In the beginning, there was darkness. And then... BANG!
Giving birth to an endless expanding existence of time, space and matter.
Now, see further than we've ever imagined beyond the limits of our existence,
in a place we call... THE UNIVERSE.
Are we alone in the Universe?
Are we the only ones who look up at the stars and wonder,
"Is anybody out there?"
Today, scientists quest for the answer in different ways.
Some with massive radio telescopes,
some with interplanetarian, interstellar probes.
If we find extraterrestrial life, what will it look like?
Soft and squishy?
Or will the first aliens we contact
simple be self-replicating machines,
their biological creators having died off millions of years ago?
Some of the top scientists in the world probe for answers
in the search for E.T.
It is the question that has kept many people awake at night
staring at the stars,
pondering the possibilities.
In a galaxy filled with a billion stars,
in a Universe filled with a hundred billion galaxies,
are we alone?
The incredible vastness of the Universe is difficult to comprehend.
But here is a way to consider it.
If you were to shrink the Sun down to the size of a marble,
and put it on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan,
the Earth would be a pinprick about 4 feet away,
Mars would be 2 feet beyond that.
The nearest other star,
where we might hope to find intelligent life,
Alpha Centauri,
would not be 10 or 100 feet away,
it would be in Washington DC.
230 miles distant.
And another star might be as much as 7,000 miles away,
in Rio de Janeiro.
But if we ever did chance upon voyagers
from these distant points in the Cosmos,
what would they look like?
Would they be basically the same as us?
Would they be fundamentally different?
Could they be perhaps so strange and unusual
that they're unlike anything we ever dreamed
or dreaded could exist?
Many believe the quest for extraterrestrial life
must really begin within a tense scrutiny of our terrestrial life,
life on Earth, might have begun.
And in the early 1950s,
two chemists at the University of Chicago
advanced understanding of life's basic chemistry dramatically.
Nobel laureate chemist, Harold Urey,
and graduate student, Stanley L. Miller,
concocted a batch of primordial soup.
They injected methane, ammonia,
hydrogen and water, into a closed system of glass bulbs and tubes.
These chemicals are thought to have been commonplace on early Earth.
If you put all of these things into a container,
and supply some form of energy to do
some kind of reactions,
what do they make? What kind of reactions go on?
Miller and Urey energized the mix with electrical sparks
to simulate lightning.
The results were... well, electrifying.
They got a brown sludge on the walls of their chamber.
And when they started analysing that brown sludge
there were lots of organic materials in it
and some of them were amino acids.
some of the precursors, the building blocks for proteins.
Proteins, of course, are in turn the building blocks for life.
The Miller-Urey experiment had demonstrated
that the precursors of living organisms
could have gotten their start from a chemical reaction.
And such reactions aren't limited to Earth.
Methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water
are plentiful on other cosmic bodies within our own Solar System,
and, many scientists believe, throughout the Universe.
Indeed, noted astronomer Carl Sagan,
speaking of the Miller-Urey test,
stated that no other single experiment had done more
to convince scientists that life is likely abundant in the Cosmos.
But the presence of water was key.
Such a chemical reaction could not have taken place without it.
Water is very good at dissolving materials,
much better than many other liquids.
And so you can dissolve all sorts of nutrients
and chemical products, things that can act as catalysts,
things that go through the chemical reactions of life.
So water is an excellent liquid for storing all those chemicals.
On Earth, where liquid water exists,
no matter how extreme the environment,
some form of life also resides.
It resides at ocean depths so great,
sunlight cannot reach them.
It resides in damp, rocky crevices miles beneath the Earth's surface.
And it even resides in the extreme salinity
of an ancient Californian lake,
with a salt content of above 10%.
That's three times the percent of salt in the ocean.
But life on Earth also needs carbon,
which was in fact the primary substance generated by the Miller-Urey experiment.
All life forms as we know them,
consist, in large part, of carbon molecules.
Life needs some sort of ability to create long molecules
that can store information.
Carbon is amazing at building long molecules.
So, for example, the DNA molecule
is sort of a billion base pairs long.
