Aliens: The Definitive Guide (2013) s01e01 Episode Script
What to Expect
1 Alien hunters are closing in on extraterrestrial life.
And what they're finding changes everything science once believed about life on other worlds.
Aliens are intelligent.
Open your mind to the possibility that they are thousands, millions of years more advanced than us.
Aliens are everywhere.
There's an exotic zoo of planets out there.
Alien life popping up everywhere.
They look nothing like us.
Could E.
T.
be based upon metal or something that isn't carbon? And they could be hostile.
An advanced civilization might well venture here as a place to colonize.
If there is any time for the aliens to arrive on earth, it is surely now.
The Definitive Guide to Aliens 1x01 What to Expect For millennia, humans have looked to the stars and asked, "Are we alone?" Do aliens exist? Step forward.
Hollywood thinks so.
They're pulling us up.
But what about the world of science? Do they believe E.
T.
is out there? Some scientists say that perhaps we are the only life forms in the universe.
Give me a break.
I mean, how many stars are there out there in the universe anyway? The Hubble Space telescope can see about 100 billion galaxies.
That's the visible universe.
Each galaxy consists of 100 billion stars.
Do the math.
100 billion times 100 billion is 10 sextillion.
That's 1 with 22 zeroes after it.
And like with our own solar system, where there's a star, there are planets, billions of worlds for an alien to call home.
There definitely are aliens in outer space.
They're out there.
But if extraterrestrial life is not just science fiction then where to aliens live? Three, two, one, zero, and lift-off of the Atlas V with Curiosity.
November 2011.
NASA launches its first unmanned mission with the specific aim to search for extraterrestrials.
And where better to start than on our planetary neighbor, Mars? Today, the red planet is most likely dead, but NASA believes there were once huge bodies of water on its surface.
For astrobiologist Chris McKay, studying the dried-up oceans of Mars could reveal carbon-based life once lived in its waters, just as it does here on Earth.
Each day, I'm involved in the operations of the Curiosity rover in Gale crater, ancient lake bed 50 million miles away on Mars.
Salt-rich environments, like the one here, are a good model for life on Mars.
So, by studying the kind of organisms that live in an environment like this, we get a glimpse of what life might have been like on Mars as it got drier and drier and colder and colder.
Eventually, the water all goes away, and we're left with the salt crust, and that's a very good mechanism for preserving evidence of that life.
So, my hope is that we trundle along on the surface of Mars, we drill down, and we pull out a sample, and in that salt is preserved the organic remains of life that was growing when it was a saltwater pond.
A long-dead pond organism isn't the kind of alien Hollywood dreams of.
But finding one would be the biggest discovery in human history because the chemical makeup of life on Mars could prove that aliens can come into being anywhere.
Life on Earth uses only left-handed amino acids.
Think of driving on the road.
We drive on a certain side of the road, the right or the left.
So, there's a handedness there.
If you were raised in one country where everyone was driving on a certain side of the road, and you woke up one day, and everyone was driving on the different side of the road, you would know that you were in an alien country.
If we go to Mars and find that all the amino acids there are right-handed, then that would be indicative of a biology that's very different from ours -- alien life.
Then, we would know that life started on Mars separately from life on Earth.
And if life started twice in our own solar system, once on Earth and once on Mars, that would be very strong evidence that life is popping up everywhere.
Yay.
I'd be very excited to know that.
If aliens made from the same carbon compounds as us are alive and kicking on other worlds, how do we find them? To help, planetary scientists are using this, Kepler, the most powerful deep-space observatory ever launched.
Right now, it's incredibly exciting because every month dozens of planets are found.
I'm sure in our own galaxy there are hundreds of millions to billions of planets that could be habitable.
So, just from the sheer number of planets out there and the diversity and characteristics, there could be way more alien life than we think.
At M.
I.
T.
, Sara Seager is scanning the galaxy.
But she's not interested in just any planets.
She's looking for prime alien real estate worlds like Earth.
Our favorite kind of planet we're always looking for are terrestrial planets.
These planets would be made of predominantly rock, and these could be bigger than Earth.
We've seen evidence for planets that are a few to several times the mass of Earth, and those planets, we think, are ideal for life, if they're in the so-called "Goldilocks zone.
" Like the fairy tale of the three bears, astrophysicists choose habitable planets like Goldilocks chooses porridge.
A long way from its sun, the planet is too cold.
Too close means too hot.
But somewhere in between, like Earth, could have the perfect conditions for alien life.
But finding these planets isn't easy.
The problem is that that faint Earth is right next to a very, very, very brit star.
In fact, our sun is 10 billion times brighter than Earth.
That's a huge, huge number.
Looking for an Earth twin next to a sunlike star is like looking for a firefly six inches from a searchlight where that firefly and searchlight are thousands of miles away.
It's painstaking work, but the results have been incredible, with potentially habitable planets being discovered every month.
Like this one 20 light years from Earth, a world with one side scorching hot, the other frozen solid, and a habitable sweet spot between the two.
This planet orbits a red dwarf star.
Aliens here could bask in blood-colored sunlight and Caribbean heat.
The implications of these discoveries are mind-boggling.
The next step is to take a closer look using new technology.
We're building a nano satellite called exoplanetsat, and this is the real size and real mass of exoplanetsat.
It'll be a tiny space telescope with deployable solar panels for power that will point very precisely at a sunlike star, searching for earth-sized planets that go in front of it.
And we plan to launch a fleet of exoplanetsats, each identical to the next, and each studying their own star.
Exoplanetsat may well find the first planet to have alien life.
There could be countless earthlike planets able to support carbon-based life.
But what if real aliens were even weirder than in the movies, allowing them to live on extreme planets nothing like Earth? To find out, it's time to think outside the box and ask, "What are aliens made from?" To understand how extraterrestrial life might spring into being, chemist Lee Cronin is looking back to how life got started on Earth.
About 4 billion years ago, planet Earth was dead.
There was no life on it.
And a few billion years later, it was teeming with life.
In the chemical soup of ancient Earth, reacting elements battled it out, and carbon-based life was born.
But what if those chemical ingredients had been different? I wonder if life just took the available chemistry and used that to start biology.
And so, does that mean that maybe we could start life again and we could do it with a different chemistry set? So, could E.
