- 6/8/2025
Mankind longs for proof that we are not alone in the universe, but the moment of first contact will certainly mean the end of the world as we know it. Whether that is a bad thing for humanity or the start of a great future is uncertain.
Michio Kaku says,"Electromagnetic radiation is the fastest, most effective way to communicate between stars."
An ion engine is based on the repulsion of like charges to create thrust; the Dawn spacecraft was launched by NASA using the principle of ion thruster. The closest star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri, is about 25 trillion miles away.
Paul Davis thinks that junk DNA is the "perfect hiding place" (as Morgan Freeman puts it) for a coded message from alien creatures if they exist.
Mike Callahan has looked at carbonaceous chondrites (space rocks).
1. Interviewed experts: Charles S. Cockell, Michio Kaku, Laurance Doyle, John Brophy at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, James Kakalios, Paul Davies, Mike Callahan.
2. Featured musicians: ArcAttack band members play music using Tesla coils.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season3
#episode1
#cosmology
#astronomy
#astrology
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#michiokaku
#willwesurvive
#willwesurvivefirstcontact
Michio Kaku says,"Electromagnetic radiation is the fastest, most effective way to communicate between stars."
An ion engine is based on the repulsion of like charges to create thrust; the Dawn spacecraft was launched by NASA using the principle of ion thruster. The closest star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri, is about 25 trillion miles away.
Paul Davis thinks that junk DNA is the "perfect hiding place" (as Morgan Freeman puts it) for a coded message from alien creatures if they exist.
Mike Callahan has looked at carbonaceous chondrites (space rocks).
1. Interviewed experts: Charles S. Cockell, Michio Kaku, Laurance Doyle, John Brophy at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, James Kakalios, Paul Davies, Mike Callahan.
2. Featured musicians: ArcAttack band members play music using Tesla coils.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season3
#episode1
#cosmology
#astronomy
#astrology
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#michiokaku
#willwesurvive
#willwesurvivefirstcontact
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Human civilization, everything we can know, feel, and hope for is forged here, on Earth.
00:11A ball of rock just 8,000 miles wide.
00:15But out there, across the vast heavens, there could be countless other civilizations,
00:23each with knowledge, history, and ambition vastly different from our own.
00:29And one day, perhaps sooner than you think, humanity and alien civilization will collide.
00:39How will that day change us? Will it be our greatest leap forward?
00:44Or the end of everything we know?
00:49Space. Time. Life itself.
00:59The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:05Think of everything you learned in school.
01:20Think of everything that Einstein, Buddha, and Shakespeare knew.
01:25The entire experience of humanity is overwhelming to a single mind.
01:30But if aliens are out there, all that is nothing compared with the sum total of knowledge in the galaxy.
01:39The day we make first contact with an alien race will be the dawn of a new era for humanity.
01:46It could spur a renaissance that will change us utterly.
01:51Or, it could be the darkest day in human history.
02:00Most kids in the 40s and 50s grew up reading tales of adventure on other worlds.
02:06And most of us imagined we were Earth's first line of defense against alien invaders.
02:11These days, I would like to think we were wrong.
02:16That extraterrestrials might be friendly.
02:25But many scientists believe basic forces of biology make aggressive aliens a safer bet.
02:33Charles Kokeld is a professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
02:43He thinks deeply about alien life.
02:46And how evolution might determine their actions at first contact.
02:52It's not clear that a civilization, just because it can travel through space, would be altruistic.
02:57Humanity, for example, landed spacecraft on the freezing moon of Titan.
03:04And yet we still go to war.
03:07So it's not the case that technological advancement necessarily comes hand in hand with altruism.
03:14And it's possible that an alien civilization could actually be quite dangerous.
03:19Charles studies the forces of evolution that gave us the intelligence necessary for an advanced civilization.
03:24Forces he believes could drive aliens to tear ours apart.
03:30It's a question of autotrophs or heterotrophs.
03:34Or in layman's terms, what's for dinner?
03:39An autotroph is a type of life that uses light as a source of energy.
03:44For example, the grass here is an autotrophic organism.
03:47It's using sunlight from the sky to power itself and to grow and reproduce.
03:52Autotrophs generally are not intelligent.
03:54Gathering sunlight is a very good way of gathering energy.
