All language subtitles for BDB4A7BEBA1BB47195C478FA2A6995D0_eng

We were born into a mystery...

one that has haunted us since at
least as long as we've been human.

We awakened on this tiny
world beneath a blanket of stars...

like an abandoned
baby left on a doorstep...

without a note to explain where
we came from, who we are...

how our universe came to be...

and with no idea how to
end our cosmic isolation.

We've had to figure
it all out for ourselves.

Best thing we had going
for us was our intelligence...

especially our gift for
pattern recognition...

sharpened over
eons of evolution.

The ones who were good at
spotting prey and predator...

telling poisonous plants
from the nourishing ones...

had a better chance
to live and reproduce.

They survived and passed on
those genes for pattern recognition...

with its obvious advantages.

Cultures all over the planet
looked up at the same stars...

and found different
pictures there.

We used this gift for
recognizing patterns in nature...

to read the calendar in the sky.

The messages written in the stars
told our forefathers and mothers...

when to camp and
when to move on...

when the migratory herds and when
the rains and the cold would come...

and when they would
cease for a time.

When they observed the connection
between the motions of the stars...

and the seasonal
cycles of life on Earth...

the y concluded, naturally,
that what happens up there...

must be directed
at us down here.

It makes sense, right?

If the sky was a calendar and somebody
stuck a Post-it note on top of it...

what else could it
be but a message?

And so when the heavenly
order was suddenly violated...

by the apparition of a comet in
the sky, they took it personally.

Can we really blame them?

Back then, they had no other logical
explanation for what was happening.

This was long before anyone
had yet to imagine Earth...

as a spinning planet with a tilted
axis, revolving around the sun.

Every ancient human culture
made the same mistake:

The comet must be a message
sent by the gods, or one particular god.

And almost invariably our ancestors
concluded the news was not good.

It didn't matter if you were an ancient
Aztec, Anglo-Saxon, Babylonian, Hindu.

Comets were portents of doom.

The only difference among them was
the precise nature of the coming disaster.

"Disaster, " as in the
Greek word for "bad star."

To the Masai of East
Africa, a comet meant famine.

To the Zulu in the
south, it meant war.

To the Eghap people of
the west, it meant disease.

To the Djaga of Zaire,
specifically smallpox.

To their neighbors, the Lube, a
comet foretold the death of a leader.

The ancient Chinese
were remarkably systematic.

Starting in roughly 1400 BC...

they began recording and
cataloging the apparitions of comets.

A three-tailed comet
meant calamity for the state.

A four-tailed comet signified
an epidemic was coming.

The human talent for pattern
recognition is a two-edged sword.

We're especially good at finding patterns
even when they aren't really there...

something known as
"false pattern recognition."

We hunger for significance...

for signs that our personal existence
is of special meaning to the universe.

To that end, we're all too eager
to deceive ourselves and others...

to discern a sacred image
in a grilled cheese sandwich...

or find a divine
warning in a comet.

Today we know exactly
where comets come from...

and what they're made of.

Our Ship of the Imagination...

fueled by equal parts
of science and wonder...

can take us anywhere
in space and time.

It can travel
faster than light...

and render visible those
things that cannot be seen.

It's carrying us to a mysterious realm
that lies one light-year from the sun.

What is this swarm of worlds?

Was it organized
by alien beings?

No, just gravity.

These are the
snows of yesteryear.

Drifting mountains
of ice and rock.

The preserved remnants of
the birth of the solar system.

It's called the Oort
cloud, after Jan Oort...

the Dutch astronomer who
foretold its existence back in 1950.

He was trying to
solve a paradox.

There's so many
ways for comets to die.

Because they cross the orbits of planets,
comets frequently collide with them.

Comets are largely made of ice, so
every time they come near the sun...

they lose a part of themselves
through evaporation.

And after several thousand
trips, their ice is all gone...

and what remains of the
comet is now an asteroid.

Comets can be gravitationally
ejected from the solar system...

and exiled into space.

And yet somehow the
comets keep coming.

Oort and other astronomers wondered,
"Where do all the comets come from?"

Oort calculated the rate at
which new comets appear...

and concluded that there must
be a vast spherical swarm of them...

a few light-years across,
surrounding the sun.

Oort's logic still holds up...

even after all the discoveries
we've made about comets...

and the solar system in
the many decades since.

