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Documentary, Horizon - We are the Aliens
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00:00If scientists had to come up with a completely crazy theory about where humans came from, what could it be?
00:07How about, we're all descended from aliens.
00:12If you go back far enough, then the ancestor of living things on Earth would be extraterrestrials.
00:18And that would include humans.
00:20And that would include humans.
00:22It's an astonishing claim.
00:25Have all these scientists beavering away in their ivory towers been reading too much science fiction?
00:31Ten years ago, I think there were very, very few people who would have taken the idea of life coming to the Earth from outside seriously.
00:41If you can't go to Mars, being descended from Martians is probably the next best thing.
00:55It's a hot and humid July in 2001.
01:02Something very strange has happened on planet Earth.
01:10Here in southern India, many villages are the focus of a possible alien invasion.
01:16It starts with rain.
01:18Red, rain.
01:20The local people were horrified.
01:30In some places, it was very intense.
01:32It was as red as blood.
01:35The people were so scared, they threw it away.
01:38According to Hindu religion, it is an era of destruction.
01:50Kali Yugam.
01:51And these are the signs.
01:52There will be chaos and it will rain fire.
01:54I thought it was the end of the world.
02:02Ever since I was a child, I was told that the world would end in the year 2000.
02:06And when the rain came, I thought it was a warning sent from God and I was very scared.
02:11The world didn't end in fact.
02:26But the red rain continued for two long months.
02:29Working in the area was a physicist.
02:31He didn't know it at the time, but his life was about to change forever.
02:35His name is Dr. Godfrey Lewis.
02:39I have heard about the news reports.
02:41And as the days went by, it became more and more mysterious.
02:47What it is, nobody seems to give a clear answer.
02:50Because, so from that moment, I was interested in that.
02:55The first official explanation for the red rain was pretty dull.
02:59Government officials claimed that it was red colored dust that had blown in from Arabia.
03:05Godfrey didn't buy this.
03:07He was convinced that there was something extra special about the red rain.
03:10He trailed around villages collecting samples.
03:13And under an electron microscope, he saw that the particles weren't dust at all.
03:20They were alive.
03:23It's quite exciting to see this.
03:25They look like red blood cells, but they are not.
03:30Because these are in a very thick cell wall.
03:32And that cell wall is not there in the blood cells.
03:39But what was this mysterious life form?
03:42There was only one way to find out.
03:44Take a look at the DNA.
03:50The results came back.
03:52There was no DNA.
03:54It was life, but not as we know it.
04:01All life on Earth depends in one way or another on DNA.
04:04The carrier of all genetic information.
04:07If the red rain cells didn't have DNA, then it meant only one thing to Godfrey.
04:12They had come from outer space.
04:15The staggering claim is that this is possibly extraterrestrial.
04:18That's a big claim, I know.
04:19But all the experiments are supporting this claim.
04:25A big claim is putting it mildly.
04:28These tiny cells, just eight thousandths of a millimeter across, might actually be aliens.
04:33A close encounter is big news, and around the world the wires were buzzing, people desperate to find out more.
04:42Godfrey contacted the one scientist in the UK who might take his claim seriously.
04:55Chandra Wickramasinghe.
04:57A brilliant astrophysicist full of maverick ideas.
04:59He's been based at Cardiff University for the last 30 years.
05:10In the late 1960s, Chandra was working with world-famous astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle.
05:15Together they came up with a startling claim.
05:19That the universe was teeming with organic compounds, the building blocks of life.
05:24Sir Fred and Chandra then went even further.
05:27They were convinced that comets actually contain life itself.
05:31And they had used clever astronomical techniques to prime it.
05:34I think it's true to say, isn't it, that if your theory is correct,
05:37life not only may be spread throughout the universe, it must be.
05:40Surely there must be many places where this has happened.
05:46Do you have an idea of the numbers?
05:48The numbers must be very favorable, Fred.
05:49There are billions of stars in the galaxy which are probably very similar to the sun.
05:53And very similar to the extent of being able to support planetary systems.
05:56So it would really be very surprising if life is not, if the galaxy is not just teeming with life.
06:06They weren't talking about large-scale life like fish.
