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00:00we all feel the weight of the shadows on our future but in another time every bit as ominous
00:11as our own there were those who could see a way through the darkness to find a star to steer by
00:20carl sagan wrote i was a child in a time of hope
00:25i wanted to be a scientist from my earliest school days the crystallizing moment came when i first
00:32caught on that the stars are mighty suns when it first dawned on me how staggeringly far away they
00:39must be to appear as mere points of light in the sky i'm not sure i even knew the meaning of the
00:47word science then but i wanted somehow to immerse myself in all that grandeur i was gripped by the
00:55splendor of the universe transfixed by the prospect of understanding how things really work of helping
01:02to uncover deep mysteries of exploring new worlds maybe even literally
01:10it has been my good fortune to have had that dream in part fulfilled
01:27for me the romance of science remains as appealing and new as it was on that day
01:34when i was shown the wonders of the 1939 new york world's fair
01:49this is where the future became a place but how could there be hope in 1939
01:59the angriest voices had taken the world stage preaching hatred and tribal division the most
02:05cataclysmic war in history which would take the lives of 60 million human beings was only just beginning
02:14yet even as darkness descended it was possible to awaken the young carl sagan and his contemporaries
02:21with a thrilling vision of the future one that was powerful enough to inspire many of them
02:28to do the years of hard work required to become scientists and engineers
02:51the miracle of television became a reality to the public at the 1939 world's fair
03:06we had learned to manipulate electrons into what would become of civilization altering force
03:13this working model of the tv set was transparent to convince the skeptics that what they were seeing
03:20was not just motion picture images the images on the television screen were actually live signals
03:26from across time and space a possible world of revolutionary high technology was first glimpsed here
03:44in the new york
03:48carl sagan was the first to explore space and time on the ship of the imagination but we have something
03:55else in common we both had life-changing experiences in this same place in flushing meadow new york
04:03when 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
04:18left it was 25 years later and our world faced a different set of problems the superpowers had rigged
04:26the planet with some tens of thousands of nuclear weapons they were on short fuses that could be lit at
04:33any moment preparing for the coming apocalypse was a frequent ritual for school children like me while
04:39we all knew that our lives could be terminated at any moment the 1964 world's fair presented a vision of a
04:47boundless future one freed of danger with science and technology have been refocused on human hopes
04:55and dreams i have stunning indelible memories of that visit my father was a key administrator for
05:02new york city during the civil rights movement and they named a monorail car after him for the day
05:08we proudly rode the tyson comet into the fair i remember the lifelike animatronic dinosaurs and being
05:22amazed that we could know about things that happened so long ago i remember the sense that earth was just
05:29a place we happened to be even the fair's main symbol the unisphere was a vision of earth in the larger
05:37context of the cosmos remember this was before anyone had ever seen the whole earth from deep space
05:46it was a time when everything soared even the buildings seemed ready for takeoff
05:56you could go on a trip to a brighter future an earth where there were no slums and no hunger
06:07some of those promises remain unfulfilled and others have been exceeded beyond even the wildest dreams
06:15of that time do me a favor try to forget everything you take for granted at this moment imagine you've
06:25never seen a laptop or tablet or smartphone that you've never searched for anything online or ever
06:33received an email or text message from anyone this was a world where if you wanted to know something
06:40about the history of life or the lyrics to a song you had to go to the nearest library
06:50like many people at that time it was here that i had my very first interaction with a computer
06:56the machine on my right is the ivm optical character reader it's a machine which reads
07:01handwritten numbers to illustrate its operation to you you will be able to ask for the news of any
07:07date that you like you simply write a date on a card and then the ivm optical character reader reads
07:12your handwritten numbers the computer replies with the news event
07:16imagine my amazement that a machine could read the date of my birth and spit out the most important
07:27events that took place on that very day
07:32how could a machine possibly know that even in this optimistic dream of the future
07:39the long shadow cast on it was inescapable
07:42the very same vehicles that promised to take us to other worlds also threatened to destroy this one
07:51they could carry explorers or they could carry weapons of mass destruction
07:58this project mercury spacecraft had recently taken scott carpenter into earth orbit
08:04there was a two-man gemini spacecraft that wouldn't be operational for another year
08:09and the most ambitious of all the apollo command module in lunar lander were close enough for me to
08:17reach out and touch the first actual man trip to the moon was still four years away think of the
08:25audacity of that time we were going to send humans to the moon and bring them back safely and do it all
08:34with computers whose best trick was to tell you what happened on the day you were born
08:42all these decades later i can't believe we really did those things
08:48but like carl the hope i discovered at the world's fair has never left me the odds were against us
08:56but we're still here more than 50 years later and still dreaming of what the future might hold for us
09:04come with me to the new york world's fair of 2039
09:34so
09:44so
09:48so
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12:08Dreams are maps.