If you stretched out a single DNA molecule from one of your cells,
it would be a yard long.
From a single one of your trillion of cells.
So you need something that can store the absolute huge amount of information
that it takes to build a creature like a lion, or a human or a tree.
But if life has taken hold elsewhere in our galaxy, or beyond,
would these conditions necessarily hold true?
Would extraterrestrial life be water and carbon based?
Would DNA shape intelligent life, and would the aliens look anythink like us?
Maybe they would look a little bit like us,
but that would be very, very coincidental.
I mean, I just saw a ground squirrel running behind a bush over here,
and he inhabits the same planet I do,
probably 70% of his DNA is the same as mine.
He doesn't look like me. So why would the aliens look like me?
They probably wouldn't.
A scientist who has spent time pondering such questions,
and rendering speculative alien forms,
is Dr. Robert Hurt, at the California Institute of Technology.
Hurt is a visualization scientist,
who uses data returned by the Spitzer space telescope
to render images of deep space objects and processes.
To try to find the best visual ways of explaining complex technical concepts
but through imagery.
The planets that have been studied around other stars,
the ways that stars and nebulae form,
processes going on galaxies in the distant Universe.
All the way out to the edge of the Big Bang.
But for this programme, Dr. Hurt has agreed to use
known scientific data to render a speculative alien life form.
For his alien world, he's chosen Jupiter.
A real challenge, since Jupiter is essentially a giant gas ball.
Here we have a place where there is no land to speak of,
the atmosphere is made primarily of hydrogen and helium gas,
though it's rich with organic compounds.
And as you go deeper into the atmosphere, it gets warmer
and much higher pressures.
So, as a kind of thought experiment almost, we supposed ,
what would you imagine living in an environment like that?
Referencing the only known model for life,
living organisms on Earth,
Hurt began by asking, "What does life on Earth need?"
You need a source of energy, you need the chemicals
that life on Earth needs to build, the materials that's constructed from.
On Jupiter, a primary source of energy is faint radiation from the Sun,
striking the top of the planet's atmosphere.
And the only known source of chemicals for use as building blocks for life
are the organic compounds swirling at the Jovian cloud blanket.
In considering a potential life form
that could take advantage of both long-term,
Dr. Hurt remembered an idea originally postulated by Carl Sagan in the 1970s:
the notion of a sort of living gas balloon.
Such a creature could remain aloft in the Jupiter's atmosphere indefinitely.
Of course, there's a problem in Jupiter,
that Jupiter's atmosphere is already made of the lightest gas we know of:
hydrogen.
So, you can't really make a lighter- than-hydrogen balloon.
So if you want a balloon to be able to float in Jupiter's atmosphere,
it actually has to be a hot air balloon.
Hurt has invented an extraterrestrial organism
that is really more plant than animal.
A balloon-like plant inflated and kept buoyant by hot air.
It's going to be really expensive in terms of biology
to generate that heat yourself,
so, instead, if we imagine a creature that has a very dark skin, very thin,
that allows solar radiation to heat the gasses inside,
you might be able to create something that will levitate,
at least during the daylight hours,
just by absorbing solar radiation.
At night, the plant would lose its heat source,
but Dr. Hurt has allowed for this problem in the creature's design.
It also has a shape that is well adapted to act kind of like a parachute
that can ride thermals when it's not able to heat its own gasses
and float like a balloon.
So, in the night time, it might sink down lower into the atmosphere
but, by finding thermals, it could ride this up, like a glider almost.
Time spent at lower altitudes would actually be beneficial for the creature.
It's here that its food is most plentiful.
I've given it a kind of air-root system that hangs at the bottom.
When it sinks into the lower parts of the atmosphere,
it can screen out, and pull up some of those organic compounds we know exist
in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Of course, Dr. Hurt's creation of the Jovian-balloon plant,
represents nothing more than an entertaining exercise in extreme,
though science-based, speculation.
But the possibility that some form of life might actually now exist
on other cosmic bodies in our Solar System,
is very real to many astro-biologists and geologists.
And one such body is right next-door to Jupiter,
the ice-covered Jovian moon, Europa.