And yet the Oort cloud is a
sight that no one has ever seen.

Nor could we.
It's dark out here.

And each comet is about as
far from its closest neighbor...

as the Earth is from Saturn.

But science gives us
special powers of our own.

It gave Jan Oort
the gift of prophecy.

Oort was also the first
to correctly estimate...

the distance between the sun
and the center of our galaxy.

That's a big deal, finding out
where we are in the Milky Way.

Our star is about 30, 000
light-years from the center.

Oort was also the first guy
to use a radio telescope...

to map the galaxy's
spiral structure.

And he discovered that the center of our
galaxy was a place of titanic explosions...

the first indication
that there might have

been a supermassive
black hole lurking there.

Does the fact that most of us
know the names of mass murderers...

but have never heard of Jan
Oort, say anything about us?

The Oort cloud is so enormous...

that it takes one of its
comets about a million years...

to complete a single
trip around the sun.

Out here at the far edge
of the solar system...

even a little tug from the
gravity of a passing star...

can liberate some of these comets from
their gravitational bondage to the sun.

Some comets are flung out of the
solar system to wander interstellar space.

But for others
there's a different fate.

This one is plunging towards the sun,
gaining speed in an unbroken free fall...

that lasts hundreds
of thousands of years.

When Neptune's gravity gives it another
tug, there's a small change in course.

Mighty Jupiter, the most massive object
in our solar system other than the sun...

attracts the comet with its
powerful gravitational pull...

bending its path.

When our comet reaches
the inner solar system...

heat from the sun bakes it.

A beautiful
transformation begins.

The barren, sooty iceberg
now sports a glowing halo...

and a tail.

These layers tell the story
of how the comet was made...

some 4 billion years ago.

During the 40,000
generations of humanity...

there must have been roughly
100,000 apparitions of a bright comet.

For all that time, the best we could
do was look up in helpless wonder...

prisoners of Earth with nowhere
to turn for an explanation...

beyond our guilt and our fears.

But then a friendship
began between two men...

that led to a permanent
revolution in human thought.

Isaac Newton and Edmond
Halley could not know it...

but their collaboration
would ultimately set us free...

from our long confinement
on this tiny world.

The comet of 1664 sent shivers
of dread throughout Europe.

And the terror
seemed justified...

when the plague and the Great
Fire of London followed soon after.

There, with long bloody hair...

a blazing star
threatens the world...

with famine, plague and war.

To princes, it spells death.

To kingdoms, many crosses.

To all estates,
inevitable losses.

To herdsmen, rot.

To plowmen, hapless seasons.

To sailors, it brings storms.

To cities, civil treasons.

But for one child...

the comet was not
the least bit frightening.

For him, it was
a thing of wonder.

Like all of us, Edmond
Halley was born curious.

Hell's bells.

He was lucky to have a father who
encouraged and nurtured his curiosity...

buying him the best scientific instruments,
and even funding his expedition...

to make the first accurate star
map of the Southern Hemisphere.

Halley dropped out of Oxford when
he was 20 and sailed to St. Helena...

an island below the equator,
off the west coast of Africa.

Hell's bells.

Problem was, nobody told Halley
that the weather on St. Helena...

was generally lousy. It took
him 12 frustrating months...

to observe enough southern
stars to make a complete map.

The gods and heroes
of ancient Greece...

were now joined by the mythic
figures of a new world and age:

a toucan, a compass,
a bird of paradise.

When Halley came home
with the other half of the sky...

his map created a sensation.

Now merchants and explorers
could navigate by the stars...

visible anywhere on Earth.

At the time, the Royal
Society of London...

was the world's clearinghouse
of scientific discovery.

It's motto, "Nullius in verba," sums
up the heart of the scientific method.

It's Latin for
"see for yourself."

In other words,
question authority.

Halley's star maps caught the attention
of the Society's curator of experiments.

I'd show him to you if
I could, but no portrait

of Robert Hooke
exists from his time...

only the verbal descriptions
of his contemporaries.

They called him
"lean, bent, ugly."

He was possibly the most
inventive person who ever lived.

And despite his appearance, he was the most
sought-after party guest in all of London.

Why? Hooke's insatiable curiosity
encompassed absolutely everything.

Hooke discovered
a little cosmos...

and we still call it by the
name he gave it: the cell.

