Human Universe (2014) s01e05 Episode Script
What is our Future
It's been 200,000 years since humans first emerged in the Rift Valley of East Africa.
Since then, we've learnt to think, to dream, to work together.
And today our human civilisation spans the globe and beyond.
But our planet is a tiny fragile speck of life in a vast, uncaring universe.
So what next for the apes who went to space? LOW VOICES SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE This cave mouth in northern Spain has been inhabited for 150,000 years.
There's basic shelter here and safety.
But from time to time, they left the light behind and headed into the dark.
In these caves you see the transition from just surviving to living, to observing the world, to enjoying it.
There were gatherings here, people coming together to make art and not just any old art, but specific representations of particular animals and particular symbols.
So in these caves we see the beginnings of superstition, the beginnings of an appreciation that there's not just a present but there's a past and there's a future.
These early artists were leaving messages to future generations.
And the one that speaks loudest lies far deeper into the darkness.
This handprint was made by a child at least 35,000 years ago and it's thought it was made by a little girl.
She'd have done the painting by taking paint and blowing it through her hand onto the wall of the cave.
Now, she would have had a basic understanding of her future, she'd have known that the seasons pass and maybe she even looked forward to coming back to this cave one day.
Leaving her mark upon the wall suggests she had started down the road of understanding time and how it stretched out into the future.
In 40,000 years, we've learned to see further ahead than she could possibly have imagined.
We've walked out into a wider world and made it our own.
And right now we are at a crossroads.
Our civilisation holds the power to shape the future of the whole planet.
I think we pay far too little attention to the future and the ability to illuminate it, to predict it is unique to us and our prosperity, and our very survival depend very much on what we glimpse out there in the dark.
Science and reason are the flames and in this film I want to convince you that we must use them to make the darkness visible.
THEY CHAT QUIETLY In late June, Earth's most northerly community are preparing to celebrate an important turning point of their year.
It's midsummer in the Arctic, and the people of Svalbard are approaching the moment when the sun rides highest in the sky, the summer solstice.
If I were in Manchester I'd say this was the longest day, but that kind of language doesn't make sense here, 78 degrees north and midway between northern Norway and the Arctic Circle cos this day, summer's day, began on April the 20th and it will end on August the 23rd.
We can predict exactly the moment that the solstice arrives.
So as strange as this long day feels, there is no mystery as to why it takes place.
THEY SING The reason for that long polar night and the months of midnight sun is the geometry of the solar system.
Svalbard is quite literally on top of the world and you feel it when you're here, it's obvious.
The sun doesn't set, it's somewhere over there at the moment and throughout the course of the day it just moves along the horizon right round, 360 degrees as the Earth rotates with the North Pole pointing directly towards the sun.
And when this place was discovered back in the 1590s, people didn't know that, or at least it wasn't agreed upon, it was still possible and indeed argued, back down there towards the equator in Italy, that the Earth was at the centre of the universe.
It's obvious that it isn't when you come up here.
I wonder what would have happened if Galileo and Copernicus and Bruno and others had visited Svalbard.
I think that everything would have got worked out much earlier.
After thousands of years of observation, our inquisitive minds began to develop models of the universe.
The full explanation for the clockwork of the solar system came in the 1680s, with Isaac Newton and his universal law of gravitation, which is the first modern law of nature.
What Newton's laws allow you to do is to predict the future given a knowledge of the present.
Newton's laws describe a clockwork universe.
Planets orbiting stars, stars orbiting galaxies.
And galaxies falling through a possibly infinite space.
One day, in our own sky, we'll see the galaxy Andromeda heading our way.
In four billion years' time, it will collide with The Milky Way.
For a billion years, our sky will be filled with cosmic choreography.
And we know that because we can predict the future.
So the laws of physics, in that sense, are little time machines.
They allow you to predict with precision what will happen in the distant future given a knowledge of the present.
We even see the sun ends its days as it swells into a red giant, some five billion years from now.
So we can be sure that we, along with all other life on Earth, will not survive into the far future.
Extinction is a necessary part of the evolution of life on Earth.
99.
9% of species that have ever existed have become extinct and that's a good thing, because when a species goes, there's a niche available in the ecosystem for other species to colonise - that's how evolution works.
