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The Earth, home to millions of species.

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But what might live beyond?

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Astronomers have discovered thousands of planets outside our solar system.

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They believe there are trillions more.

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If life exists on only a fraction of them, then the universe must be alive.

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They believe that all living things have the same needs.

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To feed.

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Reproduce.

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And evolve.

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By applying the laws of life on Earth to the rest of the universe,

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it's possible to imagine what could live on alien worlds.

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The Earth, home to millions of species.

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Being an astronomer, it's sort of like being a human conversation piece.

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There's two questions you always get. The first is what's inside a black hole.

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And the second, which is one people are really interested in, is what about life elsewhere in the universe?

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And then, you know, almost always we come down to this place.

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Area 51 is a secret U.S. Air Force base.

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Its existence was only officially recognized in 2013.

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So what really goes on back there?

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Well, nobody knows.

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Of course, some people think they know.

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The believers, the conspiracy theorists, they think that that's where all the alien bodies are.

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All the dead aliens in the crash spaceships are taken somewhere back there.

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And they're held in refrigerators or defructonators or whatever technology you need for an alien body.

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And, you know, that's essentially where all the secrets that we're not allowed to know about are being kept.

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This is footage supposedly showing an alien body being examined at Area 51.

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But the video is a hoax.

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Perpetuating the idea that aliens are among us.

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The reason why most UFO-ology sounds like a science fiction story is, it is a science fiction story.

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But, you know, in spite of the silliness of UFO-ology, I do believe that there is other life in the universe.

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And as a scientist, I'm taken to that belief because I really believe that's where the numbers now are leading us.

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A couple of years ago, a colleague and I tried to take all the amazing data that we now have.

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And we wrote down an equation that allowed us to calculate the total number of planets out there that might have civilizations on them.

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Essentially what we found was that there were 10 billion, trillion planets out there in the right place where life and possibly civilizations could form.

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Every one of those planets is essentially an experiment.

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And for none of them other than ours to turn out with this civilization, that's pushing it quite a bit.

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If aliens civilizations are statistically so likely, why haven't astronomers found any sign of them?

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Where is everyone?

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Think about it this way. Out there in the Pacific Ocean, there's 187 billion billion gallons of water.

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Now, if I take this bucket here and throw it over, and then haul up, see what's in it.

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Alrighty, what do we see? Nothing.

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Should I take the fact that I don't see any life in my bucket to tell me that there's no life in the Pacific Ocean?

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Well, that would be crazy, right?

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There's all kinds of life out there. There's sea otters and whales and octopuses and jellyfishes and god only knows what's out there.

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They're just not in this bucket.

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That's why this is a perfect metaphor for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Every time we look at an individual star, that's like dropping a bucket in the ocean.

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We're going to have to look at a lot of stars, and we're going to have to search through a lot of data until we find the clue that leads us to another civilization.

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What sort of alien civilizations might exist in the vastness of space?

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Imagine a planet nine billion years old, twice as old as Earth.

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Old enough that a truly advanced intelligence could evolve.

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This is terror.

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It was once a fertile world.

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Now it is barren.

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But life can still thrive here in artificial zones.

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The aliens convert sunlight into glucose energy, which feeds the inhabitants of terror.

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Each box contains the brain matter of a super-intelligent being.

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In time, they've evolved not to need their bodies.

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They exist only as neural tissue.

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They never age.

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They never die.

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They're monitored and maintained by robots.

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Each is an individual.

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They're created to think as one.

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A hive mind.

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This is a hyper-advanced civilization.

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Humans are the only species to have created any form of civilization.

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Why haven't other intelligent creatures done the same thing?

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The octopus is as close to an alien intelligence as exists on our planet.

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Octopuses belong to a group called cephalopods.

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And they have evolved down a completely different pathway.

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The octopus has separate nervous systems in each of its arms.

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Each arm contains about 40 million neurons.

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Each arm can make independent decisions.

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The octopus can be said to have essentially nine separate brains.

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I kind of want to reach out and touch him.

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The octopus's brain and the human's brain are quite hard to get apart.

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But we're curious to see if he's going to be able to open them.

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Octopuses are clearly smart.

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But being smart isn't enough to form a civilization.

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The key is cooperation.

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Sharing ideas.

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Passing down knowledge from one generation to the next.

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Our culture is constantly improving.

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We keep building on each other's inventions.

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Alright.

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Take this taxi for example.

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Wheels were invented more than five and a half thousand years ago.

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Iron has been smelted more than four and a half thousand years ago.

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Vulcanized rubber has been used for tires since about 180 years.

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So all of these inventions were necessary to actually build something as complicated as this car.

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An octopus by comparison has to pretty much figure out everything for himself.

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There is no improving and building on previous solutions.

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And that's pretty limiting even if you have nine brains.

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Civilizations are like living organisms with millions of connected parts.

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It's this connectivity that allows them to grow.

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But the civilization on terror is in peril.

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Its star is double the age of our own sun.

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And as stars get older they burn bigger and brighter.

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Eventually the planet terror will be incinerated.

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So an escape plan is underway.

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To colonize another planet in the same solar system.

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Further from the star than terror.

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There's ice on this world but no atmosphere.

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It needs to be manufactured.

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This is engineering on a planetary scale.

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Giant machines melt the ice caps to release vapor and gas.

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Generating enough atmosphere to warm the planet.

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Such a massive project requires a massive amount of energy.

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Delivered directly from the aging star.

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The ability to harness energy is the bedrock of civilization itself.

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Part of what I do is to try and predict the future.

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And you can look back in history and get a lot of ideas from there.

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But there are underlying trends that we can use to some extent to see what's to come.

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Like life expectancy, wealth, population size.

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And one of the most revealing is the amount of energy that civilizations use.

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The more energy a civilization can access, the more powerful it becomes.

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That's the secret of progress.

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From the stone age until today.

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So unleashing the heat and energy in charcoal allowed us to get temperatures hot enough to smelt metals.

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To make tools and weapons.

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Later on of course we harnessed fossil fuels like coal, gas.

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Allowing the creation of vehicles that could hurtle us across the world at much higher speed than we ever had before.

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But the greatest source of energy is of course our star.

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The newer power station is the largest solar complex of its kind in the world.

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Half a million mirrors at the edge of the Sahara Desert.

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The suns over here are heliostats and they track the sun as it moves through the sky and focus all its energy down on that tower.

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And that energy goes out into the world and powers modern civilization.

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So the power of our transport, our lighting, our agriculture, very relevant for here, air conditioning.

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Basically everything that keeps us safe, working and entertained comes from electricity and more and more of that electricity is coming from solar power plants like this.

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Humans use only a tiny fraction of all the energy available from the sun.

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So 430 quintillion joules of the sun's energy fall on the earth every hour.

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For comparison that's very roughly 2000 Hiroshima bombs every second.

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How much do we use? Well humanity uses 410 quintillion joules in a year.

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So in a year we fail to use all the energy the sun sends us in a single hour.

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Imagine if we could capture all that energy and use it to power our civilization.

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What miracles could we accomplish? What places could we explore with all that?

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According to astrophysicists any truly advanced civilization will be able to harness all its energy directly from the stars.

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By this measure the civilization on terror is supremely advanced.

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It has built solar panels in space near to its star for maximum effect.

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But as the star becomes bigger and brighter it also becomes more volatile.

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A solar flare.

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Sooner or later this will be the destiny of terror itself.

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To be swept away by the power of its sun.

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The solution is to colonize the new planet as quickly as possible.

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There are no life forms here. All the work is done by machines.

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They are able to think for themselves and make their own decisions.

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They are artificially intelligent.

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If humans are to form colonies in space the groundwork will be done in the same way.

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Using robots.

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And those robots will be designed by people like Philip Metzger.

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He has spent his whole life in and around the space program.

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My father used to work in this building. He helped build the Saturn V rockets that were large enough to take humans to the moon.

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I'm Paul Lerner. This is the launch operation as manager. The launch team wishes you a good luck and godspeed.

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Thank you very much. You know it will be a good one.

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I'll never forget the Apollo 11 flight.

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I was seven years old. I was across the river during the launch watching it.

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There were helicopters flying around. People who come from all over the world.

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Coming to watch the moon launch. It was electric.

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Astronauts reported feels good. 20 seconds in counting.

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T minus 15 seconds. Guidance is internal.

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12, 11, 10, 9. Ignition sequence start.

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6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go.

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Lift off. We have a lift off.

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As it climbed into the sky you can see that long beautiful flame shimmering across the water.

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We got scared Sam. I grew a weak and farmed skirt, Sam.

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So I grew up wanting to be a rocket scientist my entire life.

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Philip became a NASA scientist.

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But rather than sticking at rocket design, he moved into robotics.

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If we ever really want to do anything fabulous in space, we need robots.

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Razor is designed to work in tough planetary environments.

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It can climb over rocks. If it gets stuck, it can get itself unstuck.

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If it flips upside down, it can flip itself over.

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In any situation it can get itself out of trouble.

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The simplest thing that we can mine on a planet is the regolith, the dirt that covers the planetary surface.

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You can extract metal from the regolith.

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You can also make ceramics that are used for insulating electrical systems.

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And you can make rocket fuel.

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But mining does take intelligence.

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You have to know where to drive, where to cut.

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You've got to keep from getting lost, get yourself unstuck.

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So it's going to take a clever machine like Razor to be able to start industry in space.

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The holy grail of robotics is self-replication.

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A machine that can make copies of itself.

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This is a spare wheel for Razor, a robot part made by a robot for another robot using space materials.

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But this is an early example of how we're evolving the robots toward a fully closed ecology of robots that can self-reproduce in space.

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Once you've got self-reproducing robots, everywhere is a place you can go.

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I don't think there are any limits.

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Without input from any life form, the robots are re-engineering a planet, making it ready for colonization.

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Now it's time to abandon terror.

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Each of the domes has been designed for this moment.

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To get into orbit.

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From here, they will travel to their new home.

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The domes have their own life support systems.

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But they're helpless against a high energy burst of solar radiation.

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Nothing is evolved to survive in the vacuum of space.

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This is as true for aliens as it is for humans.

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Michael Foll knows all about the dangers of space travel.

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In 1997, he was a guest American astronaut on the Russian Mir space station.

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During the first collision in space.

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There was an attempt by the Russian commander, Vasiliy Yemtis Krumey, to control a cargo ship that weighs 7 tons.

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And dock it without the radar, without speed, without distance measurements.

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And dock it to our space station.

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I felt the station. I didn't felt it. I saw the station move all around me and I heard a thud.

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And at that point I thought, this could be it, where I die.

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Because I'm looking at all these bolts and I was just waiting for those bolts to part.

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And to kind of rip open and just see the vacuum of space.

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And then all the fans, all the lights, all the computers failed and went silent.

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And now we're in a completely silent station that's getting cold.

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And then my ears started to pop.

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I knew we were depressurizing.

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And basically, air was leaving the space station.

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And we only had 23 minutes left to live if we stayed there and we didn't stop the leak.

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I started helping Sasha pull these cables out. Huge cables. I thought it would have taken us hours to undo.

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We did them in six minutes and we take this cap and we put it in and it sucks in.

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And he goes, pssst.

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At that point we've stopped the leak.

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And it was there in front of the window, looking at the galaxy.

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I said, well, I know it's been a really bad day, but this is an amazingly beautiful view.

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You're kind of sensing, trying to sense all of the presence in the universe.

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In total, Michael Foll went into space on six missions.

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Oops, one head going away.

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But every second spent off-world increased his dose of radiation.

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We're exposed to radiation on Earth. But once you go into orbit, now you're exposed to thousands of times more radiation.

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And that radiation now is damaging our DNA much faster.

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And the repair mechanisms that we evolved to have are not able to cope with it.

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When I came back from my space flights, they found I had like 4% of my white blood cells have DNA mutations.

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Most of those mutated cells get killed by other white blood cells in your body.

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But some of them, unfortunately, don't die. They reproduce and mutate and become cancers.

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That is a fundamental risk for astronauts.

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And if we imagine going out to stars, it could be that out of a hundred ships, only one of them makes it.

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Long-distance space travel will always be risky, even for intelligent aliens.

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There's no protection against a sudden blast of stellar radiation.

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But for those that make it to the end of the journey, this is their reward.

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A new terror.

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Rather than adapting to a different world, they have created a copy of their old world.

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Such are the benefits of an advanced civilization.

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But how long will the good times last?

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The star keeps growing, bigger and brighter, spitting out more radiation.

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Eventually, it will render the new planet as lifeless as terror.

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And then they'll need to relocate again, to another planet, further from the star.

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This is the advantage of being mobile.

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It's possible to transit from world to world, making and remaking home.

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Perhaps there's an alien civilization already headed for Earth.

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If so, should we hide from them? Or make ourselves known?

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Okay, I'll go.

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Should we hide from them? Or make ourselves known?

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Okay, let me end by saying...

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Let me close by telling you why we should begin transmitting and why we should begin right now.

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Doug Vakotch wants to open up a dialogue with potential aliens, by sending them radio messages.

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But first, he needs to persuade astronomers on Earth that it's a good idea.

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This is where it all started. The biggest radio telescope Earth had ever seen.

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There's something about being here, the awesomeness, the scale of the place.

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This is where, in 1974, we sent humanity's first message into space.

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It starts by these pulses that count out the numbers from 1 through 10.

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Then after we've shown extraterrestrials how we count, we use those numbers to describe some of the chemical elements essential to life on Earth.

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And then after that, what we look like, how many humans there are, how tall we are.

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Then after that, a representation of our solar system.

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And then it ends with a representation of this telescope itself, where the message came from.

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The pulses of the Arasebo message could be arranged into a pictogram to inform intelligent aliens about life on Earth.

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But it was a one-time event aimed at a star cluster 25,000 light-years away.

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If we'd been sending messages to nearby stars at the same time we sent out the Arasebo message, we could be getting responses today from any of thousands of stars.

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But we haven't, and so we're in the dark.

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The biggest reason we haven't sent more messages is because we're afraid.

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Because the blockbuster science fiction films show aliens coming to Earth and annihilating us.

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And so that's what we think would really happen.

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I think the most prominent challenge is the concern that some people have that transmitting intentional messages will lead to an alien invasion.

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And I think the easiest response to that is our planners have been giving off evidence of life for two billion years.

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So if there are any really paranoid aliens out there who want to annihilate any competition, they've had a long time to come here, and I haven't seen them.

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Rather than sending an occasional message into space, Doug's plan is to transmit thousands of them.

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When the Arasebo telescope is on downtime.

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With radio astronomy you can do it any time of the day. But I like to do it at night.

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Caffeine is essential for astronomers. A lot of late nights in the observations and we have to stay sharp.

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Once a month Arasebo does a survey of recently discovered asteroids.

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Quite often there's a gap, maybe an hour where the transmitter is transmitting off into space at no particular place.

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What I'm proposing is that Arasebo should use those gaps in the schedule to target nearby stars with a message in case there are any extra tracerills in orbit around that star.

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Each month we could be targeting about 50 stars that may support intelligent life. For me it's a no-brainer. I think we should be doing that.

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I think of this in terms of what's sometimes called joining the galactic club.

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What I find so strange about that analogy is that no one ever talks about paying our dues or even submitting an application.

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That's what messaging extra tracerill intelligence does. It may just be our way of making first contact.

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Thank you.

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When we reach out to other stars, when we send them our messages, in the best case scenario we get a reply back in 10 or 20 years.

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But realistically it could take thousands of years.

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So this is something that we're doing not for ourselves but for our children, for our grandchildren and even for the aliens.

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Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

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In 2018 the latest planet hunting telescope went into orbit.

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It is finding evidence of new worlds across the night sky.

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Astronomers think it's only a matter of time before some alien life forms are discovered.

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Among them perhaps, intelligent beings.

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One day we will know for sure.

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Until then we can only guess at who or what is out there.

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The next day we will know who or what is out there.

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The next day we will know who or what is out there.

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The next day we will know who or what is out there.

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The next day we will know who or what is out there.

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The next day we will know who or what is out there.

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you

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you