All language subtitles for The Planets Series 1 8of8 Destiny 1080p HDTV MVGroup

The sun is the center of our solar system.

The earth is completely
dependent on its energy.

We could not live without it.

But, in the future, the sun will change.

One day, its benevolent influence will turn

against the planets that it has nurtured

for so long.

944 is N.A.

The astronauts who went to the moon,

thought that they would be
the first in a long line

of travelers in space.

But in fact, there have been no more.

The last man to set foot on another world

was Captain Gene Cernan.

The moon is bland.

It's gray in shades, and
other than the color

you have brought there yourself, the only

color you see out there is the earth.

The multi-color blues
of the ocean and whites

of the snow and the clouds.

And the earth itself is three dimensional,

and it moves through this
blackness with logic

and with purpose and with beauty

beyond comprehension.

For the first time ever, you're beginning

to see the earth

as a planet, when you never
saw it that way before.

It's spiritually different
to be able to see

the earth evolve, see
something that is very

strange and yet very familiar.

And it's something I guess
I didn't expect to see.

And as you head out to the moon,
that earth grows smaller.

Very, very quickly at first,
until the point does come

when you can literally
block out all humanity.

Your identity with reality is something

no bigger than the size of your thumb.

Since the moon missions, no spacecraft

or probe had been far enough
away to capture a view

of our planet from a greater distance.

Until Voyager.

The unmanned Voyager spacecraft
were launched in 1977.

They left our solar system and headed for

interstellar space.

On their way, they have
sent back photograph

after photograph of the
planets in beautiful detail.

But there was one more picture

that just had to be taken.

An image which provided a unique

perspective of our earth.

The idea to me that Voyager was gonna be

in a location that no
other spacecraft had been

before, equipped with
sophisticated instrumentation

so that it could turn
around and take a picture

of all the planets in the
solar system and I thought

that this would be a riveting
collections of images.

You know, a first.

Voyager scientist Carl Sagan had long

campaigned for the spacecraft
to be turned around.

But the risk of sun
damage to the cameras was

seen as too great.

At first, Carolyn Porco met
with the same response.

And they said, "Well, there's
really no scientific

justification for this.",
and I couldn't argue with

that because there wasn't.

The planets were gonna be just pinpoints.

They were gonna be just pixels.

They couldn't see it.

But as Voyager came to the very end

of its mission, there was nothing to lose,

and on Valentine's Day,
1990, 13 years after

leaving earth, Voyager
turned its cameras back

towards the now-distant planets.

The spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles away.

Each signal took five and a half hours to

reach the earth.

No single image could capture the entire

solar system and the mosaic of pictures

stretched six meters across.

The planets could barely be made out.

Mars and Pluto were too
small to be recorded,

and Mercury was lost in
the glare of the sun.

And I took my hand and
swiped the glossy print

trying to remove the dust
off it, okay, and it

turned out that one of those specks of dust

was the image of earth.

It was that small.

These were not tremendously beautiful

glorious images, I mean,
we knew they wouldn't be.

That wasn't the point.

The portrait of the planets that

has now been taken,

is, it seems to me, in the same tradition

as the extraordinary
color photographs of the

whole earth taken by the Apollo astronauts

on their way to the moon.

This looks like more than a dot, but it is

in fact, less than a pixel.

In this color picture
you can see that it is

slightly blue, and

this is where we live.

On a blue dot.

I talk about standing
on the moon and looking

at the earth and describing it as humanity,

my identity with humanity.

I mean, think about moving
outside of our solar system.

And seeing it as the Voyager saw it.

But that's what we've now done.

We came to know the solar system.

We came to know it's history.

We came to know how it's configured.

And we're starting to piece together how it

possibly came about, basically because of

the Voyager mission.

The Voyager mission gave us a perspective

on things that we just didn't have before.

But what Voyager showed was
just one moment in time,

a snapshot.

All the planets will change and evolve in

different ways before the
end of their lifetime.

