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This program is not science fiction.

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It is a report on science's very real search today for the existence of life on other worlds.

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A search by microscope examining the smallest particles of matter in nature,

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by telescope viewing the largest objects in space,

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a probe into distant galaxies and star clusters,

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looking with the enormous eyes of the optical telescopes,

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and listening with the electronic ears of the radio telescope for signals from outer space.

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And eventually this search will be carried on by man himself through interplanetary travel.

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The elements that exist here on Earth and the chemistry of our world are the same as on the most distant star.

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If the atom, one of the smallest particles of matter, and the galaxy,

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the largest mass in the visible universe are governed by the same physical laws,

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then life might well have evolved from the hydrogen atom in space.

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It continued to the development of the human brain and may have repeated a similar process

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unnumbered times in the hundreds of billions of worlds abounding in the cosmos,

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making the probability great that intelligent creatures beside Earthman, people the universe.

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On just the beginning of this search for life on other planets,

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the American taxpayer is spending two billion dollars in probes of Mars alone.

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Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Harold Urie says of the cost of the space program,

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some people say that we can't afford the space program,

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but I say the Greeks couldn't afford the plasma,

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and the Egyptians couldn't afford the pyramids,

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and middle ages couldn't afford the great procedural superiority.

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We could have always spent this money, as they say, for something else,

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but you know we can't afford the space program.

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It may be proved that life existed on Mars or ever did exist on Mars.

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In my opinion it would be one of the most horrendous discoveries of this century.

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We are not alone.

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The straight talk tire people.

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Here now your narrator, Edward P. Morgan.

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The fixed stars in our firmament have, through the ages,

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given man a feeling of security.

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We have always wanted to believe that we have our feet firmly planted

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on a solid earth with a protective heaven above.

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But science has continually whittled away at this idea.

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For some time we have known that our earth, in reality,

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is only a changing ball of rock and soil, water and air,

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held together by a tenuous gravity,

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spinning and whirling in space around our sun.

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And even as a planet we are not very special,

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being only one of nine in orbit around the mother sun.

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Our sun itself, a star and only a small middle aged one as stars go,

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is a kind of lost child on the outskirts of its galaxy,

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which we can see in the sky as the Milky Way.

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It is only one of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy,

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which is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies,

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all of which are in constant motion.

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If we are not unchanging in space, neither are we eternal in time.

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Our sun, five billion years old, will, in another five billion years or so,

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burn itself out, and in doing so expand and absorb all its planets,

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as countless other stars have done before.

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Our sun's only real distinction that we know of thus far,

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is that it has people whirling around it.

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The question is, might this have happened elsewhere in the universe,

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or are we alone?

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It was recently discovered that stars and gases in space

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emit natural radio waves, which can be picked up and amplified by radio telescopes.

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The Jodrell Bank radio telescope in England,

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the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia,

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and this one at Arrasibo in Puerto Rico, can be called man's largest ears.

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The bowl of the telescope, a thousand feet across,

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made of half-inch wire mesh, acts as a reflector,

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able to focus even extremely weak radio signals from space.

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In searching for life on other worlds,

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the theory is that intelligent civilizations in the universe

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would use natural radio frequencies as a means of communicating with one another.

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By listening to signals from interstellar space,

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intelligent codes could be distinguished from the patterns of natural radio waves.

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Radio astronomer of Cornell University and director of the Arrasibo Ionospheric Observatory,

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Dr. Frank Drake, conducted Project OSMA,

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the first search for intelligent life in space by radio telescope.

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Some years ago, it was suggested by Professors Morrison and Kikoni at Cornell

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that there might be other civilizations in space attempting to send us messages.

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We use very sensitive and ingenious detecting devices

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to search for intelligent signals amongst static which comes to us from the interstellar space.

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Well, in 1960, we made a short search for such signals.

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With existing telescopes, such as the 85-foot telescope at Greenbank,

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using the 21-centimeter line frequency,

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and we looked at... there was time, in fact, to look at only two stars,

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the ones we picked, of course, with the two nearest stars, which are like the sun.

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The stars toss cede, and the constellation of Cetus the whale,

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and epsilon arrhythmia, and the constellation of arrhythmia.

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We found no evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence signals.

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And now we must realize that this was an extremely limited search,

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and the fact that we found nothing should not discourage us

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or cause us to think that any future search is going to fail.

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One can estimate that a search which has a good chance of succeeding will take perhaps 30 years.

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But if one is going to make a realistic search, this is what is required,

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and anything less than this is really not worth the effort because the chance of success is so small.

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Surely the results of the detection of extraterrestrial signals

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are going to be one of the most exciting things that ever happened.

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While some scientists in the discipline of astronomy

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pressed the search for intelligent life in the distant stellar regions beyond our solar system

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with the big ears and eyes of the radio and optical telescopes,

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some, perhaps more down-to-earth investigators,

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feel they would be making an historic discovery by a less ambitious find.

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These men are called exobiologists.

