All language subtitles for 40E0774F7DE6FD43D3C1A5F6ABE34FEE_eng

Come with me.

A generation ago, the
astronomer Carl Sagan stood here...

and launched hundreds of
millions of us on a great adventure.

The exploration of the
universe revealed by science.

It's time to get going again.

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

from the infinitesimal
to the infinite...

from the dawn of time
to the distant future.

We'll explore galaxies
and suns and worlds...

surf the gravity
waves of space-time...

encounter beings
that live in fire and ice...

explore the planets
of stars that never die...

discover atoms as
massive as suns...

and universes
smaller than atoms.

Cosmos is also a story about us.

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

found their way to the stars.

One adventure with many heroes.

To make this journey,
we'll need imagination.

But imagination
alone is not enough...

because the reality of
nature is far more wondrous...

than anything we can imagine.

This adventure is made possible
by generations of searchers...

strictly adhering to
a simple set of rules:

Test ideas by experiment
and observation.

Build on those ideas that pass
the test. Reject the ones that fail.

Follow the evidence
wherever it leads...

and question everything.

Accept these terms,
and the cosmos is yours.

Now come with me.

In this ship of
the imagination...

free from the shackles of space
and time, we can go anywhere.

If you want to see where we are in
space, just look out the front window.

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

Here is what Earth looked
like 250 million years ago.

If you wanna see
the future, look up.

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

If we're going to be venturing out into
the farthest reaches of the cosmos...

we need to know
our cosmic address.

And this is the first
line of that address.

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

for the farthest
reaches of the cosmos.

Our nearest neighbor,
the moon, has no sky...

no ocean, no life.

Just the scars of
cosmic impacts.

Our star powers the
wind and the waves...

and all the life on the
surface of our world.

The sun holds all the
worlds of the solar system...

in its gravitational embrace,
starting with Mercury...

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

has turned it
into a kind of hell.

Mars.

A world with as much
land as Earth itself.

A belt of rocky asteroids circles the sun
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

With its four giant moons
and dozens of smaller ones...

Jupiter is like its own
little solar system.

It has more mass than all
the other planets combined.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

A hurricane three times
the size of our whole planet...

that's been raging
for centuries.

The crown jewel of our
solar system, Saturn...

ringed by freeways
of countless orbiting...

and slowly tumbling snowballs.

Every snowball, a little moon.

Uranus...

and Neptune.

The outermost planets...

unknown to the ancients and only discovered
after the invention of the telescope.

Beyond the outermost planet...

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

And Pluto is one of them.

Of all our spacecraft...

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

Voyager 1.

She bears a message to
a billion years from now...

something of who we were...

how we felt and
the music we made.

The deeper waters of
this vast cosmic ocean...

and their numberless
worlds lie ahead.

From out here, the sun may
look like just another star.

But it still exerts its gravitational
hold on a trillion frozen comets...

leftovers from the formation
of the solar system...

nearly five billion years ago.

It's called the Oort Cloud.

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

because each one
of these little worlds...

is as far from its nearest
neighbor as Earth is from Saturn.

This enormous cloud of comets
encloses the solar system...

which is the second line
of our cosmic address.

We've only been able to detect the
planets of other stars for a few decades...

but we already know
that planets are plentiful.

They outnumber the stars.

Almost all of them will be
very different from Earth...

and hostile to
life as we know it.

But what do we know about life?

We've met only one
kind so far: Earth life.

See anything? Just
empty space, right?

Human eyes see only a sliver of
the light that shines in the cosmos.

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

Infrared is the kind of light made
visible by night-vision goggles.

Throw an infrared sensor
across the darkness.

Rogue planet.

World without a sun.

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

They're orphans, cast away
from their mother stars...

during the chaotic birth of
their native star systems.

Rogue planets are molten at
the core but frozen at the surface.

There may be oceans
of liquid water...

in the zone between
those extremes.

Who knows what might
be swimming there?

This is what the Milky
Way looks like in infrared.

Every single dot, not just
the bright ones, is a star.

How many stars?

