How the Universe Works - Mysteries Of Our Place In The Milky Way- Space Discovery Documentary

what's more we could find these aliens not on distant planets in unexplored galaxies but right next door in our own solar system scientists are now honing in on proof that ET is out there and living on the most hazardous of worlds our safari will journey to seven destinations in our solar system to see just where these creatures could be and what they might look like these exotic lands are unimaginably harsh life as we think of it would perish in instant but alien life may be far tougher than we expect as we're learning from a surprising group of living things right here on earth until just a few decades ago we were sure our planet was unique it is the only one we found so far that has nurtured the evolution of millions of species thanks to its abundant sunshine warm water and protective atmosphere we logically concluded that life needed each of those things a conclusion that ruled out all other new worlds in our solar system but then biologists began combing some of the Earth's darkest and coldest places and to their surprise they found living breathing creatures [Music] biologists call these organisms extremophiles son don't be light or oxygen others survive in tremendous atmospheric pressure it seems life can turn up practically anywhere take Antarctica after years of searching this arid frozen landscape scientists doubted they'd find anything alive but in 1999 a team of explorers unearthed a Roth from six feet under the ice what they found amazed them when they cracked the rock open they found it teeming with tiny creatures here at temperatures of 68 degrees below zero and six feet under solid ice life had found a foothold biologists have been increasingly discovering life not kangaroos but you know simpler forms of life that live at very cold temperatures very high temperatures very great pressures even in places where there's sort of a high degree of radiation turns out life is able to live in a much wider variety of environments on our own planet than we used to think and if life can survive extreme conditions not just here at home but elsewhere in our solar system think of what basically unless there's something extraordinarily miraculous about our solar system or our planet then life has got to be extremely commonplace I mean that there's got to be large numbers of worlds with life and some of them would have cooked up intelligent life in the beginning on earth was as deadly a planet as any over the first billion years of Earth's existence cosmic debris pummeled it mercilessly the impacts turned its surface into a broiling seething Inferno where life was impossible but once the solar system settled down and the earth began to cool water appeared setting the stage for life in 1953 researchers Stanley Miller proved in a lab experiment just how easily life on Earth got its start the combined water with hydrogen methane and ammonia components of the Earth's early atmosphere then he zapped his solution with an electric charge to simulate lightning his results shocked the world Miller had created organic molecules called amino acids the protein building blocks of all living things if lightening helped jumpstart life on earth could it have done the same on other planets galactic probes have now found the ingredients in Miller's experiment throughout our solar system including one essential to life one of the requirements that every form of life that we know about on earth has every single one is liquid water we've used evidence for liquid water to kind of guide our search for habitable environments our safari is headed to seven worlds some possibly rich in water by scientists believe aliens might be hiding while any life there might have begun much like life on earth how it looks now is anyone's guess [Music] we begin in the world that has always fired our imaginations the planet right next door of all the planets where we've looked for life it's the one you've studied most the scientists who make it the first look at Martians if they're found is Steve Squyres principal investigator for NASA's Mars rovers Mars has always had among all the planets I think a special fascination for humans for a very long time we've known enough about Mars to know that it is probably the most earth-like it may be the most like earth with an atmosphere and seasons but we humans would perish quickly on Mars its air is thin 40 times thinner than the air at the top of Mount Everest and it sits in a bad neighborhood of our solar system near an asteroid belt its atmosphere is too flimsy to protect it asteroids continually bombarded surface violent winds can whip Mars is sandy soil into storms that consume the entire planet for weeks and spawn tornadoes eight kilometers high midday temperatures of the Equator of one degree Celsius fall to minus 70 at night David Grinspoon is a curator of astrobiology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as he sees it Mars will be warmer if it wasn't a planet free right when I grab coffee on a cold morning I know that a small espresso is gonna cool off quickly whereas the larger coffee is gonna stay warm much longer large objects stay warm longer because their interiors are shielded from the outside where the cooling occurs and planets are exactly the same way a small planet will cool off early in its history a larger planet like Earth will stay warm for billions of years which makes it a better place probably to look for life [Music] despite Mars's drawbacks it has always fascinated scientists because it's terrains seem to give evidence but it might support life it's dynamic landscape of mountains volcanoes and deep ravines is not unlike our earth too early astronomers these features look like functions and Rufus and even a system of canals supposedly not just supporting life but actually produced by it Percival Lowell in the United States observed these things and inferred that in fact these things were so straight and so regular in geometry that they had to have been the product of intelligent life okay well he was right the problem was the life was at the wrong end of the telescope in viewing this thing visually through a telescope eyepiece the the human eye brain combination studied to connect things that weren't really there Lowell was not alone some scientists were shocked when the probe Viking one beamed back this image is that a human face perhaps produced by Martians - until recently we never really know where to look in our solar system for extraterrestrial life but we've always known what the aliens will be like once we found [Music] usually there is more than a hint of the earthling in our aliens hostile or lovable they tend to resent all Newton images of ourselves as a senior astronomer at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Institute in California seth shostack has spent his career listening for the radio waves of a distant alien society there's no reason to assume that they're going to look like us or even think like us or behave like us or have language you know you just have to look at the variety of life on earth and you see that you know nature can come up with lots of different forms but if there is life on Mars how could it survive in such extreme conditions since the 1960's scientists have sent dozens of probes to the Red Planet the first pictures of the barren landscape quickly dashed any hope of finding intelligent beings but what scientists did see startled them though there's no evidence of Marshall made canals there are signs that Mars actually may have had water some think the angry red planet my points have been blue you just have to look back a couple of billion years three and a half billion 430 years ago Mars had a thicker atmosphere had water on its surface clearly may be developed life and as it slowly went bad you know the life had to adapt life may have adapted not died off because some liquid water may still exist underground but with no surface water frigid temperatures and ultra thin atmosphere Mars is a planet only one kind of creature could love an extreme a phial extremophiles thrive in the cruelest