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They are looking for microbiologic forms of life,

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lesser than intelligent man, and perhaps higher than the lowly virus,

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something between the organic molecule and the bacteria that might have evolved outside the Earth.

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The most likely candidates for such a search are the planets Mars and Venus,

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Earth's nearest neighbors in the solar system.

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The Mariner spacecraft has been our principal vehicle for unmanned planetary exploration.

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The planetary program is carried out by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

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operated by the California Institute of Technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Dr. William H. Pickering is the director.

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Mars and Venus, of course, are the two closest planets to the Earth.

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In some ways we know more about Mars than we do about Venus,

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because Venus is always covered with clouds.

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We do not believe we have ever seen down to the surface of Venus.

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That is with a telescope from the Earth.

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Whereas in the case of Mars, we usually see the surface of Mars.

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Mars, on the other hand, is a planet which astronomers for many years have compared with the Earth.

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The size is a little smaller than the Earth.

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It happens that the day on Mars is almost exactly the same length as the day on the Earth.

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The year is about twice as long as the year on the Earth.

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The seasons change in the same manner that they do on the Earth.

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In other words, the spin axis of Mars is tilted about the same way that the axis of the Earth is tilted.

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All of this has led astronomers to compare Mars with the Earth in many ways.

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And of course the one comparison which one must always make is,

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what about life?

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Is Mars a suitable planet for life as we know it?

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It is feasible.

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And what we know about life on Earth, that life could exist on Mars.

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Dr. Richard S. Young, Chief of the Exobiology Division of NASA's Ames Research Center.

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Life on Earth probably arose as the result of a very natural sequence of events.

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We think we know what the primitive atmosphere of the Earth was like before there was any life on the Earth.

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We think we know what types of energies were available on the primitive Earth before there was any life on Earth.

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The biological evolution took over and the atmosphere was changed rather drastically until we have the sort of atmosphere we have on the Earth today.

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And we have the tremendous diversity of life that we have today.

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A subsequent result over the next, say, three billion years of biological evolution.

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In fact, then, just about any primitive planet during its early history should have undergone a similar sequence of events.

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They were formed obeying the same laws of physics and chemistry that should have had the same type of primitive atmosphere

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and probably underwent chemical evolution much the same way the Earth did.

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Now what we need is proof of that.

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If we can find life on one planet, St. Mars, then it is very probable that elsewhere within our own galaxy

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there must certainly be planets comparable to Earth with life forms comparable to Earth.

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The optical telescope has been the principal tool of astronomers for studying the stars and the planets from the days of Galileo centuries ago.

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The 200-inch mirror in the Palomar Observatory Telescope in California can be called man's largest eye.

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It can bring into view the farthest observable objects in the universe, called quasars.

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Points of light believe to be billions of light years away and moving away from us at incredible speeds.

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Another kind of telescope is the 26-inch refractor or direct-view telescope,

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like this one at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

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To find planets comparable to Earth, revolving around stars comparable to our Sun,

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Dr. Kai Strand, scientific director of the observatory and his former colleague Dr. Peter Van Decamp of Swarthmore College,

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used a telescope of this type.

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They wanted to verify the argument that planets are abundant in the universe.

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In 1963, Van Decamp announced the discovery of a planet orbiting a neighboring star,

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the first planet ever to be detected beyond our solar system, although it has never been directly seen.

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That depends what you mean by seen.

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Harvard astronomer Carl Sagan explains how the existence of this planet was deduced.

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The second nearest star system after the Sun is called Barnard's Star,

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named after an American astronomer, E.E. Barnard.

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And the motion of this star, of course, the sky, is not a more or less uniform line on the background stars,

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as you might expect, but instead oscillates.

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And the wiggly path is due to the presence of a dark companion.

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We don't see the dark companion, but we can quite reliably deduce its presence

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from the wiggles in the motion of this star.

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Let's suppose this is Jupiter and this is the Sun, and the two of them are moving, of course, to space together.

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However, Jupiter is also going around the Sun, and when Jupiter is on the side of the Sun,

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its gravitational attraction pulls the Sun a little bit that way.

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When it's on the other side of the Sun, it pulls the Sun a little bit that way.

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Also, as the Sun goes from space, it has, in addition to its ordinary motion that way,

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it has, let's say, an up-and-down wiggle due to the motion of the invisible Jupiter.

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And so the wiggle tells you the presence of Jupiter, and not only that,

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it tells you its mass and it tells you how far away it is.

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The existence of planetary systems around stars other than our own Sun

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is a scientifically established fact, and if, as we know, there are hundreds of billions of such Suns in our own galaxy alone,

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some leading astronomers dedicated to the idea that life does exist elsewhere

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have calculated the possible number of stars whose energy might support life.

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Astronomer Dr. Harlow Sheppley, Director Emeritus of Harvard College Observatory,

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who first measured the size of our galaxy, now retired to his New Hampshire farm,

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discusses cosmic matters with two young friends, Georgia and Emily Huffley.

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How many stars are there?

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In the sky, the whole sky, how many stars are there?

