(upbeat instrumental music)
- Well children, we've almost reached the end of our story.
Of the brave men and women who've explored our planet Earth.
But this was only one of our many stories,
the first was about the beginning of the world.
That was back about 15 billion years ago.
What happened before? (laughs)
That no one knows for sure.
And the day after that, well, it would 10 billion years
for a great cloud of gas to cool
and condense and form our Earth,
and at incredibly high temperatures of
billions and billions of degrees,
but sure enough in time the gasses cooled
and formed matter as we know it.
(dramatic instrumental music)
(Earth rumbling)
Near a billion years later, this 10 million centuries,
the first living cells appeared.
You could say the beginning of life.
The beginning of all life.
You me and all the others,
we're all from that bit of stardust that somehow
managed to form itself into a cell that could reproduce.
We're related.
Or if you prefer, it's the very first link in the chain
which results in the creation of man.
- We all started out as a grain of stardust.
It's pretty great.
- (laughs) Pretty great.
But then it went quickly, well several million centuries.
See for yourselves.
Fla-ge-tell-i, constantly evolving to higher forms.
The trilobite.
It took another four billion years
before any amphibians set foot on dry land.
The ichthyostega.
He would eventually become, what else?
The dinosaur.
Why did they die out?
Well perhaps a giant meteor struck the Earth
and caused a cooler climate, no one really knows.
But then, the way was clear for the first mammals.
The tre-con-din.
The si-mi-no-dec-ta.
The pliopithecus.
Proconsul.
Pre-australopithecus.
Australopithecus.
The robustus.
Homo habilis.
Homo robustus.
The swans-go.
Neanderthal.
The cro-magnon.
And us. - Hi.
- That man you may be sure was very impatient
to make his own mark on the world.
And he wanted to fill it with his creations.
Well, it was only natural.
The year zero, the beginning of our era.
But man has always wanted to go further,
expand his limits and go faster and faster.
Wait wait hold on just a minute, now just stop.
Enough for now, we'll speak of all that later on.
You'll see.
But man always sought greater comfort as well.
Back in the beginning, things were pretty rough for him.
For instance, I walk into this room now.
Oh yes I'm sure to you it's pretty routine all of this.
Clocks printing electricity telephones fax machines
television computer internet, you see it every day.
But it hasn't been like that all the time,
I tried to show you how discoverers
and adventurers have shaped our lives.
- Eureka, eureka, got it!
- Archimedes discovered a thousand things.
Gutenberg, the printing press.
Galileo said the Earth spins on an axis,
and is not the center of the universe.
Newton and his laws of gravity.
Charles Darwin, man is a direct descendant from the apes.
Thomas Edison, the phonograph, incandescent bulbs,
moving pictures, you name it.
Marconi, the first long distance radio communication.
Man's always wanted to move farther, move faster.
Don't worry, we'll talk about modern things in a while.
As I was saying, yes I was saying the best way for you
to understand the Earth's a tiny planet
is for you to explore the very nature
of the vast space around us in the universe.
You remember, together we explored the cosmos,
and we also explored humans, everything comes down to man.
We discovered the millions of tiny cells
that together make up the infinitely complex
elements and functions in the universe
that is the human body.
And so here we all are today.
Benefiting from those that have explored the world
since the dawn of human history.
Greeks and Phoenicians sail around Africa
going all the way to the polar regions.
Alexander the Great goes all the way to India.
Vikings from the North sail to the American continent.
Marco Polo travels from Italy all the way to China.
And the Chinese sailor Zheng He
adventures all the way to Africa.
Christopher Columbus and the
Pinzon brothers discovered America.
In just a handful of centuries,
man will explore his planet in
all it's latitudes and longitudes.
James Cook, Stanley Livingston.
Hilary and Tenzing at the top of Mount Everest.
By now, we have combed the Earth, imagining we control it.
But man's desire for more and more leaves him
to plunder the Earth, with no regard.
