Life in The Universe Documentary | HD 1080p

this is our world a warm comfortable familiar place but walk away from the fire and look up I thought soon are we just insignificant specks is the universe welcoming more hostile [Music] we could stand here forever wondering back on this beach leave home to see the universe from here to its edge to discover its wonders confront its Horace beautiful he was malevolent dark forces the beginning of time [Music] end of the world would we have the courage to see it through or would we run for home there's only one way to find out [Music] the edge of space only a hundred kilometers up just an hour's drive from home down there life continues the traffic clubs movie stocks go on trading and start [Music] but we have to leave all his behind to [Music] dip our toe into the vast dark ocean beyond [Music] into the shutters not too far from home on to the moon [Music] dozens of astronauts have come this way before us 12 of them have walked on the moon itself just over 400,000 kilometers from home three days in a spacecraft so close it's as if we barely left home [Music] familiar safe within sight of Earth it looks like a deserted battlefield bombarded by millions of meteorites and asteroids but it's quieter now it's obvious there have been no major collisions for millions of years this brings back memories the Apollo 11 lunar module Neil Armstrong's first footprints looks like they were made yesterday there's no air to change them they should survive for millions of years maybe knowing us our time is limited we need to take our own giant leap further than any human has ever traveled out of the darkness a friendly face the goddess of love Venus the morning star the evening star sometimes she welcomes the new day in the East others she says good night in the West the planet spectacular yellow clouds reflect the sunlight that's why this is the solar system's brightest planet a sister to our planet she's about the same size and gravity as Earth we should be safe here but the Venus Express space probe is telling us these dazzling clouds are made of deadly sulfuric acid that the planet's atmosphere is choked with carbon dioxide it's ringing alarm bells [Applause] Venus is one angry goddess the air is noxious the pressure unbearable and it's hot approaching 500 degrees Celsius stay too long and we'd be corroded suffocated crushed and baked [Music] nothing can survive here like this it's a Soviet Venera robotic probe his heavy armors being wrecked by the extreme atmosphere so lovely from Earth up close his goddess she's the sister from hell pop blocked by thousands of opioids all that carbon dioxide in this atmosphere is trapping the sun's heat this is global warming gone wild before it took cold maybe Venus was calm more like as Justin if that's true this could be our planets future beginning to think we shouldn't be out here that we should turn back but there's something hypnotic about the Sun like Medusa too terrible to look at too powerful to resist luring us onwards on like a moth to a flame dwarf by scorched by the Sun it's mercury get too close to the Sun this is what happens temperatures swing wildly here at night it's minus 170 degrees come midday it's 400 plus burns frozen and look at those scars a sign that mercury had a violent past the messenger space probe is telling us something strange for its size this little planet has a powerful gravitational pull it must be heavier than it looks it's like a huge ball of iron covered with a thin veneer of rock the core of what was once a much larger planet maybe a stray planet slammed into Mercury blasting away its outer layers in a deadly game of cosmic pinball whole planets on the loose destroying anything in their path even entire planets and we're in the middle of it vulnerable exposed small everything is telling us to turn back but who could defy this the son in all its mesmerizing spender our light our lives everything we do is controlled by the Sun depends on it and more than that it's the Greek god Helios driving his chariot across the sky the Egyptian god rah reborn every day the summer solstice Sun rising at Stonehenge for millions of years this was as close as a god to staring into the face of God a hundred and fifty million kilometers from home a 20 year journey by plane switch it off and it's so far away we wouldn't know about it for a whole eight minutes it's so big we could fit a million earths inside it so heavy it's gravity controls the entire solar system [Music] but who needs numbers we've got the real thing we see it every day a familiar face in our sky how close is unrecognizable a turbulent sea of incandescent gas the thermometer rises to over 5,000 degrees [Music] down in the core it's got to be tens of millions of degrees [Music] hot enough to trigger a nuclear reaction turning millions of tons of matter into energy every second more than all the energy ever made by mankind back home you see this energy as light feel it as heat but are closed there's nothing comforting about the Sun it's so full of electrical and magnetic activity it's bursting out in these huge incandescent gas loops with prominences each one releasing more energy than 10-million volcanoes you could get the earth through one of these loops and still have tens of thousands of kilometers to spare and where they burst through its exposing the cooler layers below making sunspots they're a fraction cooler than their surroundings