The Eyes of Nye - Astrobiology

so I'm this guy standing on a planet our plan is pretty big compared to me really I'm just a speck standing on this big planet but the planet compared with the star is just another speck and the earth is orbiting the Sun and the Sun is a huge star and our star may be a big deal to us but my friends our start is just another speck so why I'm a guy I'm a speck living on a speck on the edge of the galaxy means not really in downtown Milky Way it's way out on the side we're just a speck on a speck orbiting a speck filthy what else there's billions and billions of stars billions and billions of speck and then billions of galaxies I mean I'm a speck living on a speck orbiting us back in the middle of psychosis but then I think I'm this little brain I have this brain it's only this big to think about all of this to think about the vast emptiness of space I can reason that I'm a speck on a speck in the middle spectrasys and that's cool that's worthy of respect and you can't help but wonder what those billions and billions of specks are there other specs out there that would change everything because then you know that these little brains are not alone and that my friends is worth thinking about [Music] you [Music] since we could first form the question we must have wondered are we alone is there life out there among the stars you see astronomy is a humbling undertaking our ancestors probably thought no the world is flat and they accepted that all the members of their immediate tribe comprised the whole of the human family that the earth was the center of everything but now we may be able to presume that even our existence is not unique that there are living things everywhere among the stars and we call this study astrobiology you see we may be on the verge of the most important insight of all as we search for and possibly discover other life on other worlds what are we actually looking looking for a radio signal from somewhere in outer space right presumably if they're intelligent beings out there they're they're flooding the galaxy with radio waves they're falling right here some of them will fall onto the metal mirrors out there and we'll pick them up [Music] now what is the strength of that signal is it as strong as an FM radio station you know a feather dropping on the ground here would have you know billions trillions of times more energy than the signals falling on those things but we can find them what makes you think they're out there well it comes down to this there's a lot of cosmic real estate there are four or five hundred billion stars in our galaxy there 100 billion other galaxies each with a few hundred billion stars yet that all up that's a lot of real estate so just on the basis of the numbers you figured that you know unless this is some sort of miracle here there's going to be other life out there and some of that life is going to be intelligent so that's kind of the bottom line is the earth just this unusual if I'm a rare earth or is it pretty common well we don't know the answer to that and there are some people who would argue that you know the earth is kind of special but I don't think so we don't know of other planets like the earth but I think the reason we don't know is we don't have the telescopes to find them yet now you might wonder why don't we just build a rocket to take us to the stars well we can't because they're too far away if there were a highway and you were driving to get to an average nearby star say 30 light years away it would take you 330 million years if you had a rocket oh yeah you could cut it way down to 1.2 million years now can't GetThere them but we can't do it they're too far away instead we have to come up with other schemes so for that my friends read on if we discovered a signal from another world what do you think would happen we're not going to hear extraterrestrial Neanderthals with this sort of thing we've got to hope that there are at least a fair number thousands in our galaxy say of civilizations that are if you will at least at our level may be beyond our level and that they've been broadcasting to space for a long period of time so we get this signal are we gonna be able to understand it yeah I doubt that we'll be able to understand you know you give the output of your computer modem to two cavemen they're not gonna figure it out either so maybe we won't understand it but at least we'll know they're on the air we'll know they're there but this is the first time in all of human history that we could build something like this and actually have a good shot at finding that's what makes this exciting and this is a chance worth taking of course it's worth taking of course it is I mean they can can you think of anything more interesting than finding out that we're not the only game in town this rocket is headed to Mars and on top of it is a rover it's just loaded with instruments that will help us look at Martian rocks very carefully from way back here on earth we'll examine those rocks for signs of walk and maybe even evidence of Martian life or maybe they'll lead us to another points to look at other rocks to look for other signs of water and life people I have got some exciting news life has been discovered on Titan of course there's life on Taiwan it's one of our best markets not Taiwan Titan it's one of the moons of Saturn this is a whole new market it's virgin territory we can have the first product penetration on a brand new planet or moon or whatever but the important thing is we can grab 100 percent of the market what are the demographics I was a little sketchy right now but it looks like they're segmented worm-like creatures that swim in seas of methane miles below the ice that covers the surface how long does it take to get there about seven or eight years but the marketing is gonna get there way ahead of time and that's why I want to have a series of 30-second spots ready for the next Super Bowl I want some ads that position fizzy Cola as the brand of choice for the worm people on Titan let's target the younger worm I would like to see preliminary sketches by the end of the week we are going to Titan but we consider the limits of life continued to expand until just a few years ago we thought that all living things had to be on or near the Earth's surface where there's plenty of water and sunlight but recently we've discovered all kinds of living things living in environments we once thought were too harsh too hot too cold even too radioactive for life and we call these organisms extremophiles because by our standards they love extreme environments [Music] we find microbes living in acid including and boiling water under thick layers of ice at the very bottom of the ocean works dark and cold at extreme pressures astronauts retrieve spacecraft parts which have been