(child crying)
(boy groans in disgust)
It is estimated that rivers discharge one ton of waste
for it's inhabitants every day.
You realize the amount of pollution?
A ton a day per person?
A sad commentary.
And what's the result?
Illnesses and reduced life expectancy.
But who's interested, that's the word.
Too many special interests, not enough genuine interest.
What will become of man in this?
- Maestro, Maestro.
Don't some say the Earth's
overloaded now with all it's people?
- Well maybe, maybe.
But does it mean we have a perfect right
to threaten inhabitants' lives?
I believe this is a good time to discuss demography.
Now in the beginning, five billion years ago,
of course there were no people.
No humans on the planet.
15 million centuries later arrived the one celled amoeba.
Another 30 million centuries and here comes homo erectus.
Perhaps there were, oh, a million of them.
30 million centuries later,
here comes our ancestor, mister cro-magnon.
Now there must have been a few million of them,
at least that's what we think, some of us.
The year zero, in the world there are
250 million human beings.
15 centuries later, it's up to 500 million people.
The population doubled in 1,500 years.
For centuries later, there are 2 billion.
But now it has doubled in only half the time.
1975 and it's doubled once again.
The people with statistics predict 8 billion by 2010,
16 billion in 2045. (groans)
32 billion in 2080.
64 billion in 2115.
128 billion in 2150, oh, what next?
Not a very pleasant perspective.
We must surely hope we change our ways in time.
Even today, half the population of the world,
three billion people,
do not have the bear minimum to live on.
- Couple of atomic bombs would take care of all that, right?
- You shouldn't joke like that.
Imagine the suffering and death.
You didn't mean it I'm sure, just a bad joke.
In any case, using atomic power, even for peaceful uses,
has already caused it's share of
problems for humanity, oh yes.
Not an especially beautiful sight, all this.
Oh my.
And all that atomic waste, what'll you do with that,
to get rid of it?
- Oh that would be no problem at all,
we'll just toss it in the ocean.
- Easy, we're gonna bury it.
- Well, what about shooting it all into outer space?
Would that be all right?
- This is serious.
We know it stays radioactive a long long time.
- Who is this guy anyway?
- Being a specialist is our job.
- We know our business, and our world.
- [All] We're the specialists.
- Well all right,
we'll bury it deep in a geological stratum.
Will that do it?
- What sort of geological layer?
- In a salt band.
- It has to be a clay soil.
- Put it in granite.
(specialists arguing)
- [Specialist] A very tall, very thick pyramid,
that's what we need.
- [Maestro] Nobody here has a good solution
for disposing atomic waste.
We know atomic waste can remain deadly
for up to 150 million years!
The time it took to go from dinosaurs to man.
- Did it really? - As long as that?
It took all that time for man to appear in the world?
- Even longer!
Remember what I told you.
- Those years make it hard.
I mean you have to understand,
all those thousands and millions and billions,
it's complicated.
- You're right, let me try and clear all that up.
Imagine the face of a watch.
No say that the twelve hours represent
the 5 billion years as how long the Earth has existed.
At zero hour, the world is created.
One and a half billion years later,
we can observe the very first cells.
On our watch, the time is 3:40.
The first mollusks appear at 8 o'clock.
11 12ths of all the time since
the Earth's creation has passed before
the dinosaurs appear, it's 11 o'clock.
At 11:40, the dinosaurs are history.
It's time for the rodents.
And they would open the way to the appearance of humans.
11:55, the australopithecus.
(laughing)
- Shut up.
- At 11:59, cro-magnon.
Ten seconds to 12, it's zero our for our era.
And it is within these last ten seconds
that all of human history is squeezed.
Because 12 o'clock is today.
Well, what do you say?
That cleared up for you?
- So now the evolution of man is just going to stop?
- Of course not, why would it stop?
(chuckling)
We've gone through only 10 seconds of our whole history.
