TYSON: We all feel the weight of the shadows on our future.
But in another time, every bit as ominous as our own,
there were those who could see a way through the darkness
to find a star to steer by.
Carl Sagan wrote,
"I was a child in a time of hope...
I wanted to be a scientist from my earliest school days.
The crystallizing moment came when I first caught on that
the stars are mighty suns...
When it first dawned on me how staggeringly far away they
must be to appear as mere points of light in the sky...
I'm not sure I even knew the meaning of the word "science" then,
but I wanted somehow to immerse myself in all that grandeur...
I was gripped by the splendor of the universe...
Transfixed by the prospect of understanding how things
really work, of helping to uncover deep mysteries...
Of exploring new worlds...
Maybe even literally.
It has been my good fortune to have had that dream,
in part, fulfilled...
For me, the romance of science remains as appealing and
new as it was on that day...
When I was shown the wonders of the 1939 New York World's Fair.
This is where the future became a place."
But, how could there be hope in 1939?
The angriest voices had taken the world stage,
preaching hatred and tribal division.
The most cataclysmic war in history,
which would take the lives of 60 million human beings,
was only just beginning.
Yet, even as darkness descended,
it was possible to awaken the young Carl Sagan and his
contemporaries with a thrilling vision of the future.
One that was powerful enough to inspire many of them
to do the years of hard work required to
become scientists and engineers.
*
The "miracle" of television became a reality to the public
at the 1939 World's Fair.
We had learned to manipulate electrons into what would become a
civilization-altering force.
This working model of a TV set was transparent to convince
the skeptics that what they were seeing was not just
motion picture images.
The images on the television screen were actually live
signals from across time and space.
A possible world of revolutionary high technology
was first glimpsed here.
Carl Sagan was the first to explore space and time on the
Ship of the Imagination.
But we have something else in common.
We both had life-changing experiences in this same place
in Flushing Meadow, New York.
When I was about the same age as Carl,
my family took me to the 1964 World's Fair.
I'm the little guy on the left.
It was 25 years later and our world faced a different set of problems.
The superpowers had rigged the planet with some tens of
thousands of nuclear weapons.
They were on short fuses that could be lit at any moment.
Preparing for the coming apocalypse was a frequent
ritual for schoolchildren like me.
While we all knew that our lives could be terminated at
any moment, the 1964 World's Fair presented a vision of a
boundless future, one freed of danger,
where science and technology had been refocused on human
hopes and dreams...
I have stunning, indelible memories of that visit.
My father was a key administrator for New York City
during the civil rights movement,
and they named a monorail car after him for the day...
We proudly rode the Tyson Comet into the fair.
I remember the life-like, animatronic dinosaurs and
being amazed that we could know about things that
happened so long ago.
I remember the sense that Earth was just a place we happened to be.
Even the fair's main symbol, the Unisphere,
was a vision of Earth in the larger context of the cosmos.
Remember, this was before anyone had ever seen the whole
Earth from deep space...
It was a time when everything soared.
Even the buildings seemed ready for take-off.
You could go on a trip to a brighter future,
an Earth where there were no slums,
and no hunger...
Some of those promises remain unfulfilled,
and others have been exceeded beyond even the wildest dreams of that time...
Do me a favor.
Try to forget everything you take for granted at this moment.
Imagine you've never seen a laptop, or tablet,
or smart phone,
that you've never searched for anything online,
or ever received an email or a text message from anyone.
This was a world where if you wanted to know something about
the history of life, or the lyrics to a song,
you had to go to the nearest library.
(overlapping chatter).
TYSON: Like many people at that time,
it was here that I had my very first interaction
with a computer.
WOMAN: The machine on my right is the IBM Optical Character Reader.
It's a machine which reads handwritten numbers.
To illustrate its operation to you,
you will be able to ask for the news of any date that you'd like.
You simply write a date on a card and then the IBM Optical
Character Reader reads your handwritten numbers.
The computer replies with the news event.
TYSON: Imagine my amazement that a machine could read the date of my birth,
and spit out the most important events that took place on that very day.
How could a machine possibly know that?
Even in this optimistic dream of the future,
the long shadow cast on it was inescapable...
The very same vehicles that promised to take us to other
worlds also threatened to destroy this one.
They could carry explorers, or they could carry weapons of
mass destruction.
This Project Mercury spacecraft had recently taken
Scott Carpenter into Earth orbit...
There was a two-man Gemini spacecraft that wouldn't be
operational for another year...
And the most ambitious of all: The Apollo command module and
lunar lander were close enough for me to reach out and touch.