it's why they look black but they're still hotter than anything on earth and they're massive - some of these are at least 50,000 kilometers across a solar flare a superheated stream of electrified gas blasting deadly radiation out of de space but one day all this will stop the sun's fuel will be spent when it dies that'll be it for the earth as well is God a reacts life and destroys it demands reaches partisans [Music] this comet astray too close it's being boiled away by the sun's heat creating a tail that stretches for millions of kilometres it's freezing in here there's no doubt where this comets come from the icy wastes of deep space but look at all this steam the Jesus and dust it's the Sun again melting the Comets frozen heart a kind of vast dirty snowball covered in grime eat our [Music] tiny grains of what looks like organic material preserved on ice since who knows when maybe even the beginning of the solar system say a comment like this crashed into the young earth billions of years ago may be delivered organic material of water the raw ingredients of life it may have even sown the seeds of life on earth that evolved into you and me [Music] but say it crashed into the earth now think of the dinosaurs wiped out by a comet or asteroid strike it's only a question of time eventually one day unless we can find a way to protect ourselves we'll go the way of the dinosaurs the earth is safe for now [Music] but if life on earth was obliterated we'd be stuck out here homeless adrift in a hostile universe we'd need to find another home among the millions billions of planets there must be one that's not too hot or too cold with air sunlight water we're like Goldilocks we could comfortably live the Red Planet unmistakeably Mars for centuries we've looked to Mars for company for signs of life [Music] somewhere down there could be extraterrestrial life but are we ready to find it ready to rewrite the history books to tear up the science books to turn our world upside down what happens next could change everything [Music] more than any other planet Mars captures our imagination think of sci-fi films comics or follows Martians is autos fiction right but what if there really is something here if there is it's living on a dead planet the processes that make earth habitable shut down hundreds of millions of years ago here red and dead Mars is a giant fossil something's alive a dust devil a big one bigger than the biggest tornadoes back on earth there's wind here and where there's wind there's air and that could sustain extraterrestrial life but it's too thin faster breathe full choking carbon dioxide there's nothing to protect Mars from the sun's ultraviolet rays at its coals as low as minus 80 degrees freezing water in the ground at the poles and even in the atmosphere as snow it's hard to believe anything could live here but on earth there are creatures that survive an extreme cold heat and even the deepest ocean trenches it's as though life is a virus it adapts spreads maybe we're carrying a virus of life across the universe right now even in the most extreme conditions life usually finds a way but on a dead planet with no geological activity to replenish the minerals and nutrients in its soil no heat to melt it's frozen water and all this dust it's hard to see where we're going [Music] but we can't miss this this Mars a vast ancient volcano three times higher than Everest so wide it would stretch almost all the way across Spain since its discovery in the 1970s it's been declared extinct it looks like there's something happening on its slopes it's as though lava has been flowing but any lava flow should be long dead obliterated by meteorite impacts unless this monster isn't dead after all if it's not there could be molten magma beneath the crust right now this changes everything volcanic activity could be melting frozen water in the soil recycling minerals and nutrients creating conditions for life to exist this makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the pavement it goes on and on so far it will stretch all the way across North America but look signs of activity erosion and what looks like dried up riverbeds on the canyon floor maybe volcanic activity melted ice in the soil sending water flooding through this vast Canyon activity that we now know could still be melting ice creating water and where there's water there could be life if we can find running water there's a chance we could find living creatures [Music] rumbling across this desolate landscape the NASA rover Opportunity it's finding evidence that these barren Plains were once ancient lakes or oceans the could've harbored life [Music] look at these gullies when probes orbiting Mars pass over them they keep spotting new ones more proof that Mars is alive and kicking that there may be water flowing beneath the surface creating these gullies water which could be sustaining Martian life [Music] now all we have to do is find it [Music] unless we've already found it not on Mars but on earth there's one theory that has life starting here before moving to earth the idea is that an asteroid impact blasted fragments of Mars complete with tiny microbes out into space and onto the young earth where they sowed the seeds of life itself no wonder we find Mars fascinating it could be our ancestral home if it's true it means we're all Martians the Mars we thought we knew is gone replaced by this new active changing planet and