03:57But it never really gathers sufficient energy for a creature to become intelligent.
04:04Autotrophs have another weakness.
04:07They're easy prey for heterotrophs.
04:09These sheep behind me, these are heterotrophs, but they're feeding off autotrophs.
04:14They're feeding off the grass in this field.
04:17Charles believes that the food chain is just as real of a force for alien life as it is for terrestrials.
04:25The smarter the creature, the more food it must consume to keep its brain working.
04:30Right, thanks. Just what I ordered.
04:33You can see the hors d'oeuvre I have here, and you can get some idea of the amount of grass I would have to eat a day to power a sheep's brain.
04:41But it's a completely different matter when you need to power a human brain.
04:51If we spent all of our waking hours eating the pounds of grass it takes just to power our brain,
04:57we would have little time for the imagination and ambition that sent us to the moon.
05:03But nature provides a solution.
05:07It's not pretty, but it is a fact of life.
05:11Lab, thank you.
05:17Our massive brains require colossal amounts of energy,
05:21and being a predator is the cleanest, quickest, and most effective way
05:25to acquire the energy necessary for advanced intelligence,
05:30whether human or alien.
05:33Intelligent creatures, particularly very intelligent creatures, would be predatory.
05:37They would be at the end of a food chain, and they would eat other creatures that would eat other creatures.
05:41So they're bound to be predatory in some way.
05:43Charles is confident that at first contact we will meet an intelligent race of predators.
05:50Predators that most likely developed a warlike culture, just like ours.
05:57Conflict in human beings is definitely linked to predation.
06:02It's all about grasping territory, it's all about having resources,
06:06and commanding those resources in times of famine or in times of difficulty.
06:11Predatory aliens who show up on our doorstep may well be in need of new resources.
06:16If so, the existence of humanity could be in jeopardy.
06:22If they need oxygen to burn their food, just as in the same way that we need oxygen to burn our food,
06:29they might find the environmental conditions on this planet very conducive for their civilization.
06:33And oxygen-bearing planets like ours, with high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere,
06:37might actually be quite rare in the universe, and when you find them, they might be good places to go.
06:41It is the scenario we usually see in the movies.
06:46Aliens arrive as a conquering armada, and mankind engages them in a desperate battle for survival.
06:54But one scientist begs to differ.
06:57Let's say that a civilization is hostile.
07:01Hollywood has brainwashed us into thinking that it's going to be a titanic battle between David and Goliath.
07:10I mean, give me a break.
07:13More than likely, it's going to be between Bambi and Godzilla.
07:16Physicist Michio Kaku of the City College of New York tries to be more scientific about mankind's relationship to alien civilizations.
07:27We physicists like to classify alien civilizations in outer space by energy.
07:33A Type 1 civilization harnesses planetary power.
07:38They can, for example, control hurricanes, control volcanoes.
07:43Type 2 can control an entire star.
07:47They play with stars.
07:50Type 3 controls the power of an entire galaxy.
07:53On this cosmic scale of energy, what are we?
07:59Do we control hurricanes and volcanoes?
08:03Do we play with stars?
08:05Do we roam across the space lanes of the galaxy?
08:08No, we are Type 0.
08:11We don't even rate on this scale.
08:12But we may have a chance to survive in the galactic jungle after all.
08:19Michio believes that we can rise in the ranks of civilization by learning from our superior neighbors.
08:26And the safest way to acquire their knowledge is eavesdropping.
08:32Even aliens have to obey the laws of physics.
08:36And the laws of physics tell us that electromagnetic radiation is the fastest, most convenient way
08:40to communicate between stars.
08:44The heavens are buzzing with electromagnetic radiation.
08:47Almost all of it occurs naturally.
08:50And around Earth, most is man-made.
08:53But buried in all that static could be some radiation that aliens are using to send a message.
09:01Finding such an alien signal is really tough.
09:04Like looking for a single car in the swarm of traffic that clogs the streets of New York City.
09:12We send messages by electromagnetic radiation, whether it's in the form of email, radio, radar, microwaves, FM or AM.
09:21Let's say that this car represents a message that we send into outer space.
09:26Most messages are sent by you and me, by the human family.
09:29However, what I'm looking for is much more rare.
09:33I'm looking for this.
09:35A message sent by an alien civilization using electromagnetic radiation.