Hooke discovered
the cell by looking at a

piece of cork with one
of his own inventions:

the compound microscope.

He anticipated aspects of Darwin's
theory of evolution by almost 200 years.

Hooke also improved
the telescope.

The drawings he made of the
astronomical bodies he observed...

attest to his uncanny precision.

After the Great Fire destroyed
central London in 1666...

Hooke partnered with the
architect Christopher Wren...

to redesign and
rebuild the city.

Hooke was the foremost
experimentalist of his age.

Using coiled springs, he
derived the law of elasticity...

known today as Hooke's law.

He perfected the air pump, the
height of technology in its time...

and used it to experiment
on respiration and sound.

And he experimented
with cannabis.

He reported to a meeting
of the Royal Society...

that a sea captain friend of his, quote,
"had so often experimented with it...

that there is no cause of fear, though
possibly there may be of laughter."

But coffee was the drug of choice
for England in the 17th century.

Coffeehouses sprang
up all over London.

This is where people
came to get news...

to launch new ventures,
and to debate ideas.

The coffeehouse was an oasis of
equality in a class-obsessed society.

Here a poor man needn't give up his seat
to a rich man, nor submit to his opinion.

It was a kind of
laboratory of democracy.

In this highly
caffeinated atmosphere...

Halley and Hooke met Christopher
Wren to discuss a deep mystery:

Why do the planets
move as they do?

The astronomer Johannes Kepler had
demonstrated some 80 years before...

that the orbits of the
planets around the sun...

were not perfect circles,
but actually ellipses...

and that the closer a planet
was to the sun, the faster it moved.

Why? Could some
invisible force from the sun

be responsible for
this change in motion?

If so, how did it work?

Could there be a simple
mathematical law to describe it?

Maybe something like
Hooke's law of elasticity?

Perhaps.

But try as he might, Christopher
Wren couldn't figure it out.

Damned if I haven't
tried. It's beyond me.

I'll wager a book worth 40
shillings to the man who can solve it.

That book is mine, Mr. Wren.
I've already done the calculation.

Halley was delighted.

Show us, Mr. Hooke.

But months passed, and
Hooke failed to deliver.

He couldn't do the math.

None of them could.

Finally Halley had
enough of Hooke's excuses.

Halley knew there must be someone,
somewhere, up to the challenge.

What about that
mathematician at Cambridge?

He was a clever fellow.

He had solved central questions
about the nature of light years before...

when he was still only 22.

And he invented the
reflecting telescope.

Odd bird. Dropped out
of sight a while back.

Some squabble over Hooke
and his discovery about light.

Went completely to pieces over it, has
been hiding out in Cambridge ever since.

Halley wondered if this strange and, by
all accounts, exceedingly difficult man...

might succeed where
Hooke and others had failed.

What he couldn't know, what no one
could possibly imagine at the time...

were the countless ways the world
would be forever changed by this meeting...

on an August day in 1684.

Isaac Newton was born in
England on Christmas Day in 1642.

Before he even opened his
eyes, his father was already dead.

His mother left him when he was
only 3 and did not return until he was 11.

When she did, it was with
a new family and husband...

a stepfather who
Isaac Newton despised.

Newton's refuge from
his miserable family life...

was his passion to
understand how things worked...

especially nature itself.

In 1661 the talented young Isaac entered
Trinity College at Cambridge University...

where he was a
consistently lousy student...

one without friends or a loving family to
provide any warmth or encouragement.

Newton mostly kept to himself,
sequestered in his room...

studying ancient Greek philosophers,
geometry and languages...

and pondering deep questions on the
nature of matter, space, time and motion.

This budding scientist was
also a passionate mystic.

Newton believed that a secret
knowledge called alchemy...

known only to a small group
of ancient philosophers...

was waiting to be rediscovered.

He hoped to learn how to change
ordinary metals into silver and gold...

and maybe even cook up the
elixir of life, the key to immortality.

He was also obsessed with finding
hidden messages in the words of the Bible.

He combed through translations
in several different languages...

hoping to decipher coded
instructions from God.

He made elaborate calculations in an effort
to discover the date of the Second Coming.

His lifelong research in alchemy and
biblical chronology never led anywhere.

When Halley found Newton that fateful
day, he was living as a virtual recluse.

Newton had gone into
hiding 13 years earlier...

after Robert Hooke had
publicly accused Newton...

of stealing his groundbreaking
work on light and color.