if we don't know Mars possibly the solar system's most studied planet what else don't we know there must be other secrets out there waiting to be discovered this is getting scary it's like being inside a giant computer game but these are also real asteroids some of them hundreds of kilometers wide this one must be about thirty kilometers long and look perched on it a space probe can't have been easy parking on an asteroid traveling at 80,000 kilometers an hour it's a lot of effort to investigate some rubble rubble that regularly collides breaking up and raining down on earth as meteorites magical tokens supernatural omens and more than that [Applause] turns out it was rubber like this that came together to make the planets including our own [Music] so by dating the meteorites we find on earth we know the planets were born four-and-a-half billion years ago these are the birth certificates of our solar system of our planet but for some reason these rocks didn't form into a planet something must have stopped them something powerful at least a thousand times bigger than Earth so vast you could fit all the other planets inside it something this big is going to have a major effect on its neighbors it's gravity is stopping asteroids from forming a planet [Music] and just look at it it's stunning but how close maybe things aren't quite what they seem this huge planet is almost all gas land here and we'd sink through its layers maybe never hitting a solid surface an Jupiter's good looks the product of extreme violence it's spinning at a huge rate whipping up winds to hundreds of kilometers an hour contorting the clouds into stripes Eddie's whirlpools and this the legendary Great Red Spot [Music] the biggest most violent storm in a solar system at least three times the size of earth it's been raging for over 300 years [Music] all those training plans have sparked an electrical storm just one boat is 10,000 times more intense than any at home it seems the best place the safest place to see Jupiter is from a distance that's just beautiful dancing around the poles like the Aurora back home but the Geiger counter is going wild it seems even these are deadly generated by lethal radiation pulled from space by Jupiter's powerful magnetic field we're beginning to realize out here nothing is what it seems the universe is full of contradictions deceptions traps right now we need a safe haven somewhere to find our feet catch our breath maybe this the multicolored moon Io is it those pretty colors a molten rock sulfur volcanoes spewing burning hot ash and sulfur hundreds of kilometres into the air this is no safe haven this is the most volatile place we've seen since the Sun our magical journey to the edge of the universe is turning into a desperate flight we've got to keep believing hoping that amidst the dangers there are wonders waiting to be discovered [Music] 650 million kilometers from home what a weird-looking place and yet it looks strangely familiar [Music] a bit not the Arctic will entice all those ridges or cracks [Music] this is Europa a maybe like the Arctic this ice is floating on water liquid water [Music] it's an intriguing thought but we're 800 million kilometers from the Sun surely you loco is frozen solid [Music] unless Jupiter's gravity is creating friction deep inside stopping Europa from freezing solid allowing life to develop in the waters beneath its frozen crust we might be meters away from aliens [Music] from a whole ecosystem of microbes crustaceans maybe even squid the only thing between us and a possibility of alien life this layer of ice but until we send a spacecraft to drill through the ice euro-pro you remain one of the solar system's greatest mysteries [Music] it's captivated our imaginations haunted our dreams and here it is spinning before our eyes Saturn the jewel in the solar system's crown seeing it makes everything we've experienced worthwhile there's something magical about Saturn a giant ball of gas so light it would float on water it's spectacular rings would stretch almost from earth to the moon but they're just a few hundred meters deep that's the Cassini orbiter it's big lab Dursley radio emissions probably generated by Aurora's around Saturn's poles this is the real music of the spheres and Cassini is telling us these rings are probably all that's left of a moon shattered by Saturn's gravitational pull incomparable beauty from total destruction billions of shards of ice some as small as ice cubes others the size of houses they collide break apart reassemble it's like a snapshot of our early solar system as dust and gas over to the newly born Sun and gravity worked it's magic pulling the lumps together until from debris like this home emerged [Music] we can stay here forever gazing at Saturn's seductive earlier but we have to drag ourselves away we've got so much further to go so much more to learn which isn't easy when the largest object in sight is this moon wrapped in thick clouds Titan [Music] [Music] it seems like there's an atmosphere down here there's wind ray evil seasons and look at these rivers lakes and oceans it's the most similar place to earth we've seen so far maybe it was worth tearing ourselves away from Saturn after all except that's not water that's liquid natural gas there must be hundreds of times more natural gas en than all the Earth's oil and gas reserves if we could get it home it could power our cities fuel our cars for thousands of years