Mankind still has 12 hours ahead,
that means 5 billion years to spend here on Earth,
and that's plenty of time to go through lots of changes.
Maybe man will look something like this.
Or maybe this.
Or even this.
Only I wonder how he keeps from falling over.
- And that guy, what's there left to discover for him?
- Well outer space of course, yes.
But man will explore his own body.
For instance, the human brain.
We know so little about it.
And yet the brain must have powers still undreamed of,
mysteries fascinating to explore.
As fabulous as a voyage into outer space,
to explore new galaxies,
man will always take up the challenge of new discoveries.
- And outer space Maestro?
The constellations, billions of stars,
but are there any planets approximating
conditions here on our planet?
Have they found any life there?
- And would there be life like ours on any such planet?
- Could we visit any of them?
- Anyone there?
- [Kids] Tell us!
- Hold on hold on hold on, one at a time.
Now the last known planet in our solar system, Pluto,
was discovered just a few decades ago.
So discovering planets in other solar systems
that are billions of times farther away,
well, it's not as easy as rolling off a log.
- And so nobody's found them?
- Oh yes, someone did.
Not long ago, two Swiss scientists,
Guilles and Mayor, were studying the constellation Pegasus.
(laughing)
- Look, at every revolution,
the ball pulls my hand in one direction, then the other.
A planet looping around a star does the same.
Yes each times it goes around,
it pulls first forward then backwards in a regular way.
It oscillates, like what we see here.
- You think there's a planet going around
a star in the Pegasus constellation?
- Star number 51, and we'll be announcing it!
- Now what is it, can't you see that I'm very busy?
- Boss, there were two Swiss astronomers.
They just discovered a planet
in the constellation of Pegasus!
- It's 45 light years away, nobody can see that.
That's not possible.
- Anyhow they did it, I just checked it!
- What's this, another message?
- [Both] Two French astronomers have discovered another one,
they found another planet near the star Beta Pictoris?
The distance of 52 light years?
- Two in approximately the same instant in time,
and for good measure, one more?
- Professor professor, take a look at this!
- Ah yes, it's there, it's a planet for sure!
It's in orbit around Gliese, star 229!
This is a truly marvelous event!
- Indeed it was just that.
Remember, we hadn't found a planet in so long,
and now, all these at one time.
- But how can we see them so far away?
- All of these planets are light years away.
- You're right, so far away, how do we see 'em?
Hmm.
Marconi.
Right, let's go back to Marconi, you remember him.
His early experiments in radio transmission?
In other words, he learned how to send messages
using electromagnetic waves.
They're electromagnetic waves in space.
Now once computers appeared, the task was made possible.
Scientists had a magnificent tool.
- It's beautiful, right John Mauchley?
- 17 thousand tubes in it, John Eckert.
- 6,000 switches John.
- 15,000 relays.
- 50,000 resistances.
- You think it's going to work John?
- Well soon find out, John. - Do we try it out?
- Let's go for it!
- The honor is yours.
- No, it's yours John.
- This one here, John?
- No, that one there, John.
- Of course in the end, computers came of age,
and today, they help us to understand waves.
And just a few decades later, with their help,
we're witnessing extraordinary changes all around us,
in every walk of like.
Changes we've never have thought possible.
(laughs)
Yes, our satellites placed in orbit
relay electromagnetic waves.
Now here, at a distance of 600 kilometers from Earth,
is the fabulous Hubble Telescope.
- It isn't working.
- The pictures fuzzy, the mirror, it must have a defect.
To think it took 10 years to create this telescope.
- Well, we'll have to repair it.
- In outer space, no way.
- Operational, we repaired it.
- You've seen the results of all that.
The discovery of new planets.
- Okay yes well now that we know they're there,
can't we go and see them?
- Oh yes, and how would we get there?
Going to hitchhike there, maybe?
You don't realize how far away they are.
Our nearest star, Alpha Centauri,
is over four light years away.