09:40For the past 40 years, armies of large radio telescopes have tuned into the frequencies of the universe.
09:48Just like turning the radio dial to find the station.
09:50So far, scientists have heard only empty static.
09:55But Michio believes that is because they have been listening the wrong way.
10:00We are only listening to one frequency at a time, among an infinite number of possible frequencies.
10:07It's like trying to find this alien decal on a car, on a freeway, by taking pictures.
10:13How long would it take for me to finally identify that alien decal?
10:24A week? Months? Years? Maybe even never?
10:28Michio believes that even if we stumble upon an elusive alien message, we might not even recognize it.
10:35There may still be hope to discover these rare signals, however, if we broaden our perspective.
10:41Let's say that I want to send this alien message across outer space.
10:47And let's say that each car represents a photon vibrating at a certain frequency.
10:52Well, perhaps the silliest way to send such a message is to put the entire message on one photon at one frequency.
11:01The message could be lost. The message could be degraded.
11:04A more efficient way is to cut up the message into different frequencies,
11:08creating what is called the broadband.
11:12And then, you put each fragment of the message on each photon.
11:18Using multiple channels to send a message is faster.
11:23In the same way, broadband is faster than dial-up.
11:27But if aliens communicate this way, their signals will be harder to detect.
11:32Now, here's the irony. If you were to eavesdrop on an alien conversation and you would pick up all these pieces, you would just hear gibberish.
11:42So in other words, we could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation and not even know it.
11:49If Michio is correct, the heavens could be filled with alien chatter.
11:56We do not see this radio traffic because our single frequency search only picks up fragments of their conversations.
12:03But if we were to look at the broadband, we might find what has been there all along.
12:11If we do learn to detect alien communication, how can we ever hope to understand it?
12:22What language would they speak?
12:25Now, one scientist believes he knows how to crack the code of any language, no matter how alien.
12:32Around the world, we speak to each other in about 7,000 different languages.
12:41Most of us understand only one or two.
12:44But there is no living language that cannot be translated because they all have one thing in common.
12:52The human brain.
12:54What languages might alien brains create?
12:58Could we ever hope to understand them?
13:00Could we even recognize their communication as language at all?
13:08Well, I actually only speak English and Swahili a little bit.
13:13I've learned a little Navajo and I can write a little bit in Cherokee.
13:18Oh, I took Russian too for a couple of years.
13:21Lawrence Doyle is a communications expert with the Institute of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.
13:30He is working to add one more language to his list.
13:34One no human has ever spoken.
13:38Bonlo's dolphins are perfect. We know they're intelligent.
13:41Seriously, Chomp? Wow, that's interesting.
13:44They communicate in very complex ways. They make bubbles. They play. They have complex society.
13:49But we don't have any common reference system. We can't talk about movies. We can't talk about the most elementary things.
13:56Lawrence decided to see whether he could extract any meaning from dolphin speak.
14:07He and his colleagues recorded and studied hundreds of hours of dolphin chatter.
14:12Because they have this huge range over which they can communicate.
14:24When you look at the relationship of whistles, a structure starts to emerge that's not unlike syntax in human languages.
14:31But are these whistles and clicks an actual language? One that could be translated?
14:38Large searched for patterns in the sounds using a statistical technique called information theory.
14:46A theory powerful enough to find a needle of meaning in a haystack of noise.
14:52Information theory is built on the probability of occurrence of a given signal.
14:59How often does it occur? And how often does it have a relationship with other signals in that occurrence?
15:06Perseus, best wishes, tiger, cow, accepting, printing ink, hydro, lorry, shovel in...
15:14So this is kind of a random distribution of words.
15:16I can add up how frequently each word occurs.
15:22What I am going to get from this random distribution of words is that each word occurs with about the same equal frequency.
15:29In this page of gibberish, plotting a chart of words against how often they are used gives us a straight line.
15:37That means there's virtually no linguistic information being transmitted.
15:42It is a random distribution, and you can't actually transmit knowledge this way.
15:48A message with meaning and information shows an entirely different pattern.
15:54No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's,
16:04and yet as mortal as his own.
16:06According to Lawrence, all languages, be they human, dolphin or alien, must have common and uncommon words.
16:15The most common words are ranked in descending order from left to right.
