- yesterday
The Sun is expected to run out of hydrogen fuel in 5 billion years! Afterwards, it is expected to tap into helium as a fuel source. Freeman narrates that at that point, the Sun will expand, "it will swallow Mercury."
Christopher McKay proposes migrating to the planet Mars if the Earth gets too hot. Freeman narrates,"Mars will survive even after the Earth is burned to a crisp." Perfluorocarbons or PFCs will need to be used to terraform Mars.
After the Sun burns helium for 2 billion years, it collapses into a white dwarf star.
National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's most energetic laser.
Freeman explains that Shawn Westmoreland has proposed "tethering a tiny black hole to a spaceship" to propel the spaceship in order to allow inter-stellar travel.
At the time of this documentary, the hottest temperature can be reached inside the LHC in Switzerland; the temperature of smashing particles at the LHC can get a 100,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season4
#episode3
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#morganfreeman
#spacedocumentary
#deathofsun
#deathofsolarsystem
Christopher McKay proposes migrating to the planet Mars if the Earth gets too hot. Freeman narrates,"Mars will survive even after the Earth is burned to a crisp." Perfluorocarbons or PFCs will need to be used to terraform Mars.
After the Sun burns helium for 2 billion years, it collapses into a white dwarf star.
National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's most energetic laser.
Freeman explains that Shawn Westmoreland has proposed "tethering a tiny black hole to a spaceship" to propel the spaceship in order to allow inter-stellar travel.
At the time of this documentary, the hottest temperature can be reached inside the LHC in Switzerland; the temperature of smashing particles at the LHC can get a 100,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season4
#episode3
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#morganfreeman
#spacedocumentary
#deathofsun
#deathofsolarsystem
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The sun.
00:03Its radiant light sustains nearly all beings on Earth.
00:07Its glowing disk rises each day to give us new life and new opportunity.
00:13But the sun also holds a dark secret.
00:16Someday it will bathe the Earth in a fiery holocaust.
00:23Can we move to a new home in the cosmos?
00:27Or could we master the laws of nature and create a new Earth, a new star, or even a new universe?
00:40Can we survive the death of the sun?
00:46Space, time, life itself.
00:51The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:11To survive in the cosmos, we must learn to think in timescales longer than a single human
01:18lifespan.
01:20Because the biggest threat to our existence will play out over billions of years.
01:25Our tiniest speck in the universe, planet Earth, is in terrible danger.
01:32Because the sun, the giant ball of hot plasma that fuels life, is dying.
01:40And our time here is running out.
01:50When I was young, my mother and I moved from our rural home in sunny Mississippi to cold
01:56and crowded Chicago.
01:59Heading to a strange new place was unnerving, but I had no say in the matter.
02:06We had to go, and that was that.
02:10Will our entire civilization someday have no choice but to move to a new home?
02:17Peter Schroeder is an astrophysicist whose lifelong passion to study stars like our sun inspired
02:28him to also move far away from home.
02:32From a small town in Germany to sunny Guanajuato, Mexico.
02:37Mexico gets a lot of sun, and already the ancient cultures, therefore, worship the sun as one
02:44face of their god, and still today, you can feel the presence of the sun in this country.
02:51The colors of the houses reflect this closeness to sunny days.
02:57The more he studies the sun, the more he, too, venerates its godlike power.
03:04Because the same sun that makes life possible on Earth could eventually fill our sky with
03:09an ocean of fire.
03:14In about five billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen fuel.
03:19Then it begins to burn helium.
03:22Its core shoots up in temperature, and our star expands.
03:28It will swallow Mercury, torch Venus, and grow perilously close to Earth.
03:38It may even swallow our planet and vaporize everything we know.
03:48The colleague who's working on cosmology came up to my office, and he said, well, I'm going
03:53to give a public talk to school kids, and one of these questions is always, will the sun
04:00become so big that it will swallow Earth?
04:03And I said, oh, yeah, good point, actually, I have to look at my latest models.
04:09Peter was determined to find a definitive answer.
04:14Even though he uses complex computer programming, the core of his model can also be built from
04:19clay, just like the world-famous pottery of his new hometown.
04:24To understand what's going on in the solar system, we first need a sun.
