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00:00Ever since the dawn of humanity, the skies have influenced every part of our lives.
00:10They have helped us to navigate.
00:13For our ancestors, that was their neighbor.
00:17To build.
00:19The pyramids aligned precisely towards true north.
00:23And to find the very idea of time itself.
00:28When the sun crosses the horizon, boom, you know you've been waiting one year.
00:34To explain the movements of everything above us, we populated the cosmos with gods and monsters.
00:45The sky was understood as a kind of stone tablet on which the gods inscribed their messages.
00:52But as we looked deeper into the heavens, we turned away from belief in a mythical universe to a radical new way of thinking.
01:04These phenomena cease to be linked to supernatural gods and instead become natural.
01:10This is the story of humankind's obsession with the skies and the ways our ancestors made sense of the universe.
01:22This is the story of how we move from a world ruled by supernatural beings to a cosmos revealed by scientific astronomy.
01:36This is the story of seeing other worlds and finding our true place among them.
01:46This is the story of our ancient skies.
01:51What the earth is.
02:16Today's technology allows us to see the universe in ways that were unimaginable even a few
02:28decades ago.
02:35We can observe far-off galaxies millions of light years away, analyze the chemical composition
02:44of distant planets, and even witness the birth of stars.
02:54We know that the moon is orbiting the Earth at 2,000 miles per hour, and that the myriad
03:03of pinpricks of light in the night sky are giant burning suns, perhaps each with its own
03:09set of planets.
03:14The sky is no longer a mystery in the way it was to generation after generation that
03:19came before us.
03:21And yet, when we look up at it with the naked eye, we are still filled with the same awe and
03:32wonder, they must have felt hundreds, even thousands of years ago.
03:45For our ancestors, there was no separation between Earth and sky.
03:51Together, they formed a cosmos that we shared with the supernatural beings that we believe
04:00were an integral part of its working.
04:06Mythology and religion are almost essential ways of explaining the cosmos.
04:12In ancient Egypt, the sky was personified by the goddess Newt, who curved her body of stars
04:20over the Earth.
04:23And the moon was associated with the gods Thoth and Khonsu.
04:31These supernatural beings also inhabited the stories we told about how the universe itself
04:38came to be.
04:41We explain things we can't understand through using stories because none of us really can
04:48comprehend how the universe started.
04:54Our earliest surviving creation myth dates back almost 4,000 years to the ancient Babylonians.
05:04It's called the Enuma Elish.
05:13The Enuma Elish tells the story of a colossal battle between Tiamat, the primordial goddess
05:19of the sea and the god Marduk.
05:26Marduk is described in extraordinary terms.
05:29He's got fourfold vision.
05:31He's got the aura of ten gods.
05:34He's unfathomable and unvisualizable in his splendor.
05:40Marduk took up the mace and held it in his right hand.
05:48Marduk took up the mace and held it in his right hand.
05:50Marduk took up the mace and held it in his right hand.
05:55Marduk took up the mace and held it in his right hand.
06:20Tiamat and Marduk took up the mace and locked in combat.
06:32Tiamat opened her jaws, but with his merciless mace, Marduk crushed her skull.
06:47The battle between Marduk and Tiamat explained the creation of the earth and ocean, the sky,
06:57and everything in it.
07:02It divides the universe into a top and a bottom.
07:05We have the sky and the earth.
07:08And as part of the epic and as part of Marduk's role in it, he creates the stars and the constellations.
07:14He fills the sky with all the things that are observed in it.
07:21Today, we can still get a glimpse of the cosmos as the Babylonians saw it.
07:29From the oldest world map ever discovered, etched in clay over two and a half thousand years ago,
07:46it shows the earth as a flat disk floating on the ocean.
08:02The Babylonians imagined their flat earth at the center of the universe with everything in the skies revolving around it.
08:19Belief in a flat earth was common to many civilizations across the world.
08:28From the far east of Asia,
08:33to Africa,
08:36and the Americas.
08:41From the point of view of our ancient ancestors,
08:44a flat earth made perfect sense.
08:48We know the earth is a ball and it's spinning once a day.
08:52But the thing is, that's not obvious.
08:54If you go out without really thinking about that and just look at these motions,
08:58it feels like the earth is flat and it feels like the sky is wheeling around you.