The first actual manned trip to the Moon was still four years away.
Think of the audacity of that time:
We were going to send humans to the Moon
and bring them back safely,
and do it all with computers whose best trick was to tell
you what happened on the day you were born...
All these decades later,
I can't believe we really did those things.
But like Carl,
the hope I discovered at the World's Fair has never left me.
The odds were against us,
but we're still here more than 50 years later.
And still dreaming of what the future might hold for us...
Come with me to the New York World's Fair of 2039.
(theme music plays).
*
TYSON: It's the year 2029 and there's a girl somewhere,
imaging how the future might unfold.
*
TYSON: Dreams are maps...
Without them, we go nowhere...
This new colossus, one of many erected in each of
the Earth's greatest harbors, is made of calcium carbonate,
the same material that nature used to build life's first
home in that ancient lost city beneath the sea.
Carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change,
has been extracted from our atmosphere and converted into
the mineral used to construct this monumental Tree of Life.
These new wonders of the world not only signify that our
species has found a way to avert the worst consequences
of climate change, but they also declare our ambition for
the kind of greatness that lives in harmony
with our fellow earthlings.
Welcome to the 2039 New York World's Fair.
Come with me.
(overlapping chatter).
*
MAN: Hi.
WOMAN: Yes, it's right that way.
(inaudible chatter).
TYSON: Here, in the Pavilion of the Searchers,
the greatest heroes in the history of science come to
virtual life to recount, one-on-one,
how they deciphered nature's secrets.
They tirelessly answer every conceivable question you might have.
And here, there is no such thing as a dumb question,
no shame in asking anything you really want to know.
And these aren't just robots whose heads are filled
with recorded messages.
We have found a way to reproduce the neural networks
in their brains, their ideas, memories and associations,
their connectome.
Imagine a world where the still unfolding story of the
universe was told to every child as naturally as we tell
them our nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
WOMAN: Oh, can they take us now?
TYSON: Two questions: Did it blow your mind when we
discovered gravitational waves,
even though you said we never would?
EINSTEIN: Ja.
TYSON: Second question.
Your hidden variables, solution to the paradox of
quantum mechanics, now that we know they don't exist,
what does that say about the nature of reality?
EINSTEIN: Come with me.
(overlapping chatter).
TYSON: And this is the Pavilion of the 4th Dimension, time.
It's a place where anyone can set their coordinates in space and time,
and visit any moment in the 14 billion year history of cosmic evolution.
Isn't it amazing that we only started doing science
systematically four centuries ago?
And yet we've already been able to reconstruct so much of
what happened billions of years before we even got here.
(overlapping chatter).
*
TYSON: This Cosmic Calendar,
with all of time compressed into a single Earth year,
is yours to explore.
What event in the history of the universe would
you most like to witness?
Not the Big Bang,
everybody wants to see that, and besides,
you have to be over 14.
But, we could go to that nanosecond before time began...
Or that last perfect day of the dinosaurs.
Or to spend the afternoon with the mitochondrial Eve,
the mother of us all, the woman to whom all humans can
trace their lineage?
Or what about a day trip to Giza to see the pyramids when
they were new?
Just take your pick...
TYSON: Life, the escape artist,
having found every niche on Earth,
even ventured to the Moon...
(radio chatter)
When we first stood amidst its sterile desolation,
its lifeless dust, a world painted only in shades of gray,
we began to appreciate how radically our planet
changed when it was touched by life's genius.
ARMSTRONG (over radio): The eagle has landed.
TYSON: What form will life's genius take hundreds of
millions of years in the future?
*
TYSON: Behold: This is the earliest known ancestor we
humans share with almost every animal who lives now
or ever lived on Earth.
The real Saccorrhytus coronarius was actually quite small,
just a black dot to our eyes,
but it looms large in our personal story.
"Sacco" flourished more than half a billion years ago.
It's a progenitor of the animal kingdom.
So how did life, the sculptor, carve us out of this?
Evolution, given world enough and time,
makes possible the emergence of those more complex and
completely unexpected qualities that can arise from
simpler things.
Life is a thread four billion years long.
It has survived at least five mass extinction events and
come back from each of them stronger than ever before.
Life demonstrates that we are more than the sum of our parts,
and even when we find ourselves with our backs to the wall,
life can find a way into the future...
(explosion)
Landmine.
A souvenir of our savagery left over from conflicts all over the planet.
We've infested our world with more than 100 million of them.
Every year they kill or maim thousands of civilians,
among them children at play with their friends.