04:35This is the Earth.
04:37So we can see it here, in this orbit, Earth is not falling into the center of the bowel because
04:47of the centrifugal forces, and it would hang out there forever, unless something is changing
04:55in disbalance.
04:57The Earth stays in orbit because of the perfect balance between its speed around the sun and
05:03our star's gravity pulling it inwards.
05:06However, as our aging sun begins to burn helium, the intense heat generated in its core blasts
05:15away some of its outer layers and causes it to lose mass.
05:21And in seven and a half billion years' time, the sun is losing one-third of its mass, and
05:26so it's losing part of its grip on Earth.
05:29Peter, we can demonstrate this by putting the speed up, okay, so now we see higher speed,
05:37we will establish a larger orbit.
05:43We thought, well, that's it, Earth survives and we'll be around forever.
05:49But Peter wondered if there was more to the story.
05:54The sun is not a solid ball.
05:56It is more like a mass of malleable clay, one that can distort and bend when other bodies
06:02pull on it.
06:05Just as the gravity of the moon pulls up a tidal bulge in the Earth's liquid ocean, the Earth
06:10can cause a tidal bulge in the sun's fluid plasma.
06:17And this detail changed everything.
06:20Well, it took a few years until I figured out a way to quantitatively take into account the
06:29tidal interaction.
06:32And so I programmed it into my computer model.
06:36And then the answer was, oh , Earth is plunging to the sun.
06:42We are doomed.
06:46In about five billion years, our dying sun will pull the Earth into its roiling fires.
06:53Oceans, continents, even the Earth's metal core will boil away into hot plasma.
07:03Nothing will survive.
07:13He may be a face in the crowd today, but astrophysicist Greg Laughlin could one day go down in history
07:19as the man who saved the world from a fiery death.
07:24Some colleagues and I looked carefully at the problem of could you, if you had like a much
07:29more advanced technology than what we've got, would it be possible to save the Earth?
07:34And how would you pull it off in the most elegant way?
07:38Greg thinks he's figured out how to win back the Earth from the death grip of the sun.
07:44It's a game plan of extreme patience and even more extreme precision.
07:57So here's a model of the Earth.
07:59If this represents the Earth's current position relative to the sun, as the sun expands in
08:07the sky, we're going to need to somehow move the Earth further from the sun if we want
08:13life on Earth to survive.
08:16To move our entire planet to a cooler region of space, Greg thinks we might employ a fundamental
08:22force of nature, gravitational attraction.
08:27This magnet is a good model for the force of gravity because it's fairly weak.
08:33I have to bring this magnet really close to the Earth before I get any attractive effect.
08:41Greg's plan calls for extracting a 60-mile-wide rock from the asteroid belt and sending it on
08:48an intercept course with Earth.
08:53It would be the perfect gravitational magnet.
08:58So if we're going to use the asteroid to move the Earth, the gravitational pull from
09:04the asteroid is not very strong.
09:06We've got to, every single time, come in pretty close to the Earth and really pull the Earth
09:14to get the Earth moving so that it's at a farther orbit.
09:19The asteroid would fly laps around the solar system, beginning in the outer asteroid belt,
09:26swinging by Earth every 10,000 years and back again.
09:31And each time it passes, it gently pulls us a mere 30 miles further away from the Sun, keeping
09:39us at the perfect distance.
09:41Not too cold, not too hot.
09:45But for such a high reward of saving the planet, there's an even higher risk.
09:52As the asteroid comes in close to the Earth, it's going really fast, and the absolute last
09:58thing you want to do is to hit the Earth with the asteroid.
10:01That will cause a complete sterilization of the surface of the Earth, and you've completely
10:06screwed up what you were trying to accomplish.
10:09We have to bring the asteroid by the Earth a million times.
10:14Every single time, it has to work out perfectly.
10:24Each time the asteroid passes us, it must come within a mere 300 miles of Earth's surface.
10:32At any point in its journey, collisions with small asteroids or space debris could slightly
10:38change its course and send it smashing into Earth, annihilating all life.
10:48The ever-present threat of sterilizing our planet makes Gregg's scheme a risky last resort.