16:19Well, the most frequent word here is the, and will appear here.
16:24The second most frequent word is probably of.
16:27When Lawrence plots this word chart from a message that is not gibberish, a pattern emerges.
16:35This is a plot of the frequency of occurrence, and this is the words in War of the Worlds.
16:42And we see that it has this 45 degree slope.
16:45So this is a way to tell if there's linguistic or knowledge content within a random page, even if you don't understand what the symbols mean.
16:53This 45 degree slope appears for any message, in any language, in any media, be it a book in French or a phone call in Japanese.
17:04And when Lawrence's team applied information theory to the chatter of dolphins, a 45 degree slope emerged.
17:12This was proof right away, without understanding what the dolphin signals are, that dolphins are transmitting knowledge to each other.
17:23Lawrence has not yet learned to speak dolphin, but knowing a language when we hear it is the first step.
17:33And he is now applying the same technique to the electromagnetic buzz that fills the Milky Way.
17:39There are all sorts of things in space that make noises.
17:44We could examine each one and find out which one's random, and which has the information we're looking for as a sign of intelligence.
17:53Even if alien communication sounds like empty noise to the human ear, it will still produce a 45 degree slope.
18:01We can now actually start to examine the complexity of the message.
18:06And that's going to tell us something about the species that sent it.
18:10And that's why we want to practice on non-human species on Earth.
18:14Thank you, you were lovely.
18:16I think that was dolphin for see you later.
18:23But we may not have to wait to intercept an alien message to make first contact.
18:32Many scientists now suspect an advanced spacecraft will soon forge a direct link between two worlds.
18:38And that spacecraft could come from Earth.
18:49In 1903, Orville Wright guided the first powered flight in human history.
18:56He traveled just over 100 feet.
18:59Only 66 years later, three men flew a quarter of a million miles and landed on the moon.
19:07The next quantum leap in travel may be close at hand.
19:11It would take us trillions of miles from Earth.
19:15And we could find aliens before they find us.
19:20And that is, thanks in part, to this man.
19:25John Brophy works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
19:32His expertise is exotic propulsion.
19:40So this is an ordinary balloon, and I'm going to rub it on my hair,
19:43which will separate some of the charges, leaving a net charge on the balloon,
19:48which will allow it to stick on my shirt.
19:55The same force that holds a balloon to a piece of fabric can be used in reverse to push a vessel through space.
20:03So as we just illustrated, where we can use oppositely charged particles to attract each other,
20:10if we use particles with the same charges, we can actually repel them.
20:15This electrical repulsion is the heart of John's revolutionary machine, the ion engine.
20:21Xenon gas is ionized with a positive charge, then placed against the engine's positively charged body.
20:32And those like charges repel each other and push the ions out at a very high speed.
20:38And by pushing the ions out, it pushes the spacecraft in the other direction.
20:41NASA recently chartered John's ion engine to send the Dawn spacecraft on a 2 billion mile journey to the asteroid belt.
20:52The engine stayed lit for more than three years.
20:56This groundbreaking achievement was made possible by the same high-performance engineering found in the unbridled, uncompromising, unrelenting power of an all-American golf cart.
21:19We're going to have a race between these two vehicles.
21:24And it looks like an unfair race, but actually, we're going to give each vehicle the same amount of fuel,
21:30and we're going to see how far and how fast these two vehicles go.
21:33Unlike the fuel-guzzling chemical rockets that took us to the moon, the Dawn spacecraft is an extremely fuel-efficient vehicle.
21:52But, like the golf cart, it's a bit slow off the mark.
21:57The Dawn spacecraft accelerates very slowly like we've done.
22:03In fact, it'll go zero to 60 miles an hour in about four days.
22:07So, not something you'd write home about.
22:10But, after four years, it'll be going over 26,000 miles an hour and have used only 60 gallons of fuel.
22:18It is exquisitely fuel-efficient.
22:21The old chemical rocket gets going faster, but it burns out quickly.
22:24An ion-powered spacecraft, however, can keep on accelerating for years,
22:30and eventually travel faster and farther than a chemical rocket ever could.
22:38It's completely impractical to use a chemical rocket technology to travel to the stars,
22:44and that's because you just cannot carry enough propellant to make that trip.
22:48The closest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 25 trillion miles away.