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Well, you can see a thousand stars, and you go out some clear dark night, a thousand stars,

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make or die stars, we call them, but if we put a telescope into action,

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we get deeper and deeper into space, and the further out we go, Emily, more stars we find.

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And so now, how many stars are there?

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Well, I've measured these galaxies and these stars and these shooting stars and so forth,

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and you know what I find out? That there are just billions of these galaxies.

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Now, a billion, you know what that billion is, it's a thousand million.

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Well, there are more than a thousand million of these galaxies in the sky,

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and each galaxy has more than ten thousand million stars, and so there's just lots of stars in the sky.

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I'll give you the number of few, try to remember.

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The number of stars is more than a hundred thousand million billion.

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Stars are not for everybody, see, if you want stars, you can have a lot of them.

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I don't know whether there's anybody living on those stars, not on the stars,

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it can't be on the stars, a sun, you can't be on the sun.

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Why?

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It's fire.

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Yes, it's too hot, that's it, much too hot.

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But planets, yes, you can live on it, that is here on this planet we can.

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You know any other planet where we might find life?

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Now?

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You ever hear of Mars?

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The planet Mars, that might have some life on it.

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It might have, and we'll have to get more and more observations, and then we'll come out.

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My guess is that there are more than a hundred million planets that have living things on them.

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By living, I mean like trees and grass and people of that kind.

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I think at least that many, and I'm a very conservative person.

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Our galaxy's wheel shape, you know, is flattened like this, but has a big center,

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and it has that hundred thousand million stars scattered all the way through it.

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It's rotating too, we've measured that, it's turning around.

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Long time and turning around, I'll tell you how long, it'll take about two hundred million years

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to make one complete turn around in our galaxy, where we are.

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Any other questions?

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How are the planets on?

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Oh, how are planets formed?

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Oh, that's a hard job, but I'll tell you, we think that once, long ago, long, long ago,

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there's a whole lot of dust and gas in space, and it contracted, it came together,

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and it got hotter and hotter, it came together, and it left off some chunks that went whirling around,

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and those were the things that became planets.

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So we had the sun, you see, built out of a shrinking nebula, we call it,

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out of that shrinking nebula, its sun, and it threw off these particular little chunks,

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little compared with the sun, and those little chunks developed into being the planets.

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We have the earth, once was gaseous nebulosity, we call it, it once was gas,

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and it shrunk down, and now it's hard, see how hard it is.

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We are not alone. We'll continue with Sciences Search for Life on Mars

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and the exploration of life's origin on earth after this message from the BF Goodrich Company.

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If you have little feet, big feet, bold feet, bold feet, casting feet,

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blasting feet, flantic feet, romantic feet, splashing feet,

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the F Goodrich is always coming up with innovations in footwear,

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innovations like the posture foundation wedge we build into the heels of sneakers

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to take the strain off foot and leg muscles,

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innovations in cold weather boots insulated to keep feet warm even at 25 below zero,

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innovations to protect workman's toes.

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As all kinds of fashion footwear, we make just the before of it.

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All from BF Goodrich, a company known for being pretty fast on its feet.

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Here again your narrator, Edward P. Morgan.

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If you were riding the nose cone of a rocket to the moon,

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this is what you would see as you approach the lunar surface for a landing.

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These pictures were made by television cameras in Ranger 9,

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the unmanned American picture taking expedition to the moon in March of 1965.

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Since then, thousands of spectacular close up pictures of the moon's surface

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have been returned by Surveyor One, which soft landed on the moon in June of 1966.

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Pictures from the probe of lunar orbiter in August of 1966

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showed our planet as seen from the vicinity of the moon.

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This representation of the lunar landscape shows us what a man might see from the moon,

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a bright sun in a sky black as night due to the lack of light diffusion by an atmosphere,

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and the earth visible in the lunar night hanging in its black sky like an oversized moon itself.

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Surveyor One and lunar orbiter returned much valuable information,

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and they have also shown us what we have known the moon to be,

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a body without atmosphere, without water, without life.

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Not unlike the moon in some aspects is Earth's neighbor in the solar system, the planet Mars.

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When in July of 1965, the Mariner 4 spacecraft completed a successful Mars flyby

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after a journey of 8 months and 325 million miles passing within 6,500 miles of the planet.

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21 pictures of the Martian surface were returned to Earth, including one of the most remarkable scientific photographs of this age,

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Mariner's 11th picture of Mars.

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Many scientists felt that this picture settled once and for all the century-long controversy over Martian canals.

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In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to have seen canals which he thought could be evidence for intelligent life on Mars.

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As late as 1908, the American astronomer Percival Lowell confirmed the sightings.

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The spacecraft Mariner was too far away in its flyby to be able to show decisively what exists on the Martian surface.

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But most scientists agree that if life does exist there, it will not be intelligent but of a very low order.

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Of course the early astronomers saw canals and saw a lot of other things, but Dr. Richard DeOrder has Ames Research Center.

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We no longer think canals really exist on Mars. We think they're primarily optical illusions.