10:54But could we survive the death throes of the Sun by moving out of the way?
10:59This NASA pioneer believes we can reshape entire worlds and make the cold, red planet next door
11:07our new home.
11:08If our home is destroyed by the Sun, where will we go?
11:20There is no place like Earth in our solar system.
11:24But could we take another rocky planet and transform it into a new Earth?
11:29Can we build a new home for humanity?
11:36Chris McKay is known to his peers as the Indiana Jones of NASA.
11:45But instead of a whip and a fedora, he brings more practical gear for his adventures.
11:54Whether in the freezing waters of Antarctica or the blistering sands of the Gobi Desert.
11:59I like going out into the field and looking at the extremes of life, figuring out what
12:05it's like to live on the very edges.
12:07It's sort of a little detective problem.
12:10Can life survive in this environment?
12:12How does it survive?
12:13What's it doing?
12:15Chris is now embarking on a new adventure.
12:18To find out how we could survive in the extremes of a completely alien environment.
12:25It's a quest that will take him from his home in California to an exotic greenhouse down the street.
12:34On any world, for life to be present, there must be plants.
12:38Plants are the basis of a biosphere.
12:40They make the oxygen we breathe, they make the food we eat.
12:43How to make a world suitable for plants?
12:45Well, the same way this structure is suitable for plants.
12:48This is a greenhouse.
12:49We can make a greenhouse effect on another world by putting greenhouse gases in their atmosphere.
12:54Chris believes that the same runaway greenhouse effect that is threatening climate stability today
13:00could be the very thing that builds us a new home when we leave Earth.
13:05What we have here is two worlds in a jar.
13:10Think of these as little, tiny representations of an entire planet.
13:14Soil, water, atmosphere.
13:16Just like a real planet, the sun's shining down.
13:22So what I have here is little carbonate tablets.
13:25If I take these tablets, break them in half, and stick them in this bottle,
13:30one of these systems will now have more carbon dioxide than the other.
13:33Even though it basks in the same heat, after 30 minutes the bottle with carbon dioxide ends up over 7 degrees hotter than the bottle with just air.
13:46That's because greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, retain heat from the sun.
13:53Chris believes that the right combinations of greenhouse gases could rapidly warm the frozen wasteland next door.
14:02Mars, a planet that will survive even after Earth is burnt to a crisp.
14:08Mars is a cold, dry place. By the numbers, it's minus 80 Fahrenheit, six millibars atmospheric pressure compared to 1,000 here on Earth.
14:17Its gravity is one-third that of Earth, and its distance from the sun is one and a half times that of the Earth.
14:23All of it makes it a cold, dry world, but a world that could be a warm, wet world.
14:29Chris estimates insulating Mars would require 4 million metric tons of greenhouse gases,
14:36way more than could reasonably be transported from Earth.
14:42But in 2008, NASA's Phoenix Lander showed us where these gases could come from when it dug into and analyzed Martian soil.
14:54On Mars, we would produce super greenhouse gases out of elements that are in the soil and the atmosphere.
15:00For example, perfluorocarbons. These are carbon molecules attached to fluorine.
15:06But we could go there with small factories, literally, and take the fluorine out of the rocks,
15:11take the carbon out of the atmosphere, make these perfluorocarbons, and release them in the atmosphere.
15:17In Chris's plan to terraform Mars, a small band of mobile factories about the size of SUVs crawl across the surface of Mars,
15:26eating dirt and processing it into greenhouse gases.
15:31Those gases raise the temperature of the entire planet.
15:36Chris estimates that it may only take a hundred years before humans can move to Mars,
15:43where the rain falls, water flows, and plants grow.
15:50The first pioneers to settle Mars will need to breathe through oxygen masks.
15:59But given enough time, the Martian plants will process the entire atmosphere into breathable air.
16:06It's a long, long time before the plants make enough oxygen that it's breathable.
16:11But if that occurs, then we can walk around in principle just like we do on Earth.
16:15In fact, it'd be better because with less gravity, we'd be able to jump up high.
16:19But escaping to Mars is only a temporary solution.
16:26Because after the Sun destroys Earth, it burns helium for two billion years,
16:32runs out of fuel, and collapses into a tiny, dim, white dwarf star.