Think of a global effort that would be required to find and
defuse more than 100 million explosive devices
buried in the earth.
Hopeless, right?
But botanists have devised an ingenious way to reveal
the presence of dangerous explosives beneath our feet.
They have bioengineered the thale cress plant whose roots
can detect the nitrogen dioxide gas that these
landmines and IEDs emit.
If the plant puts out red leaves, beware.
But if its leaves are green, then you can play there in
peace with your friends.
We can use our understanding of nature to spring the traps
that we've set for ourselves.
Let's take the subway to New Jersey.
We're riding the mycelium, that underground network that
connects 90% of the world's trees and plants.
It's an ancient coproduction of four kingdoms of life,
plants, bacteria, fungi and animals.
New Jersey was once a state with the highest number of
dangerously polluted areas in the country,
shameful artifacts of our technological adolescence.
But then, we partnered with the trees and the plants...
Poplars naturally transform trichloroethylenes,
known as TCEs, carcinogenic solvents that are common
by-products of industry, into harmless chloride ions.
Simple salts.
Microbiologists discovered that they could crossbreed two
different species of poplar trees to enhance their power
to neutralize TCEs.
The extensive planting of these trees not only rid this
area of its poisonous threats to human and other life,
but also added to the number of trees that turn the most
prevalent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, into oxygen.
With our wars and our lifestyle,
we dumped a lot garbage on this world.
Not just landmines and IEDs,
but the toxins from our fossil fuels,
the waste from our consumer civilization,
nuclear power plants and weapons.
And the electronic toys that we discarded at an alarming
rate laden with lethal heavy metals, lead,
cadmium, beryllium and other e-wastes.
I have moments of despair when I try to wrap
my mind around the enormity of the problem...
But life even provides a way out of this nightmare.
It's called bioremediation...
See that node at the intersection?
That's yeast.
Without it, no bread, no beer.
But in this future, we have used it to clean up
the whole world.
It was a means to neutralize the most dangerous
garbage we produced.
Yeast captures these poisons and prevents them from
contaminating the water supply and the rest of the environment.
Think of it.
Nature offered us a second chance,
a shot at undoing the damage done...
But how do we keep from doing it again?
(inaudible chatter).
What on Earth is designed by humans to protect the distant future?
We don't have a single institution that even
acknowledges the long-term danger we pose to ourselves,
let alone one designed to plan for it.
Our time horizon looms three months from now,
or four years, the corporate balance sheet,
the next election.
But science is telling us that life's time scale measures in
the billions of years.
How do we maintain awareness of the continuity
of life's past,
and our personal role in being a link to its future,
so that it has operational consequences?
Science, as of now, has no means of making us wise and far-sighted.
That's up to us.
How many have lost the battle that we fight now?
How many worlds lie buried beneath the surface of this one?
Maybe we'll never know.
But here at this fair, there's a pavilion where long-dead
civilizations come roaring back to life...
I know of one lost world that flourished for
thousands of years.
Their accomplishments were many.
They left behind a written language that no one has ever
been able to decipher.
We have yet to discover a clue that could explain
why they vanished.
They are just one of the mysteries of the
Pavilion of Lost Worlds...
TYSON: In 5th century B.C.E. Greece,
Herodotus, the father of history,
wrote of the opulent lifestyle of the Tartessians on the Iberian Peninsula.
Their wealth came from the silver and gold they extracted from the earth.
They had their own language, culture, dances,
music, and yet very little survives of them
besides a handful of trinkets of marvelous design.
Theirs is one of the lost worlds of planet Earth...
As are the nameless people, who lived in what is now
Nigeria, in a place called "Nok."
For 1,500 years, their engineers were on the cutting
edge of technology, forging new ways to work with iron.
Just as with the Tartessians,
they had their own unique civilization.
All that remains of them are some ceramic statues in a
style unlike any other and an inscription on this wall.
Everything else about them has been devoured by time...
But inside this pavilion, these lost civilizations live,
they breathe, they dance again...
Of them all, which one to bring back to life tonight?
I know...
the Indus Valley civilization
at its high point in 2,500 B.C.E.,
when it was a vast network of cities with a population of five million.
Come with me to their most famous city,
Mohenjo Daro...
(clucking)
(chanting in native language)
We don't know how this pool called the "great bath" was used,
but we do know that this city was planned and laid out,
while the Greeks wandered in small tribes,
just a band of itinerant merchants...
(running water)
Wait...
Do you hear that?
Listen...