T.
be based upon metal or something that isn't carbon? Putting this theory to the test, Cronin is trying to create alien life forms in the lab, recreating the chemical competition that sparked life on Earth but with nonorganic matter like silicon and even metal.
So, what we're trying to do in my lab is to make new blobs, inorganic blobs, that can be ostensibly alive.
What I'm gonna do here is just mix some chemicals together.
And by mixing these chemicals together, a reaction will occur.
And this reaction will go backwards and forwards.
And you're going to see a color change.
So, what we're trying to do is set up a competition.
Life, after all, is about a competition, and evolution uses competition to make things better, you know? The fittest survive.
And so, what we have in this chemical reaction here is an example of some chemistry that can switch, change team, if you like, and set up lots and lots of different properties where there can be a competition, whether red is more desirable than green or green is more desirable than red.
And then, someone's gonna win at some point.
And there may be a point, just a point, where at the end of the experiment, something does crawl out that is alive.
And don't worry.
If it escapes in the environment, because we have used very sophisticated, inorganic materials, there will be none of those out there on the Earth.
So, it will die and not take over the planet.
If aliens are made from very different stuff to life on Earth, the hunt takes a spectacular twist.
Because E.
T.
s could live almost anywhere, no matter how extreme.
Now, as astrobiologists close in on alien planets, they're ready to reveal what these otherworldly beings actually look like, and the truth is beyond anything Hollywood has ever imagined.
The classic image of aliens has mostly come from movies and conspiracy theories.
There's the ugly, scary ones Aah! the big-headed, brainy ones, and, of course, the easy-on-the-eye variety.
Then, we're the only men on the whole planet? Yes.
But if life really does exist on other worlds, then what do aliens look like? This is astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell.
For him, the real face of life on alien worlds is far stranger than fiction.
There's an exotic zoo of planets out there.
Many of them aren't anything like the kind of planets we find in our own solar system.
Space telescopes have spotted thousands of potential planets for extraterrestrials to call home.
Using this data, Dartnell is zooming in to determine what the alien inhabitants might look like.
First stop, an ocean planet with a surface temperature of 86 degrees.
One kind of planet common in the galaxy is a water world, a planet with a very deep ocean, perhaps hundreds of kilometers deep.
Life in these water worlds, it might look pretty recognizable, like the ray we have behind here or these more torpedo-, bullet-shaped fish.
But how can we know what's swimming around on a world 3,000 trillion miles away? The answer is evolution.
By comparing conditions here on Earth with the environment of the alien planet, Dartnell can theorize how life there may have evolved.
So, the propulsion mechanisms that are adapted and evolved by alien fish would be pretty similar to the propulsion mechanisms that you find on Earth simply because they're solving the same survival situation with the means that are available to them.
Miles below the ocean surface, it's pitch black.
Alien fish evolve elaborate ways to hunt.
So, what you might have is alien fish with panels of bioluminescence down their sides so they can flash signals to each other, coordinate their attack, and all swoop in at the same moment unbeknownst to their prey.
Just like Earth, hunters become hunted.
And on a world covered in deep oceans, it's likely alien marine predators evolve to be big.
But on supersized, habitable worlds, like this one 42 light years away, alien beings would evolve to perfectly suit the mega-planet's heavy gravity and rule the vast, open skies.
They would have stronger gravity, but they'd also have a thicker, more dense atmosphere pulled down around the planet.
So, flight would become easier on a super-earth because you'd be able to generate lift.
But like on Earth, not every part of the alien bird has evolved just for better flight.
So, with soaring animals darting between the clouds, you would expect them to have things like fronds streaming behind them, which hamper their aerodynamics but advertise their fitness as a mate.
Elsewhere, Dartnell believes life even exists on frozen ice worlds where temperatures plummet to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit.
Under such extreme and unrelenting environment, there'd be nothing but hardy, microbial life, the kind of bacteria we find living inside solid icebergs on Earth.
They may grow by a very exotic form of energy, not by absorbing sunlight.
We do find on earth bacteria that have joined end to end to create biological wires.
And on an alien ice world, you might have long fibers of bacteria all joined together to create vast networks of biological circuitry to extract energy from the magnetic field.
A much stranger alien habitat is the carbon planet.
It has rivers and oceans of oil and a thick, inner shell made entirely of diamond.
Life on the diamond world in the oily oceans would have to be even more exotic, even more alien 'cause they wouldn't be based on liquid water at all.
Here, solitary aliens hide in lakes of oil and produce bursts of energy to attract prey.
Zooming in to his final destination, Dartnell thinks the biggest, baddest extraterrestrials of all could live on a planet much like our own where evolution has taken a very different route.
For the best possible chances for life, especially complex animal life like ourselves, would be an earthlike place, a true twin of our home world.
But even if we were to rerun the story of evolution on Earth, you wouldn't expect the specifics of life to come out the same because there's so much chance and randomness inherent to the process of evolution.
So, perhaps, on an alien, earthlike world, there's an octopus species which has developed a hard exoskeleton to support itself against the gravity once it's come out of its aqueous environment.
So, in a galaxy where life can evolve in an infinite number of scary ways What are the chances of a planet developing intelligent, self-aware life, like us? It's possible aliens are not just smart.
They're smarter than us.
And they've taken evolution to the next step by becoming a robot species.
In our galaxy alone, there are an estimated 60 billion planets that could be home to alien life.
But is E.
T.
just a fish or a bird? Or have these otherworldly beings created great civilizations? In other words, like human beings, are aliens intelligent? There are three basic ingredients to become an advanced civilization.
First, you have to have stereo eyes, eyes of a hunter.
Because predators are smarter than prey.
That's why we say "sly fox" and "dumb as a bunny.
" If you are a predator, that means you have to have camouflage, stealth.
You have to be able to outsmart the prey.
Second, you have to have an opposable thumb, a hand, a claw, a tentacle, something by which you can manipulate the environment to create machines and eventually starships.
And third, language -- you have to be able to accumulate knowledge between generations.
The knowledge you get from this generation has to be handed down in order to create vast civilizations capable of taking you to the stars.
Like us, if some alien species are intelligent, the key to their success is through the evolution of language.
But the way E.
T.
shares their language could be far more advanced than mankind.
Aliens are more than likely not going to be individual entities.
They will be connected into a Borg, be much more powerful, be very, very difficult for us to understand, to reason with.
And the only way we're going to understand them is if we can communicate in the same sort of way.