How many worlds?

How many ways of being alive?

Where are we in this picture?
See that trailing outer arm?

That's where we live.

About 30, 000
light-years from the center.

The Milky Way Galaxy is the
next line of our cosmic address.

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

It would take light, the
fastest thing there is...

a hundred thousand years
to reach us from Earth.

This is the great spiral in
Andromeda. The galaxy next door.

We call our two giant galaxies
and a smattering of smaller ones...

the Local Group.

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

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

On this scale, all the objects
we see, including the tiniest dots...

are galaxies.

Each galaxy contains billions
of suns and countless worlds.

Yet, the entire Virgo
Supercluster itself...

forms but a tiny
pan of our universe.

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

a network of a
hundred billion galaxies.

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

Observable universe?
What does that mean?

Even for us, in our
ship of the imagination...

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

It's our cosmic horizon.

Beyond that horizon lie parts of
the universe that are too far away.

There hasn't been enough time...

in the 13.8 billion year
history of the universe...

for their light to
have reached us.

Many of us suspect
that all of this...

all the worlds, stars,
galaxies and clusters...

in our observable universe...

is but one tiny bubble in an
infinite ocean of other universes.

A multiverse.

Universe upon universe.

Worlds without end.

Feeling a little small?

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

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

afloat in a staggering
immensity...

but we don't think small.

This cosmic perspective
is relatively new.

A mere four centuries ago,
our tiny world was oblivious...

to the rest of the cosmos.

There were no telescopes.

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

Back in 1599, everyone knew
that the sun, planets and stars...

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

and that we were the
center of a little universe.

A universe made for us.

There was only one
man on the whole planet...

who envisioned an
infinitely grander cosmos.

And how was he
spending New Year's Eve...

of the year 1600?

Why, in prison, of course.

There comes a time in
our lives when we first

realize we're not the
center of the universe...

that we belong to something
much greater than ourselves.

It's part of growing up.

And as it happens to each of us, so
it began to happen to our civilization...

in the 16th century.

Imagine a world
before telescopes...

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

It was obvious that
Earth was motionless...

and that everything in the heavens, the
sun, the moon, the stars, the planets...

. . revolved around us.

And then a Polish astronomer and priest
named Copernicus made a radical proposal:

The Earth was not the center.

It was just one of the planets, and
like them, it revolved around the sun.

Many, like the Protestant
reformer Martin Luther...

took this idea as a
scandalous affront to scripture.

They were horrified.

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

His name was Giordano Bruno
and he was a natural-born rebel.

He longed to bust out of
that cramped little universe.

Even as a young
Dominican monk in Naples...

he was a misfit.

This was a time when there
was no freedom of thought in Italy.

But Bruno hungered to know
everything about God's creation.

He dared to read the books
banned by the church...

and that was his undoing.

In one of them, an ancient Roman, a
man dead for more than 1500 years...

whispered to him of a universe far greater,
one as boundless as his idea of God.

Lucretius asked the reader...

to imagine standing at
the edge of the universe...

and shooting an arrow outward.

If the arrow keeps going, then
clearly the universe extends...

beyond what you
thought was the edge.

But if the arrow
doesn't keep going...

say it hits a wall, then
that wall must lie...

beyond what you thought
was the edge of the universe.

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

there are only the same
two possible outcomes:

It either flies forever
out into space...

or it hits some boundary...

where you can stand and
shoot yet another arrow.

Either way, the
universe is unbounded.

The cosmos must be infinite.

This made perfect
sense to Bruno.

The God he
worshiped was infinite.

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

It was the last steady
job he ever had.

And then, when he was 30, he
had the vision that sealed his fate.

In this dream, he
awakened to a world...

enclosed inside a
confining bowl of stars.

This was the cosmos
of Bruno's time.

He experienced a
sickening moment of fear...

as if the bottom of everything
was falling away beneath his feet.

But he summoned up his courage.

I spread confident
wings to space...

and soared toward the
infinite, leaving far behind me...

what others strained
to see from a distance.

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

no center.