One thing we are certain will change

are the rings of Saturn.

In a hundred million years,

the rings won't be there any longer.

They will be worn away
by the bombardment of

meteorites, little bit by little and that

material basically gets
lost to the Saturn system

or else it ends up spiraling in and being

consumed by Saturn.

To me, the whole solar system will be

completely reconfigured.

You wouldn't recognize it.

In one billion years at Neptune,

the moon, Triton, will
spiral inwards towards its

planet gradually getting closer and closer

until the moon is ripped apart.

Out of this destruction will come something

even more spectacular.

Close in to Neptune is a

collection of satellites,
and if you took those

satellites and bashed them
all up at the same time,

the material would spread
out to form a ring

system that would look
pretty much like Saturn's

rings, so we might, while
losing Saturn's rings

we might have, in the
future, another beautiful

supernatural-looking ring
system around Neptune,

which wouldn't be too bad a swap.

Whatever the solar system will look like,

the most important question for its future

is what will happen to our sun?

The sun's fate will determine ours,

but how will it change?

The answers lie in the moon rocks gathered

by the Apollo astronauts.

You got some left in there?

I got some small ones and some big ones.

Don't fill it too full.

We took some of the rocks and brought

'em in the spacecraft with us.

We when we would get out
of our suits and we'd

examine the rocks with our bare hands,

the dust would literally penetrate into

the pores of our skin
and beneath our nails.

I mean, just way down in.

It was weeks and weeks
before, when I got back,

before that load of dust
ever grew out with my

nails and was de-penetrated, if you will,

from my skin.

For billions of years, constantly

bombarded by solar
particles, the moon gives

a unique insight into our sun.

Its rocks act like a
sponge, quietly absorbing

the particles and so keeping a
record of the sun's activity.

The Apollo astronauts
removed the rocks buried

beneath the lunar dust
and brought them home.

The rocks show how the sun's
energies fluctuate over time.

They reveal it has been much
more active in the past.

The sun is aging, and we too are
part of that aging process.

I think thinking about the planets

and the sun and the solar
system as a family of

objects and wondering what's
their long-term future?

I think it's a sobering
process because we tend

to think of the earth as forever.

The eternal sea, we call it.

But yet, when we start looking
at the planets in the

solar system, we realize
that they're not eternal.

The earth is in some
sense, halfway though its

lifetime, its expected lifetime.

We are living on a middle-aged planet.

The earth is middle-aged because the

sun is middle-aged, and
as the sun gets older,

it will start to work against us.

Since it's creation, it has
been getting 10% hotter

every billion years.

In one billion years' time,
it will have become so

hot that it will begin to
destroy life on earth.

Plants and animals will
find it hard to cope with

the rapidly forming
levels of carbon dioxide.

Our time on earth could be limited by this

changing solar system.

If we were to come back on our solar

system in a billion years,
it's still a place where

you can find liquid water
and go for a swim.

Earth is still the planet
of choice, I think,

in a billion years.

Maybe two billion years
or three billion years,

it's now starting to
become a hothouse here.

The oceans might start
warming up and evaporating

into the atmosphere, creating
a runaway greenhouse.

The earth would be like Venus, very thick

atmosphere trapping in a lot of heat.

Then, as the sun gets even brighter,

the earth might eventually just vaporize.

We can see the gradual steps
in the earth becoming

less and less desirable as a place to live.

There will reach a point
where earth is no longer

habitable, so, ultimately,
we have to find another

place to live.

5-4-3-2-1

We have ignition and we have

liftoff on NASA's Mars
Climate Orbiter as we

continue to explore the
mysteries of the Red Planet.

Oh, we've always imagined
life on Mars, and yet

when we got there to look for
life, we didn't find any,

and it was all the more
puzzling because there was

everything that life would
need in terms of the elements.

But the key ingredient for life on Mars,

liquid water, is missing.

We now know that water
once flowed in abundance

on the planet.