22:59That is a very long journey.
23:03Imagine the sun at the center of this quarter and Pluto's orbit around the outside edge of the quarter.
23:09Every planet that you learned about in school, everybody that you know, is contained within this quarter.
23:16With our current electric propulsion technology or advances that we can readily make,
23:22we can get around this region of space relatively well.
23:26What we really want to do is see what it takes to get to the nearest star.
23:29The question is, where is that?
23:32The question is, where is that?
23:50And this is the closest star.
23:51Astronomers now believe there are 17 alien solar systems within 100 trillion miles of Earth.
24:02With some engineering improvements, future versions of John's ion engine could reach any of these new worlds.
24:09But for the foreseeable future, an ion-powered vessel will not have the power to take human beings along for the ride.
24:16The payloads have to be small to go to the stars, primarily because you have to accelerate that mass to a very high speed.
24:24And the lighter weight the vehicle is, the easier that is to do.
24:30One day, an alien spacecraft will pierce the clouds of an unexplored world.
24:38And the aliens might be us.
24:40Crossing the vast emptiness of space is not the only challenge of making first contact.
24:47We must also figure out what we are going to say when we get there.
24:55How does one communicate across language barriers?
24:59Here on Earth, our faces can express fear, love or happiness even better than words sometimes.
25:07But what ideas and emotions could we share with aliens?
25:11And how can we avoid sending the wrong message?
25:16There's a story from U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
25:21They wanted cars to stop at a checkpoint.
25:25They used what they thought was a universal symbol for stop by holding up their outraged palm.
25:30Unfortunately for the people in Iraq, this is the symbol also for welcome, not stop.
25:39So the cars kept approaching the checkpoint even though the soldiers were signaling violently for them to stop.
25:46Jim Kakalius is a physicist who explores the hard science behind the dreams of science fiction.
25:58He thinks he has identified a universal communication medium.
26:03We're all familiar with waves, sound waves, light waves, even matter has waves, or water waves.
26:13Any disturbance on the surface and we get mechanical vibrations on the surface.
26:18The molecules move up and down but coherently forming concentric rings that expand outwards.
26:24Because waves move in predictable and regimented ways, they could be used to communicate mathematics,
26:31a language any advanced civilization will surely understand.
26:37But waves do not add and subtract like numbers.
26:42We're used to arithmetic based upon the counting of objects.
26:47One apple and two apples equals three apples.
26:50But if you were to base a mathematics based upon the addition of waves, such as light waves,
26:55sometimes it works, sometimes you get confusing results.
26:57Here we've assigned numbers to the different colors of light.
27:02One for red, two for orange, and so on.
27:06If I take a one, red light, and a five, blue light, add them together, and I get six, purple light.
27:18That works.
27:20But it doesn't always work.
27:21Let's try another color combination.
27:24One is red.
27:26Three is yellow.
27:28One plus three should give us four.
27:30Green, but no, we get orange, too.
27:33One plus three equals two?
27:35That doesn't seem right.
27:37Even though they do not add up like simple numbers,
27:40it is still possible to communicate complex mathematical ideas through waves.
27:47Because whether they move in water, light, or the air around us, all waves have frequencies.
27:55If you can give me a C.
27:58Very good.
28:00And how about a bouncy G-sharp?
28:04Those are two distinct frequencies.
28:06Aliens may describe the frequency of a wave with numbers that are indecipherable to us.
28:14But the ratio between those two frequencies will always be the same, no matter what number system is used.
28:21And the ratios could be the key to two species expressing their knowledge of the fundamental laws of the universe.
28:28Measure the circumference of a circle.
28:33Now divide by its diameter.
28:36The ratio is the number pi, or about 3.14.
28:43No matter what units you use to make the measurements, inches, your arms, or anything else, the ratio pi will always be the answer.
28:55And pi is one of only a handful of fundamental ratios in the universe.
29:03They must certainly have noticed this, because it is so common.
29:08It is one of the foundations of our understanding of nature.
29:12At first contact, we could beam aliens a pair of waves.
29:19The ratio of their frequencies equal to pi.
29:23Or, we could send another pair whose ratio is the same as the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass.
29:31Sending these messages would prove we understand the physics of the universe around us.
29:39There is no guarantee of the work.