370 million miles from Earth,
orbitting the giant gas planet Jupiter,
is the most likely harbour for extraterrestrial life in our Solar System,
Europa.
It's an ice-covered ball, about the size of our Moon,
about 1/4 the size of Earth.
Scientists believe the ice on Europa
is covering a global ocean of liquid water.
A convincing indicator is that Europa is a conductor of electromagnetic energy.
It conducts the magnetic field generated by Jupiter.
This conduction is the signature, or we think it's the signature,
of salty water inside Europa.
It's believed that the water layer on Europa
might be as much as 100 miles thick.
Now, remember Europa is similar in size to the Earth's Moon,
so that means that, even though it's a smaller body,
it actually has twice the amount of liquid water
of all of the oceans on Earth put together.
And, of course, liquid water is what makes life possible on Earth.
So, scientists who make it their business to quest for extraterrestrial life,
are keenly focused on the study of Europa.
But how could liquid water,
which freezes at temperatures below 32ºF,
exist on a moon five times as far away from the Sun as the Earth?
Europa orbits Jupiter in an eliptical pattern.
Sometimes it's close to Jupiter, and sometimes is farther away.
When it's close to Jupiter it's stretched by Jupiter's gravity,
it's an effect that we call tides,
and when it gets further away it's stretched less.
So it means that the body of Europa is continually worked.
Friction caused by this stretching generates heat,
just as a rubber ball heats up when it's squeezed repeatedly.
At the planetary scale, this process is called tidal heating,
and it creates enough heat, possibly, to keep H2O
miles below the surface of Europa, in liquid form.
It also appears that this stretching
causes fractures in the Jovian moon's icy crust.
Imagine if you were trying to change the shape of an egg,
what would happen to the shell? The shell would crack.
So when we look at the surface of Europa,
we see lines all over the place, which are almost certainly,
marking the locations of cracks.
The cracks appear to open and close frequently.
And the potential for these cracks
to allow sub-surface water to interact with the surface,
has important implications for the possibility of life on Europa.
Water from the ocean is gonna rush up into the crack,
and when it rushes up it's gonna freeze... start to freeze.
A few hours later, when the crack closes,
it's gonna squeeze that slush up to the surface.
So wherever we see these lines on Europa,
there are double ridges, one ridge lining along each side of the crack.
Most of the water, no doubt, sloshes back down out of the crack
to the ocean below.
It's likely to carry with it some of the building blocks for life
that have seeped down from the surface.
The top of Europa's ice layer holds oxygen.
It's been separated from the H2O in the ice
by charged particles in Jupiter's magnetic field.
In addition, the surface of Europa likely has organic compounds
that come down from comets and bits of comets,
so again, the surface has another ingredient that's important for life.
Dr. Richard Grinberg, of the University of Arizona,
has graphically depicted how potential lifeforms
might take advantage of the ecosystem created by a crack
in Europa's icy crust.
Although the outer few inches
would not be a good place for life to live because of radiation,
once you go down just a few feet,
life would be safe from radiation and also
would get enough sunlight for photosynthesis.
So, you could have an organism at that level that photosynthesizes
and it would be connected to the ocean
by this tidal water that rushes up and down every day.
A day on Europa is much longer than a day on Earth,
about 3.5 times the length of an Earth day.
Time for mobile organisms to venture into the fissure.
You could imagine other organisms that grasp on to the walls of these cracks
and just exploit the flow of ocean water coming past them every day.
Even molusc-like or gellyfish-like creatures
might rise with the water into the cracks
to take in fresh nutrients from the surface.
Life in Europa's ice-covered oceans may also draw energy and nutrients
from a place other than the icy surface.
It's possible that residual heat at Europa's core
has resulted in deep-see hydrothermal vents.
On Earth, such vents host multiple forms of exotic life.
What happens is that reducing water that's very hot
and has lots of heavy metals, comes out through the ground water
and is injected into the ocean itself, and there's a huge gradient
in the chemical composition that life can feed off of.
This chemical source of energy allows huge
populations of bacteriae and other very small lifeforms to exist,
and there's a whole ecosystem, a whole food chain on top of that,
leading up to fish, and various worms that thrive at those locations.