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And then aren't something that the Martians constructed to transport water from the pole to the equator and keep the deserts wet and all that sort of thing.

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Mars has, although it's a harsh environment by biological standards, Mars has an atmosphere.

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It has a very rare atmosphere. The smaller planet has a lower gravitational field and its atmosphere is probably something like 1,100 or perhaps even closer to 1,000 of the total pressure on the surface of the Earth.

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It also contains water. Life can't exist without water, but the fact that Mars has water is terribly significant.

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Now unfortunately, from a biological point of view, the amount of water in the atmosphere of Mars is very slight.

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It's about 1,000 to 1,000th of the amount that one would detect in the Earth's atmosphere with a similar observation.

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There are other features of Mars that we're reasonably familiar with. Astronomers have been observing it for something approaching 100 years now.

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They've known that there are light areas and there are dark areas. The dark areas are assumed to be, at least by the early astronomers, were assumed to be vegetation.

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Light areas were assumed to be deserts. There are also pole caps on Mars which have been shown to be water.

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However, although they're pretty extensive, the total amount of water in these pole caps is very slight.

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There's probably nothing more than a layer of frost. However, these pole caps do recede seasonally.

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In the spring, the pole cap recedes. At the same time the pole cap is receding or disappearing, the dark areas are getting darker.

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Implying, at least to the early astronomers, that, well, water is becoming available now from the pole caps and the vegetation in the dark areas is literally inhaling the water and is flourishing during the spring.

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We really simply don't know enough about the intimate detail of the surface of Mars to critically analyze any of these visual phenomena.

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All we can do is speculate about them. And so far, the best of our speculations has failed to demonstrate that life on Mars must be ruled out.

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In fact, the best of what we know still leaves well within the range of possibility the idea that life may well exist on Mars and would be well worth the search, if you will.

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I feel that in the search for extraterrestrial life, there are three approaches. One first to the one that you named to go to Mars and see whether there's life there.

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The other one, which Frank Drake has for some time tried out, listening to radio communication from outer space.

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The third one is the one that we are working on here, retracing the path by which life appeared.

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Dr. Cyril Panam Paruma, chemist at Ames Research Center, is searching for answers to extraterrestrial life by studying the chemical evolution of life on Earth.

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From the information we have today, we know that the Earth is four and a half billion years old. Let me put that down as one of our starting points.

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Four point seven billion years is the exact date given. Life as we know it, or the first evidence of life in the fossil record, is about three billion.

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Now, biology or the Darwinian theory takes over from here. See, to find the life evolving into a whole variety of organisms.

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We know that mammals are around a hundred and sixty million, and then so on, we come to the evolution of man, finally.

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What went on before this, from the time the Earth was formed, or even further back, from the time the solar system was formed?

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This can be described as chemical evolution. We know that the solar system is about five billion.

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And then, if you go backwards in time, you come to the origin of the universe, which is greater than ten billion.

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Some for you, that's thirteen, some at twenty, but we know definitely it's more than ten billion years.

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Now, we have some starting points to go on. We know that ninety percent of the universe is hydrogen.

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So, the hydrogen, then, by a series of reactions during the birth of a star, gave rise to the other elements of the periodic table.

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Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on. In other words, you would have thermonuclear reactions taking place within a star.

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So, the idea of chemical evolution, then, is the gradual evolution of hydrogen, the initial matter of the universe,

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to give the elements of the periodic table, to give the constituents of the early Earth atmosphere, the methane, ammonia, and water.

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Simple chemistry deltas of the carbon will be in the form of methane. The nitrogen will be in the form of ammonia, and the oxygen will be in the form of water.

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So, the early atmosphere of the planet would have been made up of methane, ammonia, and water.

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From here on, we visualize what happens. The early atmosphere being acted upon by lightning, or the water that lies from the sun or heat,

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producing organic molecules till the early oceans became something like a primordial soup.

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So, from a primitive atmosphere, we are hoping to go to this stage when the two molecules that are important to living things,

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the nucleic acid and the protein, will form. First molecules capable of replication.

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So, it's a stepwise process. It appears to be a beautiful plan going all the way from the hydrogen atom till the time you get to the intelligent human being.

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So, there, it is a coherent story. It is something which appears most logical. It is rational.

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So, the discovery of life on Mars to people studying the origin of life will be the greatest thing.

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As a matter of fact, in my mind, the search for extraterrestrial life is only part of the study of the origin of life.

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This is the scientifically broader question, the origin of life in the universe.

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And going to Mars is a unique opportunity that we have, perhaps the one only opportunity that we have of showing this to the entire life on Mars.

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And especially if we can show that its origin is different from the origin of life on Earth, or it is independent,

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then we will have a very hard thing on certain expression of uniqueness in life.

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New York Times Science Editor, Walter Sullivan, author of the book on which this program is based,

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raised this question with Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Dr. Harold Urey.

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Dr. Urey, a lot of the discussion on the origin of life boils down to the question of whether there are other worlds, other solar systems.

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You believe there are.