09:04We can imagine that the skies must have been an endless source of wonder and mystery.
09:16A place to be admired and interpreted.
09:22And no matter how far back we go in our human story,
09:26we find evidence of our obsession with the heavens.
09:33Nestled deep within the hills of northern Spain are the caves of El Castillo.
09:46Here, over millennia,
09:48Stone Age artists decorated the walls with hundreds of paintings.
09:54Dr. Jesus Gallego is an astrophysicist,
09:57but he has spent years studying the images that line the walls of these caves.
10:04Some of them are as old as 40,000 years.
10:09If this is correct, we would be right now in front of the oldest paintings of the world.
10:21I am surrounded by about 30 hands.
10:28We estimate that 20 belong to women and 10 belong to men.
10:34I love to consider the possibility of these people just living the contour of their hands.
10:45To live something for us, the people of the future.
10:49Dr. Gallego believes that whoever painted these pictures recorded the things that were most important to them.
11:01Our ancestors were people that were living very close to nature.
11:06So it's not a surprise that these people reproduced animals at the walls of the caves.
11:18Hidden away in one corner of El Castillo are a set of paintings that as an astrophysicist, Dr. Gallego finds particularly intriguing.
11:27Some people believe that here we have a representation of an astronomical motive, which is very important, which is the Milky Way.
11:37A sequence of faint stars all together and making one single body.
11:46Other paintings here could also have an astronomical association.
11:50Some of the current researchers identify here a sequence of astronomical events that could be related with the moon phases, with the different days of the month.
12:06This is one of the best links that we can find in the cave related with astronomical phenomena.
12:14These are the earliest paintings yet discovered that could depict the heavens.
12:21In times when we relied on the natural world for our survival, reading the skies could give our ancestors the edge.
12:41If you go out under the night sky every night and look around, you eventually become familiar with the patterns in the sky, just like you do in your neighborhood.
12:52You know where the trees are, where the bank is, or where the mountains are.
12:58And this is even more true for our ancestors, for ancient peoples.
13:03They were familiar with those stars.
13:04That was their neighborhood.
13:08Our ancestors would have seen the sun rising and setting in the same directions every day.
13:22And use the positions of sunrise and sunset to orient themselves.
13:33But even when the sun went down, the stars still helped us find our way.
13:41When we look up at the sky, all the stars appear to be circling.
13:45They're wheeling around a point fixed on the sky itself.
13:54We call those the celestial poles, the north and south celestial poles.
13:58And all the stars appear to move around them.
14:01By locating these fixed points in the night sky, our ancestors could find their bearings.
14:10But the regular motion of the heavens also made us conscious of something completely fundamental to how we organize our lives.
14:20Time.
14:22There are three basic cycles in astronomy if you're outside looking up at the sky with your naked eye.
14:29One of them is the day-night cycle, 24 hours.
14:37The next one is how long it takes the moon to go around the Earth.
14:45It goes through a cycle of phases from new to half full to full to half full again and back to new.
14:52So that gives you a way of measuring something like one month of time.
15:00The third one is how long it takes the Earth to go around the sun.
15:03And that's a year.
15:06Using the sun, we established a solar year of 365 days that encompassed the changing seasons.
15:14If you set up a distant landmark and line yourself up with the sun at, say, the midwinter solstice,
15:21when the sun crosses the horizon behind there, you mark that day.
15:27Then when the sun crosses the horizon the next day, it's a little bit off and a little bit more and a little bit more day after day.
15:34Then it starts to move back over the course of the year.
15:38And right when it rises behind that landmark again, boom, you know you've been waiting one year.
15:48All over the world, some of the oldest monuments created by human hands were built to track the solar year.
15:58The earliest examples are markers on the landscape.
16:08Like Wordy Yuang, erected by Aboriginal peoples in Australia up to 11,000 years ago.
16:15A series of pits dug in the ground at Warren Field in Scotland, 10,000 years ago.
16:28And the 7,000-year-old stone circle of Napta Playa in Egypt.
16:48Over centuries, these simple markers could become colossal structures.
16:55Some of which have survived to the present day.
17:03Stonehenge is perched at the top of Salisbury Plain in the south of England.