of places to see where they might lurk on Mars we head to the Valles Marineris a massive rift in Mars is surface 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon in places and almost as deep as Mount Everest is tall Lakes may have once flooded this valley and those lakes could have hosted life as the water dried up life could have evolved to cope with the harsher environment we won't know what these extremophiles are like until we find them but they may resemble creatures that exist in extreme places right here on earth an unusual team of biologists called astrobiologists study earth for the kinds of life we may find in outerspace [Music] astrobiologist rocker mention Elly is on the hunt for Mars's extremophiles if it went beneath the surface and some of it undoubtedly did then what happened to it well it formed brine pox so what kind of organism can live in a salty brine a salt loving organ [Music] astrobiologist Chris McKay thinks he knows the kind of salt loving creatures that might survive on Mars creatures much like those he's found in one of the driest saltiest places on earth a fundamental challenge to life on Mars is in a sense that's fundamental challenge of life here in Death Valley its dryness that is the hardest thing for life to adapt to thousands of years ago a salty lake covered Death Valley just as lakes filled Mars is Mariner trench this appears like a lifeless place big flat white empty horizon but yet just below the surface we find layers of algae and bacteria growing there living in a environment that in many ways is fundamentally different from the environment that we sense on the surface here you're in a place which looks lifeless looks dead and yet you dig down and hidden underneath there it is beneath the salt is a layer of hardy green algae that survive on the water and light that trickle through the algae in turn feeds salt loving microorganisms here in deserts on earth dried salty lake beds we're gonna find them on Mars as well salty deserts are not the only places life might be hiding on the Red Planet there are Mars is tremendous volcanoes some of them six times larger than those on earth astrobiologists penny Boston studies the caves called lava tubes left over after volcanic lava has dissipated not long ago we assumed caves like these were devoid of life they get no sunlight and no sunlight means no photosynthesis but in lava tubes outside Albuquerque New Mexico Boston has found evidence of extreme life because we know Mars has many many lava tubes and so here we have the opportunity to see how these formed and also to look at the life that inhabits them the extremophiles Boston has found appear to be thriving they get their energy by feeding on the minerals in the cave wall here right close to the wall and you can see these white patches here growing against the black basalt and each one of these is like a major city for these little guys they're you know they're all nestled in these little pockets in the basalt and so these guys are currently adapted to these freezing temperatures they never see any light and they get what they can find in the environment other creatures like these in the caves below Mars is volcano fields Boston thinks so we are going to find life and I just hope that I live a long and healthy life so that I can still be around to see that we may already have had our first glimpse of Martians not from our visit to their planet but from their visit to ours sixteen million years ago an asteroid slammed into Mars and propelled that to kilogram rock into space amazingly that rock sailed to earth and came to rest in Antarctica inside NASA scientist David McKay and Everett Gibson were amazed to spot the outlines of fossils water has carved small tunnels in the rock and in these tunnels McKay and Gibson found what they believed to be evidence of bacterial life here's a little microbes and they're dead and they're their fossils or in some cases we don't even see the forms we see the footprints so the evidence that they were their life from Mars maybe the hunt is only just beginning NASA plans to send a rover called Phoenix to Mars it will study the planets ice cap and prove three feet beneath the surface NASA even has a plan to send human visitors [Music] they may not meet the little green men of our imaginations but they could encounter life in some form what will it look like it is likely to be a subterranean dweller with an ability to survive on little water perhaps some organism with a taste for minerals and let the creatures in the lava tubes of New Mexico even the smallest find would have enormous implications proof that life is not unique to earth that exists just next door our safari to the places in our solar system likely to harbor alien life now takes us past the asteroid belt on the far side of Mars here Jupiter rains but this planet the largest in our solar system is fairly hostile to life thanks to its toxic gases and overpowering gravity not only is it pretty cold out at Jupiter it's also you know it's got this really thick atmosphere tens to thousands of miles thick and it's got ammonia and methane you know things used to clean the bathroom but Jupiter has more than 60 moons that we know about at first glance those moons would seem unlikely places to seek alien life their atmospheres are thin and they are inhumanly cold the temperature on callisto is lower than minus 200 degrees Celsius the scientific probes Voyager and Galileo have detected little on the surface of these moons but ice with one dramatic exception IO is one of the closest moons to Jupiter when NASA sent Voyager 1 to IO in 1979 astronomers were astonished to find its surface roiling with giant volcanoes io is the most volcanic ly active place in the solar system just spewing volcanic material from its surface all the time what could be heating the interior of this frigid moon amazingly it's the force of gravity from Jupiter the giant planet exerts enormous gravitational pull on its moons the closer the moon the stronger the force so strong it can actually stretch their crusts but some of these moons have a victorville orbits so as they near Jupiter the crust stretches towards it when they move further away the crust relaxes back towards spherical this constant tidal movement creates friction deep inside and that friction generates heat it's like rubbing two sticks together to start a fire the pull of Jupiter is heating io from the inside out volcanic fumes and lack of water make IO inhospitable to life but Jupiter's other large moons are more distant close enough for Jupiter's gravity to warm them from within but distant enough to remain calm on the surface [Music] three of them look particularly promising as passable homes for alien life the one farthest from the giant planet Callisto on its surface Callisto looks like our moon scarred and cratered by countless hits from asteroids those impacts may have melted the surface ice for brief periods allowing life to take hold but in 1998 the Galileo spacecraft detected a much more promising incubator deep beneath Callisto surface radioactive rocks and tremendous pressure in its core generate heat inside Callisto the heat may be melting its icy crust from below creating a hidden ocean and hidden oceans could mean hidden life as we fly closer to Jupiter we find its largest moon Ganymede Ganymede is also deeply scarred ridges rise above its surface those bright spots are craters as big as five kilometers across and likely to be lined with frost but these photos offer the most compelling clues to where life here might hide they show flowing glaciers glaciers that resemble those on earth Ganymede's moving glaciers could also be signs of heat within so like Callisto Ganymede could also have a hidden ocean buried beneath as much as a hundred and ninety kilometers of ice the third moon on this leg of our alien Safari is the most intriguing it is called Europa and of the three it resides closest to Jupiter that proximity to the giant planet means europa score may be very hot far hotter than Callisto's or Ganymede's but its surface remains frigid a potent combination for life since there could be a temperate