29:42But there is another way of looking at a series of changing frequencies.
29:47On Earth, we call it music.
29:49If aliens lack ears, they might still be able to appreciate the performance of the high-tech rock band, Architek.
30:03Because Architek can play the same song simultaneously in sound waves, light waves, and the buzzing discharge of 1 million volt Tesla coils.
30:13A Tesla coil generates waves both in radio wave signals and electric fields.
30:21It generates heat by heating up the atmosphere.
30:24It generates sound, and it generates light.
30:30This performance could initiate the greatest peaceful exchange of knowledge in our existence.
30:36We could try one of the most beautiful pieces of music that we have developed.
30:48It may just get on their nerves.
30:50But what if aliens will not or cannot meet us face to face?
30:56There is still a chance to make contact.
30:58Because aliens could have already sent us a message, hidden on Earth for hundreds of millions of years.
31:09If you compress the entire history of planet Earth into 24 hours, human beings would only appear in the final few seconds.
31:20If aliens have already come here, we probably were not around to greet them.
31:24But what if they left a record of their visit?
31:28Where would it be?
31:31One scientist thinks he may have found it.
31:35Hiding inside us all.
31:37Paul Davies is a physicist and astrobiologist who has spent many years trying to work out how aliens might communicate with us.
31:49And he has realized it is all about timing.
31:54Let me make a call on this cell phone.
31:59Three.
32:01An electromagnetic signal flies through space at the speed of light.
32:05And it only passes by our antennas for a bleeding moment.
32:11Hello.
32:12If the person at the other end doesn't connect with me, the message has gone off in these radio waves, off out into space, off into the proverbial ether, never to return, and they're lost.
32:26If aliens wanted to make contact, Paul believes they would choose to send messages with much more staying power.
32:34I'm scratching a message in a rock here, and the way that people have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years.
32:43And why do they do it?
32:44Well, it's a message for posterity.
32:47This thing will be around for a long, long time.
32:49But even a rock will eventually crumble, or get buried.
32:55Paul discovered that there is a material on Earth that could preserve a message for tens of millions of years.
33:03We all have it.
33:05Inside us.
33:06Every living organism on Earth carries genetic information encoded in a molecule called DNA.
33:14It's a whole sequence of molecular information which carry all that is needed to reconstruct that organism and to enable it to go about its business.
33:24So we've got genes in our bodies dating back billions of years.
33:27DNA is made up of four chemical building blocks.
33:32Adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
33:36The particular arrangement of those blocks creates a unique genetic code.
33:42Instructions for building our bodies from proteins and other materials.
33:48But not all of that code is used.
33:51When you tot up the length of each gene,
33:53and you soon see that only a small fraction of the total amount of DNA in our bodies is actually coding for proteins.
34:01So what you've got in this big, dark, mysterious chunk of DNA, the majority of it, is undoubtedly some real junk.
34:10Think of one person's genetic code like objects in a house.
34:17Most everything an individual needs is easily found.
34:23But not everything is out in the open.
34:26If you look around, what you see is some functional space used every day.
34:30And then when you go down to the garage, you see some space that really is storage.
34:36It contains things that we may never use for years and years on end, but we haven't thrown out.
34:42And if we move house, probably we'll take it with us to the next place.
34:46Nearly every living thing carries this genetic junk.
34:50Innocuous sequences of DNA that are faithfully passed along for countless generations.
34:57Paul realized this junk DNA could be the perfect hiding place for a coded message.
35:05Imagine that there is some way that we could etch or embellish the fundamental structure of DNA with some sort of message.
35:16In such a way that it didn't compromise the functionality of the organism.
35:22Then it could endure for tens of millions of years or even longer.
35:26Paul believes that long ago alien genetic engineers could have rearranged sequences of DNA inside living organisms on Earth.
35:37Maybe in our earliest mammalian ancestors.
35:41Their descendants would carry the message through the eons unnoticed.
35:45Until one of them is finally smart enough to sample his own DNA and read the message.
35:52Researchers have begun scouring the genetic code of humans and other species searching for unusual patterns in DNA.
36:03It is an endeavor called Genomic SETI.
36:07Supposing you saw a sequence of prime numbers spelt out in the language of DNA, which is the four bases, A, G, C and T.
36:15Well, there is no way that natural selection would ever produce such a thing.