12:25Without them, we go nowhere.
12:31This new colossus, one of many erected in each of the Earth's greatest harbors,
12:37is made of calcium carbonate, the same material that nature used to build life's first home
12:46in that ancient lost city beneath the sea.
12:50Carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change, has been extracted from our atmosphere
12:56and converted into the mineral used to construct this monumental tree of life.
13:01These new wonders of the world not only signify that our species has found a way
13:08to avert the worst consequences of climate change,
13:11but they also declare our ambition for the kind of greatness
13:15that lives in harmony with our fellow Earthlings.
13:18Welcome to the 2039 New York World's Fair.
13:26Come with me.
13:48Come with me.
14:18Come with me.
14:48Here in the pavilion of the searchers, the greatest heroes in the history of science
15:00come to virtual life to recount one-on-one how they deciphered nature's secrets.
15:07They tirelessly answer every conceivable question you might have.
15:11And here, there is no such thing as a dumb question.
15:16No shame in asking anything you really want to know.
15:19And these aren't just robots whose heads are filled with recorded messages.
15:23We've found a way to reproduce the neural networks in their brains, their ideas, memories, and associations.
15:32Their connectome.
15:33Imagine a world where the still unfolding story of the universe was told to every child
15:42as naturally as we tell them our nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
15:47Oh, can I take it now?
15:49Okay.
15:51Two questions.
15:53Did it blow your mind when we discovered gravitational waves,
15:56even though you said we never would?
15:58Yeah.
16:01Second question.
16:03Your hidden variable solution to the paradox of quantum mechanics,
16:08now that we know they don't exist,
16:09what does that say about the nature of reality?
16:14Come with me.
16:15And this is the pavilion of the fourth dimension, time.
16:36It's a place where anyone can set their coordinates in space and time
16:40and visit any moment in the 14 billion year history of cosmic evolution.
16:46Isn't it amazing that we only started doing science systematically four centuries ago?
16:51And yet, we've already been able to reconstruct so much of what happened
16:55billions of years before we even got here.
17:40This cosmic calendar, with all of time compressed into a single Earth year,
17:48is yours to explore.
17:50What event in the history of the universe would you like most to witness?
17:56Not the Big Bang. Everybody wants to see that.
17:59And besides, you have to be over 14.
18:02But we could go to that nanosecond before time began.
18:06Or that last perfect day of the dinosaurs.
18:09Or to spend the afternoon with the mitochondrial Eve,
18:14the mother of us all.
18:15The woman to whom all humans can trace their lineage.
18:19Or what about a day trip to Giza?
18:21To see the pyramids when they were new.
18:24Just take your pick.
18:25And that's what we call the mother of us all.
18:28Yes, I hope to thank you.
18:29Amen.
18:30I hope to have a look.
18:33I hope to have ALL of them
18:36and be willing for you until next week.
18:38So, down, I'll try again.
18:40Let's pretty gut.
19:11Life, the escape artist, having found every niche on Earth, even ventured to the moon.
19:24When we first stood amidst its sterile desolation, its lifeless dust, a world painted only in shades of gray,
19:32we began to appreciate how radically our planet changed when it was touched by life's genius.
19:41What form will life's genius take hundreds of millions of years in the future?
19:48What form will life's genius take hundreds of millions of years in the future?
19:59Behold, this is the earliest known ancestor we humans share with almost every animal who lives now or ever lived on Earth.
20:29The real Saccharitis coronarius was actually quite small, just a black dot to our eyes, but it looms large in our personal story.
20:38Saco flourished more than half a billion years ago. It's a progenitor of the animal kingdom.
20:46So how did life, the sculptor, carve us out of this?
20:51Evolution, given world enough and time, makes possible the emergence of those more complex and completely unexpected qualities that can arise from simpler things.
21:03Life 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.
21:17Life 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.
21:29Landmine. A souvenir of our savagery left over from conflicts all over the planet.
21:41We've infested our world with more than a hundred million of them. Every year they kill or maim thousands of civilians. Among them, children at play with their friends.