I saw that the sun
was just another star...

and the stars were other suns,
each escorted by other earths...

like our own.

The revelation of this
immensity was like falling in love.

Bruno became an evangelist...

spreading the gospel of
infinity throughout Europe.

He assumed that other lovers
of God would naturally embrace...

this grander and more
glorious view of creation.

What a fool I was.

He was excommunicated by the
Roman Catholic Church in his homeland...

expelled by the
Calvinists in Switzerland...

and by the Lutherans in Germany.

Bruno jumped at an invitation
to lecture at Oxford in England.

At last, he thought...

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

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

Copernicus was right to argue that our
world is not the center of the universe.

The Earth goes around the sun.

It's a planet, just
like the others.

But Copernicus was only the
dawn. I bring you the sunrise.

Outrageous. The stars
are other fiery suns...

made of the same substance as the Earth,
and they have their own watery earths...

with plants and animals
no less noble than our own.

Are you mad or merely ignorant?

Everyone knows there is only one
world. What everyone knows is wrong.

Our infinite God has created
a boundless universe...

with an infinite
number of worlds.

Do they not read Aristotle
where you come from?

Or even the Bible?

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

Let us begin anew, by doubting
everything we assume has been proven.

- Heretic.
- Infidel!

Your God is too small.

A wiser man would
have learned his lesson.

But Bruno was not such a man.

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

despite the fact that the
penalty for doing so in his world...

was the most vicious form of
cruel and unusual punishment.

Giordano Bruno
lived at a time...

when there was no such thing as
the separation of church and state...

or the notion that freedom of speech
was a sacred right of every individual.

Expressing an idea that didn't
conform to traditional belief...

could land you in deep trouble.

Recklessly, Bruno
returned to Italy.

Maybe he was homesick.

But still, he must have
known that his homeland...

was one of the most dangerous
places in Europe he could possibly go.

The Roman Catholic Church
maintained a system of courts...

known as the Inquisition...

and its sole purpose was
to investigate and torment...

anyone who dared voice
views that differed from theirs.

It wasn't long before Bruno fell
into the clutches of the thought police.

This wanderer, who
worshiped an infinite universe...

languished in
confinement for eight years.

Through relentless
interrogations...

he stubbornly refused
to renounce his views.

Why was the church willing to go
to such lengths to torment Bruno?

What were they afraid of?

If Bruno was right, then the sacred
books and the authority of the church...

would be open to question.

Finally, the cardinals of the
Inquisition rendered their verdict.

You are found guilty of
questioning the Holy Trinity...

and the divinity
of Jesus Christ.

Of believing that God's
wrath is not eternal...

that everyone will be saved.

Of asserting the
existence of other worlds.

Throw him in his cell.

All of the books
you have written...

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

Reverend Father, these
eight years of confinement...

have given me much time
to reflect. So you will recant?

My love and reverence
for the creator...

inspires in me the vision
of an infinite creation.

You shall be turned over
to the governor of Rome...

to administer the
appropriate punishment...

for those who will not repent.

Back to prison.

It may be that you are more
afraid to deliver this judgment...

than I am to hear it.

Ten years after
Bruno's martyrdom...

Galileo first looked
through a telescope...

realizing that Bruno
had been right all along.

The Milky Way was made of countless
stars invisible to the naked eye...

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

Bruno was no scientist.

His vision of the cosmos
was a lucky guess...

because he had no
evidence to support it.

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

But once the idea was in the air,
it gave others a target to aim at.

If only to disprove it.

Bruno glimpsed the
vastness of space...

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

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

hope to grasp the
vast expanse of time...

that is the history
of the cosmos?

The universe is 13.8
thousand million years old.

In order to imagine
all of cosmic time...

let's compress it into
a single calendar year.

The cosmic calendar begins on
January 1st with the birth of our universe.

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

which on this calendar is
midnight, December 31 st.

On this scale, every month
represents about a billion years.

Every day represents
nearly 40 million years.

Let's go back as
far as we can...

to the very first
moment of the universe.