16:38What then?
16:40How will we power civilization in the cold darkness?
16:45A groundbreaking laboratory in California may have the answer.
16:50Because it could be on the brink of building an artificial Sun on Earth.
17:00Humanity's days could be numbered.
17:03Because everything we do requires energy.
17:06And almost all of our energy comes from the Sun.
17:10When our star dies, our descendants will need a new source of power.
17:19Ed Moses is a physicist, engineer, and executive at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
17:27His group was awarded $2 billion by the U.S. Department of Energy to build the National Ignition Facility, or NIF.
17:37NIF.
17:38Completed in 2009, NIF is home to 192 of the world's most powerful lasers.
17:45They can annihilate anything locked inside this chamber.
17:50And yes, he's trying to take over the world.
17:56Now this facility, the National Ignition Facility, is the world's most energetic laser by a lot.
18:01About a hundred times more than any other laser on Earth.
18:05We'd really like to find a way to make a completely sustainable, clean energy source.
18:11If Ed succeeds, we may soon be able to power an entire city with this.
18:18The energy in this water could power San Francisco, Washington, Boston, cities that have like a million people in them, for a day.
18:30Think about the amazing part that is.
18:33So, 365 glasses of water, you power it for a year.
18:37It's an astounding thought.
18:40L'chaim.
18:41It's a life.
18:42In the right conditions, the atoms of hydrogen in water can be fused together, converting some of their mass into pure energy.
18:54It's the same fuel that burns inside our sun.
18:57Inside its core, the sun's powerful gravity squeezes the nuclei of hydrogen atoms together.
19:06As they fuse, the protons in the hydrogen nuclei convert 0.7% of their mass into pure energy.
19:14That may not sound like much, but it's enough to keep the temperature at 28 million degrees Fahrenheit.
19:21On Earth, we don't have the prodigious gravity of the sun to create enough pressure for a fusion reaction.
19:30So, Ed's team at NIF will use their giant lasers.
19:34They will charge them using a trillion watts of power from the U.S. electric grid.
19:41A fraction of this power will fire the lasers.
19:43The rest of the massive power draw will be injected into the beams along the way through a series of amplifiers.
19:52And at the central chamber, the hypercharged laser beams will converge onto a small gold cylinder containing a single tiny ball of frozen hydrogen.
20:05This target is being illuminated only for a few billionths of a second.
20:10And it's being illuminated with power so intense that it's more than 1,000 times the total electrical production of the U.S. grid at that time.
20:22And when we do that, we move this target, crush it together at around a million miles an hour, and it burns for a few trillionths of a second.
20:30In one short burst, the hydrogen atoms will be fused into a new element, helium, and release an enormous burst of energy.
20:41You know, our goal is interesting, get more energy out than we put in.
20:46You know, it sounds like the free lunch. How do you do that?
20:49You know, right now I have energy stored in this match as chemical energy.
20:52So with a small amount of energy, just the flick of my wrist, I can get this to burn.
20:59Now what if I light up all these other matches?
21:02So now from a small flick of energy, I have this much energy.
21:07So I can keep doing this and make this a greater and greater conflagration or fire.
21:12That's the goal of what we're trying to do here, to get a fusion burn to happen, to create the sun right here on our Earth.
21:20If NIF strikes a fusion reaction, its tiny artificial sun will produce enough energy to fire the lasers again and have plenty to spare.
21:31A power plant built on this technology could output 50 to 100 times more energy than is needed to fire the lasers.
21:39This is around 10 million times more energy dense than a chemical reaction.
21:47That's why fusion energy is so incredibly interesting.
21:52You know, it doesn't have carbon, it doesn't use much hydrogen, it doesn't use much water, but you could power the world.
21:59Around the world, other fusion experiments are underway.
22:02Even if NIF is not the first to achieve ignition, someone will eventually bring star power to Earth.
22:10By unlocking the energy inside hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, our descendants will have the energy they need to keep civilization running after the sun dies.
22:22But, their entire lives would be spent under artificial light.
22:30The last sunset would only be a fading memory.
22:34And every time they'd look at the heavens, they would see billions of other worlds with stars.