17:08It is one of the most famous monuments on the planet.
17:11Building this monument 5,000 years ago was a Herculean task.
17:21The largest stones at Stonehenge are up to 30 feet long and weigh up to 50 tons.
17:28Some of them were brought by ancient Britons from the Perselle Hills in Wales, 150 miles away.
17:36Nobody needed to transport those stones. They did so because those stones had some vital quality that was needed at Stonehenge.
17:45These are fantastically complex exercises.
17:51The effort required to build Stonehenge shows just how important it was.
17:57People were investing vast resources to create a centralized gathering place for the entire island.
18:03Stonehenge was a feast site for possibly the whole of Britain.
18:12People would know a year in advance when the feast was going to be.
18:16But this wasn't just a place to come and feast.
18:20People traveled vast distances to carry out ritual activities here.
18:27It seems this was a place to worship the sun.
18:30There would have been all sorts of rituals there to encourage the power of the sun to return life to the land in the middle of the winter.
18:41Stonehenge is aligned to mark sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter solstice.
18:49A kind of giant solar calendar to mark the longest and shortest days of the year.
19:00This connection between religion and solar alignment can be seen across the world.
19:07The Great Pyramid of Giza is the only remaining wonder of the ancient world.
19:23It is located on the banks of the Nile in Egypt.
19:34The Great Pyramid was built over four and a half thousand years ago as a tomb for the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Khufu.
19:43It is the centerpiece of a complex containing three giant pyramids.
19:50And the people who built these pyramids took great care in making sure that they were aligned to the four cardinal points.
20:00When we look at the pyramids today, we can see very clearly that they are aligned precisely towards true north.
20:11So north, east, south and west are almost exactly correctly referenced.
20:17The ancient Egyptians calculations were so exact that the pyramids are aligned with the points of the compass to within one-fifteenth of a degree.
20:31The fact that the ancient Egyptians took such pains to align the pyramids so accurately suggests there must have been a greater meaning.
20:40We know at the time of the great pyramids that there is an increased interest in the sun.
20:50That's made quite explicit in the titles of the pharaohs.
20:54For the first time, the pharaoh is described as the son of Ra, the sun god.
21:00So it's interesting that the relevance of solar alignment could be tied in directly to the importance of the king as the child of the sun.
21:08In the world of ancient Egyptian religion, the sun was embodied by the god Ra.
21:18The Egyptians imagined him in a boat that he sailed across the sky each day.
21:25And they also told stories that explained where he went when the sun set.
21:30In Egyptian religion, Ra dies every night and he goes through a nocturnal journey into the underworld.
21:39One of the functions of the Egyptian priesthood was to prepare for and celebrate the rebirth of Ra, the sun at dawn.
21:49Ra's importance to the ancient Egyptians can be seen in the celestial alignment of the pyramids of Giza.
21:59But how did builders achieve such an astonishing level of accuracy over four and a half thousand years ago?
22:09It's easy to think that ancient people didn't really know how to do any of this stuff.
22:15But in fact, they understood the way the sun moved. They understood the way the shadows moved.
22:19They had the knowledge of astronomy and geometry and engineering that was fine for doing this sort of thing.
22:29They were able to find the directions of north, south, east and west pretty accurately.
22:33And all you need is a long stick, a plumb bob and a hammer.
22:44This long stick is called a gnomon.
22:46And if you stick it in the ground straight up and down, it will cast a shadow due to the sunlight.
22:52Yeah, it's not bad.
22:56Now that we have our gnomon in the ground and it's straight up and down, it's casting a shadow due to sunlight.
23:01Now all we have to do is mark the end of that shadow several times over the course of the day.
23:07That's going to make an arc on the ground as the sun rises and sets.
23:11And that's what's going to help me find east and west.
23:21Once we have the arc in the ground representing the length of the shadow over the course of the day,
23:25we can take a piece of string and tie it to this gnomon, move out a certain distance and then just use that to draw a circle in the ground.
23:34That circle will intersect the arc in two spots, draw a line connecting those two points, that points east and west.
23:43Experts believe this is how the ancient Egyptians used the sun to align the pyramids of Giza to north, south, east and west.