Kevin Warwick is an expert in cybernetics.
He believes some aliens are so intelligent they will have taken control of their own evolution, merging with technology so they can communicate using only their minds.
And Warwick is doing the same, taking science to the edge, turning himself into the world's first cybernetic organism.
I had this braingate implanted into the nervous system of my left arm.
And we linked my nervous system to the computer and onto the Internet.
As I opened and closed my hand, my brain signals also opened and closed the the robot hand.
So, the hand has little sensors in the fingertips, and I was able to receive feedback from those sensors.
So, I could feel, with signals in my brain, how much force the robot hand was applying to different objects.
As long as there's a network connection, then your brain and your body don't have to be in the same place.
This proves aliens could use thought to communicate with robot technology.
The next stage is for Warwick to communicate telepathically with another living being, as he believes aliens do, so he's enlisted an E.
T.
stand-in, Mrs.
Warwick.
My wife also had electrodes pushed into her nervous system.
So, every time she closed her hand, my brain received an electrical pulse.
So, it was communicating directly nervous system to nervous system.
Aliens clearly will be communicating directly brain to brain, full-on synthetic telepathy.
Could an advanced alien species work as one nonspeaking, collective mind? It sounds like Sci-Fi, but something similar happens here on earth right under our feet.
Ants have a collective type of intelligence, which means they're extremely powerful.
And if you destroy one ant, it doesn't really have much of an effect over the overall ant colony.
It's the colony, a more networked type of intelligence, that's important.
Take the Borg from "Star Trek" for example, throwing in a bit of extra machine intelligence so it's a super-intelligent network.
If intelligent aliens do exist and they communicate with each other in sophisticated ways, will extraterrestrials talk to us? And have they tried already? August 1977.
A radio telescope in Ohio picks up a mysterious signal.
It's a narrowband signal, a lot of electromagnetic energy at a narrow frequency.
The signal comes from deep space, and the implications are out of this world, leading astronomers to ask, "Are aliens sending us messages?" When the observer was looking through, he was so excited when he saw that signal that he took the printout, and he wrote, "wow!" In the margins of the signal.
The wow! Signal is exactly the kind of signal that we would expect to see from E.
T.
The scientists monitoring the wow! Signal are a part of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
At the time, they believed it could be a message from aliens.
But after 72 seconds, the signal stops And is never heard again.
Many different astronomers have gone back and looked at it for hours and hours at many different wavelengths, and no signal has ever been detected from that position again.
No one knows why the signal came only once, but today SETI astronomer Andrew Siemion wants to be ready if E.
T.
calls again.
I wouldn't be doing radio SETI experiments if I didn't think there was a chance that we could detect a signal from another technology.
SETI's ramping up the search, collecting more space data than ever before.
We actually have several radio experiments going on at any given time.
And right now, we're showing a display here from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
Anytime anyone is using the telescope, our instrument is always running in the background looking for signals from E.
T.
So, when we see a signal like this, the next thing we want to do is apply additional tests to try to rule out the signal as coming from kind of interference on the surface of the Earth.
The next thing that we would do is we would request time on a large radio telescope to try to re-observe that sky position.
If both widely separated radio telescopes on maybe, you know, two different continents see the exact same radio signal when they look at that position in the sky, then we can be pretty sure that it's actually coming from a distant planet.
In that case, we would notify the world.
SETI is maximizing the chances of hearing new radio messages from space.
Problem is, the telescopes generate tons of data.
To analyze it, SETI astronomer Dan Werthimer is enlisting the people of earth.
So, we're asking people all around the world to help us hunt for radio signals from other civilizations.
And the way to do that, if you're interested in being part of this search, is to download the seti@home screen saver program.
Everybody is assigned a little part of the sky, and when you install that screen saver, you're talking to this computer in this closet.
This computer is coordinating the activity of 8 million seti@home volunteers all around the world.
This is not a very big computer by itself, but it's the central brain of the world's largest supercomputer -- 8 million people all looking for alien life.
This is SETI's biggest mission yet.
But it relies on one even bigger assumption -- that aliens still send messages using old-fashioned radio waves.
Biological engineer Sriram Kosuri is doing cutting-edge research that suggests E.
T.
could send messages biologically instead, stored on molecules of DNA.
So, if you wanted to send a bunch of messages into space to other planets, DNA would actually be a very useful way to do that.
DNA storage can be iredibly dense, so in theory, you can store 100 billion DVDs in about a gram of DNA.
Holding the genetic blueprint inside every living organism, DNA is nature's very own, high-capacity hard drive.
And Kosuri believes it's perfect for interstellar travel.
And the really nice aspect of that is that if you were to send information over long distances to many places, it takes less energy to send something that's less massive.
DNA, as a chemical, is very long-lived, so it's known to last very stably over thousands of years, especially in dry environments like in space.
But how would DNA be sent through space to Earth? Astrophysicist Paul Davies thinks advanced aliens could use microscopic spacecraft made from organic matter that might already be here.
The concept of a message in the bottle, I would think, is very familiar to people.
You write a message on a piece of paper, stick it in a bottle, cork it, throw it out into the sea.
You don't normally expect to get a reply.
It just goes off, and it's there for posterity.
Maybe one day someone will discover it.
So, I think we should look for alien messages in a bottle.
Now, how would those messages be etched, and what would the bottle be? Supposing the aliens have decided to create little nanomachines or even to co-opt nature's own existing machines, namely living cells, and upload information into it.
Messages can be etched into the structure of nucleic acids like DNA, and the bottle itself could be the coat of a virus or a living cell.
Now, I don't think it's any more crazy that we would discover a message in the genome of a bacterium than to discover message in radio waves coming from the sky.
From surfing deep space for radio waves to sifting the galaxy for E.
T.
DNA, alien hunters are primed for messages from life out there.
But is this enough to guarantee first contact? We're just learning how we might communicate with other civilizations, and it might be that our ideas are completely wrong.
If you had asked me 200 years ago what to look for, I would have said smoke signals.
So, if you ask me 200 years from now, it might be something completely different -- tachyons or subspace communication or something that we don't know anything about yet.
But while SETI waits and waits and waits some more, a direct way to let E.
T.
know we exist is to open all hailing frequencies and to say hello to them.
For decades, scientists have sent a steady stream of messages into the cosmos aimed at grabbing the attention of E.