In recent years, talk has arisen of sending a lander to Europa
that could penetrate the ice and probe for life.
But Europa expert Richard Grinberg believes
that a lander might uncover signs of life without penetrating the ice.
If we send a spacecraft to Europa to look for life,
it might be pretty easy to find it, easier than people have realized.
Most planning has considered how do we get through these...
these miles of ice to get down to the ocean.
How do you drill through, or melt your way through.
It may not be necessary. If you can land in a place
where liquid or ice has come up from the ocean recently,
you might find signs of organisms in that ice.
Or if you land really smart and find an active place,
you might actually be able to sample real fresh, oceanic water.
The risk in that case, some feel, would be contaminating the icy moon.
If we had micro-organisms
that stowed away on a spacecraft that landed on the surface of Europa,
and those micro-organisms found their way into the liquid water of Europa,
we might later discover life on Europa
that was life that we had sent there.
But elsewhere in our Solar System,
on another distant moon,
earthly contamination isn't a danger.
Life here would simply be too exotic.
Since 2004, a NASA probe dubbed Cassini-Huygens
has orbited Saturn,
making multiple flybyes at Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Titan is an enormous planetary body,
the second largest moon in the Solar System.
50% larger than the Earth's Moon.
If it wasn't in orbit around Saturn, Titan would be a planet in its own right.
But most impressive of all, Titan, many scientists believe,
could now, or at some point in the future,
be an abode for life.
The geology is very much like Earth's.
All the processes that we have on Earth,
wind, erosion, lakes,
vulcanism, mountain building,
impact craters...
we find them all on Titan, so Titan is very rich in terms of geology.
But at 840 million miles from the Sun,
nine times farther than Earth, Titan is beyond freezing.
The mean temperature on its surface is almost -300ºF.
It is so cold, and water on the surface of Titan is frozen
to such an extreme state, it behaves like rock.
The rocks in this blurry photo taken by the Huygens lander, are in fact water.
It is so cold that hydrocarbons, that are gasses on Earth
such as methane and ethane,
are in a liquid state on the surface of Titan.
The Cassini flybyes have spotted them.
We're seeing a lot of what looks like organic materials on the surface,
and we're seeing large bodies of liquid.
But it's not liquid water, it's liquid methane,
with possibly some ethane dissolved in it.
There are huge lakes on the size of great lakes or small seas.
Astrobiologists are beginning to entertain the notion
that organisms could have developed in those lakes.
Life could be very, very exotic.
We have been thinking of life in terms of water and liquid water.
But, could there be life in liquid hydrocarbons?
Perhaps.
Life on Earth exists in some very difficult places,
that you wouldn't expect to find life.
And we call these organisms extremophiles,
that's because they can live under extreme conditions.
For example, here, on Mono Lake, very alcaline lake.
And yet, extremophiles have been found living here.
Another possibility is that life formed
much earlier in Titan's history,
when a great deal of heat from the initial formation of the moon remained.
At that time, conditions on Titan would've been very similar
to those on primordial Earth.
There was a lot of water there,
there was a lot of nitrogen, a lot of other things.
So you've got warm water, nitrogen, carbon...
And we think some of these chemical processes
that went on on Earth to start generating
the biological, pre-biological materials that later on would be
incorporated into life,
that may have started on Titan also,
with the same kind of chemicals present in a warm environment.
Some think it's possible that if Titan's core is still warm,
microbial life at least might still be present
deep below the moon's surface.
Living organisms have been found thrinving in damp rock crevices
2 and 3 miles below the surface of the Earth.
If you go deep down into Titan, and when I say "deep down" I'm talking about
50 Km or 100 Km, maybe even a couple of hundred kilometers,
just like Earth, as you go downward, it gets warmer.
And it looks like probably at Titan there are materials
mixed in with the water, such as ammonia, that can act as anti-freeze,
and we know this liquid water is a wonderful medium
for all kinds of chemical reactions, including the reactions that generate
amino acids and other prebiotic chemicals.
At present, though, close observation of Titan's surface is limited.