zone where they meet mammoth fishes scar you Rochas thick crust of ice a sign that ice is always shifting on our own planet we see the same cracks in the ice sheets covering the Arctic Ocean Europa's crust may be riding the largest ocean in the solar system an ocean twice as large as all of Earth's put together now those oceans if they dare and the chances are pretty good that at least some of them are they've been sitting around for a long time four billion years a little longer right in four billion years an ocean of water do you think anything might have cooked up there well certainly seems plausible the environment on in Europa's ocean is more or less as nice as the environment in our own ocean as a place for for living things to exist things from planet Earth could probably live in the open ocean but Europa's oceans will be very cold even slushy and sunlight never penetrates them thanks to an icy cover that may be sixteen kilometers thick we might never have thought life could exist here if not for a revolutionary discovery off the coast of Ecuador deep in the Pacific biologists have found flourishing communities of tubeworms with crabs and even squid [Music] these creatures are thriving despite complete darkness extreme cold and the pressure of the deep ocean they feed on bacteria that take their energy not from the Sun but from chemicals erupting from the seafloor we might find very similar volcanic vents on Europa supporting their own web of life to find out NASA scientists would like to put a lander on the Europan surface some would like to send a cryo bot a robot that would melt the ice and release a probe into the liquid below that's not so hard to do you just have to melt your way through but you're gonna have to melt your way through not a couple hundred feet but maybe a dozen miles of ice and send down a fishing line with a maybe a video camera and a light bulb on it and look around in all that water we can't rule out the possibility that very simple life-forms have evolved further we might even find creatures as advanced as some here at home most likely however we would find microbes but even that would be a sea change in how we view the birth and growth of life Europa was warm what if the place is one of the coldest known or if it's lakes flow with toxic chemicals instead of water these are the worlds we find as our safari continues even deeper into space as our safari in search of alien life sweeps by the ringed planet Saturn we can see the violently swirling gases that choke its atmosphere we can also feel Saturn's gravity weaker than Jupiter's but still formidable we'll keep moving we're not likely to find living things here Saturn's rings are also extremely inhospitable they're made of rock and ice as small as a grain of sugar or as a big as a house but Saturn has many moons 56 that we've spotted so far our safari heads first to one of those moons a tiny frigid satellite called Enceladus just five hundred kilometers in diameter here gravity is very weak a fraction of that on earth and Enceladus has hardly any atmosphere it reflects back into space almost all the sunlight that hits it making it the shiniest object in our solar system until very recently we also thought Enceladus was too cold to support life it appears we were wrong in 2005 after a seven-year journey the Cassini spacecraft approached the tiny moon and detected something that stunned the missions principal investigator Caroline Porco so this was the picture that just you know grabbed us just was shocking those are plumes made of water from Ibiza the geezers steam and hot water hit the cold vacuum of space and explode into a jet of ice with little gravity to rein it in the ice cloud can grow as big as Enceladus itself [Music] porco has never seen anything like it anywhere else it's like a planetary explorers dream to come upon a body like Enceladus those Jets those fountains of fuel just spewing vapor and icy snow hundreds of kilometres above the South Pole of Enceladus there's only one conclusion time frigid Enceladus is piping hot within like Jupiter and Saturn's giant gravitational field tugs on its satellites creating friction and heat within as far as we can tell now as soon as I can inescapable conclusion that there may be liquid water deeper down on Enceladus because it's one and the best models we can put forth right now to even explain them warmth much less than jets seem to indicate that you would get temperatures warm enough to melt water heat liquid water even the farthest reaches of our solar system may contain the chemistry for life what kind of creature could live in the steamy waters of a geezer thanks to hot springs back on earth we have some idea at one point we assumed nothing lived in the steam-driven mountains of Yellowstone National Park but then biologists discovered microbes in these waters microbes that feed on chemicals dissolved in the water today we call them thermophiles the hardiest can thrive in boiling water but there be thermophiles on Enceladus to find out our Safari takes us in for a close-up of this extraterrestrial Old Faithful it's too cold for anything to live near the surface but temperatures there are minus 165 degrees Celsius but what about the hot water inside in the ice bloom above Enceladus Cassini's probes have found carbon dioxide and methane chemicals that could feed life below just as the chemical Laden springs of Yellowstone feed microbes living there we have a body that very very likely has liquid water in its interior has shown us already it's got simple organic compounds and you know a whole host of things that make it I think a major body of astrobiological interest in our solar system if Enceladus has been a shock astronomers have been astounded by another of Saturn's moons Titan it may be the unluckiest to harbor life titin gets only a limited amount of sunlight about a thousandth as much as Earth probes sent to Titan have detected ice but no liquid water under temperatures of minus 138 degrees Celsius that ice is hard as stone what could possibly make Titan a promising environment that alien life remarkably tighten in many ways resembles the earth but not the one we know now Titan has turned out to be the body fantastic in the Saturn system which is long suspected of having an environment at the surface not only similar to the kind of environment we find here on earth even believe it or not similar to the kind of environment we had on earth before the emergence of life Titan intrigued Carolyn Porco's team so much they directed the Cassini spacecraft to send a probe there in 2005 it was the most distant surface mission ever conducted the probes or just ridges and planes but a later fly over by Cassini spotted a shoreline [Music] soon thousands of lakes came into view at least one bigger than the Great Lakes of North America it's the first time we ever detected liquid on the surface of another celestial body that looks like Minnesota except the lakes are not water they're they're liquid natural gas but liquid natural gas is a liquid and that's not snow those are methane flakes like earth Titan has weather but it's of a rather psychedelic kind there are even anything hurricanes it's not water it's methane doing all the exact same things raining evaporating flowing in rivers so you have something that is basically doing what water does on earth on Titan only it's methane a similar scene may have existed on earth four billion years ago making scientists suspect that Titan could also be an incubator for life chemistry does go on at those cold temperatures it's really slow but Titan has had four billion years in which to do some chemistry and maybe in that period of time maybe something is cooked up it would have to cook up without liquid water something we've never seen before but scientists aren't ruling it out the substitute could be the methane so abundant on Titan used for fuel on earth methane was long thought poisonous to all life but in 1997 researchers examined mounds of methane ice in the Gulf of Mexico and they were astonished to find colonies of small centipede like worms thriving amid the frozen substance they think the worms may