T.
Voyager 1 left for deep space with a gold disc containing information about Earth Music, pictures, and even a message from the President.
More recently, we've beamed text messages to known habitable planets.
But so far, no reply.
This is Dr.
Doug Vakoch.
He thinks the reason aliens don't respond to our messages is because they don't understand them.
So, he's looking for some common ground.
We are a mathematical species, and that mathematics is the universal language, the key to communicating with another civilization.
For Vakoch, encoding messages in the language of science rather than, say, Urdu or Welsh is the key to starting interplanetary dialogue.
And using math, we can describe to aliens all the wonders of our world.
And here's a great example.
We start with a very simple number series called the Fibonacci series.
We start with the number one and add it to itself, one plus one.
We get two.
One plus two equals three.
And two plus three equals five.
What we find is that if you connect those squares together, you get this spiral that we see in shapes throughout nature.
We see it in spiral of a nautilus shell, spiral galaxies.
We see it in structures that we humans have created, as well, like the facade of the Parthenon in Greece.
And so, by starting with basic, mathematical principles like counting, we can go well beyond a description of our physical world to describe something like our sense of beauty.
Vakoch's ultimate goal is not only to send aliens info about Earth but to tell them what it means to be human, warts and all.
We're creating CGI images, computer graphics, that show human beings in their full, three-dimensional form in motion and also doing things that really matter to human beings.
Well, one of our highest ideals is altruism, but how would we convey that? Well, we can start by showing a person who sees someone else in need and going down and helping that person.
And in this case, it turns out well for the altruist.
But that's not always the case.
But of course, altruism also implies a sense of choice, that you might see someone in danger -- we also have the option of turning and walking away.
So, when we think about the messages we want to send to an extraterrestrial, we may want to talk about our ideals but also how well we meet those ideals and, in some ways, how we fall short.
Showing the galaxy mankind's dark side might not be everyone's idea of the perfect earth résumé.
But even if E.
T.
S do pick up our messages, will they care? What will aliens think of us? The aliens probably already have been scanning us.
I mean, for the past 50 years, we've been sending perhaps the best of our cultural archives into outer space, like "I Love Lucy" and "Leave it to Beaver.
" And any star within 50 light years of the earth will pick up our cultural emissions, and they'll be convinced there is no intelligent life on the Earth.
"Earth? No.
Crossed out on the list.
"Intelligent? No.
We've been scanning their TV emissions.
No way.
" We have this prejudice that the aliens are perhaps 100 years more advanced than us.
Open your mind to the possibility that they are thousands, millions of years more advanced than us.
The distance between ants and our civilization is very small compared to the technological distance between us and an advanced civilization that could reach us from the stars.
I mean, if you're walking down a country road, and you see an anthill, do you go down to the ants and say, "I bring you trinkets"? "I bring you beads.
I give you nuclear energy.
Take me to your ant queen.
" Or perhaps, you may want to step on a few of them.
So, what do we have to offer them, if their technology is thousands, millions of years more advanced than us? A futuristic alien race may have no interest in humanity, but, in a nightmare scenario, we do have something they want -- Earth itself.
Modern science thinks aliens are out there with civilizations far more advanced than our own.
We've been trying to make contact.
But if they respond and come to Earth, what will aliens want from us? Astronomer Geoff Marcy has a shocking theory.
He thinks some extraterrestrial visitors won't be interested in mankind at all, but they'll love Earth.
An advanced civilization would surely recognize the Earth as one of those precious planets with that combination of liquid water and continents.
They might well want to venture here, perhaps as a place to colonize for their own development, their own proliferation.
Our planet could become a second home for E.
T.
, but Marcy thinks it more likely aliens would come here to strip our assets.
We know there are natural resources here on the Earth that we cherish.
I imagine that other advanced civilizations might cherish those same resources.
We may be living on a more precious planet than we realize.
It's a scary thought.
And Dr.
Jan Zalasiewicz agrees that instead of seeking out the natural wonder on Earth's surface, aliens might only be interested in what lies beneath.
When the aliens come here to this corner of the galaxy, this is the Earth that they will come because here they will find a wealth of minerals and metals they will not find anywhere else.
On Earth, alien plunderers will find a planet with a priceless geology that has formed over 4 billion years.
So, why is the earth so special compared with, let's say, outer space? Outer space is just dull in terms of minerals, maybe a dozen of different sorts floating in the mineral dust.
When you form a star system, then the number of minerals goes up.
The star lights up.
The dust melts.
Then, you get maybe 50 minerals appearing in that.
We begin to form a planet, a planet the size of Earth.
You maybe then have 500 minerals, the same as the Moon, the same as on Mars.
Then, let us start the engine of the Earth.
Let us start plate tectonics.
Oceans split apart, ocean crust sinks into the mantle of the Earth, and all of that distills more minerals out of the Earth.
Then, we have a key moment in the history of the Earth -- life appears.
Meeting life here may not be on the agenda for super-advanced aliens, but the fact living things exist on Earth makes our world even more resource-rich.
It's when life learns a different trick -- to produce oxygen -- then, for every mineral, you have an oxide.
And because the world is wet, it has free water, you have a hydroxide, as well.
And that takes some the number of minerals on the Earth up to about 4,000.
Earth is a treasure trove for unscrupulous aliens.
And even worse, we led them right to it by sending greetings into space and showing aliens where to find our resources and how to use them.
Look what humans have done here.
Here, 200 years ago, they found a lump of copper ore the size of a skyscraper, and it's gone.
It's been converted by humans into all manner of goods and objects.
And this is what humans have done all over the Earth.
They found accumulations of metals and minerals, they scraped them out, and they've made new metals, new minerals that have not been found in nature.
Aluminum -- hardly found at all in nature.
We've made half a billion tons of aluminum.
That's enough to carpet the whole of the U.
S.
A.
in typical aluminum kitchen foil.
So, when the aliens arrive here, they will find an even richer-mineral Earth, an Aladdin's cave.
So, if there is any time for the aliens to arrive on Earth, it is surely now.
The Definitive Guide" They already know we're here.
They may be able to burrow holes through the fabric of space and time.
Are we prepared for E.
T.
contact? Even a few of the crumbs off their technological table could destabilize our civilization.
Who will protect us? We could be surrounded by aliens without even knowing about it.