Light years.
About 40,000 billion, it's a billion kilometers,
my children, it's quite a way.
At 100,000 kilometers per hour,
why that means. - 100,000 kilometers per hour?
That's fast.
- But just imagine it.
You would be traveling,
roughly I would say around, 40,000 years.
- What, that much time?
- And that's 10 times closer than
the planet they discovered up around Pegasus.
- There's no way we're gonna get up there.
So why get uptight about it?
- It is exciting, isn't it?
I mean, the speed of progress we're seeing every day.
You saw it for yourselves, with computers.
Think of Alexander the Great,
who took so long to get to India,
what would he have thought of it?
- You see that?
What in the world was it?
- Simply a mirage, Alexander.
We're tired and thirsty, and so hot.
- [Maestro] And what about Christopher Columbus
and the Pinzon brothers?
- Dear lord, send us a bit of wind.
- Do you hear that?
(jet engine roaring distantly)
What was that?
- Just your imagination, that's all.
I saw nothing, I heard nothing.
- [Sailor] Maybe it was a mirage.
- [Maestro] And Magellan with this faithful Elcano.
- I tell you, if the wind continues favorable,
we will go around the world in one year.
(jet engine roaring distantly)
- We've just gone around the world in one hour!
Not bad, huh?
- You see how progress gallops along,
there's an even better example, kids!
You remember how the first postal service was started?
- Belgium to Austria in just three days, bravo.
- Email going out from Paris to Peking, sending now.
- Got it already actually, it required no time.
- Well not exactly no time,
because even electromagnetic waves go
no faster than the speed of light.
That speed is 300,000 kilometers per second.
That transmission took a tenth of a second.
Cut of a tenth of a second off, it's instantaneous.
- Oh, why don't they just hurry it up?
- It's sure, a spacecraft will never
go faster than the speed of light, no way!
- Oh, man's history tells us, you should never say never.
As for great distances,
consider the nebula of Orion.
A beam of light would travel 15,000 years to reach us.
Light years.
- That means even at the speed of light,
we'd have to be traveling that long before we got there!
- Well maybe not.
Look at this balloon.
It looks as if the shortest route from here to here
is along the rounded surface, an arch.
But if space could be shaped like this,
the starting point is much closer to the arrival point.
Well, that's a black hole, in a way.
(laughs)
- All this talk is too complicated for me.
- As we learn spacecraft, you remember the spaceship,
it's made of anti-matter and is
able to travel at the speed of light,
300,000 kilometers per second,
a billion kilometers every hour,
a spacecraft entirely of tachyons.
Well, they would be faster than the speed of light.
No one would ever see them.
But in any ship, moving 300 times faster than light,
we would see people aging before our eyes.
- All the same, returning to the stars?
Going back to our origins?
What a wonderful experience!
- Oh yes, but quite brief.
There is perhaps a better idea.
- Inquiry, will somebody verify
connections of my frontal circuitry?
According to my systems, I have a headache today.
- Pegasus 51 in view.
Look.
- [Maestro] Yes, maybe one day one of man's spaceships
will voyage to a far distant new planet,
and it's explorers will tell us
whether anyone else is already living there.
But they're surely be very different from us.
And for now, we Earthlings have only this one planet,
just one, our Earth.
And it is about time we started taking
much better care of it than we do now.
Children, it took the Earth 5 billion years
of geological and organic activity to create
a delicate balance where life could form and develop,
giving rise to human beings, to us.
In a 60 millionth of that time,
man has destroyed that balance.
He wants to take everything and creates
mountains of pollution which he expects the Earth to digest.
Madness like this has to stop.
We have to strike a balance between our desires
and the possibilities of our Earth.
We have to restore harmony,
surely we can do that, we've accomplished so much.
Children, one day when you're adults, remember.
You can make your own contribution to saving our planet,
each one of you, protection of the environment.
We'll talk about that some other time.
(mysterious instrumental music)