eat bacteria that feed on the methane in general things that we think of as deadly many of them are potentially lively if you can figure out an evolutionary way to tap into that energy rather than having it destroy you then it can be bountiful there could be one more complication for life on the surface of Titan with only a weak magnetic field to shield it living things on the surface could be exposed to cosmic radiation but that might not be a problem for an extreme afire as we found here on earth biologists have uncovered plenty of life near Chernobyl's contaminated nuclear reactor and even swimming in toxic radioactive spills actually feeding off the decaying molecules it's possible Titans life-forms could do the same to find life on Titan we may have to dive into its methane lakes where we might find chemical loving bacteria we may even find microbes resistant to radiation not unlike those here on earth the Chernobyl living on its rock-hard ice sheets organisms that eat methane might give off heat melting the ice possibly creating another fountain for life there's no doubt life on Titan would be a strange brew but we have yet to visit the most bizarre world where scientists believe life could exist and it's much closer to home our safari of the world's most likely to harbor alien life has taken us far we visited frigid deserts submerged oceans and methane lakes but the world we are about to visit may be the most extreme of all for our final stop we are turning back to water Earth to Venus our closest planetary neighbor in the solar system if life can survive here it seems it could exist almost everywhere to reach the surface of Venus we have to fly through a dense layer of yellow clouds at 64 kilometers deep with a composition similar to battery acid the atmosphere here is 90 times heavier than Earth's too heavy for a human to tolerate on the ground there are extinct volcanoes and lava flows as far as the eye can see they cover 85% of the planet's surface it is hard to believe Venus once had vast oceans you basically had a runaway greenhouse effect where as it starts to get warmer the oceans start to evaporate and then that puts water vapor in the air well water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas so that's what leads to the runaway the oceans basically boil off and then the co2 all ends up in the atmosphere and so today you have this very hot hyper greenhouse planet with temperatures around 460 degrees Celsius Venus is even hotter than mercury the planet closest to the Sun not a surface hospitable to life life as we know it cannot exist on the surface of Venus because organic molecules would just be ripped to shreds by by the hot gases but we stopped here not because of what's on the ground but what's in the air in 1982 the Soviet spacecraft Venera 14 visited Venus in the clouds 50 kilometres up it detected temperatures much cooler than on the surface what's more it found the molecules so critical for life h2o [Music] so far every bit of water we found beyond Earth is frozen solid only in the clouds above Venus have we found it in vapour form a possible incubator for life but Venus is clouds are also filled with highly acidic sulfur once we thought nothing could live in sulfur but scientists have analyzed some of the most acidic water on earth leaching from a California mine in sulfuric acids strong enough to erode metal eat through clothing and dissolve human flesh they found life acid-loving extremophiles these organisms feed on sulfur compounds like iron sulfide eating the iron and emitting the highly acidic sulfur to extremophiles like these you float above Venus astrobiologist David Grinspoon likes to think it's possible maybe in the cause of Venus there are some software based organisms sulfur actually absorbs ultraviolet light in interesting ways and I'm just imagining that there's some maybe some kind of photo chemical reaction going on where ultraviolet light is actually being used to convert chemicals into some higher energy state which then this is basically being eaten what will these aliens be like when we do find them they would have to tolerate high temperatures and enormous atmospheric pressure they would also need to thrive in acid concentrations deadly to most life forms perhaps they might resemble a hardy aversion of the acid resistant extremophiles in California's mind we keep finding that life lives in places that we used to think were inhospitable so whenever we say oh it's impossible you couldn't have life in the gods of Venus I think we have to be very careful because they might just reflect our own ignorance or our limitations on our own imagination and maybe not real limitations on the ultimate creativity of nature which seems to find solutions to these problems as our safari returns to the cool-blue lush and lively world of Earth we can see why we so revere its life-sustaining gifts but as we are learning even the most extreme environments can Harbor living things extremophiles may resemble the first version of life in our universe and they could even be the most common could they have evolved further from these humble beginnings could intelligent life be out there as well for more than 40 years scientists at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Institute in California have been searching the skies for answers to that question astronomer Seth Shostak believes he'll know the sound of alien life when he hears it we have a couple of observing projects to try and find signals the biggest one are our radio searches and that's where we use big arrays of antennas and we point these antennas at nearby star systems that we think well this is the kind of star that might have a planet that might be something like Earth we point in those directions hoping to pick up a signal that would tell us that somebody there is clever enough to build a radio transmitter it's a safari that never leaves home [Music] today we're closer than ever to knowing the answer [Music] some scientists believe we'll get our first look at our extraterrestrial cousins in the near future I hope it's in the next 10 years and I'm ready for it next week so the sooner the better what's more we could find these aliens not on distant planets in unexplored galaxies but right next door in our own solar system scientists are now honing in on proof that ET is out there and living on the most hazardous of worlds our safari will journey to seven destinations in our solar system to see just where these creatures could be and what they might look like these exotic lands are unimaginably harsh life as we think of it will perish in an instant but alien life may be far tougher than we expect as we're learning from a surprising group of living things right here on earth until just a few decades ago we were sure our planet was unique it is the only one we found so far that has nurtured the evolution of millions of species thanks to its abundant sunshine warm water and protective atmosphere we logically concluded that life needed each of those things a conclusion that ruled out all other new worlds in our solar system but then biologists began combing some of the Earth's darkest and coldest places and to their surprise they found living breathing creatures [Music] biologists call these organisms extremophiles son don't be light or oxygen others survive in tremendous atmospheric pressure it seems life can turn up practically anywhere take Antarctica after years of searching this era - frozen landscape scientists doubted they'd find anything alive but in 1999 a team of explorers unearthed a rock from six feet under the ice they found amazed when they cracked the rock open they found it teeming with tiny creatures here at temperatures of 68 degrees below zero and six feet under solid ice life had found a foothold biologists have been increasingly discovering life not kangaroos but you know simpler forms of life they live at very cold temperatures very high temperatures very great pressures even in places where there's sort of a high degree of radiation it turns out life is able to live in a much wider variety of environments on our own planet than we used to think and if