or maybe one day we can use it here to fuel colony assuming there isn't life on Titan who've already the Huygens space probe dropped onto Titan's surface from Cassini is here to find out it's telling us there are organic materials in the soil but it's so cold minus 180 degrees there's no way these will come together to form life unless Titan [Music] the Sun Li is predicted to get hotter when it does maybe life will spring up here just like you did on earth billions of years ago as the earth gets too hot for us maybe we'll move to Titan one day Michael is this new place [Music] home we're at least a billion kilometres away now beyond this point we lose visual contact with the earth was standing on a cliff looking out into the solar system's mysterious outer reaches if we want to understand the universe to reach its edge we have to jump unseen from Earth unknown for most of history we're in the solar system's outer reaches it's like diving down into the deep ocean [Music] those rains it looks like Uranus has been tilted on its axis toppled over by a stray planet [Applause] [Music] it's eerie out here already beginning to feel small lovely maybe this is how we feel what we'll find at the edge of the universe but we've barely left the shore shrink the earth down to the size of a pea we've traveled less than two kilometers but to reach the edge of the solar system we've got to travel another twenty thousand kilometers out of the deep another strange beast the god of the sea Neptune this giant is swathe in methane gas and look a storm the size of Earth whipped up by savage 1,500 kilometer an hour winds backhoe is the Sun that drives the wind but Neptune's too far away something else must be creating these ferocious winds but nobody knows what our solar system is huge it's alarming how little we really know about it [Music] plunging deeper something to cling to after all those balls of gas a solid moon [Music] Tritan solid but not stable just look at these pieces because fiction is pumping out strange suit and this moon is going around Neptune in the opposite direction to the planet spin the cosmic bucking winds that this angry moon is always going to lose Neptune's massive gravity is pulling on Triton slowing it down reeling it in [Music] one day it'll be ripped apart by Neptune and that's it no more moons no more planets to see in our solar system it's getting colder we're getting further from the Sun slipping from the grip of its gravitational tentacles but look at all this it's not a void it's teeming with frozen rocks icy spheres like Pluto until recently it seemed Pluto was alone beyond it nothing we were wrong more frozen words discoveries so new nobody can agree what to call them pooty nose iced wars cubanos whatever the name the implications are the same our solar system is in the neat model we thought it was over 13 billion kilometers from home the most distant thing ever seen to orbit the Sun another small icy world called Sedna discovered in 2003 it's orbit takes 10,000 years and sends it a hundred and thirty billion kilometers from the Sun alone there's something else out here 16 billion kilometres from home the space probe Voyager 1 if it wasn't for this bundle of aluminium an antenna we'd have no images of the giant planets no clue about their strange moves it's traveling 20 times faster than a bullet sending messages home a look on its side that go panel a kind of intergalactic message in a bottle there's a greeting recorded in different languages and a map showing how to find our solar system but if you're in the jungle is it wise to call out anyone anything could you not call find out where we live and come knocking friendly or not a cloud of cosmic icebergs stretching for what seems like forever they look like the comet we saw earlier maybe it started life out here until something dislodged it sending it towards the Sun just like the comments that may have planted life on Earth billions of years ago and seeing all this ice maybe they carried water to earth-2 it's an astonishing thought the water in the oceans in your coffee even in your body all from this distant celestial ice machine [Music] we're eight million million that's a trillion kilometers from home but in reality this is only a baby step ahead trillions of kilometers billions of stars this is it time to stop looking in and start looking out to step out into the big wide universe [Music] it's an interstellar space [Music] interstellar space far beyond our solar system [Music] what of you billions of stars like our own Sun many with planets many of those with moons [Music] it's hard to know which way to go there are infinite possibilities in every direction whichever way we're going to need a serious burst of acceleration [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] forty trillion kilometers from home a hundred and fifty thousand year ride in a space shuttle and we've only just reached the first solar system after our own alpha century not one but three stars they're spinning around each other locked in a celestial standoff each stars gravity attracting the other they're insane orbital speed keeping them apart get between them and we could be flung into the face one of these stars vaporized trillions of kilometers from home so far the kilometers becoming illness we're going to have to talk in lightyears a beam of light takes one year to travel 10 trillion kilometers so 40 trillion kilometers is 4 