January 1st. The Big Bang.

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

For now.

Our entire universe emerged from
a point smaller than a single atom.

Space itself exploded
in a cosmic fire...

launching the expansion
of the universe...

and giving birth to all the energy
and all the matter we know today.

I know that sounds crazy, but
there's strong observational evidence...

to support the Big Bang theory.

And it includes the amount
of helium in the cosmos...

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

As it expanded, the
universe cooled...

and there was darkness
for about 200 million years.

Gravity was pulling together
clumps of gas and heating them...

until the first stars burst
into light on January 10th.

On January 13th, these stars
coalesced into the first small galaxies.

These galaxies merged
to form still larger ones...

including our own Milky Way...

which formed about
11 billion years ago...

on March 15 of the cosmic year.

Hundreds of billions of suns.

Which one is ours?

It's not yet born. It will rise
from the ashes of other stars.

See those lights
flashing like paparazzi?

Each one is a supernova...

the blazing death
of a giant star.

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

a stellar nursery.

They condense like raindrops
from giant clouds of gas and dust.

They get so hot that the nuclei of the
atoms fuse together deep within them...

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

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

All of it was cooked in the fiery
hearts of long-vanished stars.

You, me, everyone.

We are made of star stuff.

This star stuff is
recycled and enriched...

again and again, through
succeeding generations of stars.

How much longer until
the birth of our sun?

A long time.

It won't begin to shine for
another six billion years.

Our sun's birthday is August
31st on the cosmic calendar...

four and a half
billion years ago.

As with the other worlds
of our solar system...

Earth was formed from
a disk of gas and dust...

orbiting the newborn sun.

Repeated collisions produced
a growing ball of debris.

See that asteroid?
No, not that one.

The one over there.

We exist because the
gravity of that one next to it...

just nudged it
an inch to the left.

What difference could an inch
make on the scale of the solar system?

Just wait, you'll see.

The Earth took one hell of a
beating in its first billion years.

Fragments of orbiting debris
collided and coalesced...

until they snowballed
to form our moon.

The moon is a souvenir
of that violent epoch.

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

the moon would have looked
a hundred times brighter.

It was ten times
closer back then...

locked in a much more
intimate gravitational embrace.

As the Earth cooled,
seas began to form.

The tides were a
thousand times higher then.

Over the eons, tidal friction within
the Earth pushed the moon away.

Life began somewhere
around here, September 21 st...

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

We still don't know
how life got started.

For all we know, it may have come
from another part of the Milky Way.

The origin of life is one of the
greatest unsolved mysteries of science.

That's life cooking, evolving
all the biochemical recipes...

for its incredibly
complex activities.

By November 9th,
life was breathing...

moving, eating, responding
to its environment.

We owe a lotto those
pioneering microbes.

Oh, yeah, one other thing.

They also invented sex.

December 17th was quite a day.

Life in the sea really took off.

It was exploding with a diversity
of larger plants and animals.

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

It must have felt like
visiting another planet.

Forests, dinosaurs,
birds, insects...

all evolved in the final
week of December.

The first flower...

bloomed on December 28th.

As these ancient forests grew and
died and sank beneath the surface...

their remains
transformed into coal.

Three hundred
million years later...

we humans are burning
most of that coal to power...

and imperil our civilization.

Remember that asteroid back in
the formation of the solar system?

The one that got
nudged a little to the left?

Well, here it comes.

It's 6:24 a.m. on December
30th on the Cosmic Calendar.

For more than a hundred million years,
the dinosaurs were lords of the Earth...

while our ancestors, small
mammals, scurried fearfully underfoot.

The asteroid changed all that.

Suppose it hadn't been nudged at all. It
would have missed the Earth entirely...

and for all we know, the dinosaurs
might still be here, but we wouldn't.

This is a good example of
the extreme contingency...

the chance nature of existence.

The universe is already more
than 13 and half billion years old.

Still no sign of us.

In the vast ocean of time
that this calendar represents...

we humans only evolved
within the last hour...

of the last day of
the cosmic year.