life can survive extreme conditions not just here at home but elsewhere in our solar system think about this how could it survive in such extreme conditions since the 1960's scientists have sent dozens of probes to the Red Planet the first pictures of the barren landscape quickly dashed any hope of finding intelligent beings but what scientists did see is startle them though there's no evidence of Marshall made canals there are signs that Mars actually may have had water [Music] some think the angry red planet my points are being blue you just have to look back a couple of billion years three and a half billion four billion years ago Mars had a thicker atmosphere had water on its surface clearly maybe develop life and as it slowly went bad you know the life had to adapt life may have adapted not died off because some liquid water may still exist underground but with no surface water frigid temperatures and ultra thin atmosphere Mars is a planet only one kind of preacher could love an extreme a phial extremophiles thrive in the cruelest of places to see where they might lurk on Mars we head to the Valles Marineris a massive rift in Mars is surface twenty times wider than the Grand Canyon in places and almost as deep as Mount Everest is tall Lakes may have once flooded this valley and those lakes could have hosted life as the water dried up life could have evolved to cope with the harsher environment we won't know what these extremophiles are like until we find them but they may resemble creatures that exist in extreme places right here on earth an unusual team of biologists called astrobiologists study earth for the kinds of life we may find in outerspace [Music] astrobiologist rocker Manchin Ellie is on the hunt for Mars's extremophiles if it went beneath the surface and some of it undoubtedly did then what happened to it well it formed brine pockets so what kind of organism can live in a salty brine a salt living organism astrobiologist Chris McKay thinks he knows the kind of salt loving creatures that might survive on Mars creatures much like those he's found in one of the driest saltiest places on earth the fundamental challenge to life on Mars is in a sense that's fundamental challenge of life here in Death Valley its dryness that is the hardest thing for life to adapt to thousands of years ago a salty lake covered Death Valley just as lakes filled Mars is Mariner trench this appears like a lifeless place big flat white empty horizon but yet just below the surface we find layers of algae and bacteria growing there living in a environment that in many ways is fundamentally different from the environment that we sense on the surface with a system near an asteroid belt its atmosphere is too flimsy to protect it asteroids continually bombarded surface violent winds can whip Mars is sandy soil into storms that consume the entire planet for weeks and spawn tornadoes eight kilometers high midday temperatures of the Equator of one degree Celsius fall to minus 70 at night David Grinspoon is a curator of astrobiology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as he sees it Mars will be warmer if it wasn't a planetary runt when I grab coffee on a cold morning I know that a small espresso is gonna cool off quickly whereas the larger coffee is gonna stay warm much longer large objects stay warm longer because their interiors are shielded from the outside where the cooling occurs and planets are exactly the same way a small planet will cool off early in its history a larger planet like Earth will stay warm for billions of years which makes it a better place probably to look for life [Music] despite Mars's drawbacks it has always fascinated scientists because it's terrains seem to give evidence but it might support life it's dynamic landscape of mountains volcanoes and deep ravines is not unlike our earth too early astronomers these features look like oceans and rivers and even a system of canals supposedly not just supporting life but actually produced by it Percival Lowell in the United States observed these things and inferred that in fact these things were so straight and so regular in geometry that they had to have been the product of intelligent life okay well he was right the problem was the life was at the wrong end of the telescope in viewing this thing visually through a telescope eyepiece the the human eye brain combination started to connect things that weren't really there Lowell was not alone some scientists were shocked when the probe Viking one beamed back this image is that a human face perhaps produced by Martians [Music] until recently we've never really known where to look in our solar system for extraterrestrial life but we've always known what the aliens would be like once we found [Music] usually there is more than a hint of the earthling in our aliens hostile or lovable they tend to resemble mutant images of ourselves as a senior astronomer at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Institute in California seth shostack has spent his career listening for the radio waves of a distant alien society there's no reason to assume that they're going to look like us or even think like us or behave like us or have language you know you just have to look at the variety of life on earth and you see that you know nature can come up with lots of different forms but if there is life on Mars here you're in a place which looks lifeless looks dead and yet you dig down and hidden underneath there it is beneath the salt is a layer of hardy green algae that survive on the water and light that trickle through the algae in turn feeds salt-loving microorganisms here in deserts on earth dried salty lake beds we're gonna find them on Mars as well salty deserts are not the only places life might be hiding on the Red Planet there are Mars is tremendous volcanoes some of them six times larger than those on earth astrobiologists penny Boston studies the caves called lava tubes left over after volcanic lava has dissipated not long ago we assumed caves like these were devoid of life [Music] they get no sunlight and no sunlight needs known photosynthesis but in lava tubes outside Albuquerque New Mexico Boston has found evidence of extreme life because we know Mars has many many lava tubes and so here we have the opportunity to see how these formed and also to look at the life that inhabits them the extremophiles Boston has found appear to be thriving they get their energy by feeding on the minerals in the cave wall here up close to the wall and you can see these white patches here growing against the black basalt and each one of these is like major city for these little guys Mary oh they're all nestled in these little pockets in the basalt and so these guys are permanently adapted to these freezing temperatures they never see any light and they get what they can find in the environment are they're creatures like these in the caves below Mars's volcano fields Boston thinks so we are going to find life and I just hope that I live a long and healthy life so that I can still be around to see that we may already have had our first glimpse of Martians not from our visit to their planet but from their visit to ours sixteen million years ago an asteroid slammed into Mars and propelled a two kilogram rock into space amazingly that rock sailed to earth and came to rest in Antarctica inside NASA scientist David McKay and Everett Gibson were amazed to spot the outlines of fossils water has carved small tunnels in the rock and in these tunnels McKay and Gibson found what they believed to be evidence of bacterial life here's a little microbes and they're dead and they're their fossils or in some cases we don't even see the forms we see the footprints so the evidence that they were their life from Mars maybe the hunt is only just beginning NASA plans to send a rover called Phoenix to Mars unless there's something extraordinarily miraculous about our solar system or our planet then life has got to be extremely commonplace I mean that there's got to be large numbers of worlds with life and some of them would have cooked up intelligent life in the beginning was as deadly a planet as any