21:53Think of the global effort that would be required to find and defuse more than a hundred million explosive devices buried in the earth. Hopeless, right?
22:07But botanists have devised an ingenious way to reveal the presence of dangerous explosives beneath our feet.
22:27They have bioengineered the thale crest plant, whose roots can detect the nitrogen dioxide gas that these landmines and IEDs emit.
22:37If the plant puts out red leaves, beware. But if its leaves are green, then you can play there in peace with your friends.
22:48We can use our understanding of nature to spring the traps that we've set for ourselves.
22:54Let's take the subway to New Jersey.
23:09We're riding the mycelium, that underground network that connects 90% of the world's trees and plants.
23:17It's an ancient co-production of four kingdoms of life.
23:21Plants, bacteria, fungi, and animals.
23:29New Jersey was once a state with the highest number of dangerously polluted areas in the country.
23:36Shameful artifacts of our technological adolescence.
23:40But then, we partnered with the trees and the plants.
23:45Poplars naturally transformed trichloroethylenes, known as TCEs, carcinogenic solvents that are common byproducts of industry, into harmless chloride ions, simple salts.
23:59Microbiologists discovered that they could crossbreed two different species of poplar trees to enhance their power to neutralize TCEs.
24:11The extensive planting of these trees not only rid this area of its poisonous threats to human and other life,
24:18but also added to the number of trees that turned the most prevalent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, into oxygen.
24:35With our wars and our lifestyle, we dumped a lot of garbage on this world.
24:40Not just landmines and IEDs, but the toxins from our fossil fuels, the waste from our consumer civilization, nuclear power plants, weapons,
24:50and the electronic toys that we discarded at an alarming rate, laden with lethal heavy metals, lead, cadmium, beryllium, and other e-wastes.
25:00I have moments of despair when I try to wrap my mind around the enormity of the problem.
25:07But life even provides a way out of this nightmare. It's called bioremediation.
25:15See that node at the intersection? That's yeast. Without it, no bread. No beer.
25:23But in this future, we've used it to clean up the whole world. It was a means to neutralize the most dangerous garbage we produced.
25:32Yeast captured these poisons and prevents them from contaminating the water supply and the rest of the environment.
25:39Think of it. Nature offered us a second chance. A shot at undoing the damage done.
25:46But how do we keep from doing it again?
26:09What on earth is designed by humans to protect the distant future?
26:13We 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.
26:22Our time horizon looms three months from now, or four years, the corporate balance sheet, the next election.
26:30But science is telling us that life's timescale measures into billions of years.
26:36How do we maintain awareness, the continuity of life's past, and our personal role in being a link to its future, so that it has operational consequences?
26:46Science, as of now, has no means of making us wise and farsighted. That's up to us.
26:53How many have lost the battle that we fight now?
27:02How many worlds lie buried beneath the surface of this one?
27:06Maybe we'll never know. But here at this fair, there's a pavilion where long-dead civilizations come roaring back to life.
27:16I know of one lost world that flourished for thousands of years. Their accomplishments were many.
27:23They left behind a written language that no one has ever been able to decipher.
27:28We have yet to discover a clue that could explain why they vanished.
27:33They are just one of the mysteries of the Pavilion Lost Worlds.
27:39In 5th century BCE Greece, Herodotus, the father of history, wrote of the opulent lifestyle of the Tartessians on the Iberian Peninsula.
28:07Their wealth came from the silver and gold they extracted from the Earth.
28:11They had their own language, culture, dances, music, and yet very little survives of them besides a handful of trinkets of marvelous designs.
28:22Theirs is one of the lost worlds on planet Earth.
28:26As are the nameless people who lived in what is now Nigeria. In a place called Nok. For 1500 years, their engineers were on the cutting edge of technology, forging new ways to work with iron.
28:44Just 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.
28:53Everything else about them has been devoured by time. But inside this pavilion, these lost civilizations live. They breathe. They dance again.
29:02Of them all, which one to bring back to life tonight? I know. The Indus Valley Civilization, at its high point in 2500 BC.
29:12When it was a vast network of cities, when it was a vast network of cities with a population of 5 million. Come with me to their most famous city.
29:22Mohenjo-daro.
29:52Mohenjo-daro.
30:22Mohenjo-daro.
30:35We 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.
30:50Mohenjo-daro.
30:56Wait. Do you hear that? Listen.