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It is my belief that if you have conditions such as we have on the Earth, life will spontaneously appear.

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I don't know how long it takes, maybe a million years, maybe a billion years, but sometimes life as we know it will appear.

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Every indication is that the properties of the elements and the most distant stars that we look at are the same,

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as those that we have on Earth.

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The physical universe is the same everywhere.

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That is our conclusion.

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The laws are the same as far as we go, as we understand them.

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And this of course means that the chemistry of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, the four abundant elements in living things,

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the chemical properties of these elements will be the same wherever we are in the universe.

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And therefore we expect that they will have the capacity to evolve into what we would call living organisms, no matter where we go.

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Now, we don't expect that they will be the same.

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Dr. Philip Morrison is Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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The evolution of a complex being, certainly of man, and of any other vertebrates, right, is a very chancey thing.

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You can show that there were many, many choices that had to be made just to choose this end on rather than that.

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And if it hadn't been that way, it wouldn't have gone completely differently.

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So from there, you look at the place you've come to and you say, well, it was impossible to get here.

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And they say, therefore, it will never happen again in the same way. That's the general view.

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I mean, I mean, if you look at the, that's right, but if you look at the results, it's quite different.

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If I look, go down to the museum across the park here, I can see very beautiful skeletons, impressions, fossil impressions,

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and even impressions of the fleshy parts in the soft stone from a beast.

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I'd forgotten his name.

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Precious sword.

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Precious sword?

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Yes.

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You played that's right, all right.

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Who is really a reptile and was extinct for some hundreds of millions of years,

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but who swam in the oceans in a pelagic way as a marine reptile.

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And he looks for all the world like a large torpedo-shaped object about eight or ten feet long.

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Now then, you look at a tuna, a big tuna.

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He looks very similar.

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Not at all a reptile, but a fish.

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Quite a difference and really a rather more primitive object.

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And finally, you may look at the dolphin.

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It was a mammal whose ancestors were in land mammals, air-breathing fellows like ourselves,

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and we still breathe every two weeks or minutes, comes up.

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But all of these beasts were beautifully adapted by flection, by many, many, many generations of careful fleshy and all kinds of genes,

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to be able to swim very well, make a living in the scale of eight or ten feet long by catching fast fish in the sea.

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There are many, many paths to get to Central Park, but when you get there, you've arrived the same place.

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If you look at many paths that you've taken, every turn, every streetlight,

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you certainly can't predict when I start out exactly how I'll go,

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but I'm pretty sure what the end is going to be, because that end is a set of statuette, and I persist when I'm there.

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If there's any chance for a form to evolve on the surface of the planet,

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I'm a very complex, rich form of life that's going to happen.

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Now, if this is true, if it seems reasonable to suppose that there's intelligence on many other planets, what will these fellows look like?

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I don't know, I think that's more like us than one might believe,

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but less like us than the common run of what we would regard as human, something in between.

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In other words, I don't think there'll be 50-foot skeletal figures with long, towering, with long, wirey arms.

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I don't think there'll be round, fierce, four-inches diameter.

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Simply for evolutionary reasons.

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Simply for evolutionary reasons. You've got to have certain size, not too big, not too small.

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You've got to be big enough to have this complicated machinery in it. It can't be too small.

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It can't be too big, or it's very hard to manage on a planet that if anything might become a composition we're talking about.

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But as to inconsequential things, I don't know.

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Now, some people go for it. Some people say, yes, the number of fingers will not be five.

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I think it'll be something like fingers. But I would be willing to believe there might be four, there might be eight, there might even be sixteen.

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But I don't think there'll be five hundred, I don't think there'll be one.

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We are not alone. We'll continue with the story of the race for planetary exploration and the UFO controversy after this message from the B.F. Goodrich Company.

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Meet Jeffrey Masters, nuclear physicist. When it comes to splitting atoms, nothing stunts Jeffrey.

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But when it comes to buying tires, everything does.

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Jeffrey is snowed by tire talk.

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Cross brace treads four ply rayon, second line, third line, fourth line.

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00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:16,000
And faced with tire sizes and tire prices, he draws a blank.

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00:39:16,000 --> 00:39:20,000
So Jeffrey has been sold some pretty peculiar tires.

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00:39:20,000 --> 00:39:25,000
I think I did this. I think I did this.

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00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:30,000
Jeffrey, you know there's got to be an easier way to buy tires.

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Come on over to B.F. Goodrich. We've got a brand new way of doing business. We call it straight talk.

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We know you don't know a lot of technical tires talk, but you know a lot about how you drive, right?

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Okay, take this, our B.F. Goodrich tire value calculator.

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Go on, work it yourself. Tell it how you drive.

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Now turn it over. It tells you what kind of B.F. Goodrich tire is best for you.

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You don't have to be confused anymore. You see just what you're getting, just what you're paying for.

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00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:07,000
Jeffrey, what do you think of B.F. Goodrich straight talk?

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And, perfectly speaking, I explicitly endorse you.

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Yeah, thanks a lot, Jeff. Tell your friends.