In fact, it was Isaac Newton who solved
the mystery of the spectrum of light...

not Robert Hooke.

The wound was
painful and deep...

and Newton resolved
to never expose himself...

to that kind of public
humiliation ever again.

Sir, I don't suppose you recall
our meeting a few years ago?

Yes, Mr. Halley.

I'm sorry to bother you.

Never mind the
formalities. Get to your point.

I've been talking with our
friends Mr. Wren and Mr. Hooke.

That scoundrel Hooke's
no friend of mine.

Yes, I understand, sir.

But the thing is, we've been debating
the puzzling question of planetary motion.

We all agree that some
force of attraction from

the sun governs the
motions of the planets.

We suspect there must
be a mathematical law...

to describe how this force
changes with distance.

And knowing of your skill...

Yes, yes, the attraction of gravity
weakens with the square of the distance.

That's why the planets
move in ellipses.

But, sir, how can you know this?

Why, I have calculated
it some five years ago.

I beg you, show it to me.

The calculation is
here somewhere.

Well, no matter. I shall redo it
and be sure to send it on to you.

This is stupendous. Why have
we not had word of it before?

Newton remembered all too
well what Hooke had done to him...

the last time he
put forth an idea.

Just when Halley may
have begun to wonder...

if Newton was bluffing, as
Hooke had done earlier...

a messenger arrived with
an envelope from Newton.

Here are the opening
pages of modern science...

with its all-embracing
vision of nature...

universal laws of
motion, gravity...

not just for the Earth
but for the cosmos.

Halley raced back to Cambridge.

Mr. Newton, I beseech
you to work all of this

into a book as soon as possible.

I can assure you the
Royal Society will publish it.

But there was
one little problem.

We are in agreement that Mr. Newton
has produced a masterpiece.

However, I'm afraid
the Royal Society has...

Well, regrettably, sales
for the History of Fish...

have not lived up to our
financial expectations.

It's an impressive book.

Extremely comprehensive, really.

It's filled with lavish
illustrations of, well, fish.

The disappointing sales
led to a bigger problem.

The Royal Society pretty much blew its
total annual budget on the History of Fish.

In fact, they were so
strapped for cash...

they had to pay poor Halley's salary
with copies of their worst-selling book.

With no money to print
Newton's Principia...

the scientific revolution
hung in the balance.

Without Halley's
heroic efforts...

the reclusive Newton's masterwork
might never have seen the light of day.

But Halley was a
man on a mission...

absolutely determined to bring
Newton's genius to the world.

That pre-scientific world,
the world ruled by fear...

was poised at the
edge of a revolution.

Everything depended on
whether or not Edmond Halley...

could get Newton's book
out to the wider world.

Halley resolved not only
to edit Newton's book...

but to publish it at
his own expense.

Newton completed
the first two volumes...

laying the mathematical
framework for the physics of motion.

The third volume would settle once and
for all who won the coffeehouse wager.

Newton applied his principles to explain
all the known motions of the Earth...

the moon and the planets.

Unfortunately, there
was this problem.

Now Halley also took on the
role of Newton's psychotherapist.

Isaac, I'm afraid
that Mr. Hooke...

requires an acknowledgment in
the preface of your third volume.

But I have done so, thanking
him, Mr. Wren and yourself...

for prodding me to think
again on astronomical matters.

Mr. Hooke has been
going about London...

saying that you got the
law of gravity from him.

Why, that litigious little...

Never. I would sooner burn the third
volume than deface it with such a lie.

To hell with Hooke.

He will be long forgotten when
your ideas are still being celebrated.

More copies of
that dreadful book?

Wherever shall we put them all?

We talked about
this, Mary, dear.

This is my salary
from the Society.

They have nothing else
with which to pay me.

If only Mr. Hooke and
Mr. Newton were more like you.

Halley and Wren decided to
confront Hooke about his false claims.

That law is mine, I tell you.

I proved it first.

Then fetch your
proof here at once.

Let us see it. Surely we
have waited on it long enough.

You'll simply have
to take my word for it.

Empty claims may persuade
elsewhere, but not here.

Put up or shut up, Mr. Hooke.

Blasted Newton.
I'll make him pay.

If it wasn't for
Edmond Halley...

Newton's great book would've never
been conceived, nor written, nor printed.