light-years from home it's crazy distance is so fast that we'll must beyond comprehension [Music] and exciting who knows what strange worlds lie ahead what we'll discover when if 10 light-years from Earth the star Epsilon Eridani what spectacular rings of dust and ice and somewhere in there planets forming out of the debris being born before our eyes [Music] asteroids and comets everywhere [Music] we could almost be looking at our own solar system billions of years ago with comets delivering organic molecules water to these young planets kick-starting life just as they may have done on earth [Music] at the center of all this action a star smaller than our Sun it's still in its infancy any life in this solar system would be primitive the best [Music] there must be more mature develop solar systems out here but finding them is like looking for a needle in a cosmic haystack [Music] 20 light-years from Earth star Gliese 581 [Applause] it's about the same age as our son [Music] and orbiting it this planet it's just the right distance from its Sun any closer and water would boil away any further it would freeze ideal conditions for life to have evolved [Music] and if comets have struck delivering water and organic materials then life complex beings like us even civilizations like our own could be down there right now and if there are even at this distance there could be tuning into our TV signals watching shows from 20 years ago [Music] [Applause] but until future generations can find a way of communicating over these vast distances all we can do is speculate us and them living parallel lives unaware of each other's existence unless life has been and gone [Music] that's the problem with comments they're creators and destroyers as the dinosaurs found out the hard way 65 million years ago this is the needle in the cosmic haystack the closest we've come to a habitable solar system like our own but it's a chance encounter there could be hundreds millions more solar systems like this out here or none at all [Music] this is vast and look it's the planet Bellerophon so close to its own Sun it's a miracle it was discovered it problem is from Earth we can't see penances fall out that obscured by the brilliance of their neighboring stars but the planets have a minut gravitational pull on their stars measure these tiny movements trillions of kilometers away and we can prove they exist that's how we tracked our Bellerophon in the 1990s opening the floodgates to the discovery of hundreds of other distant planets 65 light-years from Earth tune in on this bright star and you pick up TV signals from Hitler's Berlin Olympics [Music] twin stirs its Algar the demon star feared since ancient times on account of its sinister behavior from earth it appears to blink as one star passes in front of the other up close it's even stranger one star has expanded into the gravitational pull of the other it's being sucked towards it almost a hundred light-years from home listen one of the first ever radio broadcasts just a faint whisper and then silence from here on out it's as if earth never existed any aliens living beyond here who have no idea whether it feels like a lifetime ago we stood on that beach looking up at the sky wondering well how we fit it in it's time to appreciate the wonders we're seeing not just for what they tell us about our own world it's what they can tell us about the whole universe its past and its future deep inside our galaxy the Milky Way a vast celestial library each star a book with a story to tell it's all here waiting for us to lift the cover the Seven Sisters daughters of the ancient Greek god atlas transformed into stars to comfort their father as he held the heavens on his shoulders and this giant Baker's the brightest biggest star we've seen so far there's got to be at least 600 times wider [Music] but this it's not a star not a planet not like anything we've ever seen [Music] a ghostly specter more than 1,300 light-years from Earth Orion's dark cloud dust and gas so dense it's shrouding us shutting us off from the universe outside they're deep inside a ball of light pulling the dust and gas towards it heating up merging into a ball burning hot gas like a star like our Sun in miniature it's millions of degrees inside it so hot it's beginning to trigger a nuclear reactions the kind that keep our sun shining making energy radiation light a star is being born or rather stars [Music] Orion's dark cloud is a vast star Factory [Music] we're witnessing the birth of the future universe [Music] we've come to expect hostile Horrors but we're discovering one of the universe's greatest creative oneness star birth [Music] perhaps we spoke too soon jets of gas exploding outwards at 200,000 kilometres an hour blasting dust and gas out for millions of kilometres it's unbelievably violent but look at the results it's beyond words nebula vast glowing clouds of gas hanging in space with no wind out here they'll take thousands of years to disperse they seem to be forming the vast stellar sculpture in its you realize nature is more than a scientist and engineer it's an artist on the grandest of scales we've seen some strange sights but this is a masterpiece a giant was his head raring up in space [Music] stars are born grow up for them then what do they die do they slip quietly into the night or go out with a bang somewhere between here and the edge of the universe lies the answer nearly four thousand light-years