06:09Rather tiny bacteria and viruses itching a lift through the cosmos.
06:14In the same way that plant seeds can travel around Earth to find suitable conditions to flourish.
06:19So microorganisms could journey through space on the back of a comet seeding other planets.
06:24And this might be how life on Earth began.
06:27The name of their theory was Panspermia.
06:30But it was all too much for the establishment. Their theory was ridiculed.
06:40I think the implication was that we were just a pair of crazy lunatics who had jumped onto the wrong band back then or something.
06:47And there was no arguments presented to say that you are wrong for such and such a reason.
06:53Chandra's been living on the outskirts of the scientific mainstream ever since.
06:59Waiting for that one piece of killer evidence.
07:01Flying saucers have invaded our planet.
07:09Washington, London, Moscow are key targets.
07:12The whole world is under attack.
07:14Can it survive?
07:15Hello, Ghatri.
07:16So nice to meet you after all the weeks of correspondence.
07:29Thank you very much.
07:31Could the red rain really be the smoking gun he's been waiting for?
07:38Chandra has come to India to find out.
07:41Ghatri, I think what I would like to see is the experiments that you did replicating these red ray microorganisms.
07:51Because that definitely is good evidence to show that this is biology.
07:57If it is true that these are alien bugs from space, then it is an absolute clear-cut proof of Panspermia, ongoing Panspermia.
08:05And that would be absolutely fascinating and that would be over the moon.
08:10For the theory of Panspermia to have any credibility requires a massive leap in our understanding of the universe.
08:27That leap of faith is, there is life beyond Earth.
08:31Until recently, it's been assumed outer space was just too cruel an environment for life to exist.
08:36But closer to home, scientists have been discovering bugs that are surprisingly tough little blighters, living in some of the harshest places imaginable.
08:45Such as here, in Mono Lake, California.
08:48Yes, that's mud for me.
08:50Yes.
08:51One of NASA's top astrobiologists, Richard B. Hoover, has the job of tracking them down.
08:57He's an extremophile hunter, and mud is a good place to start.
09:01It's a nice gray mud, with a slightly sulfurous smell.
09:06I love it. I love it. That's fantastic.
09:10That's fantastic.
09:12Mono Lake is one of the most spectacular and wonderful places on Earth, as far as astrobiologists are concerned.
09:20It has no fish. It's about three times the salinity of seawater, and it has a very high pH, like strong soap.
09:30And under these conditions, only a few forms of life are able to live.
09:37The water temperature here has gone to 85.
09:39Look at the brine shrimp in the water. They're there by the billions.
09:49We'll take a sample of that.
09:51Yes.
09:53We call them extremophiles because they live in what we consider to be extreme conditions.
09:58The microorganisms that live here would actually think where we're living would be extreme conditions
10:02because of all this terribly poisonous oxygen around.
10:04Extremophiles are far tougher than anyone had thought possible.
10:10Life can live just about anywhere.
10:11And Richard has had to resort to ever more drastic measures to track it down.
10:20We have a new microorganism that was collected in the guano of the penguin during the expedition to Antarctica,
10:28and this microorganism is actually able to grow at temperatures of minus 5C.
10:32That's it. But basically you found it in penguin shape.
10:36Penguin dew is perhaps the more polite way.
10:40But yes, guano is a very interesting source for these kind of strange exotic microorganisms,
10:47particularly from places like Antarctica and Patagonia.
10:50And we thought you were weird getting mud samples.
10:56Life has even been found living in a place more extreme than frozen penguin dew.
11:02Happily making home in the heart of a nuclear reactor.
11:06They discovered that there was a microorganism that was living in this highly alkaline water
11:12in the presence of spent nuclear fuel rods and growing in the water and on the fuel rods
11:17and eating holes in the stainless steel cylinders.
11:19So these microorganisms were able to live in incredibly high radiation environments, high alkalinity environments,
11:27and their primary food source was the iron itself of the stainless steel.
11:30While Richard continues work on these earth organisms, what he would really like to find is an alien version.
11:41And here I have a hormigonium of this cyanobacteria.
11:46It's a collection of individual cells. It's a reproductive state.