The moon is cloaked in a dense atmosphere of nitrogen and methane.
The Cassini probe is equipped with an infrared imager,
but photos shot in a visible wavelength
are often much more useful to analysts.
You have to, somehow, get around this opaque atmosphere
that's obscuring your view of the surface.
But to really see what's going on on the surface,
and notably to get a really firm idea of what
is the composition of all these different things that we see on the surface,
it turns out we're going to have to go down there close to do that.
The Huygens lander has touched down on the moon
and sent back images.
But the lander is not mobile.
When you land on a planet,
of course, that brings tremendous advance in terms of science.
But it's only one spot.
So, how much of the Earth would you know
if you landed on the Sahara Desert, for example?
You wouldn't see the kind of life that we see here.
One possibility for exploring vast expanses of the Titan's surface
would be to use a craft that works much like a hot-air balloon on Earth.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing a balloon craft
that would carry both imaging gear and equipment
for studying the Titan atmosphere.
Engineers considera a balloon
the most stable platform for such a mission.
If a balloon looses its electronic control for several hours,
no big deal, you can have something on board
that senses that and tells the balloon, "Ok.
"Close your ascent-descent valve and just go to a safe altitude
"and sit there until you get further instructions."
But while complex missions to far-off moons within our Solar System
are exhilarating, and often return great scientific insight,
the promise of discovering more than primordial extraterrestrial life,
is slim at best.
The hope of finding intelligent, technology-producing life
seems greatest when we look beyond our Solar System
to neighbouring stars.
While we may never encounter such lives
for most scientists who study the Universe
the notion that it exists somewhere makes perfect sense.
Life tends to evolve, to become more successful
and one of the things that makes organisms successful,
it seems, on Earth, is to become intelligent.
So, it seems quite plausible to me that there are
creatures that have some sort of intelligence on other planets.
If one of those starts out a billion years before our Solar System started out
and it takes that one a billion years longer to get to that point,
well, they're at the right time right now.
And at radiotelescope installations across the globe,
we earthlings are listening for them.
Howdy doody boys and girls?
We have been sending signals into the void for decades.
Every broadcast on this planet, every FM radiowave,
every television transmission
goes out into the infinite for all of eternity.
Could anybody out there be listening?
And how long would it take our radio signals to cover the distance?
Let's consider once again the analogy
where our Sun is a marble on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan,
Alpha Centauri, the closest other star,
is a marble on a sidewalk in Washington DC,
and a more distant star is a marble in Rio de Janeiro.
A rocket launching from Earth, the marble in Manhattan,
would take 75,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the marble in DC.
That same rocket would take 2 million years to reach the marble in Rio.
A star 100 light years away.
Fortunately, radio signals are much faster than rockets.
They travel at the speed of light.
So, rather than taking 75,000 years,
a signal travelling from the marble in Manhattan to the the one in DC,
would only take 4.5 years.
A signal travelling from the marble in Manhattan to the one in Rio,
would take 100 years to make the journey.
Some of our earliest transmissions might now be getting close.
But what about the reverse?
Could intelligent alien civilizations be sending pings toward Earth,
to see if anyone is at home?
Scientists on Earth are listening,
using technology originally developed for studying distant cosmic phenomena,
like exploding stars.
Many phenomena produce radiowaves and by studying them,
we can also learn something about what's out there and how it works.
So, using radio-antennas to study the Universe is an idea that goes back to
before the Second World War.
The huge radio antennas used today, called radio telescopes,
are so advanced and so incredibly sensitive,
they can easily detect the energy of a flee hopping.
They're just big reflectors, right?
So the radiowaves that are coming down
and falling on the ground all around us on the whole Earth, after all,
some of those radiowaves will fall on these antennas.
So they bounce off that big mirror,
then they get focused to a very sensitive amplifier,
and then the signals are sent via cables
back into a control room that's right nearby here,
where they have sensitive receivers to analyse the radioenergy that's coming in.
Dr. Seth Shostak is a senior astronomer
at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
SETI is an acronym that stands for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.
The SETI organisation also uses radio telescopes,
but not for studying natural cosmic phenomena.
The very same technology can also be used to look for signals
that are made not by nature, but by, perhaps, ET.
And how might one know the difference?
The kind of signal that we're looking for is what's called a narrow-band signal.
That is to say, it's just a signal that's at one spot on the radio dial,
that's at one frequency. That's the indication that the signal
is made by a transmitter, not made by nature.
Of course, computers do the listening, not scientists.
We have specialized receivers to do all the listening,
and the computers are monitoring the receivers.
So, typically, we'll have receivers that monitor,
say, 100 million channels at once,
so, if the computers see a signal that looks like it might be extraterrestrial,
as opposed to a radar at the local airport,
or telecommunications satellites or something like that,
then the computer will follow up on that signal
and if it's beginning to look like, "Yeah, this might be the big one,"
then it will call us up and draw it to our attention.
So we don't have to sit there and be bored all the time.
To date, no such signal has been detected.
But the SETI Institute presses on faithfully.
Rightly so, in the minds of many prominent astronomers.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
So we can't say, "Oh, SETI hasn't found anything so far,
"so, obviously there are no other intelligent civilizations out there."
No, we can't say that. And I support their continuing to look.
There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy,
and hundreds of billions of galxies in the Universe.
Just by sheer weight of numbers, I would be surprised if there's not
intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe.
With so many possibilities, how do SETI astronomers determine
exactly where to focus their telescopes and efforts?
You want to pick star systems that have a good chance
of maybe having a planet something like this one,
so that there's a greater chance of having intelligent life,
but we don't really know very much about what kind of planets these stars have.
So, we just have long lists, literally millions of stars,
relatively nearby our cosmic backyard,
and we just work our way through them.
And what would happen if one day a SETI radiotelescope
picked up a signal that looked like it could be an alien transmission?
One thing you would certainly do if you picked up a signal,
is say, "Look, I'm not gonna believe it till somebody else can see it as well."
Because there could be bugs in the software or hardware that are fooling you.
So, what you would do is at the point where you thought "this looks real",
you would call up somebody at another radio observatory
where they also have antennas just like these, and tell them,
"Look. Look at that part of the sky, over this range of radio frequencies,
"this part of the dial, and see if you find anything."
And if it were confirmed by two, or maybe three observatories,
I think at that point you could safely go and have your press conference.
But, what if our first contact with ET isn't through radio signals?
What if ET arrives in a form we don't recognize?
The first alien delegation could reach Earth
in the form of machines
so tiny, human beings cannot detect them with the naked eye.
Step forward.
You speak English!
We speak every language.
Since the 1950s at least,
science-fiction films have consistently depicted potential alien beings
as human-like.
- Homo sapiens? - Sleeps.
One particular alien form has been widely popularized in recent decades.
UFO enthusiasts believe the US military
recovered bodies from crashed alien spacecrafts in the 1950s.
These alleged extraterrestrials are essentially frail miniature humans
with oversized heads.
Little grey guys, usually have big eyes. They don't smile a lot...
But they're always sort of soft, squishy organic things,
maybe they don't have DNA, but they're biology. They're alive.
It's an easy anatomical form for human beings to comprehend and accept.
Is that what ET would really be like? Maybe, I mean, it's a good guess.
That's what we're like.
But on the other hand, I think within 100 years we may invent thinking machines.
And if we can do that, if we ever do that,
maybe the aliens might have done that a long time ago.
Keep in mind that the Universe is a lot older than the Earth is so,
they've had plenty of time.
Hello Kismet?
You wanna talk to me?
While the notion of thinking machines might sound far-fetched,
some futurists believe such machines are just around the corner.
We're shrinking the size of transistors on an integrated circuit
so every two years we can put twice as many on a chip
and they run faster 'cause they're smaller.
And this has been true now for decades.
I can carry in my pocket today a computer that's thousands of times more powerful
than the computer that all of us thousands of students and professors
shared when I came to MIT in the 1960s.
Ray Kurzweil is convinced that the power and speed of computers
will shortly surpass that of the human brain.