23:55Across the world, every civilization that was moved to build major religious monuments made them with celestial alignments.
24:13The Aztecs tended to orient their main temple to the east facing west, especially for Tenochtitlan's great temple.
24:28The two shrines on top of it were aligned so that on the equinox the sun would rise directly between them.
24:35We can see other similarly aligned monuments on that east, west, north, south model in India.
24:49Southeast Asia in Cambodia.
24:52The great temples of Angkor.
24:55Huge site.
25:05These were civilizations separated by thousands of miles and centuries in time that evolved completely independently of one another.
25:21And yet, they were all using astronomy to build celestially aligned monuments.
25:26To navigate.
25:29To navigate.
25:33And even tell the time.
25:37But astronomy didn't just influence our architecture.
25:41It also inspired us to create treasures of exquisite beauty.
25:45At the Halle State Museum of Prehistory in Eastern Germany, there's an artifact that could be our earliest astronomical instrument.
25:58It is known as the Nebra Sky Disc.
26:02Discovered in 1999, it is believed to have been made over three and a half thousand years ago in the heart of Bronze Age Europe.
26:10Made from bronze, overlaid with gold.
26:14The disc has been interpreted to show a variety of objects in the night sky.
26:19It now sits permanently behind glass.
26:23But Dr. Harold Meller has used this precious, perfect copy to study its secrets.
26:29There you see 32 stars.
26:33And a full object in which it can handle the sun or the moon.
26:39And a single object in which it can handle the moon.
26:43And especially about seven stars in which it can handle the Pleiades.
26:48By lining up these horizon arcs with a sunrise on specific days of the year, it could be used as a kind of solar calendar.
27:02Here is the 21st, the 6th, the Sommersonnwende.
27:09The sun goes on this day up and down here.
27:12And the sun goes on the 22.6th, 23.6th, until the 21st, 12th, the shortest day of the year.
27:25The ship is a completely new quality.
27:29It is a religious symbol.
27:31It is a symbol for the sun god.
27:34It is a symbol for God.
27:35And it shows that the sea is now from a rational object of knowledge and irrational object of mythology and religion.
27:46The Libra Skydisc shows how a culture without writing could use pictures to record astronomical observations.
27:52But 2,000 miles away, one of our greatest civilizations would use the written word to take astronomy
28:03to a whole new level.
28:10It all began in a place often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization, ancient Mesopotamia.
28:19When we talk about ancient Mesopotamia, we are referring to a geographical region that's
28:31currently covered by Iraq, Syria, and parts of Turkey.
28:34It's the region that is around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
28:40And that's actually where the name comes from.
28:43Mesopotamia is Greek for the land between rivers.
28:51Within the region of ancient Mesopotamia was the famous city of Babylon.
28:58It was the Babylonians who gave us our earliest known scientific observations of the skies,
29:05starting over 3,000 years ago.
29:07They were the first to systematically record observations about the planets and the stars,
29:15about the motion of celestial bodies, and to try to correlate them to more familiar events
29:22that happen in the human sphere.
29:28Many of these recordings have survived to this day.
29:31They're kept here, at the British Museum in London.
29:45They are written in cuneiform, an ancient form of writing that dominated in this part of the
29:50world for centuries.
29:55Cuneiform is a system of writing predominantly on clay, using a wedge-shaped stylus to produce
30:04wedge-shaped signs, and these signs can make up words.
30:10Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform texts have been found by archaeologists, but the knowledge
30:15to decode them is relatively recent.
30:19Even today, there are very few people in the world who can read them.
30:24Professor John Steele is one of these few.
30:28The problems were the first to really get interested in making detailed, precise, and regular observations.
30:34They were looking for eclipses.
30:36They were looking for the motion of the moon past various stars, the motion of the planets
30:40past stars.
30:42This is a very interesting collection of lunar eclipse observations.
30:47The compilation extends for over 400 years, from the middle of the 8th century down to just
30:52before 300 BC.
30:54And you can see here, it's divided up into a grid, like a table, like a modern spreadsheet.
30:58And within each cell of the table, we have a report of a lunar eclipse.
31:05These records were added to from generation to generation, enabling Babylonian astronomers to look
31:15at patterns and cycles in the skies over centuries.