further luminous clouds suspended in space encircling what was once a star like her own son all that's left of it are these brightly colored gaseous elements formed by nuclear fusion deep inside a star released into space on its death green and violet hydrogen and helium the raw materials of the universe red and blue nitrogen and oxygen the building blocks of life on earth [Music] for us to live stars like this had to die the oxygen in our lungs the nitrogen in our DNA it was all produced by nuclear fusion in stars that died long before the earth was even born we are made of Stella nuclear waste our family tree begins here [Music] [Music] at its heart the ghost of a star it's a white dwarf white hot small but unbelievably dense in the stars dying moments its atoms fuse and squeeze together making it so dense than just a teaspoon of this white dwarf would weigh one ton it's a chilling premonition of our son's fate six billion years from now it'll become a white dwarf its death will herald the end of life on Earth it makes you wonder how many other worlds have been and gone stories left untold celestial books lost forever but the greatest story of them all is still to be told [Music] we must go back through time to the very first chapter to tell the story of how the universe began the scattered remains of a dead star a nebula the Crab Nebula with 6,000 light-years from home deep inside a stellar graveyard we've learned so much seen things we never have believed possible now sites like this wonders once beyond imagination we've taken our stride we're ready ready to face whatever lies ahead determined to reach the edge of the universe it looks dead but maybe this is just the calm after the storm after a massive explosion powerful enough to turn a huge star into a cloud of dust and gas a supernova the eye of the storm a spinning pulsating star a pulsar gravity must have squeezed the giant stars call and down to this it's just 20 kilometers across unimaginably dense one pinhead of this would weigh hundreds maybe millions of tonnes as it shrank like a figure skater spinning on the spot arms outstretched then pulling them in it began to spin faster two beams of light energy radiation and spinning 30 times a second powering the huge cloud of dust and gas there's so much radiation here more even than on the Sun [Music] that was easily the deadliest thing we've encountered so far once it will terrify us but now we realize that without the dangers there be no wonders without the nightmares there'd be no dreams [Music] getting a strange sensation a feeling as though there's something bad out here the malevolent presence the one thing we didn't want to encounter impossibly black blotting out the stars behind it we are staring into the face of extinction the remains of a giant star a black hole instead of contracting to a white dwarf or a pulsar it just kept on going shrinking until it got so small is just a few kilometers across far denser than a pulsar and impossible to resist [Music] stray too close there's no turning back now we know why it's a black hole its gravity is so intense what even light can escape this asteroid it's a lump of solid rock but it's actually stretching being dragged towards the gaping hole inside there's no matter as we move it their time their space all use of physics collapse [Music] the asteroid is gone truth is nobody really knows where we're looking at the limit of human understanding there could be millions of black holes creeping around our galaxy more perhaps than all the stars in the sky but we wouldn't see them until it was too late like this star spiraling disappearing down an invisible who's to say we don't live inside a faster black hole that the whole universe isn't inside one right now inside another universe think about it for too long and your mind reels sometimes it feels like the more we see the less we know but we do know our galaxy is more complex and more dangerous than we ever imagined and we're still in our own galaxy the Milky Way the vastness of the universe beyond still lies ahead the wonders the dangers the secrets they're out there but first we've got to find a way out of the Milky Way [Music] seven thousands light-years from home still deep inside our own galaxy it's as though we're in a forest thick with trees each so beautiful so fascinating it's impossible to look beyond to see the bigger picture we have to find a way through reach the clearing of the galaxy's edge only then can we begin to understand we're here and we all began but faced with sites like this it's hard to leave a colossal glowing cloud topped by these great towers of dust the pillars of creation like a gateway into the far galaxy both pillars studded with tiny protrusions embryonic star systems each one the size of our solar system another monument to nature's astonishing creativity [Music] we have to ignore its captivating Beauty its siren song tear ourselves away in order to carry on words towards the edge of the galaxy dazzled by the milky way's beauty we've been blinded to his tariffs and strayed into a cosmic minefields like an explosion in slow motion giant clouds of gas are bursting out of this star a massive star millions of times brighter than our Sun it's going into meltdown the fuel that sustains it is running out the nuclear reactions that power it winding down we're watching its death throes eventually the core will implode the results a new black hole an even