11:48Ah, this is gorgeous.
11:52The main reason that astrobiologists are interested in extremophiles is because most of the other bodies of the solar system
12:01are either very cold or very dry or very barren atmosphere.
12:07So from the earth's perspective, those conditions are extreme conditions.
12:13So the kinds of things that we find in these extreme environments on earth are very good models for the kinds of things that we should look for on other places in the solar system.
12:22If life is ever found beyond earth, it will be a vital pillar to the theory of panspermia.
12:35And the guys most likely to succeed are NASA.
12:44One of the most ambitious NASA projects is based in this nondescript shed in Texas.
12:48It's part of a plan to look for life on a tiny moon of Jupiter called Europa.
12:57Leading the team is alien hunter Bill Stone.
13:00I'm just an engineer and an explorer.
13:03To me, there's a frontier out there for us to explore.
13:06Some of those things we can do by ourselves, manned exploration.
13:10Personally, I would prefer to do that if I could, but there are some places that right now we can't go,
13:14but with robots we can learn from, and Europa is one of those places right now.
13:22Bill's goal is to make an autonomous robot submarine that will hopefully find alien life on Europa.
13:31Europa is a very popular destination for NASA.
13:34The reason that it is of such great interest is the fact that for sure it has water.
13:40Those high resolution photographs showed that the surface indicated tidal cracking of ice in such a fashion that it produced pressure ridges similar to what we see in the Arctic Ocean on Earth.
13:51You can only have that with an ocean of water underneath.
13:55If you have water, you have high possibility for the presence of life.
14:00So that's why Europa is such a direct hit in terms of the astrobiology interest.
14:06This bold mission is planned for 12 years time.
14:10Unfortunately, their machine is still in this.
14:14This is a 2005 and a 2006 cable.
14:19I have no idea.
14:21One of those is a no connect.
14:23This is John Kerr. John's our lab manager and also Jack of all trades.
14:27This is Bart Hogan from the University of Maryland.
14:30He's working on the power subsystems for the entire vehicle.
14:32The Europa mission is probably the greatest technological challenge that mankind has ever undertaken.
14:39To break it down in pieces, the master lander comes down from the mothership.
14:44It lands on the surface of Europa in a flat area that's safe, not in an area where you have cracks or anything.
14:49You have a second stage of the lander that melts its way through three kilometers worth of ice.
14:55There will be something that will be not unlike the autonomous underwater vehicles that are being developed today.
15:00They look fish-like, they look torpedo-like, they move fast, so we call that portion the fast mover.
15:05On the nose of this will be the successor to that device right there.
15:10And whether it's called Depthex or something else at that point, who knows.
15:13But it's going to inherit what we've learned from this device.
15:16It sounds pretty happy. It sounds like it's pretty long.
15:18Here's a good question for these guys here. How many lines of code do you guys think are going to be in the whole bot when we're done?
15:28For each sensor system, there's about 1,500 bucks a code.
15:31And there's 96 sensors in the system. And 6 actuators.
15:34Any bucks? That's the most important.
15:36That's why we want it to be as short as possible.
15:38Right now, yes. Please, no.
15:45When we say we're searching for life, we're not talking about aliens.
15:48Anthropomorphic creatures that come down and do nasty things to humans.
15:52No, we're talking about microbiological life.
15:55Things that are so small you can't see them except with a microscope.
15:57Those things form the bulk of life in the universe as far as we can tell.
16:01And so it's that is what we expect to find.
16:04Non-intelligent, very, very tiny life.
16:06Non-intelligent?
16:09Very, very tiny life?
16:11Sounds familiar.
16:13Chandra is hoping that this is just the sort of organism that the red rain of southern India might be.
16:19Bacteria are perhaps not as exciting as little green men.
16:22But they are much, much tougher, making it easier for them to survive a trek through the solar system.
16:28We've got to endure the extreme cold of space, the vacuum of space,
16:33ultraviolet radiation, cosmic rays, x-rays.
16:36That sounds like a total order.
16:38But bacteria do that.
16:40From what we know, survival out in space is more or less ensured.