(toilet flush)
Yes, the Indus Valley people of nearly 5,000 years ago
installed modern plumbing in their homes!
Something most people didn't have until the late 20th century.
And, they mastered other forms of hydro-engineering,
underground pipes, sewage management,
kitchens with running water.
They had dentistry, and standardized measures for the
tiniest quantities.
They were great sculptors who introduced natural reality
into the three dimensional depiction of the human form.
They had writing, and hung signs on buildings,
but we have yet to understand their meaning.
They used dice to play games of chance and wiled away their
evenings with board games.
And there's something curious about them.
They left no depictions of war in their art,
nor large caches of weapons.
There's no evidence that their meticulously planned cities
were ever burned to the ground by enemy invaders.
In the study of their contemporaries,
and human history generally, this is most unusual.
This figurine is one of the only surviving remnants of their civilization.
And yet, they were as real as we are.
Their moment as real as ours...
*
Just beyond the Pavilion of Lost Worlds,
there's another one...
The pavilion of worlds still to come...
We've launched five ships to the stars.
They are backward and primitive craft, moving,
compared to the immense interstellar distances,
with the slowness of a race in a dream.
But in the future we will do better.
We've located and begun to study thousands of worlds that
orbit other suns, all this from our remote confinement in
the suburbs of the galaxy, all this in just 400 years since
Galileo's first look through a telescope.
The Milky Way has hundreds of billions of stars,
and likely even more worlds.
Somewhere in the vastness,
there may be an Encyclopedia Galactica,
a reference work that includes all the worlds of all the stars.
*
TYSON: Our vague perceptions and inferences of thousands of
exoplanets have given way to a more intimate degree of
knowledge of some half a million worlds.
Imagine a huge galactic database,
a Library of Alexandria for the whole universe...
a means for our small world to attain some measure of cosmic citizenship...
Imagine an Encyclopedia Galactica
that is constantly evolving and growing,
an open source where the knowledge of
the worlds of the universe would be available to all.
These guys, who call themselves "We Who Survived,"
are only a little more advanced than we are.
If we could only communicate with them,
maybe they could tell us how they got through their stormy adolescence.
And these guys, too...
"We Who Flower in Darkness."
What about a civilization far more advanced than ours?
There may be worlds with engineering on a scale that
dwarfs our proudest achievements.
There may be cultures that disassemble other planets in
their system and reassemble them around their world to
make a ring, buying them more room and more resources.
Well, their future looks bright.
But the poor beings of these worlds have only a 1 in 3 chance
of making it through.
What is that?
Could this be their attempt to solve a solar system-wide energy crisis?
They depend on solar power,
but their star is only a feeble red dwarf,
incapable of providing direct energy
for their multi-planetary civilization.
Maybe, they've used up all their fuel.
So, they're building a shell to surround their star
and harvest every photon of sunlight.
How would we frame our own entry in the
Cosmic Encyclopedia of Possible Worlds?
Perhaps, even now, someone has written it for us,
a planetary dossier garnered from our television broadcasts
or from some discreet survey mission.
They might summon up the index of blue worlds in our province
of the Milky Way, until they came to the listing for Earth.
What would they think of us?
We have long watched the stars and mused about whether there
are other beings who think and wonder about us.
In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human
understanding, we're a little lonely.
50%, huh? That's all?
I know a way we can up those odds...
It's about taking what science is telling us to heart.
(overlapping chatter).
This is the dream of Cosmos.
And this is the story that science is telling us...
Our universe began, some 14 billion years ago,
when matter, energy, time and space burst forth...
And the darkness was cold, and the light was hot and the
union of these extremes gave shape to matter and
there was structure...
There were great stars, hundreds of times the mass of
our Sun and these stars exploded,
sending oxygen and carbon to the worlds to come and
adorning them with gold and silver...
And in their deaths, the stars became darkness and the weight
of their darkness vanquished the light...
And new stars were born from their death shrouds and they
began to dance with each other.
And now there were galaxies...
Galaxies make stars...
(gasping).
(cheering and applause).
TYSON: Stars make worlds...
And a world made life...
And there came a time when heat shot out from the molten
heart of this world, and it warmed the waters and the
matter that had rained down from the stars came
alive and that star stuff became aware...
And that life was sculpted by the Earth,
and its struggles with the other living things...
And a great tree grew up, one with many branches,
and six times it was almost felled...
But still, it grows and we are but one small branch...
One that cannot live without its tree.
And slowly, we learned to read the book of nature...
To learn her laws... To nurture the tree...
To become a way for the cosmos to know itself
and to return to the stars.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.