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B.F. Goodrich, the straight talk tire people.

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00:40:20,000 --> 00:40:25,000
Here again, ABC News correspondent Edward P. Morgan.

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Sometime in 1973, a spacecraft will take off from Earth. Its name will be Voyager.

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Voyager.

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The Voyager, a new kind of space vehicle, will begin a trek to the planet Mars.

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The first of a series of missions that will eventually carry sophisticated life detection devices to the Martian surface.

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The success of a Voyager mission would be a scientific breakthrough in our unmanned planetary program.

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It will be our first attempt to soft land an instrument package on another planet.

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Looking beyond Voyager to 1977, 1979, and the 1980s, space engineers are already at the hard, practical model stage of designing devices that are still emerging from the minds of scientific dreamers.

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One such device designed for a Mars life search is the automated biological laboratory called an ABL.

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One concept of it has been developed by the Aeronutronic Division of the Philco Corporation.

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It would operate remotely and automatically on Mars, so says space research engineer William Hostetler.

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There are several processes that have to be performed. First, you have to obtain physical samples of the surface of Mars, physical samples of the soil, because that's where the organisms will congregate if they are living organisms.

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I might comment, evidently, that we are concerned more with the lower forms of life, the molecular forms of life, rather than telephones and horses and so forth.

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We are prepared to take pictures of these things if they happen to be there.

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The ABL is divided really into three basic integrated subsystems. One of these is the sampling subsystem that is used to obtain the soil samples from the surface of Mars.

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At the very bottom of the ABL, directly underneath, there is a system that uses a brush and vacuum system to obtain samples of the Martian surface directly under the ABL.

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Also, there is a core drill system that drills into the surface about 10 feet to obtain subsurface samples in case the water availability or other conditions make it more likely as a place for Martian biological life.

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A second system picks up samples around the ABL with a sampler as you see here, which is located on a linking to the main body and will pick up samples generally around the ABL location.

418
00:43:33,000 --> 00:43:54,000
A third system is used for getting samples from a considerably further distance and in particular selected areas that the visual survey system has pointed out as being particularly desirable because possibly they are warmer than the surrounding spots or they have a different appearance that might appear to be vegetation or something of that nature.

419
00:43:54,000 --> 00:44:07,000
So, a sampling line is deployed ballistically, fired out like a small rocket, carrying this line to some distance up to possibly a thousand feet from the ABL location.

420
00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:26,000
A sampler, then similar to the one that works in the vicinity of the ABL, is carried up on an elevator latched onto a trolley on this line and deployed out to the desired spot to obtain the surface sample, returning and delivering it to the operating parts of the ABL.

421
00:44:26,000 --> 00:44:36,000
These samples are then processed and brought into the interior of the ABL for chemical processing prior to reading out the experiment.

422
00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:46,000
The chemical processing equipment is located generally in the central area of the ABL in the form of 13 chemical processors located circumferentially around the central core.

423
00:44:47,000 --> 00:45:02,000
Certain supplies, water, certain gases are stored in tanks around the center of the ABL. Other chemical reagents are stored in ampules which hold individual quantities in this area that surrounds the processors.

424
00:45:02,000 --> 00:45:20,000
These ampules are put into cartridges like this so that they feed to the outer end and can be picked up by the processing by the transport device which internally then moves them to the proper location to conduct the chemical analysis.

425
00:45:20,000 --> 00:45:35,000
After the analysis is completed, the sample is then transferred to the instruments to read out the experiment results. The data from these are then processed internally and transmitted through the high-gain system back to Earth.

426
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:47,000
If the scientific and engineering problems that must be solved to accomplish this feat are not overwhelming, the political obstacles may indeed be insurmountable.

427
00:45:47,000 --> 00:45:58,000
Congress will soon have to make the most important decision on space policy since President Kennedy first won approval to commit us to the space age.

428
00:45:58,000 --> 00:46:10,000
The future of planetary exploration will hinge on the outcome of congressional action that will begin with hearings now set for February 1967.

429
00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:28,000
Because of the need for long lead times, planning policy and funds must be committed now, not only for the Voyager program in 1973, but for the life detection missions to Mars and Venus to come in the next decade or two.

430
00:46:29,000 --> 00:46:44,000
Whether the Soviet Union has its equivalent of our Voyager ready to shoot for Mars or Venus is no longer in question. In Russia, cosmic expositions and public displays of space vehicles are commonplace.

431
00:46:44,000 --> 00:46:53,000
Interest in planetary exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life is at a high pitch among scientists and the public alike.

432
00:46:54,000 --> 00:47:05,000
If our race for space with the Soviet Union were to be judged by who will first land a man on the moon, the contest at this stage might be considered a dead heat.

433
00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:19,000
But if the second lap of this race is one of planetary discovery on which depends the exciting scientific trophies of the foreseeable future, then the United States is estimated far behind.

434
00:47:20,000 --> 00:47:30,000
Soviet cosmonauts, male and female, become the honored protégés of the state, symbols of Soviet communist achievement.