The many channels in its
surface were created by the

action of seas and rivers,
but as the planet cooled

over millions of years,
water turned to ice and

became trapped below the surface.

If we assume that there is water tied up

in the polar caps and as the
sun gets much brighter than

it is now, and the surface
temperature of Mars gets

above the melting point,
then the polar caps are just

gonna turn into oceans and
Mars will, once again,

have a water-rich environment
and that could trigger

a release of large amounts
of CO2 very quickly,

once you cross the freezing point.

Mars may have its second re-awakening

and could be suitable for
life, and that would occur

when the sun was two or
three times brighter than

it is today.

Springs will emerge through the pores

of the planet surface.

The desert-like surface
could again have the

possibility of life.

And as the water vapor rises,
the planet will rebuild

its atmosphere and once
again be shrouded in white

cloud, like the earth.

As the sun gets brighter, well, it could

be too much of a good thing
from Mars' point of view,

if you go from being too
cold to being too hot.

Mars is probably not a
long-term place for home,

but if you think about it,
there's no place that's

gonna be suitable for life forever.

It's just a question of how long.

How long do we wanna have
the rent on this planet

or that planet?

Earth, we've been lucky,
we've had several billion

years, Mars we may have
half a billion years, but

still, a place to live
for half a billion years

is a good place.

As the sun warms the moons of the distant

planets that perhaps will
be the best hope for life

in the future solar system,
Jupiter's moon, Europa

already looks the most likely candidate.

Far below it's dense and
inhospitable layers

of ice, some form of primitive
life may, even now, exist.

Dr. David Black is chairman
of the NASA Origins Program,

a project designed to search for
the signs of life in space.

The moon Europa is very very
intriguing, it appears.

It's an ice covered planet,
but some of the features

that we see on the surface
suggest that, in fact,

there's a liquid ocean below that.

How extensive, we don't know
that yet, that's one of

things that we'll try and
explore in the future.

We know that deep down in our own ocean,

where there's no sunlight to
speak of, we've seen signs of

life near these deep-sea
vents, the smokers,

as they're called.

So, it's possible that there's
an analogous situation

going on on Europa even as we speak.

There may be very primitive
forms of life there.

In the future, Europa will warm up, and

its icy surface will start to melt.

It could become a watery world

where life might just survive.

I'm not sure that this means it's a

vacation spot in the future,
but it's at least a place

where we might see life at a
very very primitive stage

another place in the solar system.

The Cassini-Huygens Mission left Earth

in October, 1997 on a seven year journey

to Saturn and its moon, Titan.

As the sun continues to
heat up, this little moon

might also develop life.

It's the only other planetary object

that looks like our own earth.

It's the only other object
that we know of that has

an atmosphere of nitrogen,
and also, we know that there

is an organic chemistry
taking place inside this

atmosphere and we have the
creation of all those

molecules that we find on earth.

The only thing that is
lacking is a little bit

of temperature, little bit of heat,

and a little bit of oxygen.

Along the beach here is where the

Huygens probe will land.

The question is, will it
be able to see the oceans?

In Paris, Athena Coustenis and Chris McKay

are studying some of the latest
telescope images of Titan.

Right now, it's very cold, but
it has all the ingredients

to being a very nice place to live.

In some sense, it's like a
pie frozen in the freezer,

and when the sun gets more
bright, it would warm up and

bake and have a nice
water-rich environment with a

nitrogen atmosphere and we
know today that there's

rich organic chemistry occurring
in the haze in Titan's

atmosphere, that organic
chemistry could, in fact,

be the seeds for life so even
if life from earth doesn't

migrate to Titan, Titan could
initiate life of its own

when the sun becomes bright
enough to cook that pie.

Titan is covered entirely
by thick cloud deck,

and it does not allow you to
look down to the surface.

So we have been very frustrated.

For years, we have been
trying to get a glimpse of

the surface of Titan and
nothing would come out.

The tiny European space agency probe,

Huygens, will parachute
through the thick Titan

atmosphere and descend
to the surface below.