If you take the most conservative estimate of the amount of computation
required to simulate the entire human brain,
which is 10 at the 16th calculations per second,
there other estimates that are lower than that,
take the most conservatively high estimate,
we'll have that for 1,000 dollars by 2020.
We'll have it for $1 by 2030.
We'll have that in a supercomputer actually within a few years.
Kurzweil predicts that in the near future
tiny supercomputers will be integrated into the human body
to bolster some of its weaknesses.
We've already started.
There's people walking around that have computers in their brains
that replaced a portion of their brain, like Parkinsons patients,
and already these devices can download new software,
so you can download new software to the computer in your brain
from outside the patient. This is today.
It doesn't stop there.
As technology marches forward,
microscopic computer-driven machines called nanobots,
will be capable of performing a wide variety of maintenance tasks
within the human body.
We are soon be able to send these devices through the blood stream,
and we'll have billions of these bloodcell-sized computers
and little robots inside our bloodstream. They'll keep us healthy,
and they'll be interacting with the biological neurones.
So by 2030, the common man and woman
will be part biological and part non-biological.
But perhaps Kurzweil's most radical prediction
is that computers will ultimately allow human beings
to transcend their biology,
shed their bodies altogether.
Computers will scan the neurological functions of a person's brain
and upload the individual's knowledge, experience and personality
to a storage device.
You'd have to, in real time, go inside my brain,
probably with nanobots, bloodcell- sized scanners inside the blood stream,
and send billions of them into my brain,
through the capillaries, and they would scan all the different neurones
and gather every detail about me, all the neurotransmitters,
and ion concentrations, and inter-neuronal connections,
every detail that makes me, me.
And I think that would be feasible, that'll take longer,
maybe that's 40 years from now, or more,
but we'll get to a point where you could actually capture
every detail about a person and then recreate that personality.
The implications are, of course, staggering.
Chief among them, is the possibility of immortality.
You can backup your files.
If the hardware dies it's not the end of your files,
you just copy them over to a new machine.
The whole personality of your machine can be preserved,
you can make another copy of it...
And the machines themselves will be intelligent enough to self-replicate,
and steadily improve their design.
We see self-replication in computers, for example, the software virus.
That's an entity, it's not physical,
it's just a piece of software but it's actually able to copy itself.
So, someone can put out one software virus,
and it's busy copying itself, and moving through the Internet,
and pretty soon it can be on a billion computers, so that's self-replication.
And, of course, intelligent machines that are both immortal
and much less vulnerable to radiation and other hazards of space,
could possibly survive long-term interstellar voyages.
It's an argument that leads Ray Kurzweil and other futurists to believe
that our first alien encounter will more likely be
with intelligent machines than biological creatures.
Any civilization intelligent enough to make the trip here
they're not gonna send big, squishy creatures,
they're gonna send little nanobots,
non biological systems, and that's what we're gonna do.
Intelligent or not, biological or not,
the discovery of any form of extraterrestrial life
would arguably be the most profound scientific revelation
in the history of human civilization.
Some would even argue it could have a profoundly positive influence
on human interaction.
To me, I would think that this would really change our perspective as a people.
I mean, if nothing else, just to give us the perspective
that we are one species on one world in the Universe
in which we are unique for what we are.
And if this doesn't provide leverage for us
to get past some of the foolish differences,
I don't know what will.
I think, ultimately, it might be one of the best things
that could happen for us.
There's even the possibility that contact with an alien civilization
wouldn't cause panic in the streets, as some might predict.
At the proper moment the invasion will be launched from our platform.
- I'm getting out of here! - Stay where you are!
I think humans are ready to meet aliens
much more than they're given credit for.
I think we're a lot more flexible and open to these things,
and the idea that we'll tear ourselves apart in panic
and that society would colapse,
I think that actually sells us way short.
But, what if we never find the answer?
What if we never hear any alien signals?
Never meet an intelligent species outside of our own?
Silence, in its own way, would be an equally profound response...
It tells us that life is unique,
and that intelligent life is precious.
It should be treasured and protected at all costs.
Are we truly alone?
It is perhaps the greatest question that we can ask...
of the Universe.