30:59Yes. The Indus Valley people of nearly 5000 years ago installed modern plumbing in their homes. Something most people didn't have until the late 20th century.
31:12And they mastered other forms of hydro-engineering. Underground pipes, sewage management, kitchens with running water.
31:23They 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.
31:41They had writing and hung signs on buildings, but we've yet to understand their meaning.
31:56They used dice to play games of chance. The wild 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.
32:13There'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.
32:30This 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.
33:00Just beyond the pavilion of lost worlds, there's another one. The pavilion of worlds still to come.
33:22We've launched five ships to the stars. They're backward, primitive craft, moving compared to the immense interstellar distances with the slowness of a race and a dream.
33:34But in the future, we will do better. We've located and begun to study thousands of worlds that orbit other suns.
33:42All 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.
33:52The Milky Way has hundreds of billions of stars and likely even more worlds. Somewhere in the vastness, there may be an Encyclopedia Galactica.
34:05A reference work that includes all the worlds of all the stars.
34:12Our vague perceptions and inferences of thousands of exoplanets have given way to a more intimate degree of knowledge of some half a million worlds.
34:40Imagine 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.
34:53Imagine an Encyclopedia Galactica that is constantly evolving and growing. An open source with a knowledge of the worlds of the universe would be available to all.
35:05These 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.
35:29And these guys, too. We who flower in darkness.
35:51Perhaps a little bit of a lot of words about.
35:56After once we're understood, perhaps from the end of this little world toBadди Park.
36:01Yes.
36:02I write a story about the feeling of the universe the whole world has been in theirachs and is in-lustrated case.
36:09It's absolutely just that we wish for it all.
36:14What about a civilization far more advanced than ours?
36:25There may be worlds with engineering on a scale that dwarfs our proudest achievements.
36:31There may be cultures that disassemble other planets in their system
36:35and reassemble them around their world to make a ring,
36:39buying them more room and more resources.
36:44Well, their future looks bright.
36:58But the poor beings of these worlds have only a one in three chance of making it through.
37:06What is that?
37:07Could this be their attempt to solve a solar system-wide energy crisis?
37:16They depend on solar power, but their star is only a feeble red dwarf,
37:21incapable of providing direct energy for their multi-planetary civilization.
37:25Maybe they've used up all their fuel.
37:30So they're building a shell to surround their star and harvest every photon of sunlight.
37:35How would we frame our own entry in the cosmic encyclopedia of possible worlds?
37:55Perhaps even now, someone has written it for us.
38:00A planetary dossier garnered from our television broadcasts or from some discreet survey mission.
38:07They might summon up the index of blue worlds in our province of the Milky Way
38:11until they came to the listing for Earth.
38:15What would they think of us?
38:17We have long watched the stars and news about whether there are other beings who think and wonder about us.
38:32In a cosmic setting, vast and old, beyond ordinary human understanding,
38:37we're a little lonely.
38:39Fifty percent, huh?
38:46That's all?
38:50I know a way we can up those odds.
38:54It's about taking what science is telling us to heart.
39:09This is the dream of cosmos, and this is the story that science is telling us.
39:19Our universe began some 14 billion years ago,
39:47when matter, energy, time, and space burst forth.
39:54And the darkness was cold, and the light was hot.
39:59And the union of these extremes gave shape to matter, and there was structure.
40:09There were great stars, hundreds of times the mass of our sun.
40:14And these stars exploded, sending oxygen and carbon to the worlds to come,
40:22and adorning them with gold and silver.
40:25And in their deaths, the stars became darkness.
40:34And the weight of their darkness vanquished the light.
40:41And new stars were born from their death shrouds.
40:44And they began to dance with each other.
41:02And now, they were galaxies.
41:04Galaxies make stars.
41:23Galaxies make stars.
41:23Galaxies make stars.
41:44Galaxies make stars.
41:46Galaxies make stars.
42:05Galaxies make stars.
42:07came alive, and that star stuff became aware, and that life was sculpted by the
42:21earth and its struggles with the other living things,
42:27and a great tree grew up, one with many branches, and six times it was almost
42:35felled, but still it grows, and we are but one small branch, one that cannot live
42:44without its tree, and slowly we learn to read the book of nature, to learn her laws,
42:54to nurture the tree, to become a way for the cosmos to know itself.
43:05And to return to the stars.
43:35You
43:38You
43:42You
43:44You
43:46You
43:48You
43:49You
43:51You
43:53You
43:55You