31:19As a consequence of that, they were the first people to attempt to analyze these things mathematically,
31:26to make precise and detailed and accurate predictions.
31:31Contained in these tablets is the very birth of modern astronomy.
31:36So really on both the observational and the predictive or theoretical side, Babylon is where it all
31:42starts across the world.
31:49The Babylonians believed that by using astronomy to understand the skies, they could interpret
31:55the desires of the gods.
31:57The celestial bodies, whether they were stars or planets, were thought to be the writing
32:04of the gods.
32:05And the sky was understood as a kind of stone tablet on which the gods inscribed their messages.
32:11If they could read these divine messages, the Babylonians could take appropriate action
32:18in the mortal realm.
32:25An eclipse, for example, was a very dangerous phenomenon that required the king to be hidden
32:31away and a substitute put in his place for a few months until the danger was perceived
32:35to have passed.
32:38This need to look to the skies for help in making important decisions can be seen all
32:43over the world.
32:51In Central America, another of our great civilizations became skilled astronomers to better understand
32:58the will of the gods.
33:02We can pick up traces of Maya culture going back to the second millennium BCE.
33:07The Mayas created the most sophisticated writing system of the pre-Columbian Americas.
33:19They wrote on their pottery.
33:23They wrote in sculpted hieroglyphs on monuments and on stairways.
33:28These inscriptions survive on Mayan documents across parts of modern-day Mexico, Guatemala,
33:38Belize and Honduras.
33:43We also have records that the Maya wrote books on a paper made from the ficus tree.
33:51Almost all of these have been lost over time.
33:55Whether they decomposed in the humid Central American climate or were destroyed by marauding
34:02Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.
34:09But at the Saxon State Library in eastern Germany, locked away in a room known as the
34:16treasure chamber is one of only four Mayan books left in the world.
34:22It is known as the Dresden Codex and archaeologist Dr. Christian Prager has studied it for years.
34:33This book here comes from the 12th or 13th century but was used until the arrival of the Spaniards.
34:41The Dresden Codex is the most complete of the four surviving books written by the Maya.
34:48It shows how the Mayans used the skies to influence decision-making in their everyday lives.
34:56The Dresden Codex was a book that was used by Maya priests to give advice to people, for
35:01example, which is the best day to give food to a specific god or when is the best day to
35:07go to hunt and on which day will there be rain and so on.
35:17The Codex contains a number of sections which relate directly to the skies and their religious
35:22significance.
35:24They believed in a lot of gods and they had specific gods for the reign, for the royal power,
35:35for the death and so on.
35:39The moon goddess is the seated lady here with the black hair with a figure on her back.
35:58This is a depiction of a sun eclipse.
36:00It always has a black and white area and the sun eclipse is hanging from a celestial band.
36:12As well as providing ritual and religious information, it also gives us a clear window into the world
36:18of Mayan astronomy.
36:23The astronomical observations in the Dresden Codex are very exact.
36:28They can be compared to our knowledge from today.
36:33Just like the Babylonians, the Maya compiled tables of complex astronomical observations.
36:39The astronomical information that we have in the Dresden Codex are mainly on Venus cycles
36:51and the eclipse cycles or the lunar and solar eclipse.
36:56This is the most important thing.
37:00Venus was particularly important to the Mayans.
37:05Its presence in the sky had the possibility to predict warfare.
37:10And by watching Venus closely, the Mayans were able to make a discovery about it that eluded
37:16other civilizations.
37:21One of the fascinating things about Mesoamerican astronomers is that they figured out that Venus
37:26was a single entity.
37:30Whereas in much of the world, people thought that it was an evening star and a
37:34morning star.
37:35And they were two separate beings.
37:38But Mesoamericans figured out that there was a cycle where it returns to the same spot
37:42on the landscape.
37:48The calculations for the Venus cycles can be seen here in the dots and bars that the Mayans
37:53used to signify numbers.
37:55They calculated the correct day when there was a Venus as morning star, when there was a
38:03Venus as evening star.
38:05The phase of the Venus is 583 point something days.
38:10And they calculated 584 days.
38:13So after 13 years, there's a deviation of one day.
38:17They corrected this one one day.
38:18So according to the knowledge that we have today, these predictions of the Venus positions
38:25were very exact.
