the seeds in this vault will
still be viable in 20,000 years.
When you look at this achievement,
how do you see it?
When I walk in here, I see
a history of agriculture,
all the way back to Neolithic days.
So our ancestors, yours and mine,
have been saving these seeds
in a successful, unbroken
line until today.
They're every option that we're going
to have for the future, so any
and everything we want and need -
rice and wheat to be in the future
is represented,
is made possible by this diversity.
Some people call this
The Doomsday Vault. Yeah.
Seems to me to be a rather, er
I don't know, grim... Apocalyptic?
Yeah. Yes. Is that a,
a reasonable description?
For me, when I walk down here I get
this immense feeling of happiness
and frankly, hope that,
OK, here are 800,000 crop varieties
that are not going to become extinct.
So to me, this represents a problem
that didn't happen.
Also seems to me, it's an example
of genuine long-term thinking,
this transcends political cycles,
it transcends lifetimes.
Yeah, when I look at this place,
I see about the only structure
in the world that I know of that's
built essentially for eternity,
for as long as we can imagine,
involving all the countries of the
world in something
that's long-term and positive.
That's hopeful, to me.
I came here to tell
a story of an uncertain future,
but I found something else under
the permafrost of Svalbard...
optimism.
We have the privilege to live
in a very special and unique time,
because for the first time in the
history of life on Earth,
there's a species that at least in
part is masters of its own destiny -
has its survival in its own hands.
It's true to say that
because there's an unbroken
line of life stretching back from me
to the origin of life on earth
3.8 billion years ago, that at any
point in that long history,
something could have happened to
wipe us out,
and something could
happen tomorrow to wipe us out,
but increasingly, we can see those
threats coming.
So, we have a chance,
the possibility,
of prolonging our existence into the
indefinite future,
if we can just find a way of taking
that responsibility seriously.
Today, we are writing our chapter
in the human story.
But as we do so,
we must keep in mind the future and
learn lessons from the past.
Back in the darkness
of the El Castillo caves,
there may be a stark reminder of
life's perilous existence.
More accurate dating of the
paintings suggests that the
story of our young artist
might have a sting in its tail.
If this art is not
just around 40,000 years old,
but over 43,000 years old,
not much of a difference,
then this is not human.
Because there were no humans in this
area of Europe 43,000 years ago.
If that's the case, this art was
created by Neanderthals,
a completely different species.
Just think about that.
Neanderthals were pretty much as
capable, mentally, as we are.
So if they'd been given enough time,
given the pressures that
we humans felt,
then there's no reason why they
couldn't have developed a
civilisation.
But they didn't have time.
Instead they disappeared,
they became extinct,
leaving perhaps, these signs of the
beginnings of their culture on the
roof of a cave.
But our species didn't die out -
we worked together,
held on and then flourished.
Should we send these up to Grandad?
Yeah, let's send them up to Grandad.
In the face of adversity,
we adapted and used our brains to
develop technologies.
In time, we built mighty
civilizations
with science as their foundation.
And then, within the
blink of a cosmic eye,
we journeyed to other worlds...
...and we glimpsed the very
nature of reality itself.
Right, let's send these to Grandad.
Going to put them in the envelope.
LOUD RUMBLING
We even have an outpost of our
civilisation living beyond Earth.
Science is unreasonably effective,
it's generated knowledge
beyond all expectation.
It's also delivered perspective.
Yes, we are an insignificant
speck in an infinite universe,
but we're also rare.
And because we're rare,
we're valuable.
So what are we to do to
secure our future?
Well, we must learn to value
the acquisition of knowledge
for its own sake, and not just
because it grows our economy
or allows us to build better bombs.
We must also learn to
value the human race
and take responsibility
for our own survival.
Why? Because there's nobody
else out there
to value us or to look after us.
And finally, most important of all,
we must educate the
next generation in
the great discoveries of science and
we must teach them to use the light
of reason to banish the
darkness of superstition,
cos if we do that,
then at least there's a chance that
this universe will remain
a human one.
There's a card in here.
It's got "Grandad"
written on it.
Are you a grandad?
I'm not a grandad.
Hey, Alex, you a grandad?
No, not that I know of.
I guess it's me.