bigger dangerously unstable star but this one's about to explode and when a star this big dies it's a hundred times more violent than a supernova somehow we've stumbled into the most violent star death imaginable a hypernova [Music] the cause collapsed it's becoming a black hole and that's the shockwave surging through the star ripping its outer layers into space [Music] there's lethal radiation everywhere enough to have a catastrophic effect on any planet unlucky enough to be nearby when virtually every species on earth was wiped out 450 million years ago the culprit may have been one of these deadly hyper Nova's frozen comets scorched planets white dwarfs red giants earth tiny drops in a vast pool of white light our home galaxy the Milky Way we wanted to know where we fit in his answer civilizations past and present everyone that's ever lived the smallest bug the highest Lambs him all of it invisible not even a tiny speck [Music] our home is a minor planet of an insignificant star if it disappeared right now who or what wouldn't even notice and yet so far we found nowhere else we would rather live nowhere we could live it's only now far from home that we're beginning to truly appreciate it [Music] look at all these stars hundreds of thousands of them [Music] surely one of these more than one must be capable of supporting life [Music] maybe here in this swarm of stars the great cluster back in the 1970s astronomers sent a message in this direction detailing the structure of our DNA and our solar system's location but it's so far from home the message went awry for at least another twenty five thousand years we haven't found alien life yet Beneatha have we found any reason to believe it isn't out here somewhere there's an equation devised to estimate the number of other advanced civilizations crunch the numbers and the result is shocking there could be millions of civilizations just in our own galaxy [Music] everything we've seen so far is inside the Milky Way now here's our chance to see other galaxies to glimpse the even bigger picture and perhaps to answer the ultimate question where does all this come from we are now ready to leave our solar system our galaxy eventyr intergalactic space [Music] beyond the Milky Way through the vast expanse between galaxies against all the odds we've made it to intergalactic space [Music] out here there's no horizon in sight even the closest galaxies are millions of light years away the remains of galaxies ripped apart by the Milky Way's huge gravitational pull scattered through nothing [Music] this is as close as the universe gets to a perfect vacuum but even this isn't totally empty there are thin wisps of gas fine traces of dust and something else dark matter so mysterious we can't see it feel it taste it touch it or even measure it yet so common it could make up over 90% of all the matter in the universe if dark matter does exist it means there's no such thing as empty space even out here was surrounded by matter we only know it exists because of the strange hold it exerts on galaxies like this one the Large Magellanic Cloud [Music] more than six billion years in today's fastest spacecraft 160,000 light years from the Milky Way at the edge of its gravitational reach this galaxy should spin off into space but something is holding it here something invisible powerful dark matter stars clusters of stars nebulae it's a vast astronomical treasure house [Music] but look at this it's like a string of gleaming paths it's a fireball expanding out from what must have been a massive explosion a supernova so bright that when light from the explosion which the earth in 1987 it was visible with the naked eye and so violent it triggered a string of nuclear reactions forcing atoms together donating new elements though blasting them out into space the gold in the ringing of finger was forged in a massive supernova like this trillions of kilometers away billions of years ago before we left home the universe seemed separate something out there up in the sky we were wrong the story of the universe is the story of every one of us it's comforting to remember as we venture through this abyss further and further faster and faster the andromeda galaxy two and a half million light-years away it's moving through space that may be a million kilometres an hour everything in space is moving apart like shrapnel from an explosion we're seeing this galaxy as it was when I applied ancestors first walked across the African plains [Music] we go further through space and further back in time this doesn't look right a whole galaxy exploding the only thing large enough to cause an explosion on this scale has to be another galaxy it looks at the end of the world but we've seen enough to know things are never that simple this galaxy won't die it'll be reborn a new shape perhaps even new stars as dust and gas collide creating friction shockwaves triggering the birth of stars [Music] there's order in this chaos infinite variety an endless cycle of birth and death creation and destruction it's a pattern woven through the vast fabric of space that binds each of these galaxies there are billions of galaxies in the universe each with billions even trillions of stars possibly more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on earth and all of these are just the stars that exist now what about the stars that have been on God all the stars being born yet to be born we're finally beginning