over the first billion years of Earth's existence cosmic debris pummeled it mercilessly the impacts turned its surface into a broiling seething Inferno where life was impossible but once the solar system settled down and the earth began to cool water appeared setting the stage for life in 1953 researcher Stanley Miller proved in a lab experiment just how easily life on Earth got its start he combined water with hydrogen methane and ammonia components of the Earth's early atmosphere [Music] then he zapped his solution with an electric charge to simulate lightning his results shocked the world Miller had created organic molecules called amino acids the protein building blocks of all living things if lightening helped jumpstart life on earth could it have done the same on other planets galactic probes have now found the ingredients in Miller's experiment throughout our solar system including one essential to life one of the requirements that every form of life that we know about on earth has every single one is liquid water we've used evidence for liquid water to kind of guide our search for habitable environments our safari is headed to seven worlds some possibly rich in water where scientists believe aliens might be hiding while any life there might have begun much like life on earth how it looks now is anyone's guess [Music] we begin in the world that has always fired our imaginations the planets right next door of all the planets where we've looked for life it's the one you've studied most the scientists who make it the first look at Martians if they're found is Steve Squyres principal investigator for NASA's Mars rovers Mars has always had among all the planets I think a special fascination for him as for a very long time we've known enough about Mars to know that it is probably the most earth-like it may be the most like earth with an atmosphere and seasons but we humans would perish quickly on Mars it's air is thin 40 times thinner than the air at the top of Mount Everest and it sits in a bad neighborhood of a minority of the population for example if you show people a photograph which is actually being computer-generated of them from their childhood going on a balloon ride and this photograph is in with lots of photographs from things in their childhood which really did take place a sizable minority will actually quite happily tell you about the time they went up in a hot-air balloon when they were six even though that event never actually took place we do know that we're all potentially prone to these false memories and much more so than we would ever once cast false memory syndrome was based on the idea that memory is faulty a memory is faulty obviously I'm living proof that memory is faulty the older I get the fact is though that memory is not so faulty that people are going to forget entire events they might get details wrong they might get their chronology out of order a little bit but the fact that they were for example in a train crash or something like that they're not going to forget that event without anecdotal evidence without human memory without the ability to retrieve memories we would not have a judicial system and a civilization we grow into all psychologists have developed a wide range of plausible theories to explain why individuals believe they've been abducted by aliens but all of them have ultimately been countered by ufologists it has ranged from simply lying to psychosis it's mass hallucination it's mass hysteria it goes on and on and on there is no end to it however skeptics believe there is one simple factor that makes their case watertight as a scientist I'm interested in the question of whether or not there is anything happening here in terms of objective reality if there's no way of us being able to produce any kind of evidence hard physical evidence then I'd say that what we're looking at is essentially a psychological phenomenon in order to really challenge the skeptics argument ufologists need to find evidence that can stand up to scientific scrutiny in France one of the real 4400 believe they may hold the proof you follow Jesus have been looking for absolutely no as Chanel Aleph world on his activity it only posted Eric julienne is a retired pilot an air traffic controller whose career involved making tough decisions while under immense pressure who is a filament Hickey the man who stabbed you tips ecology hits the more important Don Roberto people over on young over the past 15 years Eric claims to have had a variety of extraterrestrial experiences both at home and at work Citadel more local doctor other than target so Muskoka dollars critical Iranian Army layer he a little less the value Western alfalfa meal kilometer as well as sightings Eric claims have had regular contact and communication with alien beings that have given him a clear understanding of their technology they know zooty certificate the pub so limited a dispersed metal yellowed immunity it's a totally difficult akin to the home a kimono compartment is expected as a possibility after enduring years of abduction experiences Eric believes he has recently been left with solid evidence of their visits an element of woven Pratap appeared on Palacios sit Latino student on his person you see it to edit an oblong located political activist who puddin me that Rick slum provides science with something tangible a contest but Budd Hopkins believes his thirty years of research has already unearthed all the evidence that anyone would need the skeptics are fond of saying there's no physical evidence what the skeptics are saying gee I haven't heard of any because I haven't looked into it ok these are some of the photographs of scooping works that turn up again and again I may have seen a hundred of these why don't the critics recognize it it's because they don't even know anything about it but bob has collected photographs of abductees who claim their experience left him with abnormal scars a man's back here's another one on the front of the shin this is one I'm a little boy that turned up overnight he was five years old I had one case where there were three young women involved in an abduction experience and at the end of it each one had a scoop mark in exactly the same place the doctors who have looked at these things have told me that they most closely resemble the scars from punch biopsies sometimes they will take two samples that person is reacted and another sample is taken sometimes people remember the tool that was used one can infer without much difficulty that they're taking a flesh sample to take from us our own DNA our own physical genetic makeup again these are marks which turn up again and again but we have no explanation of exactly why they are taking this flesh except obviously they're getting some kind of sample [Music] Eric has come to London to visit a leading ear nose and throat specialist and have the lump behind his ear tested hello this is very freely on can see that the puzzle piece he's hoping the results will make sense of his belief that the lump is in fact an alien implant supported windy curvy after two not a variety si vous Kujo not to meet you nice to meet you okay let's take a look at this band it's not tender at all if I was to touch it like this not causing any pain or discomfort no securities at home store doll set up low C key booth to sell the movie the dues MiniMed from Simois stranding head slightly away from me if you knew Cooney paddock or organic or dollar corner keep it fair to say tip the extra this could be Easter diagnosed further by doing a couple of tests and I propose that we do an ultrasound of this area and a plain x-ray and it actually give us a lot more information one of the reasons why Eric believes his lump is an implant is due to the nature of his experiences that took place in the summer of 2003 families experience critical new you give it is it pay off medical you've got a lump or a problem behind your ear I understand CT don't kiss varnish a sea of an especially those in sulky was only a Selden at least a few fois canoe the sixth annual the this under buddha silicon it was so loose all right once the ultrasound and x-ray results