36:20It would leap out at you as being an obviously artificial origin.
36:24If Genomic SETI does find something, one of the first questions we will ask is,
36:32why did aliens go to all the trouble of sending such a message?
36:37People have all sorts of different ideas.
36:40Some people think, well, it could be a religious symbol.
36:43Some people think it could be a monument.
36:45We go to Egypt, for example, and we see these huge monuments.
36:49What are they for? What are they for? Posterity.
36:51They're put there because people feel that their civilization was great.
36:55It has something. It can speak to people all down the generations.
36:58They want to leave something behind.
36:59A message in our DNA could also communicate something much more fundamental.
37:05That DNA is the language of all life in the galaxy.
37:12It sounds like wild speculation, but it is not.
37:16Because this man may have found the common bond between us and alien life.
37:22We have always looked to the stars in our effort to make contact with aliens.
37:33Now that quest could be taking an unexpected turn.
37:38Because we may find the link between ourselves and aliens, not in the heavens,
37:44but in the life-creating code of DNA.
37:47In the vast, frozen emptiness of Antarctica, researchers recently stumbled across fragments of a four-billion-year-old meteorite.
38:00A piece of cosmic shrapnel that dates back to the very birth of our solar system.
38:06This is one of the most precious objects known to man.
38:11Unscathed, it is worth a small fortune.
38:14But sometimes, science requires sacrifice.
38:22First thing I'm thinking to myself is don't mess up.
38:25Don't mess up and don't cough on it.
38:28Mike Callahan is a chemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
38:33His studies focus on a rare type of meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites.
38:39These meteorites are very, very rich in carbon and contain a wealth of organic molecules.
38:47You can think of our meteorite extractions kind of like making a cup of tea.
38:53When we place the tea bag into our liquid, you can see that you're extracting out all the herbs and all the flavors into your solution.
39:01And this is what we're doing with our meteorite.
39:05Mike is trying to brew up conclusive evidence that molecules essential to life were present in space rocks four and a half billion years ago.
39:15People have found lots of interesting molecules, such as amino acids, which are the building blocks of your proteins, another essential molecule in meteorites for years.
39:26But there was always this missing puzzle piece with nucleobases.
39:29That's been a scientific question that's been out there for over 50 years.
39:32Nucleobases are the letters of DNA, A, G, C and T, the molecules that zip together the double helix.
39:43For decades, biochemists have struggled to synthesize them and puzzled over how they could have been created on our primordial earth.
39:53But in Mike's meteorite tea, the answer may finally have arrived.
40:00We find these simple building blocks, these nucleobases, like adenine and guanine, in meteorites.
40:07The same molecules that make up the DNA common to all life on earth have existed in outer space for billions of years.
40:16They were created when our solar system formed.
40:19It's amazing when you start looking at what's inside these meteorites, what you actually truly find.
40:26And now we're looking at this and thinking, well, if these meteorites are coming into earth,
40:30and now they're being scattered everywhere in the solar system, everywhere in the universe,
40:34I think maybe aliens do look very similar to us, because maybe we're all composed of the same building blocks.
40:40Mike's finding shows that the building blocks of DNA could be scattered all over the galaxy.
40:46That DNA might be the basis not just of life on earth, but of alien life as well.
40:53First contact could be with our distant cosmic cousins.
40:59But there's no guarantee it will be a warm family reunion for them or us.
41:04The impact of a first contact would be absolutely stupendous on the level of the discovery of fire.
41:16We would have access to new technologies that would solve some of our immediate problems.
41:22But the big problem is we'd also need to have the wisdom to be able to implement those changes in a way that won't cause massive economic and social disruption.
41:32That wisdom part is really difficult.
41:35An extraterrestrial signal, I think, would begin to go, guys, we're inhabitants of the galaxy and we have to start thinking that way, it's time to grow up.
41:42One thing we do is think a lot more about the planet.
41:47Oh my gosh, we've got this giant spaceship called planet Earth and we better take care of it.
41:51It could happen tomorrow, or a message from aliens could already be here, waiting to be discovered.
42:01But when we finally experience first contact, our species will be forced to come of age, to realize that we are members of a family of life forms that inhabit the cosmos.
42:15We'll see you soon.
42:16We'll see you soon.
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