22:42Just like the one we once knew.
22:44What would it take to move to a new cosmic home?
22:49With the rockets we have today, no astronaut could ever live long enough to travel to another star.
22:55But theoretical physicists may have discovered a new means of propulsion.
23:01So powerful, it could take our entire civilization to any star in the galaxy.
23:08When our sun dies, life in this solar system will change forever.
23:18Moving billions of us to a new star, trillions of miles away, seems next to impossible.
23:25But a radical idea from the frontiers of physics may show us how.
23:29The starships that will take the human race to a new home could be powered by the most enigmatic objects in the cosmos.
23:48Sean Westmoreland is a mathematician and physicist who often does his best work when he escapes the office.
23:53A lot of times it's good to kind of let go of what you're working on and maybe try not to actually think about it.
24:04If I'm stuck on a problem, I often will write a song or just play music.
24:12Sean is noodling on the details of how we might trek across the stars.
24:19It's a problem of energy efficiency.
24:27Sending the space shuttle a mere 200 miles above the surface of the Earth burned over 4 million pounds of rocket fuel.
24:36At that rate, sending a group of human beings trillions of miles to another star would take more fuel than we could ever manufacture.
24:45But Sean knows that all matter contains significantly more energy than can be unlocked through burning.
24:54Thanks to a famous equation.
24:57This equation, E equals mc squared, was discovered by Albert Einstein.
25:03And it tells us that everything that has mass has energy.
25:07The amount of energy is given by the mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light.
25:12And since the speed of light is such a fast speed, there is an enormous amount of energy contained even in a small amount of mass.
25:22When I burn this paper, I'm releasing a lot of energy.
25:34But for this process, I'm only converting about 15 billionths of a percent of the mass into energy.
25:43The most efficient energy producing process on Earth will soon be hydrogen fusions, where almost one percent of the fuel's mass is converted to energy.
25:55But Sean and his colleagues believe nature may already have created energy factories with much higher efficiency.
26:03Black holes.
26:04For a black hole, practically one hundred percent of the mass is converted into pure energy.
26:16These voracious gravitational wells devour every particle of matter or light that they touch.
26:23But they aren't entirely black, because any mass that they swallow eventually radiates away.
26:35Our best theory of how matter works, quantum mechanics, envisions particles as more like vibrations.
26:43And these particle vibrations can and will tunnel out of traps that are otherwise inescapable, even if that trap happens to be the event horizon of a black hole.
26:58The smaller the black hole, the more energetic the escaping radiation.
27:04It's not unlike the exhaust nozzle of a jet ski that pushes water out to move the vessel forward.
27:09If the nozzle is big, the exhaust water pushed out doesn't have much speed.
27:16But with a small nozzle, the energy is intense enough to push the vessel forward.
27:25Sean has worked out the optimum size of a spaceship powering black hole.
27:30Too big, and there won't be enough radiation power.
27:34Too small, and it will burn out in a few seconds.
27:37We calculated that a black hole with the mass of a couple million tons seems to be a good candidate for a starship engine.
27:46Two million tons is about the mass of an oil tanker.
27:50A black hole with the same mass would fit into a space 300 times smaller than a proton.
27:57Sean's plan calls for tethering a tiny black hole to a spaceship.
28:05The constant wind radiation it generates would propel the ship forward.
28:11The best idea would be, like a sailboat, the sail is being pushed by the wind, and the black hole generates radiation, and this radiation pushes on the reflector driving the starship.
28:25forward.
28:28And it would last for about 100 years.
28:32If you're wondering where we might find a black hole of this size in the cosmos, Sean is one step ahead of you.
28:39He has worked out how we could build our own black hole, its size made to order.
28:57I calculated that a perfectly efficient square solar panel, 100 miles on each side, in a tight circular orbit about one million miles above the surface of the sun, would, over the course of one year, absorb enough energy to create one of these black holes.
29:18Sean's solar panel would charge up high power gamma ray lasers and fire them at a concentrated point, producing a microscopic black hole seething with radiation.
29:31A source of fuel unlike anything mankind has ever known.
29:36The black hole powered starship is the captain's ultimate delight.
29:41It's like bringing along your own wind.
29:43Our inefficient chemical rockets have so far only sent a small band of humans to the moon.
29:51But Sean calculates that an array of black hole engines could transport millions of people aboard a single ship.
29:59The constant thrusts accelerating them to velocities near the speed of light.
30:05And the passengers need not worry.
30:08The black holes are so tiny, they pose no threat of swallowing the ship.
30:14We might outlive the sun by moving all of humanity to a new star.
30:20Just as the explorers of previous centuries discovered new worlds, new continents here on Earth,
30:29future explorers can travel to new worlds beyond our solar system.
30:33If we master the power of black holes, the human race may truly become cosmic sailors, wandering from star to star.
30:44But every star in the universe has an expiration date.
30:49Astronomers believe that someday, far into the future, every single star in the heavens will burn out.
30:55Is this the end of humanity?
30:59Or could we build a new universe?
31:04Our sun is going to die.
31:08So are all the other stars in the heavens.
31:12When the cosmos goes dark, life as we know it will be impossible.
31:18But this does not have to be the end of humanity.
31:22Because we might be able to create a new universe.
31:27Anthony Aguirre is a cosmologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
31:38A town famous for its artists.
31:42Staying true to the local spirit, he's exploring a unique creative process.
31:48One that shaped our entire cosmos.
31:51The universe is sort of everything that there is.
31:55And yet, modern cosmology has suggested that maybe that's not the case.
32:00That we understand how our universe was sort of created and has evolved.
32:05And through that understanding, we've come to think that maybe that's a process that could happen many times.
32:10That you could create not just this universe, but other ones.
32:14Anthony, like most cosmologists, believes that 13.7 billion years ago,
32:21our universe rapidly expanded into existence, creating the heavens we see today.
32:28And he also believes that the forces of creation continue to generate a near infinite number of other universes.
32:37Thanks to a cosmic mechanism called inflation.
32:40So inflation is the process where a very small region of the universe, with a very, very high energy, takes on the properties in which gravity actually becomes repulsive.
32:59And this anti-gravity force pushes the universe apart.
33:04Sort of like the small piece of glass on the end of this gets blown up by a large factor into this sort of large and smooth expanse.
33:12So the universe starting out rather messy and small turns into something dramatically bigger and much smoother.
33:20If this is the case, the immense cosmos we see today started off as a puny speck.
33:28In fact, Anthony's calculations suggest that the raw materials needed to trigger the creation of an entire universe could be held in your hands.
33:38It turns out that the region that you need to get inflation going has a mass of only about 10 kilograms.
33:46And from that 10 kilograms, you get something that's this big, and then that expands into the entire observable universe.
33:53So immediately you sort of start to wonder if it just takes 10 kilograms, it's small, can't we just do that?
33:58Anthony calculates that any 10 kilogram mass could invade into a new universe, provided it is correctly compressed and heated up to 100 trillion trillion degrees.
34:16Today, the hottest temperature we can reach is inside the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.
34:22Here, tiny particles accelerate to near the speed of light and smash into one another, raising the temperature to more than 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.
34:38But it's not nearly hot enough to create a new universe.
34:43A collider would have to be sort of solar system size.
34:46And we can imagine that far in the future, those colliders and accelerators and experiments will have attained the sort of energies that we need to get inflation going.
34:59Over the next few billion years, Anthony's space-faring descendants will have enough time to work out the details of building a collider the size of the solar system.
35:08If they pull it off, they could trigger an inflation reaction and create a parallel universe.
35:18But that's just one snag.
35:23Unfortunately, if we could make this baby universe, it still would be frustratingly difficult for us to actually make the transition into that other universe.
35:34The bridge connecting our universe and the new baby universe would be both infinitesimally small and incredibly short-lived, a tiny fraction of a second before it would pinch off.
35:45If we tried to get to the other side, we'd almost certainly just end up in a black hole.
35:50Of course, this black hole would be so small that we could never fit inside it either, but we should probably just leave it there.
35:56If the only way to get to a new universe is through a tiny black hole, how would we ever move there?
36:06This scientist is working out how to pull off the greatest escape of all time.
36:12If he succeeds, we could survive forever.
36:18Forever.
36:28Could we ever travel to a parallel universe?
36:32A new home with new stars that will burn for eons to come could be waiting for us.
36:38Through a wormhole and one scientist is already working out how to make this fantastic voyage.
36:51Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and a die-hard fan of science fiction.
36:58His work may soon bridge the dreams of these two disciplines.
37:06He's figuring out when we'll be able to make the journey to a new universe by quantifying how far our technology has advanced to date.
37:17This looks like a set from a science fiction movie.
37:20But actually, it's the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant.
37:25It's one of the largest, most modern, up-to-date waste treatment plants on the planet Earth.
37:32Over a million people's wastewater is processed, purified, and dumped right back into the oceans.
37:39So in some sense, this is a monument to our technological advances.
37:43Today, our knowledge of science and engineering allows us to control natural resources of entire cities.
37:51And to Michio, it's a sign that our civilization is climbing up the cosmic ranks.
37:58We look at civilizations based on energy production.
38:02A Type I civilization, for example, can harness truly planetary forms of energy.
38:08They can perhaps control the weather, perhaps control the course of earthquakes.
38:13Eventually, you become Type II, that is, stellar.
38:17You play with stars, sort of like the Federation of Planets in Star Trek.
38:23And then, you begin to roam the galactic space lanes.
38:27You become a galactic empire, like in Star Wars.
38:31Now, on this cosmic scale, what are we?
38:35Do we control the weather? Do we roam the galactic space lanes?
38:38No, we're closer to Type 0.
38:40However, if you look at it very carefully, we can harness the power of entire cities and nations.
38:47So technically speaking, we are about a .7 civilization.
38:51Right now, our Type 0.7 civilization can manipulate city-wide natural resources, like water.
38:58But to venture to another universe, we'll have to master the most fundamental natural resource in all creation.
39:09The fabric of space and time.
39:11Let's say the surface of this water represents our universe.
39:16Everything we can see and touch and feel represented right here on the surface.
39:21And let's say this is us.
39:23Notice that we are stuck on the surface of this water.
39:27So we cannot leave our universe.
39:32That's us floating on the fabric of space and time.
39:36However, there could be another universe located at the bottom of this water.
39:42What we need is a bridge connecting two universes.
39:46Most physicists believe that nature allows parallel universes to exist just like two separate planes of water.
39:55But is there a way to connect two planes that are completely isolated from one another?
40:00Water can be distorted into a whirlpool that connects the top and the bottom.
40:08Physicists like Michio have discovered that just like a whirlpool, space itself can bend and distort to form a pathway between two parallel universes.
40:20A pathway known as a wormhole.
40:23Now, a wormhole is a portal that allows you to go back and forth between two worlds.
40:28But they are potentially unstable.
40:31To stabilize them, we need a new substance called negative energy.
40:40Just like an oil-based solution pushes apart water, negative energy would push apart space itself.
40:48You see, this negative energy is anti-gravitational.
40:52Positive energy wants to collapse the hole.
40:54Negative energy wants to keep it afloat.
40:56However, with enough negative energy, you may be able to go right through the wormhole.
41:05Our entire civilization could move from one universe to another through a wormhole.
41:12And nature may have already given us the raw materials to build one.
41:16To actually create a wormhole, you would have to manipulate the power of a star.
41:23For a type 3 civilization, it would be child's play to get a ring of white dwarf stars.
41:29You could create a wormhole in slow motion.
41:33By simply increasing the velocity of the stars and the number of stars, you can slowly open up a wormhole.
41:40This would be like the looking glass of Alice in Alice in Wonderland.
41:45And then you would add negative energy to stabilize it.
41:47In that way, you can create a wormhole.
41:51In order to outlive our sun and every other star in the universe, we may someday initiate a great cycle of cosmic immortality.
42:02New universes would be grown in laboratories, then ventured into through wormholes.
42:09A process that could repeat forever.
42:13Forever.
42:17Today, we exist at the mercy of our sun.
42:22But as we discover the true laws of the universe and learn to master them, we may at last find our independence.
42:31We'll become citizens not of the earth, but of the galaxy, the cosmos, or even of the multiverse.
42:40Surviving as long as our ingenuity will allow.
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