38:33All over the world, our great civilizations looked at the skies and recorded the things
38:39they saw.
38:44The Egyptians began to draw up star clocks to track the motions of selected stars.
38:52Ancient Indian stargazers wrote text detailing their observations of the skies.
38:58And Chinese astronomers created complex maps of the stars.
39:06The science of astronomy had arrived.
39:23All ancient astronomers needed ways to navigate the fantastically complex night sky.
39:32You go out at night and you look up in the sky and you see the stars.
39:35And those stars stay in that same fixed pattern night after night after night.
39:43Those patterns gave our ancient ancestors a way to create memorable landmarks in the sky.
39:52Today, we know them as constellations.
39:56A constellation is a group of stars.
39:59That's what the word means.
40:00And so we tend to see the stars in these patterns.
40:04We look across the sky.
40:06For example, there's Ursa Major, the big bear.
40:16Or Orion, the hunter, which looks enough like a person with their arms raised.
40:20Leo, the lion, kind of looks like a lion seen from the side.
40:31And so a lot of different cultures recognize that if they're familiar with lions.
40:41But not every culture saw the same shapes in the stars.
40:47Constellations have more to do with patterns that have had cultural or other types of significance
40:53for the various cultures and civilizations who have noticed these patterns throughout human history.
40:58Chinese astronomers saw a monkey, a snake, and a dragon.
41:11Native Americans saw a beaver, an owl, and a wolf.
41:16And the Aztecs saw practical things from their everyday lives.
41:25What we call the Pleiades, the Aztecs called Tiancuizli, which is the marketplace.
41:31And what we call Orion's belt and sword was seen as a fire drill.
41:41Today in the Western world, there are 88 officially recognized constellations in the night sky.
41:50But most of us are familiar with a much smaller number of them.
41:55They are the ones that have been grouped together into what we now call the Zodiac.
42:04We recognize 12 official Zodiac constellations, the ones you've heard of, Libra, Taurus, Gemini, and all of those.
42:14The Zodiac was established by Babylonian astronomers around two and a half thousand years ago.
42:22And it's the same Zodiac that exists to this day.
42:29But picking 12 constellations from the countless patterns in the sky
42:33wasn't just a flight of fancy.
42:36There was a serious scientific reason behind it.
42:40As the Earth goes around the Sun over the course of the year,
42:43it appears that the Sun is moving in a line around the sky.
42:47We call that line the ecliptic.
42:50And the constellations that it passes through, those are the Zodiac constellations.
42:55The 12 Zodiac constellations provided Babylonian astronomers with a virtual grid system in the sky.
43:10They used this grid to accurately identify the locations of all their observations.
43:18This enabled the Babylonians to take the science of astronomy to a whole new level.
43:26What the Zodiac did was it allowed them to organize information in a new way.
43:31From about the 6th and 5th centuries BC onward, we start to really see advanced mathematical astronomy
43:39being carried out by scholars, astronomers and astrologers in ancient Babylonia.
43:47They were able to build a mathematical model of the cosmos and to predict the movements of stars and planets.
43:55But while their astronomy was scientific, their writings show that they still believe that everything in the skies was moved by gods and goddesses.
44:07This sort of systematic observation and extrapolation that we find in these texts
44:12is a kind of testament to the assumption that the gods were responsible for what we saw in the sky.
44:20And that the divine was inseparable from the natural sphere.
44:26But the rise of a new civilization was about to completely revolutionize the way we understood the cosmos.
44:37Almost 3000 years ago, the peoples of Greece and the Aegean Sea were emerging from a dark age.
44:503.
44:51Many countries of Greece and the world were discovered.
44:52But the world was a place they shared with supernatural beings.
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45:18into a constellation of stars, and the sun was driven across the sky each day in a fiery chariot.
45:28It was clearly the custom to explain the movements of the stars and planets through stories about gods and goddesses.
45:39These divine beings populate the great epic poems of early ancient Greece.
45:44Like other ancient people, the Greeks didn't regard the heavens as existing in some other dimension.
45:56Their stories tell of a shared world in which gods and mortals live alongside each other.
46:05Yet only the gods could freely plunge into the depths of the ocean, or make their home on the highest mountain.