16:43Bacteria, I think, seem to me to be born space travelers.
16:46One simple noisy fact has convinced Godfrey Lewis he is right.
16:55Just before the red rain came down, there was an enormous explosion.
16:59According to Godfrey, this could be a comet or a meteorite hitting the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrating.
17:04Just the sort of object that could be transporting aliens.
17:09He spoke to one of the witnesses.
17:10It happened around 5.30 in the morning.
17:16I was sleeping in this room.
17:19The noise is very intense.
17:24It was like a very strong booming sound, like an object cracking into pieces.
17:29This is some of the samples we have collected.
17:40Right, right.
17:42Pretty good sample we have.
17:44So this is the real stuff, my goodness.
17:46Yeah, this is the real stuff.
17:48Godfrey's research on the red rain is now in the scientific literature.
17:52But many in the establishment remain highly skeptical.
17:54They have come up with their own bizarre earthbound explanations.
18:03One theory is that a meteorite struck a flock of bats.
18:07And it was their blood that came down as red rain.
18:11This would explain the lack of DNA, because red blood cells don't have any.
18:15Look, where are all the other bats?
18:18Where are the bats' remnants?
18:21And how can for two months the bats continuously get killed?
18:25These are very funny periods, a flock of bats.
18:32Another idea is that millions of lichen spores were swept up from trees and into the atmosphere.
18:37And then returned as the red rain.
18:41But where is the DNA that lichen cells should have?
18:44Godfrey's unimpressed.
18:45If you look at the magnitude of the rain, the amount of quantity of material that has fallen down,
18:51and the geographical distribution of this throughout the entire state,
18:56that this theory cannot explain the phenomenon.
19:00But if it's alien, it would be pretty dangerous, isn't it?
19:03No, that is a popular concept.
19:05Every alien should be dangerous, but that may not be the case.
19:08Because it's friendly aliens.
19:09An invasion of friendly aliens in southern India might seem far-fetched.
19:16But there is one man who's supposed to take it all very seriously.
19:24Close to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.,
19:28he has perhaps the most important job this side of Pluto.
19:31He is a planetary protection officer for NASA.
19:35So, John, do you get tired of the man in black image?
19:39I'm not sure I've developed one yet.
19:42But do you like the film?
19:43Oh, I enjoy the film very much.
19:45Yeah, it's a good film.
19:47When the out-of-this-world gets out of control,
19:50don't bother calling the CIA.
19:52Forget the FBI, because there's only one government agency we can turn to.
19:58This is my office, and this is from where I hold forth when I'm in Washington, D.C.
20:05Well, my guess is that if there's life out there, it would be interesting.
20:11It might even be compelling in its lessons, but it wouldn't be dangerous.
20:15But that's just my guess.
20:17And one of the things that I have to acknowledge is that ignorance is not bliss.
20:21I'm not going to be able to guarantee to anybody that life out there isn't dangerous.
20:24Oh, that looks beautiful.
20:26It has a stark beauty all its own.
20:29It's like much of the high desert of the United States.
20:33It's different, but it's very pretty out here.
20:36John's job has been around for some time.
20:39Ever since they put a man on the moon in 1969, NASA has been nervous about what they might bring back to Earth.
20:47In fact, the Apollo astronauts, the concern was whether or not there would be a disease that the astronauts would pick up from a lunar microbe.
20:55NASA took no chances.
20:58The Apollo astronauts were put into sealed quarantine and kept there for 21 days.
21:02They didn't think alien life could survive on the moon, but they had to make sure.
21:09Even President Nixon wanted to check they were alien free.
21:13The lunar quarantine was accomplished both in Texas as well as at NASA Ames in Moffat Field, California.
21:21And they really did test the lunar material against everything that they could think of.
21:26So they were injecting it into animals and things?
21:27Injecting it into animals, testing it against plants, feeding it to chickens, you know, what have you.
21:34Anything that they thought was, you know, potentially going to show you an effect.
21:38And did they find anything?
21:40No. Other than chickens don't like lunar dust.
21:49But during the mission, they had found something rather special.
21:52This is Surveyor 3.
21:55It was an unmanned probe sent to scope out potential landing sites.
21:59It arrived two and a half years before the first moon landing.
22:03On board was a camera, which the astronauts were instructed to bring home.
22:08We're ready to start getting a TV camera.
22:11Okay.
22:13Okay.
22:15And when this camera was studied in great detail,
22:18there was found to be evidence of a living microorganism on the inside of a piece of foam on the interior of the camera.
22:27The scientists concluded that this microorganism had remained alive on the surface of the moon for approximately 30 months.
22:34But it was not thought to be an extraterrestrial life form, but rather a contaminant that got into the camera during the testing on Earth before the Surveyor spacecraft was sent to the moon.
22:43It was a common microorganism, Streptococcus mitus.
22:48Somebody probably sneezed when they were assembling the camera before it went to the moon.
22:53That means that microbial life could conceivably survive in space and could conceivably be transferred from one place to another, which is the fundamental concept of panspermia.
23:02While protecting the planet takes up much of John Rommel's time, the rest of his working day is spent making sure we don't contaminate other planets.
23:14Any probe sent to Mars or Europa has to be spotless.
23:18There's a test before they can launch, and the planetary protection officer is responsible for providing that test, and we go down and we assay the spacecraft for the presence of microbes, and they get a passing grade or a failing grade.
23:33But you'd be able to cancel the mission?
23:35Yeah. I would have the authority to say stop. More likely I would say clean it first, then you can launch it.
23:42Main engine start, zero, and liftoff of the Stardust spacecraft returning a time capsule of the elements of the formation of our solar system.
23:52If the panspermia theory is to be proven one way or the other, it's vital not to contaminate other planets.
23:58If we go to other moons, other worlds, etc., and take Earth contamination there, and then later go back and discover life, and go, golly, life on Mars looks just like life in Florida. How about that?
24:17We're actually ruining the principal element that NASA focuses on is preserving the science.
24:21Things look very good at this point. Going under 5,000 miles an hour.
24:35The greater the likelihood of finding life, the stricter the cleanliness required.
24:40DevTex will have to be spotless for her voyage to Europa.
24:44But sneezing into the machine is the least of Bill Stone's problems at the moment.
24:49You ever hear that Dirty Harry line?
24:52Do you feel lucky?
24:54In this case, we ask everybody, did you check all the O-rings?
24:58Instead of sending DevTex all the way to Europa and her maiden voyage, they're going to lower her into a tank of water on the other side of the workshop.
25:07And even here, there's still much to go wrong, not least to find out whether this $5 million submarine is waterproof.
25:12Okay, and I've got, I've got two connectors over here, two mink tens that are open.
25:18Let's just bend it all the way.
25:19Yeah, let's just bend it all the way.
25:20Right, just to the surface.
25:21Same.
25:22Lower.
25:29Alright.
25:30Southwest research and the CU's wet.
25:33No leaks.
25:34No leaks so far.
25:36This is a big step going wet.
25:38While Bill and his team continue their hunt for alien life in the solar system.
25:45Past Permians are waiting for the party to come here.
25:48Hidden amongst some of the 500 tons of meteorite that fall to Earth every year.
25:52One particularly rare type of meteorite is the carbonaceous pond right.
25:59A sort of burnt out comet.
26:01Some believe that this is the most comfortable form of transport for an alien visitor.
26:05And Richard B. Hoover is convinced he's found the evidence of just such an intergalactic joyride.
26:11It's called the Murchison meteorite and it fell into the Australian outback.
26:14One lady was hanging up her laundry and she saw the sun in the sky and she thought it was strange because it was in the wrong part of the sky.
26:22And then she looked and saw that the sun was in the right part of the sky.
26:25And here were two suns.
26:27And she was actually seeing the fireball associated with the Murchison meteorite when it came in.
26:31And large chunks of Murchison black rock landed all around her.
26:34One piece actually came smashing through the roof of a shame.
26:39In fact, this is one of the pieces of Murchison that fell.
26:45And in fact, when you open the vial, you can actually get a bit of the aroma, the odor of the Murchison meteorite.
26:54And it has a power-y, sulfurous smell.
26:57It's really quite spectacular.
26:59These are the organic gases that are still continuing to come off of the meteorite.
27:02We take the meteorite and we break it in in a fresh fracture and then put it under the electron microscope so that we look at a freshly broken piece of the meteorite.
27:13And we found a lot of very, very complex structures that look like microfossils of blue-green algae.
27:20Not just in terms of shape, but also in terms of precise detail in structures like reproductive structures and the presence of external structures as well.
27:30You found evidence of light.
27:32Well, I think it's tremendously interesting that the meteorites appear to contain the remains of living organisms.
27:39I think that these living organisms were actually living on a body like a comet.
27:44If in fact this is correct, this means that comets may be carriers of light from one place of the solar system to another.
27:50He's found fossils, entire colonies of fossil microorganisms, just stuck in the middle of these space rock rocks.
28:02That's amazing.
28:03I think it's amazing. I think it really proves that comets were the carriers of life, are still the carriers of life.
28:10And when a comet becomes exhausted, when all the gases flow out of them, then these fossils remain and that's what he's finding.
28:17Richard's claim that this is fossilized life is highly contentious and it still leaves open the question as to whether life forms on a meteorite could survive the dramatic impact of landing on Earth.
28:29They say it's not the falling that kills you, but the sudden stop at the end.
28:33What Mike is doing today is, he's taking small grains of rock which have bugs in, then putting them into a missile, a carrier which will be launched in the gun, and the grains of rock carry on and hit the target.
28:55The bug is sitting in the rock, it lives in the rock, and it's quite happy there as bugs go. But in our case, that bug is suddenly going to be accelerated.
29:06At the University of Kent, they're trying to replicate what happens to the bugs when they crash into Earth on the back of a meteorite.
29:13For this, they need a very big gun, and some very small bugs. Oh, and a belief in panspermia.
29:19So what will happen next is we fire the gun, and we want to reach a speed of 5 kilometers a second. That's about 10 to 15,000 miles per hour. So it's going to be fast.
29:30The target is water with a rock behind it. So it's like hitting an ocean. But first we have the water, and then there's an ocean floor beneath it.
29:39Then we'll hit the water as if they've come from the space of these 10, 20,000 miles per hour, and about to be very heavily shot. And this would normally kill those things.
29:48The only question is, will it survive? And if it does, it will just be happy again, growing in its new home.
30:00Growing in its new home.
30:11The firing of the gun happens in a vacuum to maximize the speed.
30:16The bugs are now on a 15,000 mile per hour roller coaster.
30:19But remember, in space, no one can hear you scream.
30:29Have any of the bugs survived?
30:30And I'm afraid nothing's hit the target. The rock has come off slightly off axis. Instead of going through the hole here, has hit the container up here. So our target's still intact, and our bugs have hit solid metal. And that's a lot harder than water when you hit it at high speed. And so they've probably been crushed and almost certainly all are dead. So hey-ho, it's a bug's life.
30:47But other experiments by Mark have confirmed that bugs can survive. These are some of the lucky ones. The casualty rate is very high. But this is not a problem.
31:08What would happen is if you went into the garden and dug up one gram of soil, one little small cubic centimeter perhaps of soil, you'd find 10 or 100 million bugs in there. If we could fire that, a rock that size in our gun, with that number of bugs in, we would find about 10 or 100 of them survive our experiments. So the survival rate is very, very low. But you only need 10 or 100, and they just multiply.
31:32About five or six years ago, when I went to the first meeting and announced this work, we were still doing tests and didn't have success, but someone in the audience stood up and said,
31:40this is crazy. Why are you doing this? Everyone knows the answer. Nothing survives.
31:44Well, we then did some more experiments. We started to show that in high speed impacts, bugs can survive and potentially could have come from space if they're out there and invaded the Earth, as it were.
31:54At which stage, when we started announcing the results in conference, a different person stood up in the audience and said, well, why are you doing these experiments? Everyone knows the answer. Of course they survive.
32:01So in the space of just a few years, it went from being a denouncement to why you wasted your time because it's trivial.
32:08It's not trivial by any means, because Mark's experiments have helped to support Palspermia.
32:14And it's not just been experiments in the lab that have verified the concept.
32:18Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.
32:23A tragic real-life event has added support to the idea. In 2003, the Columbia Space Shuttle blew up during re-entry and seven astronauts lost their lives.
32:39What is not well known is that some of the microorganisms on board the space shuttle survived.
32:45Columbia, you know, was a mission that effectively broke up over a multi-state area.
32:50And inside of some of those pieces, you know, were experiments that had been flown for biological purposes.
32:57And in at least one of those experiments, the organism survived the trip.
33:02So the Columbia accident was a tragedy that involved not only the melting of a wing, but the physical dismantling of a shuttle.
33:12It's a very interesting, you know, fact that things falling from high up on the Earth can survive.
33:19All scientists now agree that microorganisms can survive extraordinary conditions, be it radiation, extreme cold, extreme heat, extreme ignorance.
33:34Most space scientists also believe that the solar system almost certainly contains other life forms, and are very, very keen to find them.
33:42And a few scientists are convinced that certain meteorites contain the remains of life.
33:47Putting all the evidence together, Chandra believes that this is how life on Earth began in the first place.
33:53It arrived on the back of a comet 3.8 billion years ago.
34:05Life did not start here on the Earth.
34:07We came in ready packaged genetic bits and pieces from space.
34:12Other scientists disagree.
34:16They think life started here on Earth.
34:24One scientist who argues that it all began here, in a small bubbling puddle, is David Diemer.
34:30If you've never thought about it, if this is the first time you ever saw a soap bubble, you'd be astonished that this kind of a structure could just appear out of nowhere.
34:40David is not blowing bubbles just for fun.
34:45He's interested in how soap bubbles, by assembling themselves, will help explain the origin of life.
34:52So this is what we mean by a self-assembly process.
34:56It's one of the very simplest self-assembly processes.
34:59He's using his expertise in bubble blowing to try to create new life in the lab.
35:11It's alive!
35:12It's alive!
35:13It's alive!
35:14It's alive!
35:15It's alive!
35:16It's alive!
35:17It's alive!
35:18In the name of God!
35:20Now I know what it feels like to be God!
35:22David uses soapy material to form microscopic bubbles.
35:33This froth is what David believes was the first step in the origin of life on Earth.
35:41No comet required.
35:44The bubbles, or vesicles as he calls them, are crucial to his theory because they provide the perfect place for making new life from scratch.
35:52So we think that vesicles were very much part of the first forms of cellular life.
35:57All life today is cellular.
35:59It means there's a membrane surrounding a compartment.
36:02And what we're doing here is stepping through the evolutionary process that must have occurred on the Earth about three and a half billion years ago,
36:09when the first forms of cellular life appeared.
36:14David then inserts small chunks of DNA inside his artificial cells.
36:23Is it alive?
36:24Not yet.
36:25But it's a shared goal of a number of laboratories now to actually make an artificial form of life.
36:33And some might say a dangerous goal.
36:35I don't think so.
36:36The fact is that there are all sorts of dangerous life out there right now, the latest being the avian flu virus, for example.
36:44And what we might do in the laboratory would not stand a chance of surviving, I think, in today's biological world.
36:53We think, however, that we're trying to do something that simulates what happened on the early Earth,
37:03and not trying to put together a living being in the sense that Frankenstein was.
37:08I think they're playing at God.
37:11I think the object of all these experiments is to show that life is not that special of a system.
37:19I would be exceedingly surprised if he succeeded, or if anybody succeeded,
37:23because the improbabilities are so immense.
37:27And to think that they could be overcome in a small laboratory flask is asking not for the moon,
37:34it's asking for the cosmos.
37:39David Diemer is the first to admit that his cells are not fully-fledged living organisms.
37:44But if he does succeed in creating life relatively easily,
37:47then it makes it much more credible that life could have started on Earth.
37:52I'm always attracted to what we call Occam's razor.
37:56Look for the simplest explanation.
37:58And the simplest explanation is that there was a set of organic molecules
38:03which could self-assemble into microscopic structures
38:07that increasingly took on the properties of life as we know it.
38:12So, to sum up, life began on the Earth and was not delivered to the Earth.
38:21We still don't know how life began on Earth.
38:23We don't know how life would have begun on other places in the cosmos.
38:28Even though it's generally accepted that life began on Earth through these primordial reactions in the ancient oceans,
38:36it's quite possible that life began on Earth as a result of transfer of biological materials
38:42from other portions of the solar system.
38:44It's these arguments that make Chandler so determined to get to the bottom of the red rain.
38:53If the red cells really are alien life, then it must be proof of panspermia.
38:58Chandler has been doing independent tests on samples of the red rain.
39:07In science, things are rarely clear-cut, and he has very different results from Godfrey.
39:14And these are positive amplification products, so this is DNA from the red rain.
39:20Wow, there's no doubt about it. There's no doubt about it.
39:23It's absolutely conclusive as far as I can see.
39:26The discovery of DNA in the red rain cells has been corroborated by another lab.
39:31Yet this recent finding has done nothing to dent Chandler's unshakable belief
39:35that the red rain is extraterrestrial.
39:37He believes that all life in the cosmos will probably share various types of DNA.
39:43Before I came, I had grave doubts as to whether the red rain was really an indication
39:47of life coming from space, new life coming from space.
39:50But on reflection and after talking to Godfrey, I think I would now fairly firmly believe
39:58that it did represent an invasion of microbes from space.
40:02Over in Washington, D.C., the planetary protection officer remains skeptical.
40:10He thinks the red rain has a more mundane origin.
40:14The material when examined by astrophysicists and people who are looking for evidence to support a view
40:22doesn't appear to be anything that they've ever seen before.
40:26But people who actually have seen things before say, looks like red algae to me.
40:30I would tend to go with the people who have seen more things in the biological kingdom
40:35rather than those who are looking to support their own ideas about how the world should work
40:40without the data to back it on.
40:42For the moment, the jury's out.
40:46But Chandler remains convinced that this sort of interplanetary transfer of microbes
40:51is how life first originated on Earth.
40:54And Chandler is not alone.
40:55There are an increasing number of scientists who are happy to put their family ancestry down to aliens.
41:02Earth life is essentially alien life.
41:04It is not a life that was indigenous to be Earth by any means.
41:07And if we evolve from that life, then I think we are the products of evolution from alien life.
41:17If the hypothesis is correct, then all of the life that we see today originated from material that was brought into our planet.
41:24And if it's coming from beyond the atmosphere, then it is extraterrestrial.
41:30That's not an unusual concept.
41:32That's the way in which life propagates on Earth.
41:35You have seeds and these seeds are carried by the winds and they start growing at other places when they find conditions are suitable.
41:42In that sense, we are all extraterrestrials. The ancestors are probably outside Earth.
41:52So we have actually emerged from some extraterrestrial organism actually.
42:00The idea that life functions face only actually tells you how life started on Earth.
42:06It still doesn't address the big question, how did life itself start?
42:09But at least it starts giving us an answer to what's it like here on Earth?
42:12Why is the life here on Earth?
42:13And it would suggest there's life elsewhere, which is something else a lot of people want to know one way or the other.
42:18Maybe we are Martians. Maybe life here on Earth came from Mars.
42:21Much of Chandra's work on panspermia has now been vindicated.
42:28So are we really descended from aliens?
42:32It could have come straight from a comic book.
42:35I think science fiction is always a very appealing thing for many of us to read.
42:40And at some times, science fiction turns into science fact.
42:43But the journey towards the truth is always a rewarding one, I think.
42:47And I saw this as a journey towards discovering a truth that was quite plain to me.
42:53And it's becoming plainer and plainer to other people now after 30 odd years.
43:00If you want to experience that being humbled, go look at the NASA Hubble Deep Space image.
43:08Look into the darkest, darkest little tiny segment of the sky.
43:12And what they saw back in that picture, to me, was the most devastating news of all for people who think were important.
43:18What you saw were clusters of light that were not stars.
43:22There were galaxies.
43:24And there were thousands and thousands of galaxies in that little picture of the darkest part of the universe.
43:29If you think that there's not other life out there, think again.
43:33Think again.
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