to see the big picture and it's grander than we ever imagined is galaxy the huge pinwheel galaxy is so far from Earth that if we send a message home now it'll take 27 million years to get there who knows whether our species our planet will still be around to receive it most likely not [Music] we travel on back through time past the point where the dinosaurs were wiped out past the moment where the first creatures clambered onto land [Music] two billion light-years from home closing in on the edge of the universe going back to the beginning of time this isn't a galaxy it's brighter than hundreds of galaxies put together a blinding beam of energy bursting out for trillions of kilometres something this big this bright must be incredibly powerful experience tells us out here power equals danger it looks like a quasar the deadliest thing in the universe if it is then our journey could be over just as the end is almost in sight the deadliest most powerful thing in the universe a quasar a swirling cauldron of superhot gas brighter than hundreds of galaxies [Music] the source of this awesome power lies deep inside the heart of the beast a heart of darkness a supermassive black hole as heavy as a billion suns [Music] it's ripping apart all-stars sucking their gases into the quasar devouring them until they're nothing lost forever from the visible universe we've seen the worst the universe can throw at us the most powerful and destructive forces the universe produces now it's on to the very edge of the universe it's almost Within Reach [Music] we'll need to go further go faster if we're to cross the final reaches of a known universe eight billion light-years from home more galaxies but these are different ragged small close together we're so far back in time we're seeing these galaxies as they were before the earth was even born they're still young still growing we're getting closer to where and how it all began twelve billion years ago [Music] look at the galaxies now they're more like primitive plankton floating in a vast dark ocean it's magical clouds of dust and gas dancing forming a shape merging to make embryonic galaxies this is how our own galaxy was born [Music] they're disappearing [Applause] we've gone back before the stars were born inter-cosmic Dark Age [Music] and before that light the afterglow from a massive explosion the explosion which created the known universe [Music] we're almost there this is it we've made it the edge of the universe a hundred thirty billion trillion kilometers from her thirteen and a half billion years ago the very instant of the Big Bang the most violent most creative moment in history everything that's ever happened follows from this moment every religion every culture has pondered it but we still don't know what sparked this act of creation or why [Music] this is where our journey ends and the universe begins an infinitely hot small dense point erupts [Music] creating space time matter our universe itself first with the size of a subatomic particle the tiniest fraction of a second later it's big enough to hold in the palm of your hand moments later it's the size of the earth [Music] today the lights from the Big Bang is still spreading out as a hiss of radio static whoo TV erial picks it up you can see it as static on an untuned TV we go on forwards through time riding the blast wave all the things we've seen on our journey a sparks flying out from the Big Bang galaxies stars planets all just deadly [Music] back through our galaxy our solar system until we reach a methacholine cinder swirling in the afterglow of the Big Bang the earth we had to go back to the past to see our future 3 billion years from now the vast Andromeda galaxy smashes into other the new galaxy is born the Sun and planets survive but they've been thrown into a huge looping orbit around the new galaxy the Sun is becoming a red giant swallowing up Mercury and Venus scorch our planet's surface destroying all life on Earth [Music] the Sun dies shrinking to a white dwarf neighboring stars are dying to being replaced by white dwarves pulsars black holes the lights are going down on the galaxy since the Big Bang the universe has been fading dye not with a bang but with a long drawn-out whimper [Music] but there could be a way out an escape route from our dying universe [Music] it might be possible for our distant descendants to find a shortcut through space and time a wormhole if there are other universes they could take our descendants from are doomed to move us into a parallel one where they could find another earth still in the prime of life [Music] if they're lucky enough they will live on in a new universe I knew of you

Channel: Andrew Foley

Views: 6,982,381

Rating: 4.662169 out of 5

Keywords: life, alien life, in the universe, documentary, documentaries, space, space documentary, space documentaries, 2013, new, brand new, extraterestrial, science fiction, science, 1080 pixels, hd, high detail, HD, history channel, discovery channel, science channel, animal planet, Channel, Star, black hole, planet, galaxy, solar system, habitable planets, cosmos, Aliens, Alien, Ufo, Milky Way (Galaxy), Moon, Earth

Id: 34sEX6VM9sU

Length: 93min 11sec (5591 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/TheMexicanJuan]

Not actually 1080p, it's just upscaled.

Here's a true 1080p with an even better narrator, Alec Baldwin ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVQpwxgMQCg