1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:11,000
It's August 15, 1977. Astrophysicist Jerry Elman is scanning the cosmos with his radio telescope at the University of Ohio.

2
00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:21,000
It is connected to a 100 meter long antenna used by the SETI project, whose goal is to listen to the cosmos in the hopes of discovering a message of alien origin.

3
00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:27,000
Glancing briefly at the data printout, the astrophysicist is shocked by what he sees.

4
00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:34,000
A few minutes earlier, at exactly 11.16 p.m., a strong radio signal was captured.

5
00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:40,000
Elman is so surprised that he even writes the word WOW in the margin.

6
00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:47,000
Did this signal really come from somewhere else? And if it did, from where?

7
00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:03,000
The astrophysicist is shocked by the fact that the antenna is a satellite.

8
00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:09,000
The astrophysicist is shocked by the fact that the antenna is a satellite.

9
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:15,000
The astrophysicist is shocked by the fact that the antenna is a satellite.

10
00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:21,000
The astrophysicist is shocked by the fact that the antenna is a satellite.

11
00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:26,000
The astrophysicist is shocked by the fact that the antenna is a satellite.

12
00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:31,000
The astrophysicist is shocked by the fact that the antenna is a satellite.

13
00:01:31,000 --> 00:01:36,000
The astrophysicist is shocked by the fact that the antenna is a satellite.

14
00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:44,000
To most people, the expression, unidentified flying object, brings to mind images of interplanetary spacecraft.

15
00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:49,000
However, the theory that aliens exist has met with many objections.

16
00:01:49,000 --> 00:01:53,000
Some scientists will even say that it's nothing more than nonsense.

17
00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:58,000
According to them, if we consider the vast distances that separate the stars,

18
00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:02,000
it is ridiculous to think that aliens could be visiting us.

19
00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:07,000
For instance, if we look at the star that is closest to our sun, Alpha Centauri,

20
00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:11,000
we see that it is slightly more than four light years away from Earth.

21
00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:15,000
In other words, it is as far as light would travel in four years.

22
00:02:15,000 --> 00:02:19,000
Since light travels at a speed of 300,000 km per second,

23
00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:23,000
we're talking about a distance of approximately 38 billion km.

24
00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:27,000
That would be the number 38, followed by 12 zeros.

25
00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:32,000
Even if we could imagine an alien civilization capable of traveling at close to the speed of light,

26
00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:38,000
they would take at least four years to get to our planet and another four to get back home.

27
00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:44,000
And if they decided to trade in their spaceship for a car driving down the highway at 60 miles per hour,

28
00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:49,000
our intergalactic travelers would take 120 million years to cross the same distance.

29
00:02:49,000 --> 00:02:51,000
And to do what?

30
00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:54,000
To butcher a few cows in the US Midwest?

31
00:02:54,000 --> 00:02:56,000
To kidnap a Boston postal worker?

32
00:02:56,000 --> 00:02:59,000
To gather a few samples of lavender in France?

33
00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:01,000
Let's get serious.

34
00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:09,000
We now know, based on certain criteria, that Alpha Centauri cannot have any habitable planets orbiting it.

35
00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:13,000
This means that if aliens do exist and are visiting our planet,

36
00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:18,000
they must have come from somewhere else, somewhere much farther away.

37
00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:20,000
But where could that be?

38
00:03:23,000 --> 00:03:25,000
We might be getting off track.

39
00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:28,000
It might not be as far away as we think.

40
00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:32,000
The speed of light might not be as absolute as astrophysicists claim,

41
00:03:32,000 --> 00:03:36,000
and somewhere else may turn out to be nowhere.

42
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:41,000
The universe has by no means revealed all of its secrets.

43
00:03:41,000 --> 00:03:45,000
The UFO problem raises two questions with regards to aliens.

44
00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:49,000
First of all, do intelligent life forms exist in the universe?

45
00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:53,000
Secondly, do they have the means to visit us?

46
00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:59,000
In terms of biochemistry, life as we know it is like a cake recipe.

47
00:03:59,000 --> 00:04:01,000
Certain ingredients are required.

48
00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:06,000
Professor Rene Racine is considered by many as one of Quebec's leading astronomers.

49
00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:16,000
I'm no expert, but they think that life is carbon-based,

50
00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:24,000
and only a mixture of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen could produce life,

51
00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:29,000
or the level of molecular complexity necessary to generate life forms.

52
00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:34,000
Other combinations also exist.

53
00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:39,000
For instance, silicon mixed with oxygen gives sand,

54
00:04:39,000 --> 00:04:45,000
but it's far from being as malleable and fertile as say, blood, for example,

55
00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:50,000
which is composed of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

56
00:04:54,000 --> 00:05:00,000
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen exist everywhere in the universe,

57
00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:06,000
so all we need is the right conditions for these elements to combine,

58
00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:11,000
then increase in complexity and evolve into a life form.

59
00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:24,000
Obviously, simply mixing elements such as hydrogen, oxygen and carbon together

60
00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:28,000
is not enough to spark the complex process that produces life.

61
00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:34,000
Going back to our cake recipe, tossing a couple of eggs, some flour and sugar into a bowl

62
00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:37,000
and mixing them together doesn't give us a cake.

63
00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:42,000
The mixture needs to spend a certain amount of time cooking in the oven at a specific temperature.

64
00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:48,000
In cosmic terms, the equivalent of the cooking process for this hydrogen, oxygen and carbon mixture

65
00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:51,000
is referred to as planetary conditions.

66
00:05:52,000 --> 00:06:00,000
We need to understand that the conditions required to create this biological or living soup are very precise.

67
00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:07,000
There's the time element, the stability of the planet's orbit and surface temperatures,

68
00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:12,000
and it's hard to find ideal conditions where all of these elements coexist.

69
00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:15,000
We've known that for a long time.

70
00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:20,000
It makes us realize how incredibly unlikely it was for life,

71
00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:26,000
especially intelligent life, to emerge here on Earth, and yet it happened.

72
00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:32,000
To be more precise, it's believed that a planet's surface temperatures

73
00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:39,000
must allow for biochemical reactions to take place, therefore they must remain within a certain range.

74
00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:43,000
They have to stay between water's freezing point and evaporation point, for example,

75
00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:46,000
since water is an essential element.

76
00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:51,000
And the orbit of the planet, or the object on which a life form might develop,

77
00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:54,000
must be very constant.

78
00:06:54,000 --> 00:06:59,000
Planets orbit around stars, just like Earth orbits around the Sun.

79
00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:06,000
And if the distance between the planet and its star varies over time, surface temperatures will change.

80
00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:13,000
Now you can see why we are so concerned with the effects of an increase in temperature on Earth's ecosystem.

81
00:07:13,000 --> 00:07:19,000
Even a change of one or two degrees can have a catastrophic result.

82
00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:25,000
To keep the temperature constant, it's crucial that Earth's orbit remain as circular as possible.

83
00:07:25,000 --> 00:07:29,000
Earth is always the same distance from the Sun within a one percent margin.

84
00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:32,000
That's just one example among several others.

85
00:07:33,000 --> 00:07:39,000
From our observations, we now know that when planets, or other protoplanetary objects,

86
00:07:39,000 --> 00:07:45,000
form around young stars, there is a dynamic of intense agitation.

87
00:07:45,000 --> 00:07:50,000
And it's not easy to explain how a solar system such as ours could have come about,

88
00:07:50,000 --> 00:07:58,000
in which there are eight or nine planets, if we include Pluto, whose orbits are nearly perfectly circular.

89
00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:00,000
So those are the conditions.

90
00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:05,000
And I've given you an idea of how difficult it is for all of those conditions to be present at once.

91
00:08:05,000 --> 00:08:08,000
It happened here in our solar system.

92
00:08:08,000 --> 00:08:14,000
There was a planet called Earth just the right distance away from its star for the water to maintain its fertile properties.

93
00:08:14,000 --> 00:08:17,000
Water can be too hot or too cold.

94
00:08:17,000 --> 00:08:20,000
The temperature of Earth's water may not have been ideal at first.

95
00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:22,000
The Sun may have been hotter in the beginning.

96
00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:25,000
Mars might have had a relatively high surface temperature.

97
00:08:26,000 --> 00:08:29,000
There may have been archbiology on Mars. Who knows?

98
00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:33,000
The point is, it's very difficult to meet all of the conditions at once.

99
00:08:35,000 --> 00:08:41,000
In the early 1960s, scientists were optimistic about the existence of extraterrestrial life forms.

100
00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:45,000
They used planetary conditions found here in our solar system as a model,

101
00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:49,000
believing that the same model must exist everywhere else in the universe.

102
00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:56,000
But recent discoveries of planets outside of our solar system have put a damper on their optimism.

103
00:08:56,000 --> 00:09:02,000
It seems that stable planetary systems are actually a lot rarer than we had thought up until now.

104
00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:13,000
Establishing our level of knowledge or confidence is a question of statistics.

105
00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:21,000
In the 1960s and 70s, Frank Drake came up with a relatively simple mathematical equation

106
00:09:21,000 --> 00:09:26,000
that included the probabilities of each factor required for life to emerge.

107
00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:29,000
What is the probability that a star will have planets?

108
00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:33,000
What is the probability that these planets will have a stable orbit?

109
00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:38,000
What is the probability that the planet will be far enough away from the star?

110
00:09:39,000 --> 00:09:44,000
If we want to calculate the probability of communicating with extraterrestrial life forms,

111
00:09:44,000 --> 00:09:49,000
what is the lifespan of a civilization capable of communication?

112
00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:57,000
I recall at the time, we would multiply all of these factors by the number of stars in the galaxy.

113
00:09:57,000 --> 00:09:59,000
And the answer would be a few units.

114
00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:06,000
There would only be a few habitable planets where life could develop in our galaxy the Milky Way.

115
00:10:07,000 --> 00:10:12,000
But back then, we were going on the supposition that all stars have planets.

116
00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:15,000
And now we know that's not true.

117
00:10:15,000 --> 00:10:21,000
There has been a lot of talk about discoveries of planets outside of our solar system.

118
00:10:21,000 --> 00:10:28,000
But we have to remember that the 80 or so planets that have been discovered so far

119
00:10:28,000 --> 00:10:32,000
were among 3,000 stars that were examined.

120
00:10:33,000 --> 00:10:38,000
This shows that it's not 100% certain that a star will have a planet.

121
00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:43,000
In reality, the probability is more like 2 or 3%.

122
00:10:50,000 --> 00:10:57,000
What's even worse, if we include in our probabilities the total number of planets discovered around stars,

123
00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:02,000
there are planets whose orbit is irregular or elliptical

124
00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:08,000
or whose surface temperature varies between 100 and 300 degrees Celsius,

125
00:11:08,000 --> 00:11:15,000
not over a period of millions of years, but over a period of weeks or days.

126
00:11:17,000 --> 00:11:22,000
I would say that recently, over the past five years or so,

127
00:11:22,000 --> 00:11:30,000
the consensus has been that the creation of life as it occurred here on Earth happens very rarely elsewhere.

128
00:11:34,000 --> 00:11:38,000
The optimism of Drake at the beginning was based on...

129
00:11:38,000 --> 00:11:44,000
Drake's initial optimism was based on the fact that there are over 10 billion stars in our galaxy.

130
00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:53,000
At the time, it was believed that chances were pretty good of finding stars with planets orbiting around them.

131
00:12:04,000 --> 00:12:07,000
We have since discovered a lot of massive planets.

132
00:12:08,000 --> 00:12:15,000
But according to the basic criteria, these massive planets could not have formed close to their star.

133
00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:25,000
They would have had to form far away from the star like Jupiter did in our solar system.

134
00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:29,000
Jupiter is five times further away from the Sun than the Earth is,

135
00:12:29,000 --> 00:12:34,000
so these massive planets must have moved closer to their star over time.

136
00:12:35,000 --> 00:12:38,000
At first, we wondered how that could happen,

137
00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:45,000
but after much study, we realized that it was relatively easy for a planet as big as Jupiter to evolve

138
00:12:45,000 --> 00:12:51,000
and then migrate from the position where it was formed to a new position closer to the star,

139
00:12:51,000 --> 00:12:57,000
which makes us wonder if this is possible, then why is Earth still in the same place where it is now?

140
00:12:57,000 --> 00:13:00,000
If Jupiter had moved closer to its star,

141
00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:06,000
like the other massive planets that we observed, then Earth wouldn't be here anymore.

142
00:13:11,000 --> 00:13:15,000
Now we're asking ourselves the question, why are we still here?

143
00:13:22,000 --> 00:13:28,000
It seems that Jupiter is different from a lot of the planets that we discovered outside of our solar system.

144
00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:36,000
The good news is that once all of the conditions have been met, it's easy for life to spring forth.

145
00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:46,000
In 1953, Stanley Miller, a young biochemistry student, took a sphere and filled it with the gases that were present on Earth a billion years ago.

146
00:13:46,000 --> 00:13:53,000
He then bombarded the sphere with strong electrical charges, recreating Earth's original climatic conditions.

147
00:13:53,000 --> 00:13:59,000
At the end of the experiment, Miller observed that his mixture had become enriched with an additional substance.

148
00:13:59,000 --> 00:14:03,000
Amino acids, the building blocks of life.

149
00:14:03,000 --> 00:14:09,000
Miller's experiment proved that it was possible to create life from inorganic matter.

150
00:14:09,000 --> 00:14:16,000
As for the transition from organic life to intelligent life, it was just a question of time and ability.

151
00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:24,000
To help you understand this long process, let's imagine the Earth's entire evolution reduced to the length of a 24-hour day.

152
00:14:24,000 --> 00:14:27,000
We start with the formation of the planet Earth at 12 a.m.

153
00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:30,000
Then life does not appear until 5 a.m.

154
00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:35,000
The planet takes all day to develop, and the first mollusks do not appear until 8 p.m.

155
00:14:35,000 --> 00:14:38,000
Dinosaurs don't show up until 11 p.m.

156
00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:43,000
Then our human ancestors appear on the scene at 11.55 p.m.

157
00:14:43,000 --> 00:14:47,000
On this scale, the Industrial Revolution was a mere hundredth of a second,

158
00:14:47,000 --> 00:14:52,000
and space exploration has only been taking place for three thousandths of a second.

159
00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:56,000
If we try to imagine this long process taking place on another planet,

160
00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:02,000
it is almost certain that the original life form will eventually evolve into an intelligent species.

161
00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:06,000
However, it is highly unlikely that it would lead to humanoid beings.

162
00:15:06,000 --> 00:15:09,000
Unlikely, but not impossible.

163
00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:13,000
Michio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of New York.

164
00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:21,000
Exo-biologists, that is biologists that look for perhaps intelligent life forms in other planets,

165
00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:26,000
say that there are really three ingredients for intelligence, just three.

166
00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:30,000
First is the ability to have some kind of language, culture,

167
00:15:30,000 --> 00:15:34,000
to be able to hand down communication from generation to generation.

168
00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:42,000
Second is a hand of some sort, a way to grab a tentacle, perhaps a claw, fingers,

169
00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:44,000
to manipulate the environment.

170
00:15:44,000 --> 00:15:50,000
And the third, eyeballs of some sort, some way to sense the environment.

171
00:15:50,000 --> 00:15:55,000
But that's it. I sight of some sort, some sort of grappling instrument,

172
00:15:55,000 --> 00:15:59,000
and some sort of culture, communication, language.

173
00:15:59,000 --> 00:16:01,000
Beyond that, anything goes.

174
00:16:01,000 --> 00:16:04,000
Look at the animal kingdom on the planet Earth.

175
00:16:04,000 --> 00:16:10,000
There are many animals that could, given a few millimetres, probably become intelligent.

176
00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:14,000
Octopus, for example, they have tentacles, lobsters have claws,

177
00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:19,000
mammals, if they had opposable thumbs, they would be able to manipulate the environment.

178
00:16:19,000 --> 00:16:24,000
Just on the planet Earth, we have a fantastic variety of animals

179
00:16:24,000 --> 00:16:29,000
without two eyes, nose, mouth, ears, chin, forehead,

180
00:16:29,000 --> 00:16:32,000
in the exact proportion of a human.

181
00:16:32,000 --> 00:16:37,000
Therefore, when I see a picture of an alien that looks just like us,

182
00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:43,000
I tend to think that these are simply memories of 1950s science fiction movies

183
00:16:43,000 --> 00:16:45,000
when we saw bug-eyed monsters.

184
00:16:45,000 --> 00:16:50,000
Even on the planet Earth, the diversity of life forms is fantastic

185
00:16:50,000 --> 00:16:54,000
compared to what we see in science fiction movies.

186
00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:58,000
I would be more convinced if I saw an intelligent octopus or intelligent lobster,

187
00:16:58,000 --> 00:17:04,000
I would really be quite impressed if somebody says they were abducted by an intelligent octopus.

188
00:17:05,000 --> 00:17:09,000
If anatomical shapes are infinite, then what about intelligence levels?

189
00:17:09,000 --> 00:17:12,000
Can you imagine what an extraterrestrial civilization,

190
00:17:12,000 --> 00:17:16,000
one thousand or ten thousand years ahead of us, might be like?

191
00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:21,000
We physicists believe that when you look in outer space,

192
00:17:21,000 --> 00:17:26,000
we have type 1, type 2, and type 3 civilizations.

193
00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:32,000
A type 1 civilization is perhaps a hundred, two hundred years more advanced than ours.

194
00:17:32,000 --> 00:17:36,000
They control planetary energy, anything involved with the planet,

195
00:17:36,000 --> 00:17:40,000
the weather, perhaps earthquake and volcanoes they can control.

196
00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:47,000
However, eventually they expand by a factor of ten billion to have the power of a star.

197
00:17:47,000 --> 00:17:52,000
They control solar flares, a type 2 civilization.

198
00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:56,000
A type 2 civilization can roam across the parts of the galaxy.

199
00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:01,000
They have the power of thermonuclear fusion, the power of stars themselves.

200
00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:06,000
Eventually they exhaust the power of a star and they become galactic.

201
00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:08,000
They become type 3.

202
00:18:08,000 --> 00:18:13,000
They have tremendous accesses to huge vast regions of our galaxy.

203
00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:18,000
A type 2 civilization is ten billion times more powerful than type 1.

204
00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:23,000
A type 3 is ten billion times more powerful than type 2.

205
00:18:23,000 --> 00:18:26,000
But on this scale, what are we?

206
00:18:26,000 --> 00:18:29,000
We are type 0.

207
00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:33,000
We get our energy from dead plants.

208
00:18:33,000 --> 00:18:38,000
We can only speculate what it would be to be like a planetary civilization,

209
00:18:38,000 --> 00:18:43,000
to be able to energize volcanoes and earthquakes and change the weather at will.

210
00:18:43,000 --> 00:18:49,000
If such civilizations exist in the universe, what do these beings look like?

211
00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:52,000
And how can we detect their presence?

212
00:18:52,000 --> 00:18:56,000
In the early 1960s, anxious to obtain an answer to this question,

213
00:18:56,000 --> 00:19:01,000
scientists set up an ambitious project designed to listen to space.

214
00:19:02,000 --> 00:19:07,000
It was called Project City, search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

215
00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:11,000
The idea was to use radio telescopes to listen in on the interstellar void,

216
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:15,000
in the hopes of picking up a radio signal of alien origin.

217
00:19:15,000 --> 00:19:21,000
Here on Earth, we use radio waves in practically all forms of communication.

218
00:19:21,000 --> 00:19:25,000
If extraterrestrials were living on a planet orbiting the star Zeta reticuli,

219
00:19:25,000 --> 00:19:29,000
some 30 light years away from Earth, and doing the same experiment,

220
00:19:29,000 --> 00:19:35,000
they would just now be picking up old episodes of Hawaii 5-0, or the invaders.

221
00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:39,000
City researchers had to choose a specific wavelength to listen in on.

222
00:19:39,000 --> 00:19:42,000
For convenience sake, astrophysicists decided to choose a wavelength

223
00:19:42,000 --> 00:19:48,000
that was equivalent or close to that of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe.

224
00:19:48,000 --> 00:19:51,000
So they chose 1420 MHz.

225
00:19:51,000 --> 00:19:54,000
Since then, space has been hopelessly silent.

226
00:19:54,000 --> 00:19:59,000
Apart from a few abnormalities, like the signal picked up on August 15, 1977,

227
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:04,000
which was dubbed the Wow signal, Project City has not recorded any signals

228
00:20:04,000 --> 00:20:09,000
that could be indisputably interpreted as a message from alien intelligence.

229
00:20:09,000 --> 00:20:13,000
The apparent failure of Project City has led several scientists to conclude

230
00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:17,000
that there are no advanced civilizations anywhere in the cosmos,

231
00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:20,000
a conclusion that some feel is a bit premature.

232
00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:25,000
Many scientists look at the city program and they say,

233
00:20:25,000 --> 00:20:31,000
see, we've scanned the heavens and we see no evidence of any intelligent life in outer space.

234
00:20:31,000 --> 00:20:33,000
Well, I don't think so.

235
00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:39,000
I don't think that perhaps in the next century we'll find any usable signal from outer space.

236
00:20:39,000 --> 00:20:45,000
First of all, we've only scanned perhaps 100 light years from the planet Earth in some detail.

237
00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:49,000
Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across,

238
00:20:49,000 --> 00:20:53,000
and galaxies are tens of millions of light years distant.

239
00:20:53,000 --> 00:20:57,000
So we've only scanned a small neighborhood of our galaxy.

240
00:20:57,000 --> 00:21:02,000
Second of all, we've only looked at frequencies near the frequency of hydrogen.

241
00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:04,000
That's silly.

242
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:08,000
This goes back to the person who lost his key.

243
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:13,000
A person who drops his key will often look next to a lamp post.

244
00:21:13,000 --> 00:21:16,000
But if you say to the man, why are you looking next to a lamp post?

245
00:21:16,000 --> 00:21:18,000
You dropped your key over there.

246
00:21:18,000 --> 00:21:20,000
The person will say, well, that's where the light is.

247
00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:22,000
There's no light over there.

248
00:21:22,000 --> 00:21:24,000
Therefore, I will look over here.

249
00:21:24,000 --> 00:21:27,000
We look at hydrogen frequencies because they're convenient.

250
00:21:27,000 --> 00:21:33,000
However, we don't think, scientists don't think that these aliens will communicate at hydrogen frequencies.

251
00:21:33,000 --> 00:21:36,000
Perhaps they use laser technology.

252
00:21:36,000 --> 00:21:39,000
We've only barely begun to scan other frequencies.

253
00:21:39,000 --> 00:21:42,000
Therefore, we have to look at the broadband.

254
00:21:42,000 --> 00:21:49,000
Also, when you communicate across vast distances, we sometimes take a signal and chop it up.

255
00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:53,000
And then we send each piece, and it reforms at the other end.

256
00:21:53,000 --> 00:21:55,000
That's how the internet works.

257
00:21:55,000 --> 00:21:59,000
Email is chopped up, sent through various cities, and is reformed at the other end.

258
00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:06,000
But if you were to intercept one fragment of email, you'd get nonsense, gibberish, until it's reformed.

259
00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:11,000
Therefore, in outer space, they probably send signals not on one frequency,

260
00:22:11,000 --> 00:22:17,000
but perhaps on the entire spectrum, so that a passing star will not interrupt the entire signal.

261
00:22:17,000 --> 00:22:20,000
Then at the other end, they reassemble the signal.

262
00:22:20,000 --> 00:22:25,000
If you were to listen in on their signal, you would hear gibberish, nonsense.

263
00:22:25,000 --> 00:22:34,000
In other words, we could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation, and we wouldn't even know.

264
00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:39,000
Our technology is so primitive, we look on simply one frequency.

265
00:22:39,000 --> 00:22:43,000
Any advanced civilization will send messages across all frequencies,

266
00:22:43,000 --> 00:22:50,000
in order to compensate for passing stars, passing stellar explosions, and static interference.

267
00:22:50,000 --> 00:22:52,000
That's real science.

268
00:22:52,000 --> 00:22:58,000
However, scientists sometimes judge alien technology on the basis of what we can do.

269
00:22:58,000 --> 00:23:05,000
Not on the basis of what a type 3 civilization millions of years more advanced than ours can do.

270
00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:15,000
A lot of UFO followers find scientists' attitudes to be somewhat of a paradox.

271
00:23:15,000 --> 00:23:21,000
On one hand, efforts are being made to listen to space, in the hopes of picking up an alien signal.

272
00:23:21,000 --> 00:23:27,000
And on the other hand, scientists do not seem to be particularly interested in the UFO phenomenon.

273
00:23:27,000 --> 00:23:35,000
From an objective point of view, we must admit that there has been no solid proof linking this phenomenon to visits by extraterrestrials.

274
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:37,000
But the theory is still valid.

275
00:23:37,000 --> 00:23:43,000
Unfortunately, too many scientists continue to view this theory as nothing more than a popular fantasy.

276
00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:47,000
To defend their view, scientists cite the Fermi Paradox.

277
00:23:47,000 --> 00:23:52,000
Fifty years ago, Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist, a friend of Einstein,

278
00:23:52,000 --> 00:23:57,000
once said, if there are extraterrestrials, where are they?

279
00:23:57,000 --> 00:24:05,000
In asking this question, Fermi wanted to point out to his colleagues that if life was as widespread in the cosmos as they believed it was,

280
00:24:05,000 --> 00:24:10,000
then it was reasonable to think that civilizations far more evolved than us existed.

281
00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:16,000
According to Fermi, several of those civilizations should be technologically advanced enough to visit us.

282
00:24:16,000 --> 00:24:24,000
By Fermi's logic, given the fact that extraterrestrials have not yet landed on our planet, it must mean that they don't exist.

283
00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:29,000
This rather radical statement became known in scientific circles as Fermi's Paradox.

284
00:24:29,000 --> 00:24:36,000
In fact, it was only a quick leap to say that people who believed they had met extraterrestrials were delusional.

285
00:24:36,000 --> 00:24:44,000
As for the credibility of a witness or the assessment of a witness's credibility,

286
00:24:44,000 --> 00:24:54,000
Enrico Fermi's name was often mentioned, saying, listen, if extraterrestrial beings had visited us and were among us,

287
00:24:54,000 --> 00:24:58,000
we wouldn't be sitting here discussing it. It would be obvious.

288
00:24:58,000 --> 00:25:05,000
We need only look at the example of Europeans arriving in North America in the 15th and 16th centuries.

289
00:25:05,000 --> 00:25:13,000
It didn't take years for news to spread to the West Coast that ships had arrived in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

290
00:25:13,000 --> 00:25:16,000
It would be the same thing in modern times.

291
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:25,000
If extraterrestrial beings were visiting Earth, which is highly unlikely, then they would be on television.

292
00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:27,000
They're not that shy.

293
00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:34,000
The problem with Fermi's Paradox is that it considers alien visits in terms of our expectations and not reality.

294
00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:39,000
Extraterrestrials may already be among us, unbeknownst to us.

295
00:25:39,000 --> 00:25:47,000
There is the famous Fermi Paradox, that is, if there are extraterrestrial beings out there, then where are they?

296
00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:54,000
Well, take a look at this. Let's say we have an anthill in the middle of a forest.

297
00:25:55,000 --> 00:26:01,000
Right next to the anthill, they're building a 10-lane superhighway.

298
00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:08,000
The question is, would the ants be able to communicate or understand what a 10-lane superhighway is?

299
00:26:08,000 --> 00:26:16,000
Would the ants be able to understand the technology, the intentions of beings building a 10-lane superhighway right next to the ants?

300
00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:20,000
Let's say, however, you go down to the ants and you say to the ants,

301
00:26:20,000 --> 00:26:27,000
I bring you trinkets, I bring you beads, I bring you knowledge, I bring you nuclear energy, I bring you DNA technology,

302
00:26:27,000 --> 00:26:31,000
I bring you utopia. Take me to your leader.

303
00:26:31,000 --> 00:26:34,000
Is that what you say when you bump into ants?

304
00:26:34,000 --> 00:26:38,000
No. Most people simply step on a few of them.

305
00:26:38,000 --> 00:26:47,000
Now, if we are really a type zero civilization and beings of a type three civilization consortium,

306
00:26:48,000 --> 00:26:53,000
they are perhaps millions of years more advanced than us.

307
00:26:53,000 --> 00:27:02,000
The distance between us and ants would be the same comparable distance between type three and a type zero civilization.

308
00:27:02,000 --> 00:27:06,000
In other words, we are so arrogant.

309
00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:12,000
We're so conceited that we say they must visit us.

310
00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:22,000
We're so important that they're going to interrupt all their business just to come to us and give us a little bit of super technology.

311
00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:24,000
I don't think so.

312
00:27:24,000 --> 00:27:31,000
Again, ants looking at a 10-lane superhighway, they would first of all not even know what a highway is.

313
00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:38,000
They would not be able to detect the presence of a highway, understand their communications, and even if they did,

314
00:27:38,000 --> 00:27:41,000
would the ants say, why don't they visit us?

315
00:27:41,000 --> 00:27:45,000
Why don't they come and bring us this fantastic technology of ours?

316
00:27:45,000 --> 00:27:47,000
I don't think so.

317
00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:56,000
Other than the question of perception, scientists point to physics-related problems to disprove the theory that we are being visited by extraterrestrials.

318
00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:03,000
Their main argument, of course, is the expansive distances that separate the stars, which seem at first glance uncrossable,

319
00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:06,000
even traveling close to the speed of light.

320
00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:10,000
In physics, we have something called the Giggle Factor.

321
00:28:10,000 --> 00:28:16,000
That is, anyone talking about UFOs will find themselves drummed out of the scientific community.

322
00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:19,000
UFO research is the third rail of science.

323
00:28:19,000 --> 00:28:26,000
Any scientist who dares touch UFO research finds their scientific career electrocuted.

324
00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:30,000
However, I think we have to look at the long-term perspective.

325
00:28:30,000 --> 00:28:36,000
Many scientists say the stars are so far away, hundreds, thousands of light-years away,

326
00:28:36,000 --> 00:28:42,000
that any intelligent being would take thousands of years to reach the Earth, making it impractical.

327
00:28:42,000 --> 00:28:50,000
I think that's a mistake, because we assume that these extraterrestrial beings are only 100, 200 years more advanced than us.

328
00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:52,000
Then that's a problem.

329
00:28:52,000 --> 00:28:56,000
Einstein said that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit.

330
00:28:56,000 --> 00:28:59,000
You cannot go faster than the speed of light.

331
00:28:59,000 --> 00:29:02,000
That's Einstein's special theory of relativity.

332
00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:05,000
But you see, we have to go beyond Einstein.

333
00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:10,000
We have to go to the general theory of relativity, where it is possible, we think,

334
00:29:10,000 --> 00:29:14,000
that you might be able to go faster than the speed of light, and even beyond that,

335
00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:20,000
to the quantum theory, to the unified field theory in which all bets are off.

336
00:29:20,000 --> 00:29:25,000
So I think that the fundamental mistake that many scientists make is that they assume

337
00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:31,000
that extraterrestrial beings are only 100, 200 years beyond our civilization,

338
00:29:31,000 --> 00:29:35,000
not thousands, millions of years beyond ours.

339
00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:42,000
What if extraterrestrials do not come from another planet, but rather from another dimension that we are unaware of?

340
00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:45,000
A sort of parallel universe out of our grasp?

341
00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:49,000
Five years ago, such a concept would have been considered ludicrous.

342
00:29:49,000 --> 00:29:54,000
However, with the discovery of quantum physics, our vision of the universe is changing.

343
00:29:56,000 --> 00:30:01,000
When I was a child, I used to go to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco,

344
00:30:01,000 --> 00:30:05,000
and I used to look at the fish, the carp swimming in a shallow pond.

345
00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:12,000
I used to go down and look at the fish and wonder what would it be like to live in two dimensions.

346
00:30:12,000 --> 00:30:16,000
These fish could only move forward, backward, left and right.

347
00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:20,000
And I mentioned what a strange universe it must be.

348
00:30:20,000 --> 00:30:25,000
The concept of up, up into the third dimension was alien to them.

349
00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:32,000
I could put my nose right next to the fish, and they would never know that there was something called hyperspace.

350
00:30:32,000 --> 00:30:37,000
Today, many physicists believe that we are the fish.

351
00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:42,000
We move forward, backward, left, right, up, down.

352
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:45,000
And we say, that's all there is.

353
00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:47,000
What you see is what there is.

354
00:30:47,000 --> 00:30:52,000
However, we now believe that there is a theory of everything that will allow us to quote

355
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:56,000
read the mind of God, as Albert Einstein would fondly say.

356
00:30:56,000 --> 00:31:03,000
We think that there is a higher theory, called M-theory, that exists in eleven dimensions.

357
00:31:03,000 --> 00:31:07,000
Dimensions where we have strings and membranes that pulsate.

358
00:31:07,000 --> 00:31:11,000
And we now believe that our universe is nothing but a tiny bubble,

359
00:31:11,000 --> 00:31:15,000
a bubble floating in a much larger hyperspace.

360
00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:21,000
In other words, cosmologists don't really believe in a universe anymore.

361
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:28,000
We believe in a multiverse, a megaverse of bubbles that are constantly springing into existence,

362
00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:30,000
expanding like in a big bang.

363
00:31:30,000 --> 00:31:36,000
So in other words, our universe may coexist in an ocean of other universes.

364
00:31:36,000 --> 00:31:43,000
Now, five, ten years ago, this notion was considered bizarre, science fiction, not anymore.

365
00:31:44,000 --> 00:31:48,000
In the last five years, the data is almost conclusive.

366
00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:50,000
We have something called inflation.

367
00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:54,000
The fact that the universe expanded in many stages,

368
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:57,000
won an extremely rapid stage of expansion.

369
00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:02,000
The only way to explain this rapid expansion is to assume that our universe is a bubble,

370
00:32:02,000 --> 00:32:08,000
coexisting with other bubbles in a multiverse, in a megaverse of universes.

371
00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:12,000
Just one universe among so many others.

372
00:32:12,000 --> 00:32:14,000
It sounds like science fiction,

373
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:21,000
but over the past few years, new discoveries have greatly reduced the gap between science and science fiction.

374
00:32:21,000 --> 00:32:24,000
Scottish genetic engineers cloned Dolly the sheep.

375
00:32:24,000 --> 00:32:31,000
American, British and Dutch researchers succeeded in teleporting a photon, which is a particle of light.

376
00:32:31,000 --> 00:32:35,000
Obviously, we are still a long ways away from the famous Star Trek line,

377
00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:42,000
Be Me Up Scotty, but we're already taking steps towards the teleportation imagined by Gene Rottenberry.

378
00:32:42,000 --> 00:32:44,000
What does the future hold?

379
00:32:44,000 --> 00:32:47,000
What will science be like in the year 3000?

380
00:32:47,000 --> 00:32:53,000
What might be the science of a civilization 100,000 years more technologically advanced than we are?

381
00:32:53,000 --> 00:33:00,000
On Star Trek and many science fiction movies, we see an emerging type 2 civilization.

382
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:03,000
The Federation of Planets is type 2.

383
00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:07,000
They have colonized a small fraction of our galaxy.

384
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:13,000
However, they live in fear of a type 3 civilization on their program called the Borg.

385
00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:16,000
The Borg are a genuine type 3 civilization.

386
00:33:16,000 --> 00:33:21,000
They are galactic. They go between star systems within the galaxy itself.

387
00:33:21,000 --> 00:33:28,000
We physicists have looked carefully for type 1, type 2 and type 3 civilizations in outer space.

388
00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:34,000
For example, a type 2 civilization may have what is called a Dyson Sphere.

389
00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:38,000
A Dyson Sphere encapsulates an entire star.

390
00:33:38,000 --> 00:33:51,000
They are able to use the entire energy output of a star, which in turn is about 10 billion times the energy that is contained within a planetary civilization, a type 1 civilization.

391
00:33:51,000 --> 00:33:53,000
We've looked for them.

392
00:33:53,000 --> 00:34:00,000
Even if they try to cloak themselves and hide themselves, they must obey the second law of thermodynamics.

393
00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:04,000
They must emit waste heat in the infrared.

394
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:05,000
We've looked for them.

395
00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:10,000
We've looked for the infrared signature of Dyson spheres in outer space.

396
00:34:10,000 --> 00:34:18,000
Unfortunately, at the present time, we have found no evidence of type 1, type 2 or type 3 civilizations.

397
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:23,000
But we physicists, when we look in outer space, we don't look for little green men.

398
00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:27,000
We look for civilizations on the basis of energy.

399
00:34:27,000 --> 00:34:31,000
Energy hundreds, thousands, millions of years ahead of ours.

400
00:34:31,000 --> 00:34:36,000
A type 1 civilization is about 100 to 200 years ahead of ours.

401
00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:38,000
You can already see the beginning of it.

402
00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:42,000
The internet is the birth of a type 1 telephone system.

403
00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:45,000
The European Union is the birth of a type 1 economy.

404
00:34:46,000 --> 00:34:51,000
English and a few European languages are the foundation of a type 1 language.

405
00:34:51,000 --> 00:34:58,000
A type 2 civilization is perhaps 5,000, 10,000 years more advanced than ours

406
00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:03,000
because growing at a simple 3% rate of their gross domestic product,

407
00:35:03,000 --> 00:35:08,000
they would attain stellar energy on a scale of perhaps 10,000 years.

408
00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:16,000
A type 3 civilization would be perhaps 100,000 to a million years more advanced than ours.

409
00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:19,000
My point is very simple.

410
00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:24,000
When we look at outer space, you cannot judge aliens by type 0 technology.

411
00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:29,000
We assume that aliens are nothing but an advanced type 0 civilization.

412
00:35:29,000 --> 00:35:35,000
However, once you obtain type 3 status, you have access to what is called the Planck energy.

413
00:35:35,000 --> 00:35:40,000
The Planck energy is 10 to the 19 billion electron volts.

414
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:43,000
That's one with 19 zeros after it.

415
00:35:43,000 --> 00:35:48,000
That's a quadrillion times more powerful than our most advanced atom smasher.

416
00:35:48,000 --> 00:35:53,000
At the Planck energy, it may be possible to bend time into a pretzel,

417
00:35:53,000 --> 00:35:58,000
punch a hole in space, and leap into the 11th dimension.

418
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:03,000
Recently, a few astrophysicists proposed the idea of wormholes

419
00:36:03,000 --> 00:36:07,000
to explain the problem of crossing huge interstellar distances.

420
00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:12,000
In theory, these wormholes are like tunnels that allow passage from point A in the universe

421
00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:15,000
to point B using a shortcut.

422
00:36:15,000 --> 00:36:18,000
They are a pathway for interstellar travelers.

423
00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:23,000
In Einstein's general theory of relativity,

424
00:36:23,000 --> 00:36:27,000
space-time is like a fabric, like a sheet of paper.

425
00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:32,000
Einstein realized that perhaps the sheet of paper can fold on itself

426
00:36:32,000 --> 00:36:35,000
and give us a shortcut through space and time.

427
00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:37,000
In other words, take a sheet of paper.

428
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:39,000
We all know that if I take two points,

429
00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:43,000
the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

430
00:36:43,000 --> 00:36:45,000
However, we now know that's not true.

431
00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:49,000
The shortest distance between two points is a wormhole.

432
00:36:49,000 --> 00:36:53,000
That is, if you can rip the fabric of space and time,

433
00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:57,000
you can take a shortcut, like a subway ride through space and time.

434
00:36:57,000 --> 00:36:59,000
Now, Einstein realized this.

435
00:36:59,000 --> 00:37:02,000
We call them Einstein-Rosen bridges.

436
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:05,000
Bridges between two points in space and time.

437
00:37:05,000 --> 00:37:09,000
Most people know this as Alice's looking glass.

438
00:37:09,000 --> 00:37:13,000
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice was faced with a mirror.

439
00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:15,000
She put her hand through the mirror,

440
00:37:15,000 --> 00:37:19,000
and her hand went to the other side of Wonderland.

441
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:23,000
In Einstein's equations, we have many solutions,

442
00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:28,000
in fact, hundreds of solutions in which we have Einstein-Rosen bridges.

443
00:37:28,000 --> 00:37:31,000
For example, take a look at a black hole.

444
00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:36,000
If I have a spinning black hole, the black hole does not collapse to a dot.

445
00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:40,000
It collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons.

446
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:44,000
This ring of neutrons forms the frame of Alice's looking glass.

447
00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:48,000
If you fall in between the ring, through the ring,

448
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:52,000
then your hand may, in fact, go to the other side of the universe.

449
00:37:52,000 --> 00:37:55,000
Now, there are problems involved with wormholes.

450
00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:57,000
The main problem is stability.

451
00:37:57,000 --> 00:37:59,000
We're not sure if they're stable.

452
00:37:59,000 --> 00:38:03,000
We have to go to a quantum theory to calculate whether or not

453
00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:07,000
you could really make a journey through the black hole itself.

454
00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:11,000
However, I should point out that astrophysicists have now discovered

455
00:38:11,000 --> 00:38:14,000
about 30 black holes in outer space.

456
00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:18,000
All of them are spinning very rapidly, about a million miles an hour.

457
00:38:18,000 --> 00:38:24,000
And we do think that perhaps at the very center, there is a ring of neutrons,

458
00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:29,000
such that perhaps at the very center, if you go through the bullseye,

459
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:32,000
you may go to perhaps another universe.

460
00:38:32,000 --> 00:38:35,000
Are we being visited by aliens?

461
00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:40,000
According to the most recent statistics, close to one out of two Americans think so.

462
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:43,000
If UFOs are linked to these visits from outer space,

463
00:38:43,000 --> 00:38:47,000
we can only marvel at their incredible discretion.

464
00:38:47,000 --> 00:38:52,000
History has shown that when two societies meet that are too far apart on the technological scale,

465
00:38:52,000 --> 00:38:57,000
chaos ensues to the detriment of the more primitive society.

466
00:38:57,000 --> 00:39:00,000
Arthur C. Clarke once said,

467
00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:05,000
whether intelligent life exists in outer space or whether it doesn't exist in outer space,

468
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:09,000
either thought is frightening.

469
00:39:09,000 --> 00:39:13,000
If we are the only ones in the universe with intelligence, it's frightening,

470
00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:15,000
because we're alone.

471
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:19,000
However, if we're not the only intelligent species on Earth,

472
00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:24,000
then we are also frightened, because we wonder about their intentions.

473
00:39:24,000 --> 00:39:31,000
Think about what happened when Cortez met Montezuma in Mexico City.

474
00:39:31,000 --> 00:39:38,000
The Aztecs were perhaps 500, perhaps a thousand years behind the technology of the West.

475
00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:42,000
Cortez had gunpowder borrowed from the Chinese.

476
00:39:42,000 --> 00:39:44,000
He had horses.

477
00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:50,000
He had a technology centuries, perhaps a thousand years, more advanced than the Aztecs.

478
00:39:50,000 --> 00:39:56,000
The Aztec civilization, which lasted perhaps 10,000 years since the last Ice Age,

479
00:39:56,000 --> 00:40:00,000
collapsed in just a few months.

480
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:03,000
That's what happens when two civilizations encounter each other,

481
00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:07,000
when one civilization is more advanced by perhaps a few centuries,

482
00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:10,000
but has malevolent designs.

483
00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:15,000
I think that if a civilization that advanced, millions of years advanced,

484
00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:21,000
more advanced than ours were to meet ours, perhaps we would be ants to them.

485
00:40:21,000 --> 00:40:26,000
If a 10-lane superhigh were being built next door, and there was an ant hill next to it,

486
00:40:26,000 --> 00:40:29,000
what would the construction crew do?

487
00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:31,000
They wouldn't even give it a thought.

488
00:40:31,000 --> 00:40:34,000
They would simply pave the ant hill away.

489
00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:37,000
My personal point of view is they're out there.

490
00:40:37,000 --> 00:40:40,000
In fact, many of my friends also believe they're out there.

491
00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:44,000
What divides us is the question of whether or not they can reach us,

492
00:40:44,000 --> 00:40:50,000
whether or not they can sail across millions of light years between different galaxies and star systems.

493
00:40:50,000 --> 00:40:53,000
However, most physicists believe in their heart of hearts.

494
00:40:53,000 --> 00:40:55,000
Yes, they're probably out there.

495
00:40:55,000 --> 00:41:00,000
And when they do encounter us, I hope that when the encounter is made,

496
00:41:00,000 --> 00:41:03,000
an encounter of the third kind, that they are benevolent,

497
00:41:03,000 --> 00:41:05,000
that they are type 3.

498
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:07,000
They are beyond planetary.

499
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:10,000
At the present time, we are type 0.

500
00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:16,000
We have all the sectarian, fundamentalist, racial hatreds coming from the swamp.

501
00:41:16,000 --> 00:41:21,000
We are just barely out of the swamp with all the savagery of the swamp.

502
00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:24,000
By the time we're type 1, we will become interesting.

503
00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:30,000
Civilized, a planetary civilization capable of working out their differences,

504
00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:35,000
capable of being able to work out sectarian, nationalistic, regional differences.

505
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:41,000
By the time they are type 3, they will have had perhaps a million years

506
00:41:41,000 --> 00:41:45,000
in which to sort out all their aggressive tendencies.

507
00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:50,000
So I think that if we do encounter a type 3 civilization in outer space,

508
00:41:50,000 --> 00:41:55,000
it won't be like the encounter between Cortes and Montezuma.

509
00:41:55,000 --> 00:41:57,000
Perhaps they will be benevolent.

510
00:41:57,000 --> 00:42:01,000
Perhaps they will see intelligent life forms as precious.

511
00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:06,000
The most precious commodity in the universe is consciousness and intelligence.

512
00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:12,000
If extraterrestrial beings are visiting us, what do they want?

513
00:42:12,000 --> 00:42:16,000
What interest could they possibly have in a civilization as primitive as ours?

514
00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:21,000
Nowadays, quantum physics is showing us a universe that is much more complex

515
00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:23,000
and dynamic than we thought.

516
00:42:23,000 --> 00:42:28,000
We no longer speak of a single universe, but rather multiple universes.

517
00:42:28,000 --> 00:42:31,000
The speed of light is no longer an absolute value.

518
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:35,000
It is a simple variable in an equation that is constantly changing.

519
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:38,000
Scientists who have been discrediting UFO reports under the pretext

520
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:44,000
that alien visits are nothing more than a dream must now re-examine their arguments.

521
00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:48,000
While the data gathered today on UFOs does not conclusively support the theory

522
00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:51,000
of extraterrestrial visits more than any other theory,

523
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:55,000
science has not managed to exclude this possibility either.

524
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:02,000
We're aware that interstellar visits would require tools and means

525
00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:05,000
far beyond any technology that we have here on Earth.

526
00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:09,000
We would have to examine quantum physics,

527
00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:12,000
reformulate the theory of general relativity,

528
00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:16,000
and consider the possibility of traveling faster than the speed of light.

529
00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:18,000
All of that is reasonable.

530
00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:23,000
I'm certainly not going to sit here and tell you that science has gone as far as it can go,

531
00:43:23,000 --> 00:43:28,000
that in a hundred years or a thousand years we won't know much more than we do now.

532
00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:31,000
So it's just a question of means.

533
00:43:31,000 --> 00:43:38,000
I think that if a civilization continues to survive and to develop over a long period of time,

534
00:43:38,000 --> 00:43:42,000
it will eventually discover the means of interstellar travel.

535
00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:47,000
The question is, do many civilizations exist?

536
00:43:47,000 --> 00:43:53,000
And do they have enough wisdom to continue to survive long enough to reach this point?

537
00:43:53,000 --> 00:44:00,000
Earth has already launched two Voyager probes, which are now outside of our solar system.

538
00:44:00,000 --> 00:44:06,000
And over the next tens of thousands of years, they'll be reaching stars other than our sun.

539
00:44:06,000 --> 00:44:11,000
We're capable of sending out a small plaque with the drawing of a man and woman on it saying,

540
00:44:11,000 --> 00:44:18,000
hi, we're here. Will it end up in the right place? It's doubtful.

541
00:44:18,000 --> 00:44:22,000
There's a very small probability of it happening.

542
00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:29,000
We're still not ready to build crafts capable of carrying an entire ecosystem on board for interstellar travel.

543
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:36,000
Trips such as those would require extreme speeds, which we're thousands of years away from achieving.

544
00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:41,000
The ship would need to have an entire ecosystem, including agriculture.

545
00:44:41,000 --> 00:44:49,000
It would be a bit like putting Montreal Island into orbit with its entire population, which would continue to reproduce.

546
00:44:49,000 --> 00:44:53,000
We're not there yet, but we might be someday.

547
00:44:53,000 --> 00:45:02,000
If we're still a viable civilization in 10,000 years in human and technological terms, then why not?

548
00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:11,000
We're still a viable civilization in 10,000 years in human and technological terms.

549
00:45:11,000 --> 00:45:16,000
We're still a viable civilization in 10,000 years in human and technological terms.

550
00:45:16,000 --> 00:45:21,000
We're still a viable civilization in 10,000 years in human and technological terms.

551
00:45:21,000 --> 00:45:26,000
We're still a viable civilization in 10,000 years in human and technological terms.

552
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:31,000
We're still a viable civilization in 10,000 years in human and technological terms.

553
00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:36,000
Music

554
00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:41,000
Music

555
00:45:41,000 --> 00:45:46,000
Music

556
00:45:46,000 --> 00:45:51,000
Music

557
00:45:51,000 --> 00:45:56,000
Music

558
00:45:56,000 --> 00:46:01,000
Music

559
00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:06,000
Music

560
00:46:06,000 --> 00:46:11,000
Music

561
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:16,000
Music

562
00:46:16,000 --> 00:46:21,000
Music

563
00:46:21,000 --> 00:46:26,000
Music

564
00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:31,000
Music

565
00:46:31,000 --> 00:46:33,000
Music