All language subtitles for 8E9215A51DFDB4D2A950F56DF82FE4AE_eng

The cosmos is all that is, or ever was,
or ever will be.

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 it seems.

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's what Earth looked like 250 million
years ago.

If you want to see the future,
look up.

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

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

we need to know our cosmic address.

And this is the first line of that
address.

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

known, for the farthest
reaches of the cosmos.

Our nearest neighbor, the Moon,
has no sky.

No ocean.

No life.

Just the scars of cosmic impacts.

Our star powers the wind and the waves, and
all the life on the surface of our world.

The Sun holds all the worlds of the solar
system in its gravitational embrace.

Starting with Mercury.

To

Cloud-covered Venus,
where a 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.

Neptune.

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.

A world without a sun.

A 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 them.

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.

It's 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 100,000 light years from home.

It would take light,
the fastest thing there

is, 100,000 years to
reach us from Earth.

This is the Great Spiral in Andromeda.

The galaxy next door.

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

the Local Group.

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

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

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

Each galaxy contains billions of suns and
countless worlds.

Yet, the entire Virgo Supercluster itself
forms but a tiny part of our universe.

This is the cosmos.

On the grandest scale we know.

A network of 100 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.

Why?

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 of stars.

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 1,500 years,

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

Lucretius asked the reader
to imagine standing at the

edge of the universe and
shooting an arrow outward.

If the arrow keeps going, then clearly the
universe is gone.

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 makes perfect sense to Bruno.

The God he worshipped 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.

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.

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.

Jude Donald 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
worshipped an infinite universe,

languished in
confinement for eight years.

Through relentless interrogations, he
stubbornly refused to renounce his views.

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

What were they afraid of?

If Bruno was right, then
the sacred books and the

authority of the Church
would be open to question.

Finally, the Cardinals of the Inquisition
rendered their verdict.

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.

You are thrown into hell.

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.

Dr. Peter!

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 31st.

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 it 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 15th 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 21st, three and a half billion
years ago in 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 lot to 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 the 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.

It 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.

But the asteroid changed all that.

Suppose it hadn't been nudged at all.

It would have missed the Earth entirely.

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

This is a good
example of the extreme

contingency, the chance
nature of existence.

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

Still, no sign of us.

In the vast ocean of time that this
calendar represents, we humans only

evolved within the last hour of the last
day of the cosmic year.

11.59 and 46 seconds.

All of recorded history occupies only the
last 14 seconds.

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

All those kings and battles, migrations
and inventions, wars and loves,

everything in the history
books happen 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 hundreds 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 timescale 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 share and
shape their environment, taming wild

plants and animals, cultivating land,
and settling down.

This changed everything.

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

We needed a way to keep track of it.

At 14 seconds to midnight, or about 6,000
years ago, we invented writing.

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

Writing allowed us to save our thoughts and
send them much further in space and time.

Tiny markings on a clay tablet became a
means for us to vanquish mortality.

It shook the world.

Moses was born seven seconds ago.

Buddha, six seconds ago.

Jesus, five seconds ago.

Muhammad, 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 future of 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 wind-blown 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.

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.

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.

Thank you for our stay.

We hope you have fun here.

We hope to see you It's gonna be