And can humanity avoid an alien apocalypse? As soon as the aliens spot that we're here, they're probably gonna destroy us.
And what they're finding changes everything science once believed about life on other worlds.
Aliens are intelligent.
Open your mind to the possibility that they are thousands, millions of years more advanced than us.
Aliens are everywhere.
There's an exotic zoo of planets out there.
Alien life popping up everywhere.
They look nothing like us.
Could E.
T.
be based upon metal or something that isn't carbon? And they could be hostile.
An advanced civilization might well venture here as a place to colonize.
If there is any time for the aliens to arrive on earth, it is surely now.
The Definitive Guide to Aliens 1x01 What to Expect For millennia, humans have looked to the stars and asked, "Are we alone?" Do aliens exist? Step forward.
Hollywood thinks so.
They're pulling us up.
But what about the world of science? Do they believe E.
T.
is out there? Some scientists say that perhaps we are the only life forms in the universe.
Give me a break.
I mean, how many stars are there out there in the universe anyway? The Hubble Space telescope can see about 100 billion galaxies.
That's the visible universe.
Each galaxy consists of 100 billion stars.
Do the math.
100 billion times 100 billion is 10 sextillion.
That's 1 with 22 zeroes after it.
And like with our own solar system, where there's a star, there are planets, billions of worlds for an alien to call home.
There definitely are aliens in outer space.
They're out there.
But if extraterrestrial life is not just science fiction then where to aliens live? Three, two, one, zero, and lift-off of the Atlas V with Curiosity.
November 2011.
NASA launches its first unmanned mission with the specific aim to search for extraterrestrials.
And where better to start than on our planetary neighbor, Mars? Today, the red planet is most likely dead, but NASA believes there were once huge bodies of water on its surface.
For astrobiologist Chris McKay, studying the dried-up oceans of Mars could reveal carbon-based life once lived in its waters, just as it does here on Earth.
Each day, I'm involved in the operations of the Curiosity rover in Gale crater, ancient lake bed 50 million miles away on Mars.
Salt-rich environments, like the one here, are a good model for life on Mars.
So, by studying the kind of organisms that live in an environment like this, we get a glimpse of what life might have been like on Mars as it got drier and drier and colder and colder.
Eventually, the water all goes away, and we're left with the salt crust, and that's a very good mechanism for preserving evidence of that life.
So, my hope is that we trundle along on the surface of Mars, we drill down, and we pull out a sample, and in that salt is preserved the organic remains of life that was growing when it was a saltwater pond.
A long-dead pond organism isn't the kind of alien Hollywood dreams of.
But finding one would be the biggest discovery in human history because the chemical makeup of life on Mars could prove that aliens can come into being anywhere.
Life on Earth uses only left-handed amino acids.
Think of driving on the road.
We drive on a certain side of the road, the right or the left.
So, there's a handedness there.
If you were raised in one country where everyone was driving on a certain side of the road, and you woke up one day, and everyone was driving on the different side of the road, you would know that you were in an alien country.
If we go to Mars and find that all the amino acids there are right-handed, then that would be indicative of a biology that's very different from ours -- alien life.
Then, we would know that life started on Mars separately from life on Earth.
And if life started twice in our own solar system, once on Earth and once on Mars, that would be very strong evidence that life is popping up everywhere.
Yay.
I'd be very excited to know that.
If aliens made from the same carbon compounds as us are alive and kicking on other worlds, how do we find them? To help, planetary scientists are using this, Kepler, the most powerful deep-space observatory ever launched.
Right now, it's incredibly exciting because every month dozens of planets are found.
I'm sure in our own galaxy there are hundreds of millions to billions of planets that could be habitable.
So, just from the sheer number of planets out there and the diversity and characteristics, there could be way more alien life than we think.
At M.
I.
T.
, Sara Seager is scanning the galaxy.
But she's not interested in just any planets.
She's looking for prime alien real estate worlds like Earth.
Our favorite kind of planet we're always looking for are terrestrial planets.
These planets would be made of predominantly rock, and these could be bigger than Earth.
We've seen evidence for planets that are a few to several times the mass of Earth, and those planets, we think, are ideal for life, if they're in the so-called "Goldilocks zone.
" Like the fairy tale of the three bears, astrophysicists choose habitable planets like Goldilocks chooses porridge.
A long way from its sun, the planet is too cold.
Too close means too hot.
But somewhere in between, like Earth, could have the perfect conditions for alien life.
But finding these planets isn't easy.
The problem is that that faint Earth is right next to a very, very, very brit star.
In fact, our sun is 10 billion times brighter than Earth.
That's a huge, huge number.
Looking for an Earth twin next to a sunlike star is like looking for a firefly six inches from a searchlight where that firefly and searchlight are thousands of miles away.
It's painstaking work, but the results have been incredible, with potentially habitable planets being discovered every month.
Like this one 20 light years from Earth, a world with one side scorching hot, the other frozen solid, and a habitable sweet spot between the two.
This planet orbits a red dwarf star.
Aliens here could bask in blood-colored sunlight and Caribbean heat.
The implications of these discoveries are mind-boggling.
The next step is to take a closer look using new technology.
We're building a nano satellite called exoplanetsat, and this is the real size and real mass of exoplanetsat.
It'll be a tiny space telescope with deployable solar panels for power that will point very precisely at a sunlike star, searching for earth-sized planets that go in front of it.
And we plan to launch a fleet of exoplanetsats, each identical to the next, and each studying their own star.
Exoplanetsat may well find the first planet to have alien life.
There could be countless earthlike planets able to support carbon-based life.
But what if real aliens were even weirder than in the movies, allowing them to live on extreme planets nothing like Earth? To find out, it's time to think outside the box and ask, "What are aliens made from?" To understand how extraterrestrial life might spring into being, chemist Lee Cronin is looking back to how life got started on Earth.
About 4 billion years ago, planet Earth was dead.
There was no life on it.
And a few billion years later, it was teeming with life.
In the chemical soup of ancient Earth, reacting elements battled it out, and carbon-based life was born.
But what if those chemical ingredients had been different? I wonder if life just took the available chemistry and used that to start biology.
And so, does that mean that maybe we could start life again and we could do it with a different chemistry set? So, could E.
T.
be based upon metal or something that isn't carbon? Putting this theory to the test, Cronin is trying to create alien life forms in the lab, recreating the chemical competition that sparked life on Earth but with nonorganic matter like silicon and even metal.
So, what we're trying to do in my lab is to make new blobs, inorganic blobs, that can be ostensibly alive.
What I'm gonna do here is just mix some chemicals together.
And by mixing these chemicals together, a reaction will occur.
And this reaction will go backwards and forwards.
And you're going to see a color change.
So, what we're trying to do is set up a competition.
Life, after all, is about a competition, and evolution uses competition to make things better, you know? The fittest survive.
And so, what we have in this chemical reaction here is an example of some chemistry that can switch, change team, if you like, and set up lots and lots of different properties where there can be a competition, whether red is more desirable than green or green is more desirable than red.
And then, someone's gonna win at some point.
And there may be a point, just a point, where at the end of the experiment, something does crawl out that is alive.
And don't worry.
If it escapes in the environment, because we have used very sophisticated, inorganic materials, there will be none of those out there on the Earth.
So, it will die and not take over the planet.
If aliens are made from very different stuff to life on Earth, the hunt takes a spectacular twist.
Because E.
T.
s could live almost anywhere, no matter how extreme.
Now, as astrobiologists close in on alien planets, they're ready to reveal what these otherworldly beings actually look like, and the truth is beyond anything Hollywood has ever imagined.
The classic image of aliens has mostly come from movies and conspiracy theories.
There's the ugly, scary ones Aah! the big-headed, brainy ones, and, of course, the easy-on-the-eye variety.
Then, we're the only men on the whole planet? Yes.
But if life really does exist on other worlds, then what do aliens look like? This is astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell.
For him, the real face of life on alien worlds is far stranger than fiction.
There's an exotic zoo of planets out there.
Many of them aren't anything like the kind of planets we find in our own solar system.
Space telescopes have spotted thousands of potential planets for extraterrestrials to call home.
Using this data, Dartnell is zooming in to determine what the alien inhabitants might look like.
First stop, an ocean planet with a surface temperature of 86 degrees.
One kind of planet common in the galaxy is a water world, a planet with a very deep ocean, perhaps hundreds of kilometers deep.
Life in these water worlds, it might look pretty recognizable, like the ray we have behind here or these more torpedo-, bullet-shaped fish.
But how can we know what's swimming around on a world 3,000 trillion miles away? The answer is evolution.
By comparing conditions here on Earth with the environment of the alien planet, Dartnell can theorize how life there may have evolved.
So, the propulsion mechanisms that are adapted and evolved by alien fish would be pretty similar to the propulsion mechanisms that you find on Earth simply because they're solving the same survival situation with the means that are available to them.
Miles below the ocean surface, it's pitch black.
Alien fish evolve elaborate ways to hunt.
So, what you might have is alien fish with panels of bioluminescence down their sides so they can flash signals to each other, coordinate their attack, and all swoop in at the same moment unbeknownst to their prey.
Just like Earth, hunters become hunted.
And on a world covered in deep oceans, it's likely alien marine predators evolve to be big.
But on supersized, habitable worlds, like this one 42 light years away, alien beings would evolve to perfectly suit the mega-planet's heavy gravity and rule the vast, open skies.
They would have stronger gravity, but they'd also have a thicker, more dense atmosphere pulled down around the planet.
So, flight would become easier on a super-earth because you'd be able to generate lift.
But like on Earth, not every part of the alien bird has evolved just for better flight.
So, with soaring animals darting between the clouds, you would expect them to have things like fronds streaming behind them, which hamper their aerodynamics but advertise their fitness as a mate.
Elsewhere, Dartnell believes life even exists on frozen ice worlds where temperatures plummet to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit.
Under such extreme and unrelenting environment, there'd be nothing but hardy, microbial life, the kind of bacteria we find living inside solid icebergs on Earth.
They may grow by a very exotic form of energy, not by absorbing sunlight.
We do find on earth bacteria that have joined end to end to create biological wires.
And on an alien ice world, you might have long fibers of bacteria all joined together to create vast networks of biological circuitry to extract energy from the magnetic field.
A much stranger alien habitat is the carbon planet.
It has rivers and oceans of oil and a thick, inner shell made entirely of diamond.
Life on the diamond world in the oily oceans would have to be even more exotic, even more alien 'cause they wouldn't be based on liquid water at all.
Here, solitary aliens hide in lakes of oil and produce bursts of energy to attract prey.
Zooming in to his final destination, Dartnell thinks the biggest, baddest extraterrestrials of all could live on a planet much like our own where evolution has taken a very different route.
For the best possible chances for life, especially complex animal life like ourselves, would be an earthlike place, a true twin of our home world.
But even if we were to rerun the story of evolution on Earth, you wouldn't expect the specifics of life to come out the same because there's so much chance and randomness inherent to the process of evolution.
So, perhaps, on an alien, earthlike world, there's an octopus species which has developed a hard exoskeleton to support itself against the gravity once it's come out of its aqueous environment.
So, in a galaxy where life can evolve in an infinite number of scary ways What are the chances of a planet developing intelligent, self-aware life, like us? It's possible aliens are not just smart.
They're smarter than us.
And they've taken evolution to the next step by becoming a robot species.
In our galaxy alone, there are an estimated 60 billion planets that could be home to alien life.
But is E.
T.
just a fish or a bird? Or have these otherworldly beings created great civilizations? In other words, like human beings, are aliens intelligent? There are three basic ingredients to become an advanced civilization.
First, you have to have stereo eyes, eyes of a hunter.
Because predators are smarter than prey.
That's why we say "sly fox" and "dumb as a bunny.
" If you are a predator, that means you have to have camouflage, stealth.
You have to be able to outsmart the prey.
Second, you have to have an opposable thumb, a hand, a claw, a tentacle, something by which you can manipulate the environment to create machines and eventually starships.
And third, language -- you have to be able to accumulate knowledge between generations.
The knowledge you get from this generation has to be handed down in order to create vast civilizations capable of taking you to the stars.
Like us, if some alien species are intelligent, the key to their success is through the evolution of language.
But the way E.
T.
shares their language could be far more advanced than mankind.
Aliens are more than likely not going to be individual entities.
They will be connected into a Borg, be much more powerful, be very, very difficult for us to understand, to reason with.
And the only way we're going to understand them is if we can communicate in the same sort of way.
Kevin Warwick is an expert in cybernetics.