are processed and evaluated the consultant will be able to provide eric with a clear diagnosis of his lump [Music] you experience Rachel and the boys were confused by what it was they experienced the next day we talked about it again and you just wanted to know who else had seen it but you just didn't know how how to to find that out and you know we talked about a number of things and mum came up with the idea of phoning the radio station the local radio station family from North Lancashire been describing how they saw a mysterious light in the sky last night Rachel Deveraux was driving on the moors between inkle turn and Bentham with her two children and her mother and they all saw a bright light move with great speed and change directions and so she's never seen anything like it before this was like a really really bright pure white light in a perfect no trails nothing lots of people say well a few people said they see this light seriously Keith Nicola Thoreau vera and Clara and Ian in Finnish goals a local UFO group also had a family story and made contact I got in touch with Ann first I phoned her up and that was shortly after the first saw the light and she was very euphoric about it she was just wanting out it was really the UFO group were able to help Rachel and and document the events of the night but the emotional support they could offer was limited we're a local UFO group we're not professionally qualified at all and I think you'll be quite difficult for someone to go to their MP who I mean the GP there isn't anyone who could deal with people who've got a strange experience like this I think they'll want to get answers to what happened son during that time whether the will do is opened question you suddenly you've got all these different factors in your life they're just a complete mystery it's helplessness and it makes you cry because you don't know how to stop it you don't know what it was and I mean it's making me cry I don't know right growth if you stop think about it like we are now may becomes overwhelming and you can't cope with it you I mean they cannot use xscape just couldn't say oh you've all got false memories and you all imagined it I know I didn't because I know how it's made me feel inside more than anything it's so it's just wanting to make sense of it that's the way that's the feeling it gives you just wanting more knowledge in wanting to to make everything fit into place in a way that you can understand while these experiences often create feelings of fear and anxiety not everyone who reports them find them distressing in fact many believe their contact with extraterrestrial beings has ultimately enriched their lives my first really conscious memory of my experiences with extraterrestrials was from about the age of three years old where I would be meeting I guess like my other family there were no difference to me I just saw them as my my style family alike you know and my parents here were my earth family Tracy Taylor grew up in Perth Western Australia and came to have had regular experiences that involved tests on her body and information put into her mind I think I learned pretty quick not to talk about it I think I just focused it into my schoolwork and used the knowledge and the understandings that I had to should do well at school Tracy's experiences intensified through her teens until she got to the point where she felt she needed to take control of what was going on I had to question my own sanity basically so I went along to visit psychiatrists psychologists asked for my brain to be scanned I'm ready to thinking that they're gonna take me up to the hospital in a minute the brain scans showed up to be normal other psychological tests showed up to be fine one of them walked up to me and said you know is there anything really negative about this I said well not really but it's hard to integrate into my life they said well good luck with it how's this what okay and this is confirmation for me all right and that was the end of it I just walked out of there and thought okay I'll get on with it I'll accept it Tracy now integrates her experiences into the rest of her life and focuses on the positive aspects they've brought out just fantastic single isn't yeah she believes her contact with extraterrestrials has given her a unique artistic ability that she now wants to develop into a career the first time I ever did one of these drawings I just had the urge to get my paper in my pen something just sort of came over me and my hands started to move do you actually see anything called is it just from within you like a down loading of information I suppose in a symbolic form it just sort of seems to feel like it comes through me it's not from me much more like I sort of radio waves Tracy was interested in art before these illustrations came through but claims that her style of drawing changed radically overnight I recognized pretty much the Silver State symbol over a period of time I spoke to people who study ancient cultures and these people were able to pinpoint things in the pictures saying this is something that you could find in a temple in in Peru when this is something you'd find in a temple in in Luxor in Egypt and turned an expert read this I've had linguists looking at it and they say again that it's related to hieroglyphics in ancient Sumerian at various times over the past six years Tracy's also produced a series of graphical illustrations which she claims she later discovered hold a hidden message and that circles dropping over the top of that pyramid exactly yes yeah yes again it fits so these were all done over different periods of time and yet they all look together to form a whole looking at just on a purely surface level there is an element of storytelling apparently this depicts the past and moving into the present and they're moving into the future and that only was the storytelling I can relate to because they have a similarity of stained glass windows and telling a spiritual story and the lotus blossom and they're bursting forth yeah we probably may even we never know the answer of where it comes from or how it gets to be in a pencil at the tip of a hand but you can't take away from the fact that there is something there it's common for abductees to came to be given special abilities as a result of their experience typically these will include the ability to heal or to be able to pass on messages to humanity if in some way the messages that are coming through me can assist other people and the planet that they're connected to I think it's it's right one of the things that has to always be borne in mind about the abduction experience is that the communication in virtually all these cases is telepathic so one has to assume that every abductee can pick up thoughts from the aliens and communicate non-verbally therefore that's a basic paranormal gift is that something that only abductees have or is that something that might be more extensively present in the population we don't really know believers argue that people who return with enhanced psychic abilities provide yet further proof that their experience was real people who have had this experience claim that they have unusual powers the natural facts they don't seem able to demonstrate these powers under controlled conditions if they could then that would be absolutely amazing but at the moment that the wider scientific community doesn't even accept that these kind of claim powers are real skeptics continue to dismiss the types of evidence ufologists and believers have to offer but can ignore the medical opinion of a qualified surgeon especially one who claims that strange objects he has removed from abductees defy earthly explanation we have those which are metallic and covered with this very very strange membrane and at the time of surgery he can't be cut with a surgical blade is impervious to cutting [Music] [Music] Rachel Devereaux had her first missing time experience just three months ago while driving home having looked into the phenomenon she has decided to take a bold but common step for people who have had this type of encounter she's going to have hypnotic regression