46:15To humans, the heavens were out of bounds.
46:21Any mortal trying to reach the skies was in danger of incurring divine anger and certain downfall.
46:29And perhaps no Greek myth is a better example of this idea than the story of a man called Daedalus and his son, Icarus.
46:44Daedalus.
46:48Daedalus flew ahead like a bird.
46:53He urged the boy to follow and showed him the dangerous art of flying.
46:58The boy began to delight in his daring flight, and drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher.
47:15His nearness to the sun softened the wax that held the wings, and the wax melted.
47:32that held the wings, and the wax melted.
47:40He flailed with bare arms, but could not ride the air.
47:47Even as his mouth cried his father's name,
47:51it vanished into the dark blue sea.
48:03It would be more than 2,000 years before man risked
48:06the wrath of the gods, and again took to the skies.
48:11But even as Icarus's fabled feathers touched the water,
48:14the ancient Greeks had already set sail
48:17to trade and colonize lands far beyond their own.
48:24Skilled sailors, they ventured overseas
48:27in search of new opportunity.
48:32As they did so, they increasingly came into contact
48:36with other cultures.
48:41They took the alphabet from the Phoenicians.
48:51They took artistic influences from the Egyptians.
48:54And from the Babylonians, they took astronomy.
49:07The Babylonian astronomy is a really strong current
49:10that flows into the Greek sort of archaic culture.
49:14There's the planetary tables,
49:17the recording of planetary observations
49:19that influence really strongly the way that Greeks
49:22understand astronomy and do astronomy.
49:28Armed with astronomical knowledge from the Babylonians,
49:31the Greeks began to reinterpret
49:33the way they viewed the cosmos.
49:35They weren't just satisfied with observation and prediction.
49:40They wanted to know why the things they saw in the sky
49:43moved the way they did.
49:44One man is often credited with being the person
49:49to provide the biggest change
49:51in our understanding of the cosmos.
49:53His name was Thales.
49:56Thales of Miletus is the person
49:59we tend to call the father of philosophy.
50:02He shifts the way in which Greeks
50:05think about asking questions about the natural world.
50:08Thales lived in the 6th century B.C.
50:14He was from Miletus,
50:16a Greek settlement on the shores of modern Turkey
50:18that had direct access to the ideas
50:21and knowledge of the East.
50:26He is credited with being the first person
50:29to question the belief
50:30that the cosmos could be explained through mythology.
50:32For Thales and his fellow philosophers,
50:37every observable thing in the cosmos
50:39had to have a rational, scientific explanation.
50:44They believed this was as true for things in the skies
50:47like the movements of the sun and the moon
50:49as it was for things that happened on Earth.
50:53He stops asking questions about individual phenomena.
51:08This earthquake, that storm, this lightning bolt.
51:17And instead asks questions about phenomena,
51:21earthquakes, lightning bolts.
51:23storms.
51:27In the process, these phenomena
51:30cease to be supernatural
51:32or linked to supernatural gods
51:34and instead become natural.
51:38It's something that happens naturally.
51:42This was a pivotal moment
51:44in our scientific understanding of the universe.
51:48It was now possible to believe
51:51that everything we observed in the skies
51:53was part of the natural,
51:54not the supernatural world.
52:02What's amazing is we have such an incredible shift
52:06from the dark ages to this period
52:09when we have the birth of philosophy,
52:11the birth of science.
52:12This was the dawn of a new era in human history
52:18where we would change the way we view the world around us,
52:25the skies above,
52:28and everything in them
52:30forever.
52:33We have the story of just a little bit of impact on us,
52:38and we're looking forward to the facts.
52:39You mean,
52:42we're going to be able to face Chevy,
52:43under literal service of somebody,
52:43and we're going to be able to face any history,
52:48to go back to Columbia,
52:48and raise the information on one spot.
52:49And we're going to bear the boy
52:51back to you in the chat because we didn't say thataczy Eli,
52:51and us thanks to Jack Corey.
52:52We've been waiting for the event,
52:54here for a while,
52:54chapters have been about 17 to 1,
52:56and
52:57the misfortune.
52:58A walk in in the universe.
52:59This was the FPS.
52:59Transcription by CastingWords