Okay, but so what? What
difference does that make to us?

What's the big deal?

When Isaac Newton was born in this house
in 1642, the world was very different.

Everyone looked at
the perfection of the

clockwork motions of
the planets in the sky...

and could only understand it as
the work of a master clockmaker.

How else to explain it?

There was only one way such a thing
could come about in their imagination.

Only one answer for them: God.

For reasons beyond our understanding,
God just created the solar system that way.

But this explanation
is the closing of a door.

It doesn't lead to
other questions.

Along came Newton, a
God-loving man who's also a genius.

He could write the laws of nature
in perfect mathematical sentences.

Formulas that applied universally to
apples, moons, planets and so much more.

With one foot still
in the Middle Ages...

Isaac Newton imagined
the whole solar system.

Newton's laws of gravity
and motion revealed

how the sun held
distant worlds captive.

His laws swept away the
need for a master clockmaker...

to explain the precision and
beauty of the solar system.

Gravity is the clockmaker.

Matter obeyed commandments
we could discover...

laws the Bible hadn't mentioned.

Newton's answer to why the
solar system is the way it is...

opened the way to an
infinite number of questions.

Principia also happened to
include the invention of calculus...

and the first sound theoretical basis
for an end to our imprisonment on Earth:

space travel.

Newton envisioned the
firing of a Cannonball...

with increasingly
greater explosive thrust.

He reasoned that
with enough velocity...

the bounds of gravity
could be broken...

and the cannonball could
escape to orbit the Earth.

This changed everything.

Newton's Principia Mathematica
set us free in another way.

By finding the natural laws governing
the comings and goings of comets...

he decoupled the
motions of the heavens...

from their ancient
connections to our fears.

If Halley hadn't been standing
next to Newton for all those years...

perhaps the world
would remember him...

for his own host of
accomplishments and discoveries.

But the only thing that comes to
mind for most people is the comet.

The irony is that
discovering a comet...

is actually one of the few
things that Halley never did.

Mountain of ice to starboard.

Come about. Come about!

Aye, aye, Captain Halley!

After the publication
of the Principia...

Halley was commanded by his
king to lead three ocean voyages...

scientific expeditions to solve
navigational problems for the British navy.

Halley used this opportunity to make the
first map of the Earth's magnetic field.

And he was also a businessman.

Halley perfected
the diving bell...

and used his invention to start a
flourishing commercial salvage operation.

Hmm. Our Dr. Halley's
gone and done it this time.

I reckon he's been down
there at least three hours.

Not one to risk the lives of others,
Halley personally tested his own invention.

I make it exactly four
hours since our descent.

Not at all bad for 10 fathoms.

He invented the weather map.

And the symbols he devised for indicating
prevailing winds are still in use today.

Halley laid the groundwork for
the science of population statistics.

How?

He compared the birth, marriage, death and
population densities of London and Paris.

He actually had to pace off the
entire perimeter of Paris on foot...

to learn its true dimensions.

He came to the conclusion that
since roughly half of all adults...

fail to reproduce children, who
themselves survive to reproduce...

every married couple
must have four children

in order to maintain
the population.

And it was Edmond Halley who gave
us the actual scale of the solar system.

He figured out a clever way to find
the distance from Earth to the sun.

It involved precisely
measuring the time it took

for the planet Venus
to cross the sun's disc.

Twenty-seven years
after Halley's death...

Captain James Cook made
his first voyage to Tahiti...

for the express purpose
of testing Halley's method...

during a transit of
Venus across the sun.

Using a special filter
to protect his vision...

from being destroyed by
looking directly at the sun...

Cook and his men made
it possible for us to know...

that the sun is 93
million miles from Earth.

And Halley was the
first to realize that the

so-called fixed stars
were not fixed at all.

How'd he do it'?

He pored over
the observations...

made by the ancient Greek
astronomers of the brightest stars.

And he compared
their observations...

with the ones he himself made
of the same stars 1800 years later.

Why hadn't anyone
noticed this before?

Halley figured out that it
would only become apparent...

if you waited long enough
between observations.

It's hard to perceive the motions
of things that are far away.

And the stars are so
very far away that you

would need to track
them for many centuries...

before you could detect
that they moved at all.

Halley discovered the first
clue to a magnificent reality:

All the stars are in motion,
streaming past each other...

rising and falling like
merry-go-round horses...

in their Newtonian dance
around the center of our galaxy.