He believes some aliens are so intelligent they will have taken control of their own evolution, merging with technology so they can communicate using only their minds.
And Warwick is doing the same, taking science to the edge, turning himself into the world's first cybernetic organism.
I had this braingate implanted into the nervous system of my left arm.
And we linked my nervous system to the computer and onto the Internet.
As I opened and closed my hand, my brain signals also opened and closed the the robot hand.
So, the hand has little sensors in the fingertips, and I was able to receive feedback from those sensors.
So, I could feel, with signals in my brain, how much force the robot hand was applying to different objects.
As long as there's a network connection, then your brain and your body don't have to be in the same place.
This proves aliens could use thought to communicate with robot technology.
The next stage is for Warwick to communicate telepathically with another living being, as he believes aliens do, so he's enlisted an E.
T.
stand-in, Mrs.
Warwick.
My wife also had electrodes pushed into her nervous system.
So, every time she closed her hand, my brain received an electrical pulse.
So, it was communicating directly nervous system to nervous system.
Aliens clearly will be communicating directly brain to brain, full-on synthetic telepathy.
Could an advanced alien species work as one nonspeaking, collective mind? It sounds like Sci-Fi, but something similar happens here on earth right under our feet.
Ants have a collective type of intelligence, which means they're extremely powerful.
And if you destroy one ant, it doesn't really have much of an effect over the overall ant colony.
It's the colony, a more networked type of intelligence, that's important.
Take the Borg from "Star Trek" for example, throwing in a bit of extra machine intelligence so it's a super-intelligent network.
If intelligent aliens do exist and they communicate with each other in sophisticated ways, will extraterrestrials talk to us? And have they tried already? August 1977.
A radio telescope in Ohio picks up a mysterious signal.
It's a narrowband signal, a lot of electromagnetic energy at a narrow frequency.
The signal comes from deep space, and the implications are out of this world, leading astronomers to ask, "Are aliens sending us messages?" When the observer was looking through, he was so excited when he saw that signal that he took the printout, and he wrote, "wow!" In the margins of the signal.
The wow! Signal is exactly the kind of signal that we would expect to see from E.
T.
The scientists monitoring the wow! Signal are a part of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
At the time, they believed it could be a message from aliens.
But after 72 seconds, the signal stops And is never heard again.
Many different astronomers have gone back and looked at it for hours and hours at many different wavelengths, and no signal has ever been detected from that position again.
No one knows why the signal came only once, but today SETI astronomer Andrew Siemion wants to be ready if E.
T.
calls again.
I wouldn't be doing radio SETI experiments if I didn't think there was a chance that we could detect a signal from another technology.
SETI's ramping up the search, collecting more space data than ever before.
We actually have several radio experiments going on at any given time.
And right now, we're showing a display here from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
Anytime anyone is using the telescope, our instrument is always running in the background looking for signals from E.
T.
So, when we see a signal like this, the next thing we want to do is apply additional tests to try to rule out the signal as coming from kind of interference on the surface of the Earth.
The next thing that we would do is we would request time on a large radio telescope to try to re-observe that sky position.
If both widely separated radio telescopes on maybe, you know, two different continents see the exact same radio signal when they look at that position in the sky, then we can be pretty sure that it's actually coming from a distant planet.
In that case, we would notify the world.
SETI is maximizing the chances of hearing new radio messages from space.
Problem is, the telescopes generate tons of data.
To analyze it, SETI astronomer Dan Werthimer is enlisting the people of earth.
So, we're asking people all around the world to help us hunt for radio signals from other civilizations.
And the way to do that, if you're interested in being part of this search, is to download the seti@home screen saver program.
Everybody is assigned a little part of the sky, and when you install that screen saver, you're talking to this computer in this closet.
This computer is coordinating the activity of 8 million seti@home volunteers all around the world.
This is not a very big computer by itself, but it's the central brain of the world's largest supercomputer -- 8 million people all looking for alien life.
This is SETI's biggest mission yet.
But it relies on one even bigger assumption -- that aliens still send messages using old-fashioned radio waves.
Biological engineer Sriram Kosuri is doing cutting-edge research that suggests E.
T.
could send messages biologically instead, stored on molecules of DNA.
So, if you wanted to send a bunch of messages into space to other planets, DNA would actually be a very useful way to do that.
DNA storage can be iredibly dense, so in theory, you can store 100 billion DVDs in about a gram of DNA.
Holding the genetic blueprint inside every living organism, DNA is nature's very own, high-capacity hard drive.
And Kosuri believes it's perfect for interstellar travel.
And the really nice aspect of that is that if you were to send information over long distances to many places, it takes less energy to send something that's less massive.
DNA, as a chemical, is very long-lived, so it's known to last very stably over thousands of years, especially in dry environments like in space.
But how would DNA be sent through space to Earth? Astrophysicist Paul Davies thinks advanced aliens could use microscopic spacecraft made from organic matter that might already be here.
The concept of a message in the bottle, I would think, is very familiar to people.
You write a message on a piece of paper, stick it in a bottle, cork it, throw it out into the sea.
You don't normally expect to get a reply.
It just goes off, and it's there for posterity.
Maybe one day someone will discover it.
So, I think we should look for alien messages in a bottle.
Now, how would those messages be etched, and what would the bottle be? Supposing the aliens have decided to create little nanomachines or even to co-opt nature's own existing machines, namely living cells, and upload information into it.
Messages can be etched into the structure of nucleic acids like DNA, and the bottle itself could be the coat of a virus or a living cell.
Now, I don't think it's any more crazy that we would discover a message in the genome of a bacterium than to discover message in radio waves coming from the sky.
From surfing deep space for radio waves to sifting the galaxy for E.
T.
DNA, alien hunters are primed for messages from life out there.
But is this enough to guarantee first contact? We're just learning how we might communicate with other civilizations, and it might be that our ideas are completely wrong.
If you had asked me 200 years ago what to look for, I would have said smoke signals.
So, if you ask me 200 years from now, it might be something completely different -- tachyons or subspace communication or something that we don't know anything about yet.
But while SETI waits and waits and waits some more, a direct way to let E.
T.
know we exist is to open all hailing frequencies and to say hello to them.
For decades, scientists have sent a steady stream of messages into the cosmos aimed at grabbing the attention of E.
T.
Voyager 1 left for deep space with a gold disc containing information about Earth Music, pictures, and even a message from the President.