435
00:47:31,000 --> 00:47:45,000
Not so burdened by war costs, the Soviet budget, according to a recent analysis, has allocated to planetary exploration from five to ten times as much as the United States.

436
00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:57,000
And as a result, the great discoveries concerning our neighboring planets, Mars and Venus, will be made by the Russians unless early steps are taken to escalate the American effort.

437
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:11,000
In the field of radio astronomy too, the Soviets had been more consistently searching for extraterrestrial signals and recently reported having observed beacons of an interstellar civilization.

438
00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:21,000
Although later observations by American scientists negated their claims, the Russians never completely revised their earlier contention.

439
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:32,000
However, in the area of the extraterrestrial life search, they have held the door open to international cooperation, says astronomer Carl Sagan.

440
00:48:32,000 --> 00:48:51,000
They have made a recommendation that a worldwide international cooperation be established for a further going search of large numbers of stars and galaxies to see if there is any intelligible radio communication being sent.

441
00:48:51,000 --> 00:48:57,000
And who knows if possible that such a collaborative effort might be established.

442
00:48:57,000 --> 00:49:09,000
Previous collaborative efforts, for example, the IGY between the United States, Soviet Union and other countries have been enormously productive scientifically and in fact in other ways.

443
00:49:09,000 --> 00:49:17,000
A persistent furor in the past few years is the one over the alleged sightings of flying saucers.

444
00:49:17,000 --> 00:49:34,000
The number of officially reported sightings of UFOs, unidentified flying objects, has risen from 399 in 1963 to more than 1500 in the last 18 months according to U.S. Air Force figures.

445
00:49:35,000 --> 00:49:44,000
A cult of enthusiasts has developed promoting the theory that these phenomena are visitations from intelligent beings in outer space.

446
00:49:44,000 --> 00:49:52,000
And according to a recent Gallup poll, about 5 million people have reported seeing UFOs over the years.

447
00:49:53,000 --> 00:50:07,000
Organizations with names like Flying Saucer News Club of America and National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, which has doubled its membership of 5,000 in the last year and a half,

448
00:50:08,000 --> 00:50:24,000
have sprung up complete with annual conventions, recruiting drives and publicity bulletins arguing for acceptance of the idea that flying saucers must be dealt with as emissaries far out diplomats from space.

449
00:50:25,000 --> 00:50:39,000
The scientific community, even though scientists committed to the belief that other intelligent life does exist somewhere in the cosmos, has greeted the flying saucer theory in the main with open skepticism.

450
00:50:39,000 --> 00:50:45,000
Physicist Dr. Philip Morrison of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

451
00:50:45,000 --> 00:50:57,000
This is a social phenomenon, a phenomenon of journalism and television. If you look in the records of newspapers 100 to 120 years ago, exactly the same things were seen, exactly the same stories were given.

452
00:50:57,000 --> 00:51:11,000
They're much more frequent now. And what has happened is the infernal invention of the phrase, the flying saucer. However, most of the things they see are, as we all well know, planets and lights in the sky and aircraft and so on.

453
00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:32,000
And I think it's one of the most striking evidences, if I may exploit this opportunity, that we don't really have a deep spread of understanding and education in science as a fact that people are not able to cope with the phenomena they see in any other way than inventing what I agree is a possible theory, but a very much more improbable theory than most of the things it describes as fact.

454
00:51:33,000 --> 00:51:52,000
And I think there's a sneaking suspicion also in literature of the flying saucer that this is just some terrestrial object of secret kind, which is surely another social phenomenon in response to the enormous importance given to secrecy and military preparations in secret, which is the characteristic feature of the last 20 or 30 years.

455
00:51:52,000 --> 00:52:06,000
And if you take these two things out of it, then you don't have a great deal left, except a lot of interesting phenomena seen by people, some of which are new and quite unexplained and would be nice to find out more about, but a great many of which are rather familiar things, seen under unfamiliar circumstances.

456
00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:18,000
We are not alone. We'll continue with the religious and philosophical implications that would result from the discovery of life on other worlds after this message from the B.F. Goodrich Company.

457
00:52:23,000 --> 00:52:32,000
How come the typical American motorist puts off buying tires until he can't put it off any longer?

458
00:52:40,000 --> 00:52:44,000
Maybe it's because the typical American tire store is like a foreign country.

459
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:56,000
A whole new world with a strange and different language. When you ask for help, you need an interpreter to help you with the answers. And when you finally get the bell.

460
00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:04,000
Now you don't have to let the tire buy and get you down. Go see B.F. Goodrich.

461
00:53:06,000 --> 00:53:10,000
At B.F. Goodrich, we speak your language. Straight talk.

462
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:27,000
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463
00:53:27,000 --> 00:53:33,000
And it comes up with the right B.F. Goodrich tire, the lowest price tire for your driving needs.

464
00:53:34,000 --> 00:53:41,000
Straight talk. How about it, typical American motorist? Ready for a little straight talk?

465
00:53:46,000 --> 00:53:50,000
B.F. Goodrich. The straight talk tire people.