And, oh, yes, there was
that thing about the comet.

What were those strange
and beautiful celestial visitors...

that appeared without
warning from time to time?

Halley set out to solve this
mystery as a detective would...

by gathering all credible
eyewitness testimony.

The earliest precise observations
of a comet that Halley could find...

were made in Constantinople
by Nicephorus Gregoras...

a Byzantine astronomer
and monk, in June 1337.

Halley hunted down every
astronomical observation of a comet...

recorded in Europe
between 1472 and 1698.

And remember, there was no such
thing as a search engine or a computer.

All Halley had were
his books and his mind.

Now here comes the hard part:

Halley had to take the
observations made for each comet...

and find the shape of its
actual path through space.

No one else but Newton
had yet attempted...

to apply his new set of laws
to an astronomical question.

In an arduous tour de force
of mathematical brilliance...

Halley discovered that comets were
bound to the sun in long elliptical orbits.

And he was the first to know
that the comets seen in 1531

1607, and 1682...

were one and the same.

A single comet that
returned every 76 years.

In a stunning example of
true pattern recognition...

he predicted it would be seen
again more than 50 years in the future.

For millennia, comets had
been props for mystics...

who considered them to be
merely omens of human events.

Halley shattered their monopoly,
beating them at their own game.

A game that no scientist
had ever played before:

prophecy.

And he did not hedge his bet.

Like Babe Ruth predicting where his
next home run would land in the stands...

Halley stated flatly that the comet
would return at the end of 1758...

from a particular part of the
sky, following a specific path.

There is hardly a prophecy
attempted by the mystics...

that ever even strives
for comparable precision.

That's Halley's Cornet.

Out here at the edge of the solar
system, it doesn't look like much.

Just a big hunk of
ice and rock in space.

That's because beyond the orbit of Neptune,
nearly 5 billion kilometers from the sun...

comets lead very quiet lives.

As it reaches the
far end of its orbit...

it'll slow down till the sun
allows it to go no farther.

Then it'll begin its long fall
back to the inner solar system.

Halley's Comet is in
free fall around the sun.

Everything in
our solar system...

the Earth, the moon, the other
planets, comets, asteroids...

all of them are
falling around the sun.

Gravity pulls the planets towards the sun,
but because of their orbital momentum...

they keep moving around
the sun, never falling into it.

"Robert Hooke had died years before, having
ruined his health with some bad habits."

daily doses of Wormwood,
opium, mercury.

A few months later,
Newton was elected to

replace him as president
of the Royal Society.

It is said that a portrait of
Hooke once hung on these walls.

Halley lived on to accomplish
many more astonishing feats.

He worked right up
to his death at age 85.

His final act was to
call for a glass of wine.

He downed it with pleasure
and breathed his last breath.

Some believe that it
was on a night like this...

that Isaac Newton finally took
his revenge against Robert Hooke.

Heh.

But Halley's prophecy
was not forgotten.

Fifty years later, as the time of
the predicted return approached...

the world's astronomers vied to be
the first to catch sight of his comet.

They weren't disappointed.

It's been welcomed
back every 76 years since.

When Halley's Comet
returns to our skies,

sunlight will warm up
the ice on its surface...

once again setting loose the
dust and gases trapped within.

Halley's Comet most recently
visited our neighborhood back in 1986.

And if you're seeing this in
2061, then you'll know it's back.

May you feel the wonder of all
those who came before you...

and none of the fear.

Newton's laws made it
possible for Edmond Halley...

to see some 50 years into the future
and predict the behavior of a single comet.

Scientists have been using
these laws ever since...

opening the way to the moon,
and even beyond our solar system.

The baby in the basket
is learning to walk...

and to know the cosmos.

Which brings me
to one last prophecy.

Using nothing more than
Newton's laws of gravitation...

we astronomers can confidently predict
that several billion years from now...

our home galaxy,
the Milky Way...

will merge with our
neighboring galaxy Andromeda.

Because the distances between the stars
are so great compared to their sizes...

few if any stars in either
galaxy will actually collide.

Any life on the worlds of that
far-off future should be safe...

but they would be treated to an
amazing, billion-year-long light show...

a dance of a half
a trillion stars...

to music first heard
on one little world...

by a man who had
but one true friend.