I'm feeling quite nervous about it about the regression but also quite excited so you might know this before but I think Rachel's hoping that under hypnosis she can be taken back to when she had her experience and retrieved memories that are not consciously accessible I want it to be an honest account you know if I do remember it's it's no walls it's just black everywhere he's like standing in the middle of space there's big big bright light here right in front of me that's high and that's watching what the little ones are doing the small ones going around and looking I wasn't talking to each other they think the boys are funny I think we're funny I can hear laughing now the children laugh and they're really giggly I'm scared for the children put the lights there and it's just telling me it's fine and we're not gonna hurt them that your children that your children yeah that's fine yeah yourself going back wow I can't believe how real that felt from my perspective having completed thousands of regressions over the years she didn't fabricate that she didn't pretend to cry speechless I'm just kind of speechless do I believe everything that happened I'm sort of 90% there yeah but it was real testimonies obtained from abductees under hypnosis often provide compelling detailed accounts of what happens during their missing time episode they have given you follow gists a mountain of anecdotal evidence to support their claims but skeptics find these reports unreliable the alien abduction phenomenon I think is somewhat complicated by the whole debate about hypnosis let's be honest scientists don't even agree on what hypnosis is people typically think that hypnotic regression is this kind of magic key for unlocking repressed or hidden memories in actual fact it's a great way of producing false memories it's based on expectations is basically imagination it's all we wove them together and then they believe in this narrative in the hands of the wrong people it can be disastrous and in the hands of the right people people who know what they're doing who have adequate controls in place for false memories and things like that hypnosis is an excellent tool for getting at the truth with such a major source of research ignored by skeptics the need for unequivocal physical evidence is all the more important in America a surgeon has come forward with claims which may provide ufologists with a break they've been hoping for I started this as the ultimate skeptic I was then embroiled in the phenomena and shown things that could not be satisfactorily explained by our own science dr. Leah has been a practicing foot surgeon for the past 35 years but in 1994 he began removing foreign bodies from patients who claimed they were alien implants one of these people have things in their bodies which they've stepped on or exposed in a machine shop to a piece of metal others unfortunately have mental problems and would like to be an abductee since he started in this area eight years ago dr. Leah has conducted 11 operations and claims to have removed an assortment of mysterious objects there it is here is putting me some white guys I think this is it so we're gonna x-ray to make sure we have those which are metallic and covered with this very very strange membrane and at the time of surgery can't be cut with a surgical blade that's impervious to cutting and researching the pathology books no such entity has ever been found of the human body a logic explanation would be that it's not human tissue of course however when we get into the metals that's when we really get in to the strange stuff we had help from the National Institute for discovery science and they sent the first set of specimens to Los Alamos National Labs then to Mexico New Mexico Tech now these were blind studies all the studies are wine I mean by that that the laboratories are not told the origin of the specimens and the best analogy that the scientists were able to make initially where these were very close to meteorites the scientific community is generally disregarded dr. Leah's claims they feel his studies are inconclusive and are not supervised closely enough to rule out any chance the disciples may have been tampered with dr. Leir stands by his claims and thinks that it's the skeptics who are at fault I have never met a skeptic yet that didn't know everything about what I was doing and drawn all the conclusions but has never looked at one shred of the physical evidence or the data [Music] the moment of truth has arrived for Eric [Music] with the x-ray and ultrasound results return to the consultant Eric is about to discover if the lump behind his ear is natural or extraterrestrial so see it's decay come or until possibilities many metal see one first thing I want to show you is the ultrasound report and they all sound scan and as you can see here there is the lesion that we are looking at and it's just under the surface of the skin and the appearances of those in keeping with assist and nothing else and when we look at the plain x-ray there certainly is nothing metallic or anything of a hard consistency in this lump and this is again in keeping with the diagnosis of a benign cystic lesion we call it a sebaceous cyst it's a collection of material from a blocked sweat gland and it arises when a sweat becomes obstructed and the normal sebaceous material is not able to escape and therefore collects under the skin surface and forms a cystic collection will be possible to have an explanation about how assist could move from one way to from one point to another one there is no easy solution or answer to that problem all I can speculate is that there may have been an episode of inflammation which is typical of these cysts well thank you very much indeed we noggin is repeated profit monitoring or news new intruder technology detects activists only the power definitely more hope you see in Ipoh discusses war and avoids the past although dr. Patel believes his findings are conclusive Eric remains unconvinced by such an Orthodox diagnosis and his concerns are shared by implant specialist dr. Leah the object is certainly rectangular the color is not normal for the skin he claims that it has moved that certainly negates the southern being a sebaceous cyst sebaceous the words sebaceous comes from the word sebum which is a gland attached to a hair follicle and that becomes inflamed and infected and that's how you get the sebaceous cyst they would not move from one hair follicle to another we got one of these implants and it turns out that it's a of alien technology or that it's made of materials that wouldn't be easy to find on earth then great it's a fantastic scientific breakthrough when dealing with this phenomenon skeptics argue that the evidence does not exist whereas ufologists say the evidence is there but science just doesn't know how to interpret it it would seem that without a miraculous breakthrough there is little chance of either side reaching a common understanding however there are a new set of theories developed by the world's leading physicists that believers point to as holding the key to explaining this mystery a lot of physicists think we're entering a new golden age of theoretical physics and in a way we're beginning to be able to address questions such as why is the universe here at all dr. Brian Cox is a particle physicist who is directly involved with multimillion-dollar experiments to find out at the universe could contain hidden dimensions that are still to be discovered in the last 10 years theories have been developed where that we need other dimension

Channel: How the Universe Works

Views: 1,178,371

Rating: 4.064466 out of 5

Keywords: universe documentary, space documentary, national geographic, space, documentary universe, 2017, the universe, discovery, explore, evidence, mysterys, documentary 2017, the universe documentary, national geographic documentary, full documentary, discovery documentary, bbc documentary, Universe Documentary 2017, astronomy, moon, marss, tars, asteroid, stephen hawking, neil degrasse tyson, Live

Id: dfr9VvP8hv0

Length: 89min 43sec (5383 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018