11:59 and 46 seconds.

All of recorded history occupies
only the last 14 seconds...

and every person you've ever
heard of lived somewhere in there.

All those kings and battles,
migrations and inventions...

wars and loves, everything
in the history books...

happened here, in the last
seconds of the cosmic calendar.

But if we want to explore such
a brief moment of cosmic time...

we'll have to change scale.

We are newcomers to the cosmos.

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

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

Three and a half
million years ago...

our ancestors, yours
and mine, left these traces.

We stood up and
parted ways from them.

Once we were
standing on two feet...

our eyes were no longer
fixated on the ground.

Now we were free to
look up and wonder.

For the longest part of human existence,
say the last 40,000 generations...

we were Wanderers, living in small
bands of hunters and gatherers...

making tools, controlling
fire, naming things...

all within the last hour
of the cosmic calendar.

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

to see the last minute of the
last night of the cosmic year.

11:59. We're so very young on
the time scale of the universe...

that we didn't start
painting our first pictures...

until the last 60 seconds
of the cosmic year...

a mere 30,000 years ago.

This is when we
invented astronomy.

In fact, we're all descended
from astronomers.

Our survival depended on
knowing how to read the stars...

in order to predict the
coming of the winter...

and the migration
of the wild herds.

And then, around
10,000 years ago...

there began a revolution
in the way we lived.

Our ancestors learned how
to shape their environment...

taming wild plants
and animals...

cultivating land
and settling down.

This changed everything.

For the first time in our history, we
had more stuff than we could carry.

We needed a way
to keep track of it.

At 14 seconds to midnight...

or about 6000 years
ago, we invented writing.

And it wasn't long before we started
recording more than bushels of grain.

Writing allowed us
to save our thoughts...

and send them much
further in space and time.

Tiny markings
on a clay tablet...

became a means for
us to vanquish mortality.

It shook the world.

Moses was born
seven seconds ago.

Buddha, six seconds ago.

Jesus, five seconds ago.

Mohammed, three seconds ago.

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

the two halves of the
Earth discovered each other.

And it was only in
the very last second...

of the cosmic calendar that
we began to use science...

to reveal nature's
secrets and her laws.

The scientific method is so powerful
that in a mere four centuries...

it has taken us from Galileo's first look
through a telescope at another world...

to leaving our
footprints on the moon.

It allowed us to look out
across space and time...

to discover where and
when we are in the cosmos.

We are a way for the
cosmos to know itself.

Carl Sagan guided the
maiden voyage of Cosmos...

a generation ago.

He was the most successful science
communicator of the 20th century...

but he was first and
foremost a scientist.

Carl contributed enormously
to our knowledge of the planets.

He correctly predicted the
existence of methane lakes...

on Saturn's giant moon Titan.

He showed that the
atmosphere of the early Earth...

must have contained
powerful greenhouse gases.

He was the first to understand
that seasonal changes on Mars...

were due to windblown dust.

Carl was a pioneer in the
search for extraterrestrial life...

and intelligence.

He played a leading role in
every major spacecraft mission...

to explore the solar system during
the first 40 years of the Space Age.

But that's not all he did.

This is Carl Sagan's
own calendar from 1975.

Who was I back then?

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

with dreams of
becoming a scientist...

and somehow the world's most
famous astronomer found time...

to invite me to Ithaca,
in upstate New York...

and spend a Saturday with him.

I remember that snowy
day like it was yesterday.

He met me at the bus stop...

and showed me his
laboratory at Cornell University.

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

"For Neil, a future
astronomer. Carl."

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

The snow was falling harder.

He wrote his phone number, his home
phone number, on a scrap of paper...

and he said, "if the
bus can't get through..."

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

I already knew I wanted
to become a scientist...

but that afternoon I
learned from Carl...

the kind of person I
wanted to become.

He reached out to me
and to countless others...

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

Science is a cooperative
enterprise, spanning the generations.

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

A community of minds
reaching back to antiquity...

and forward to the stars.

Now, come with me.

Our journey is just beginning.