sitting on the moon in a vacuum of space for years when they got the parts back to the earth there were microbes on them that had made the trip and they were still alive maybe there are billions of planets out there with living things we've never even imagined and from their point of view we are the weirdos we are the extremophiles did you ever think of that here we are breathing this highly chemically active corrosive toxic oxygen atmosphere and we're stumbling around and only the very driest parts of this otherwise lovely sea soaked little metal planet see it could be a wild world world the world by studying life in extreme environments here on earth we may be able to get an idea of what life would be like out there there might even be life in our own solar system perhaps even on our closest neighbor the Red Planet our ready buddy Mars we're standing on Little Red Hill Little Red Hill it's my favorite place on earth because it's a lot like Mars actually it's red and it's mostly lifeless but in fact this little square we're standing on is teeming with life underneath these rock say this one for example see that layer of green these are algae that are living under the rocks they live under the rocks because the rock traps moisture so it's a little wetter under the rock than it isn't just your but much wood yeah so this is a rocket broke earlier open it up it's white inside the light comes through the red layer comes through the right rock and reaches the algae so they're living under little rock greenhouses so how much light gets through there I mean five percent one person about one percent in fact if you hold it up to the Sun you can sort of see the Sun coming through it you look at it through this magnifying glass you can see it looked kind of like grapes little clusters little balls and in fact adding a little water makes it really clear that it's a set of cells rather than than a mineral deposit it looks like moss yeah tiny tiny box yeah now how did these organisms come to be here on the earth well these are some of the oldest organisms on earth to the most ancient find them early in Earth's history these type of cyanobacteria they're called in fact these bacteria are the ones that are responsible for the oxygen in our atmosphere these are the only other species besides humans that are capable of changing a planet they changed it by making oxygen 2 billion years ago and these are the organisms I'd really like to find on Mars because if there are organisms like this on Mars as history well maybe Mars could have had the kind of changes that Earth has had it's really good evidence that Mars at one time maybe long ago had a lot of water on the surface we see gullies I don't have any water in them now but have all the signatures that water having flowed through them so we see dry rivers dry lakes and maybe even dry ocean floors and since water is what life needs that's why Mars is interested this is sodium bicarbonate you find it in the rocks around here it's what chemists call a base this is cream of tartar it's made from grapes it's an acid now when acids and bases mix they often react [Music] but you can see there's no reaction there's no way for the electrons to get from one atom to another no way for the atoms to interact but watch what happens when we add water now they're reacting I crazy so for life just add water [Music] Tommy what is the most important thing for life as we know it to exist what [Music] Barry is it liquid water mr. Sanders very good so where should we look for other life forms in the universe we should look at wait let's see if Tommy has an answer that will get me big laughs in the teachers lounge we should look for planets that could possibly contain water hey mr. Sanders Tommy got it right that was excellent don't hit mr. Sanders I was not going to hit you Tommy I was just patting you on the head ah well I guess Tommy is not feeling well so let's return to more of the eyes of my [Applause] [Music] what if we found life on Mars well be interesting you would tell us well here's another planet with life but the real question would be is it the same life see these guys and us we're the same the genes and these algae are very much the same as the genes in your cells and in myself they have DNA they have DNA and it's got the same alphabet that we have in our DNA it's the same words and their genes as in our genes what if we went to Mars and we found some organisms and they had a completely different alphabet completely different words in their deeds completely different chemistry that well that would be interesting as then we'd have two really different types of life when we go to Mars we're not just searching for life we're searching for alien life from searching for something that's different SSA that's he's ready NASA ma'am NASA MIM ready SMA Anthony is ready this rocket is the product of huge investments in both money and manpower and you might say what are you gonna find out there millions of nautical miles away no we don't know that's right we don't know we know what we're looking for but we don't know what we're gonna find Mars is an unknown horizon a new frontier this ship is going places we've never seen this is the human imagination at its best exploring seeking working on that question are we alone four three two main engine start zero and liftoff of the Delta rocket with opportunity a chance to explore and unlock the secrets of our neighboring planet of course anybody who's been to the movies can tell you you got company there's life and up sticks one carrot of the deep await the exploring spaceman underwater creatures warm from the depth to exact their primitive engines upon the invaders from Earth if aliens are anything like you and me they live on planets see they can't live on stars because the energy coming off the surface of a star is so intense it incinerates molecules so we figure a Lian's live on planets going around distant stars now distant stars are well distant so any planets that are orbiting them are too far away too small and too dim to see but there are people working on I'm dr. Debra Fisher and my job is to find planets around nearby stars and you have found some plants that's right collectively astronomers in the world have found about 100 planets now orbiting other Suns other stars and our group has found about 70 of these 70 planets you know what are these planets like well they're different from our earth much different because the technique that we use is actually more sensitive to finding large gas giant planets like our Jupiter which is 317 times the mass of our earth till it's these large planets that find out what made you start looking for these things we're trying to find out if our planetary system is common if it exists if there are platforms for life around these other stars because before 