To me, the most interesting question

that Huygens will answer is,

"What is the nature of the surface?

What is that material that it slams into or

splashes into?

Is is liquid hydrocarbons
that have accumulated

over billions of years,
literally a sea of natural gas,

or is it solid ice or solid
CO2 or is it something

that we're not even expecting at all?"

No matter how earth-like it becomes,

eventually, even life on Titan
will become impossible.

Like the earth, it, too, will
finally be uninhabitable.

Ultimately, there is no
hope for survival within

our solar system.

The sun is on the path to destruction

and nothing can stop it.

This fact was first discovered
by Father Angelo Secchi,

a Vatican astronomer.

In 1868, he peered through
his telescope as he had done

many nights before.

He gazed up at a dying
star far above the earth.

It was Gamma Canes Venatici,
400 light-years away.

He was using a new technique
to analyze starlight,

spectroscopy.

The light was split into
colors using a prism,

and the chemical composition
of the star could

be determined from the patterns of color.

Secchi had recorded blue
stars and yellow stars

in the past, but that
night, he added a new star

to his list.

A red star.

Secchi started to catify
them and give them names.

The red star, called
Superba, the arrogant star,

because its spectrum is
very very different.

The real reason it looks very different is

because it was cooler, and
it was big and luminous

and it is what we now
know as a red giant star.

This was one of the most significant

of all Secchi's discoveries,

but its secrets were not to be revealed for

another fifty years.

Cambridge astrophysicist
Douglas Gough is a leading

solar scientist.

In the 1950's, he was
inspired to work on stars

after studying under Sir
Fred Hoyle, one of the

century's greatest cosmological thinkers.

Fred Hoyle is one of the leaders of the

revolution that has overtaken astronomy.

His views are often
controversial, as he strives

to understand the very
origin of our universe.

Internationally famous,
he commutes regularly

between Cambridge and California.

Fred Hoyle, the man who coined the

phrase "Big Bang", was
one of the first people

to realize what was going
to happen to our sun.

He had a really broad vision of

how everything in physics fitted together,

and I found that very very inspiring.

He picked out the most
important things that

needed to be understood,
to get the whole story

right, and then pursued them
with vigor and enthusiasm.

During WWII, Fred Hoyle devoted his spare

time to developing theories
on the evolution of stars,

and on the destiny of
one star in particular.

Ours.

It was known that red giants existed,

but one of the things that Fred

contributed to was understanding that

these are towards the end
of the life of a star.

In those days, there were no computers,

and so, therefore, he really had
to use his brain and think.

He started to understand why
stars became red giants.

Our sun was destined to become a red giant

from the moment it was born.

Created in a blinding flash,
every star has a finite

supply of fuel to take it into old age.

Fred Hoyle discovered that a red giant is

a star about to run out of fuel.

He realized, too, that this
limited the sun's future.

Stars are like people.

They're born, they live and
they die and part of the

way a star dies is that
it becomes a red giant.

So, something like the sun,
for example, will swell

after another roughly five
billion years is our best

guess, nothing that I'm
going to worry about.

It will swell up to a
size perhaps as large as

where the earth is in its orbit.

When the sun becomes a
red giant, it puffs up,

becomes enormous,

very distended, whereas the core shrinks,

and it's tiny, it's like a
pea in a swimming pool.

A red swimming pool because
the star is red, and

it gets very turbulent,
lots of motion, and the sun

will expand 50, 100 times its current size.

The sun will engulf Mercury
and Venus, probably.

It probably won't get as far
as the earth, we're not

100% sure of that, but it
will get a good fraction

of the way to the earth, so
it will fill the sky, almost.

It'll be this enormous big,
red object in the sky.

The process of burning hydrogen in the

sun's core will eventually come to an end.

But hydrogen trapped in
its outer layers beyond

the core will cause a
final burst of energy out

into the solar system.

As the sun expands, the earth
will start to vaporize.

Its surface will disappear
in the intense heat.

It'll be rather like a
cube of ice in a glass

of boiling water, so the
outside will start to melt

as the ice would, I mean,
evaporate as far as the

earth is concerned, but
the inside may survive.

It depends on how big the sun gets.

Maybe it won't completely
engulf the orbit of

the earth, but nonetheless,
we will be fried for

sure, so if we have any
inclination to save ourselves

we better high-tail it
outta here before then.

As the giant red sun gradually cools,

material from it will
disperse into space, leaving

behind its tiny core,
a white dwarf star.

Ultimately, it will fade into darkness

and our solar system will fade with it.

What planets are left will
still be orbiting around it,

the inner planets will have gone,

and, they will be orbiting
around something which is

just as heavy, but which
is very small and very

dim, so everything will be black and cold,

and it will be night all the time.

As our sun dies, there's gonna be

other stars and suns that are born.

I would expect that by
that time we would have

been smart enough and moved
far enough into the future

to hitch a ride on another star out there

and find another planet.

When we go to a dark place,
anywhere here on earth,

the desert somewhere and
we look up and we say,

"My golly, look at all the
stars, I didn't know there

were that many stars."

You realize how many suns and

how many planets and how
many stars are out there

that we know so little about
because think of all the

ones we can't see.

A handful of sand contains
one million grains.

One thousand handfuls make one billion.

There are 100 billion
individual stars within

our galaxy and there are at
least 50 billion galaxies

in the universe.

There are more stars in the
universe than there are grains

of sand on every beach on earth.

One of the things we learn
in astronomy is that

almost all young stars have
discs associated with them.

Now, we believe these
discs are the precursors,

the things out of which planets are formed.

How many of these discs of dust

actually go on to form planets is unknown.

But now, astronomers are
setting out to hunt

for planets around distant stars.

The detection of extrasolar planets,

or planets around other stars,

is difficult because the first

idea is only to look and
see if we can see planet,

and this simple idea is
not so efficient because

of contrast of light between
the star and the planet

is so huge.

It's about one billion, so
it's absolutely impossible,

at least at the present
time to directly detect and

take a picture of a planet.

Planet hunter Michel Mayor and

his colleague Didier
Queloz have been trying

to find planets around distant stars.

Every few months, they
take the long drive from

their base in Geneva to a little-known

observatory in Saint-Michel,
Haute-Provence,

with no chance of ever
seeing a planet directly

from earth.

The two of them developed a way of looking

for planets indirectly by
looking at the motion of stars.

A wobble in the star would
indicate the presence

of a planet, it's gravity
tugging against the

star's orbit.

The planet is turning around
the star, in fact, the

star itself is turning also
a little bit and if the

planet is doing a very big orbit,

the motion of the star

will be extremely small,
so this is, the idea is,

to look for this wobble.

[{Voiceover] In December,
1994, they discovered a star

whose wobble could only have
been caused by something

like a planet, but whatever
was causing this wobble

was stranger than anything
they had imagined, and was

orbiting the star very
quickly, going right round

in a matter of days.

We detect something completely
crazy which was planet

of the size of Jupiter, but
which had a period of five

days, less than five days, it
means very close to the star.

And nobody was expecting this, even us.

They were extremely cautious about

revealing their discovery.

It was not the first time
that such an extraordinary

claim had been made.

There were half a dozen or
so claims of the detection

of the first planet ever around a star.

All turned out to be bunk,
in short, and various

people contributed to the
de-bunking of these planets,

but because of this rather
sordid history of planet

detections that proved to
be false, there was an

extraordinary burden placed
on the Swiss team to

be extra careful.

Before they could double-check their

data, the star, 51 Pegasus,
disappeared below the horizon.

They had to wait a
frustrating six months to

observe it again.

We had to be sure that this
was real, and we had to

work a lot to be convinced
that the only explanation

for this phenomena was a planet.

The Swiss team had discovered the first

world outside our solar system.

But a planet with such a
fast orbit could easily

be observed by another team.

They had to keep it secret until they were

ready to announce the discovery.

We were joking on this secret,

and my son,

he was 17 years old at the time, say,

"Oh, I know the number."

because he was measuring with us during the

night, he was

clever enough just to see that every

light we were measuring was
the same star and we have

a long discussion with Didier
if we have to kill him

to keep the secret.

Others had been looking for extrasolar

planets since the early 1980's.

At the Lick Observatory in San Francisco,

Geoff Marcy was planet hunting.

When the discovery of 51
Pegasus was announced,

he took a closer look at
his data and realized

he'd long since found
what he was looking for.

We were developing our
technique for looking for

wobbles of stars and not
actually analyzing our data,

and we only found out a
couple of months later that

among the 107 stars that
we had been monitoring,

two of them leapt out immediately as having

planets and in the successive
few months, four more

stars leapt out as having planets.

So, by April of '96, we had
discovered six planets

around other stars in rapid succession.

Geoff Marcy's team have continued to

discover new planets.

Well, the pace of discovery
is frenetic is all I can say.

We're discovering about
a planet every month.

I expect that to continue
for the next few years,

and I think the next few
years will find that we've

scoured the galactic
neighborhood for all of the

big planets there are to be found.

Planet hunters have now uncovered

over 100 planets outside our solar system.

But these newfound planets
are very different

from anything that was expected.

It was thought impossible
for a giant planet

to exist close to its star.

They should only form
far out in the coldest

ice-bound regions of a solar system.

The image we had, a
formation of planets, was

very much based on one system.

Ours.

And so, we thought we had
understood the process

by just looking at one system.

Now here it comes and they
are totally different.

This is all a system that looks different.

These are strange planetary worlds.

So strange that some
scientists have questioned

whether they are really planets at all.

Some argue that until
we've actually seen them

directly, we cannot be absolutely sure.

Others remain convinced.

The chances that this is
not a planet are so remote

that nobody believes it.

It would be an incredible
thing, it would even be

more incredible to have
something that mimics so

closely the presence of
a planet than having a

planet itself.

The easiest interpretation
at this stage, and in fact,

the only one I think is that
if it walks like a duck

and it quacks like a duck,
what we've found are ducks.

And I think that's the best
argument that we've, in fact,

found planets around other stars.

But how much can be found out about

these other worlds?

With Michel Mayor, Athena
Coustenis is looking at

the new data from 51 Pegasus.

She has developed a new
technique that identifies

the chemical makeup of the star's planet,

something previously thought impossible to

measure from such a distance.

Three years ago, we have
absolutely no idea that

we can have access to the
chemistry of a planet, so

it's sometimes, science is exciting.

The idea we had was to use the star itself

to push forward its planet
and tell us something about

what its planet's made of.

They cannot see the planet itself, but

they can see changes in
the lights from the star.

The interaction between
the wind of the star and

the atmosphere of the planet
create big tail flowing

away from the planet and
if the light of star goes

through this tail, you have
access to the chemistry

of the planet.

By analyzing the changing spectrum of

light from the star, they
hope to find out exactly

what the atmosphere of
the planet is made of.

Of course, if we manage
to detect an atmosphere,

it's definite proof that this is a planet.

However, the future for planet hunting

will lie not in ground based observations,

but in space missions.

200 miles above us, the
Hubble Space Telescope

is providing a unique
insight into deepest space.

Among the thousands of
galaxies that Hubble has

photographed, there must be
a myriad of other planets.

But to see even the planets
in our own galaxy,

The Milky Way, we need a
vast telescope in space.

Probably the most important
telescope in the line

of telescopes that we're
thinking about for the Origins

program is a device that we
call "The Planet Finder".

This is a fairly large
telescope that will probably

be what scientists call an interferometer.

It's really more than one telescope.

It'd be made up of four
or five small telescopes

that will mimic a very large telescope.

Telescopes like Planet Finder

will allow us to see extrasolar planets for

the first time, bringing the
unseen into sharp focus.