466
00:53:51,000 --> 00:54:10,000
What if one day we do actually establish radio communication with some other civilization out in the cosmos? The possibility cannot be dismissed. The prospect has captured the imaginations and stirred the emotions of scientists and laymen alike.

467
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:31,000
One of the stunning questions raised by the possibility of life on other planets in other solar systems is this. If proved, what will it do to theology? Man has been inclined to conceive of himself as cast in an earthly but divine image of God or gods.

468
00:54:32,000 --> 00:54:51,000
What if God supervised the beginnings of other civilizations on other planets first? Do the Martians, if any, have their equivalent of Adam and Eve? Did somebody else out there discover long before Darwin the Darwinian theory of evolution?

469
00:54:52,000 --> 00:55:05,000
These and countless other related religious questions, of course, must await the results of these new Christopher Columbus voyages of science through the solar system.

470
00:55:06,000 --> 00:55:19,000
Dr. Morrison, for centuries, and really ever since man evolved on this planet, he thought of himself as being central, as being unique, as being the supreme representation of life.

471
00:55:19,000 --> 00:55:35,000
Supposing we discover that this is not the case, we know we're not central, suppose we discover we're also not really as superior as other beings elsewhere. What is going to be the effect of this on our concept of our place in the universe and of ourselves?

472
00:55:35,000 --> 00:55:48,000
Everyone who tries to think himself as having a view of the world and seeing his place in it, whatever his attitudes, will agree, I think, that above all, you have to be true.

473
00:55:48,000 --> 00:56:01,000
If we want to find out if it turns out we have to adjust to this, certainly we can do so. I think we'll in some ways remove what must be an essential loneliness of this position, an arrogance, a sense of responsibility, which perhaps is not all ours.

474
00:56:01,000 --> 00:56:30,000
Is it not true that, at least in the Western world, in the galactic community, as far as the Ural Mountains, Europe and North America, there's been a lengthy tradition of saying that all that is most valuable in the view of life, in the view of state, in the view of the individual, in the view of morality, a great deal of that comes, of course, from our religious development?

475
00:56:30,000 --> 00:56:43,000
But an equally large, or almost equally large contribution, comes from the study of societies which are absolutely gone, with whom we never again communicate, the most important being the world of Greece.

476
00:56:43,000 --> 00:56:56,000
The Greek playwrights, the Greek philosophers, the Greek historians and statesmen are their thought and what they did is on the lips and on the pens of most of the learned people in the world.

477
00:56:56,000 --> 00:57:13,000
All we have is containing about 10 or 15,000 books, which is a small library easily held in a good-sized office. Those are all the Greek texts about everything that we will ever have, and yet scholars and students have gone over and over and over to those and they're terribly valuable.

478
00:57:13,000 --> 00:57:30,000
Now we've extended that in our time, because most of us are by studying other cultures with their rich traditions, the culture of the Orient, the cultures of the Orient, the cultures of America, old America, the cultures of West Africa and so on, each of which have big contributions and give us a lot of understanding, a lot of insight.

479
00:57:30,000 --> 00:57:51,000
And I don't think we make a real human culture until we have all this fed in, and I think on top of that, enriching it by having the story equally complex and much longer, but in less detail, which we kind of think we'd have to have from some remote society, could do anything but add tremendous challenge and enrichment and satisfaction to those people.

480
00:57:51,000 --> 00:58:07,000
Indeed, I think if I put myself into their place, that's the reason they would do it, because then it would be added to their libraries too. What our history has been, and that must be the only thing they can guess from science is the complexity of playwriting or histories of kings or folklore.

481
00:58:07,000 --> 00:58:19,000
You can get their general pattern, but the detail is too rich. You can easily show them mathematically. There's just too many possibilities. So I think that they will also be happy to have one more library coming into their signals, and that's what I'd like to say.

482
00:58:20,000 --> 00:58:21,000
Mr. Walder Sulliman.

483
00:58:22,000 --> 00:58:28,000
What a wonderful planet is our world, and how far it may be to anything else like it.

484
00:58:29,000 --> 00:58:48,000
We are reasonably believed there are other planets, blessed with our advantages, a kindly, stable parent star, a well-placed orbit, a suitable atmosphere, dry continents for advanced life forms, great seas within which their primitive ancestors evolved.

485
00:58:49,000 --> 00:59:05,000
But the fragile green hue of life appears only here and there on our planet, a scene from space. Its hold is tenuous. If inbred passions overcome reason, we can now render the planet uninhabitable.

486
00:59:06,000 --> 00:59:18,000
Is that the fate of all technological societies? It is up to us, on this wonderful world of ours, to prove that it is not so.

487
00:59:19,000 --> 00:59:26,000
We are not alone.

488
00:59:26,000 --> 00:59:39,000
Has been brought to you by B. F. Goodrich, the name that spells quality in tires, chemicals, plastics, footwear, products for homes, and for the rest of the world.

489
00:59:39,000 --> 00:59:59,000
This has been a presentation of ABC News.