1995 for all we knew these stars were just desolate bright objects up in the sky it wasn't until 1995 that a group of Swiss astronomers detected the first planet orbiting a star much like our own Sun this was the first direct evidence that planetary systems like our own are not unique there may be planets orbiting stars all over the universe how do you go about finding a planet on another star but unfortunately what we'd like to do is go up and take a picture of the star and see the planet sitting right next to it and then in one night we'd have the front page of the New York Times covered but instead we we actually exploit the laws of physics again we measure the speed of all kinds of things thanks to a discovery by Christian Doppler listen to this as the ringing moves towards you it sounds higher pitch as the ringing moves away it sounds lower pitch this is the Doppler effect as the clock moves towards you the waves of sound are pushed closer and closer together and you perceive a higher pitch as the clock moves away the sound waves are pushed farther and farther apart and you perceive a lower pitch this is true for clocks and it's true for car it's also true for light and this is how Debra Fisher and her team infer the motion of stars see their light varies in color in frequency ever so slightly so she figures as a result of the star having motion toward us and away from us notice that if you and I are moving together there's no change the pitch of the sound it's only when there's relative motion towards you or away from you that you perceive the Doppler effect well let's get back to the show because time flies so on night one and I'll come up and I'll measure a star like this take an observation it will take about ten minutes and take about an hour to analyze and I'll get the position of all of these lines and then I'll come back a week later or a month later it'll observe the star again and if there's a planet there that's caused the swishing or the speed and start a shift then you'll see those these lines in a slightly different place this is the motion that planet hunters look for this is a star and this is a nearby planet as the planet orbits the star its mass influences the Stars motion and wobbles stars without planets spin evenly stars of planets orbiting them whoa and so you see the velocity changing and then you see a line that's been drawn in this is a theoretical model that fits the data and what does it fit the data if each one of these dots represents one night of data one observation of the star and you can see pretty quickly we knew that something was going on that the stars velocity was changing so we knew there was a planet there and the nice thing is that once we get this mathematical model and imagine that these future lines are missing here the line continues and when we come to the observatory the next points that we get had had better fall right on this line or our model was wrong if you look here the wobble is modulated by a second yeah this one has two planets around it and the Stars without any planets we just have a constant velocity all these dots would lie in straight line but a star that has a planet has velocity that changes comes the star comes tortoise moves away from us in this orbit and so that's what we're measuring here you think there's life out there I think it's likely extremely likely that there's some sort of life out there so it's impossible to describe what that life might be like I guess the scientist in me wants to stay a little reserved and wait until we have more data to understand what that life might be like but what about the romantic passion well the romantic passion a person believes that there's life out there and other civilizations and other beings with all of the diversity of life that we have here on this one planet it's hard for me to imagine that there isn't life on other planets around other stars the moment of truth has arrived for NASA's Mars rover after a six-month journey the rover is about to land on the Red Planet this is no easy thing that last little bit is a freefall with a spacecraft dropping like a mars rock there are small retro rockets to slow the descent then bouncing like a fumbled football if all goes well the Mars rover with all its precision instruments will bounce down and roll to a stop somewhere in the target landing zone of course a crash-landing is always a distinct possibility the best way to know what's happened 35 million miles away is if the rover fires up its computer and begins sending radio and video signals back to earth if the rover doesn't work millions of dollars of research go right out the Martian window what do we see NASA successfully landed two Rovers on opposite sides of Mars in January 2004 the second rover Opportunity landed on the Meridiana plumb and rolled into a small crater close examination of the light-colored rocks along the lip of the crater revealed that not all of the Martian surface consists of volcanic lava flows these small blueberry sized pebbles found embedded in the rock appear to be composed of hematite a common type of iron oxide that forms in the presence of liquid water along with that chlorine bromine and sulfur were found in the Martian soil in the same proportions that we see in old ocean floors on earth we figure they got there when an ancient Martian sea evaporated these and other discoveries lead scientists to believe that this area was once soaked in liquid water perhaps it was one suitable for life but while finding water is encouraging no actual living organisms have been found so the scientific community is now clamoring for more space missions to continue probing the mysteries of Mars because until we actually make contact with or observe space aliens the question of life in outer space remains well a question we got a signal from another world everybody would have to stop and think oh absolutely no I think that it'll have a tremendous impact on us even if we don't understand the message simply knowing they're there everything we know about medicine everything we know about agriculture everything we know about disease and pest control and so on is all based on studying that one example of life imagine if we had to you might be a lot smarter finding evidence for life on another world would just be a shattering I think to a lot of people we'd have to reevaluate our place in the universe we'd have to I think unite globally and understand that we're one people [Music] we've covered a lot of ground but it's just the tip of the iceberg check out eyes of 9.0 RG for more cool science [Music] [Music]

Channel: Zain Husain

Views: 43,996

Rating: 4.6923075 out of 5

Keywords: bill nye, eyes of nye, astrobiology, 01, episode 1, bill nye the science guy

Id: h-_EywxPYWU

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 02 2012