The Planet Finder will provide
us not with a picture

in the sense that we're used to seeing from

satellites in orbit around
the earth, we won't

get that kind of a picture.

What we will get is

a dot is about all we'll get in

terms of the image, but the
signal that comes from

that dot will be the key
thing for the scientists.

Rock 'n roll Atlantis.

But what can a dot of light tell us

about another planet far
away in the universe?

Before the probe Galileo
headed for Jupiter, it

looked down on Earth to
see if life could be

detected from space.

What Galileo showed us
was that, in fact, these

molecular signatures that
we think are indicative

of life on the planet
were really there and you

could separate them out so
it gave us some confidence

that by looking for similar
signatures when we look

at the atmospheres of other
planets, that we could

maybe infer from those signatures

that life was there, as well.

The signs of life as we know it are

universal, the combinations
of chemicals on earth

could be repeated on any
planet, and all of these

chemicals can be identified
from a distance.

And we'll be looking for
things like signs of

water in the atmosphere,
carbon dioxide, which would

indicate that it's got a
substantial atmosphere.

Ozone, which says that there's
oxygen in the atmosphere.

And all these taken together,
each one tells you

something about the
likelihood that the planet is

either inhabited or may be habitable.

If you can find methane,
especially with oxygen in

the atmosphere, it's a
slam-dunk, as we say in

America in basketball,
that you can conclude that

life is on that planet.

Somewhere in a solar system, many now

believe that the combination
of these elements will

almost certainly mean life.

If you hand a biochemist
a planet with a rocky

surface with a temperature
that's not too cold so

that the water is frozen
into ice and not so hot that

the water is evaporated into
steam, but a temperature

that, in the words of Goldilocks,
is just right for the

liquid form of water, it
will pool into lakes and

rivers and streams and of
course, oceans, and the

biochemists are unanimous
that the laws of chemistry

will take over.

You'll end up with complicated
organic molecules

that we, in fact, would call life.

But we've yet to find a planet that

falls within this "Goldilocks"
zone and is rocky

and small enough to be suitable for life.

A planet like the earth.

I would be happy to find
an earth-like planet

even if it's cold or far
away or close by or too hot

or anything.

I'd like to see that these
exist, as well, because

if I find one of those, I
can be sure that there are

others elsewhere that might
be more suitable for life.

So, I think the major
question is to see one, then

we'll start being picky
and wanting them at the

right temperature.

Like Voyager looking back at our family

of planets, telescopes in
space may one day allow us

to look at distant worlds.

The earth is a very
insignificant, at least in a

cosmic sense, very significant
to us, but in a cosmic

sense it's that pale blue
dot as Carl Sagan has said

off in the distance.

And in many ways, much of
what the Origins program

is about is a search for
yet another example of the

pale blue dot.

Some 500 years ago, Copernicus,
in effect, removed

the earth from the center of the universe.

We have since had great
observations that show

that the sun itself is
nothing special, neither is

our galaxy, but the thing that
remains is that we've only

have evidence from one
example of life and that's

the life that's on this planet.

We are so obsessed with
finding other life forms

and understanding how life
originated, it's like life

needs to seek out itself.

That's manifest in our thinking.

Almost certainly, any
expedition we mount to

another solar system will
be to a solar system that

looks like it's going to
be most like our own.

It's not beyond the stretch of imagination

to think of sending a probe,
an automated probe...

Imagine that your sitting
at a control room 50 or 60

years in the future after
this probe was launched, and

suddenly there's this signal
that comes back and you're

not quite sure where it is
and you scratch the computer

archives and by the way, this
probe is actually one we

sent to Beta Hydrae 50
years ago, and now it's

telling us what that
remarkable place is like.

I think that would be very exciting.

It was curiosity about what lay

beyond our atmosphere
that drove us into space.

But the further we venture
in our search for new

worlds, the more we are
struck by the special

beauty of own planet.

Our tiny Earth, remains for us, the most

inspiring place in the universe.