More recently, we've beamed text messages to known habitable planets.
But so far, no reply.
This is Dr.
Doug Vakoch.
He thinks the reason aliens don't respond to our messages is because they don't understand them.
So, he's looking for some common ground.
We are a mathematical species, and that mathematics is the universal language, the key to communicating with another civilization.
For Vakoch, encoding messages in the language of science rather than, say, Urdu or Welsh is the key to starting interplanetary dialogue.
And using math, we can describe to aliens all the wonders of our world.
And here's a great example.
We start with a very simple number series called the Fibonacci series.
We start with the number one and add it to itself, one plus one.
We get two.
One plus two equals three.
And two plus three equals five.
What we find is that if you connect those squares together, you get this spiral that we see in shapes throughout nature.
We see it in spiral of a nautilus shell, spiral galaxies.
We see it in structures that we humans have created, as well, like the facade of the Parthenon in Greece.
And so, by starting with basic, mathematical principles like counting, we can go well beyond a description of our physical world to describe something like our sense of beauty.
Vakoch's ultimate goal is not only to send aliens info about Earth but to tell them what it means to be human, warts and all.
We're creating CGI images, computer graphics, that show human beings in their full, three-dimensional form in motion and also doing things that really matter to human beings.
Well, one of our highest ideals is altruism, but how would we convey that? Well, we can start by showing a person who sees someone else in need and going down and helping that person.
And in this case, it turns out well for the altruist.
But that's not always the case.
But of course, altruism also implies a sense of choice, that you might see someone in danger -- we also have the option of turning and walking away.
So, when we think about the messages we want to send to an extraterrestrial, we may want to talk about our ideals but also how well we meet those ideals and, in some ways, how we fall short.
Showing the galaxy mankind's dark side might not be everyone's idea of the perfect earth résumé.
But even if E.
T.
S do pick up our messages, will they care? What will aliens think of us? The aliens probably already have been scanning us.
I mean, for the past 50 years, we've been sending perhaps the best of our cultural archives into outer space, like "I Love Lucy" and "Leave it to Beaver.
" And any star within 50 light years of the earth will pick up our cultural emissions, and they'll be convinced there is no intelligent life on the Earth.
"Earth? No.
Crossed out on the list.
"Intelligent? No.
We've been scanning their TV emissions.
No way.
" We have this prejudice that the aliens are perhaps 100 years more advanced than us.
Open your mind to the possibility that they are thousands, millions of years more advanced than us.
The distance between ants and our civilization is very small compared to the technological distance between us and an advanced civilization that could reach us from the stars.
I mean, if you're walking down a country road, and you see an anthill, do you go down to the ants and say, "I bring you trinkets"? "I bring you beads.
I give you nuclear energy.
Take me to your ant queen.
" Or perhaps, you may want to step on a few of them.
So, what do we have to offer them, if their technology is thousands, millions of years more advanced than us? A futuristic alien race may have no interest in humanity, but, in a nightmare scenario, we do have something they want -- Earth itself.
Modern science thinks aliens are out there with civilizations far more advanced than our own.
We've been trying to make contact.
But if they respond and come to Earth, what will aliens want from us? Astronomer Geoff Marcy has a shocking theory.
He thinks some extraterrestrial visitors won't be interested in mankind at all, but they'll love Earth.
An advanced civilization would surely recognize the Earth as one of those precious planets with that combination of liquid water and continents.
They might well want to venture here, perhaps as a place to colonize for their own development, their own proliferation.
Our planet could become a second home for E.
T.
, but Marcy thinks it more likely aliens would come here to strip our assets.
We know there are natural resources here on the Earth that we cherish.
I imagine that other advanced civilizations might cherish those same resources.
We may be living on a more precious planet than we realize.
It's a scary thought.
And Dr.
Jan Zalasiewicz agrees that instead of seeking out the natural wonder on Earth's surface, aliens might only be interested in what lies beneath.
When the aliens come here to this corner of the galaxy, this is the Earth that they will come because here they will find a wealth of minerals and metals they will not find anywhere else.
On Earth, alien plunderers will find a planet with a priceless geology that has formed over 4 billion years.
So, why is the earth so special compared with, let's say, outer space? Outer space is just dull in terms of minerals, maybe a dozen of different sorts floating in the mineral dust.
When you form a star system, then the number of minerals goes up.
The star lights up.
The dust melts.
Then, you get maybe 50 minerals appearing in that.
We begin to form a planet, a planet the size of Earth.
You maybe then have 500 minerals, the same as the Moon, the same as on Mars.
Then, let us start the engine of the Earth.
Let us start plate tectonics.
Oceans split apart, ocean crust sinks into the mantle of the Earth, and all of that distills more minerals out of the Earth.
Then, we have a key moment in the history of the Earth -- life appears.
Meeting life here may not be on the agenda for super-advanced aliens, but the fact living things exist on Earth makes our world even more resource-rich.
It's when life learns a different trick -- to produce oxygen -- then, for every mineral, you have an oxide.
And because the world is wet, it has free water, you have a hydroxide, as well.
And that takes some the number of minerals on the Earth up to about 4,000.
Earth is a treasure trove for unscrupulous aliens.
And even worse, we led them right to it by sending greetings into space and showing aliens where to find our resources and how to use them.
Look what humans have done here.
Here, 200 years ago, they found a lump of copper ore the size of a skyscraper, and it's gone.
It's been converted by humans into all manner of goods and objects.
And this is what humans have done all over the Earth.
They found accumulations of metals and minerals, they scraped them out, and they've made new metals, new minerals that have not been found in nature.
Aluminum -- hardly found at all in nature.
We've made half a billion tons of aluminum.
That's enough to carpet the whole of the U.
S.
A.
in typical aluminum kitchen foil.
So, when the aliens arrive here, they will find an even richer-mineral Earth, an Aladdin's cave.
So, if there is any time for the aliens to arrive on Earth, it is surely now.
The Definitive Guide" They already know we're here.
They may be able to burrow holes through the fabric of space and time.
Are we prepared for E.
T.
contact? Even a few of the crumbs off their technological table could destabilize our civilization.
Who will protect us? We could be surrounded by aliens without even knowing about it.
And can humanity avoid an alien apocalypse? As soon as the aliens spot that we're here, they're probably gonna destroy us.