You know, if the dinosaurs hadn't become extinct, it's very likely that we wouldn't exist.
So when considering the ultimate destiny of our species the answer seems obvious - extinction.
But I'd argue this doesn't have to be the case.
We are different to the other species on this planet because we're intelligent.
Intelligence matters and it's extremely rare, in fact you can argue that intelligence may be extremely rare in the universe.
It is possible that we're the only intelligent species in the Milky Way galaxy amongst 400 billion suns and countless billions of worlds.
And that makes us extremely valuable and worth protecting.
I think the way to keep this light alive is for humans to continue to venture out.
And explore.
To this end, we've built a ship large enough for six astronauts to train in.
This is Aquarius, which is used by NASA as Nemo, the Nemo missions.
And the reason this place is extreme, if you look here is because we're below the ocean.
The pressure in here is two and half to three times atmospheric pressure, which is why I sound like a Munchkin.
50 metres below the surface, Aquarius offers a unique training facility for deep space exploration.
This is, er, this is brilliant cos you can play at being an astronaut, I mean, you'd have six astronauts in here.
The reason that they use this as a mission simulator is because the environment is as close as you can get to space on Earth, you have to live here for weeks.
And if you stay here for more than one hour - so we've got one hour - you have to stay here for a further 17 hours to decompress, so you can't just run away if you, you know, psychologically feel a bit claustrophobic and you think "I don't like it," you can't just leave, it's one of the few places on Earth where that would be the case.
CHATTER OVER RADIO In recent months, Nemo has been tasked with a very specific type of deep space exploration.
They're developing methods to space walk onto asteroids, where gravity will be a fraction of that experienced on the moon.
Whilst at times dreaming of an asteroid encounter is a lot of fun, the motive behind the mission is deadly serious.
MAN SPEAKS ON RADIO In 2013, on a wintry morning in Russia, a massive fireball cut the sky.
RUMBLING TYRES SKID Seconds later, it exploded, with 20 to 30 times more energy than the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.
EXPLOSION COMMOTION Earth had been hit by the largest asteroid in more than a century.
And no-one had seen it coming.
It seems our powers of prediction failed us and that's because, in reality, nature can be chaotic.
I can demonstrate that with a simple experiment.
These are magnets, so let's say that this is an asteroid, then watch what happens when I set the pendulum off, let's say from this point here.
So I'm going to release it, I've got a laser there.
From exactly that point, I'm just going to let it go.
We see the laser tracing out the path on this photo paper, this is asteroid orbiting the solar system, gravitationally interacting with the Earth, the sun of course, let's say a massive planet like Jupiter.
There you go, it's collided with the yellow one, the sun.
I can do it again and what I'm going to try and do is line it up in exactly the same way and let it go.
In this case it's radically different, that's because this is what is known as a chaotic system, there you go, and it's hit the Earth, so that will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
The point is that the orbit is critically dependent on what we call, what physicists call, the initial conditions.
That's how precisely did I line this up, how precisely did I release it, what precisely happens as it sets off on its path through the solar system? In here are the little air currents that deflect it a little bit, all those infinitesimally small changes can be amplified in a complicated system such as this.
And that's why it's not good enough to just discover the asteroids that come near to the Earth, it's not good enough because one of those tiny nudges could take something that you might think was safe, just using Newton's laws very naively, and in fact nudging it onto a collision course with the Earth.
This fundamental feature of nature means that we may get little warning when the next one comes our way.
So we must continue to track threatening asteroids and develop technologies that will get us out to them at short notice.
In January 2014, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft awoke from a 31-month period of hibernation.
It had travelled four billion miles to intercept a comet.
Throughout August and September, the tiny spaceship made a careful approach, scanning the comet for a place to land.
And next week, it will deploy a probe to attach itself to the surface.
Rosetta will greatly increase our understanding of comets and the early solar system.
It also tests our ability to mount a manned mission to an asteroid if the need arises.
The problem is that even with a sophisticated rocket system, it took Rosetta ten years to reach its target.
To send astronauts that deep into space will require a great leap in our technical ability and our ambition.
I had an ambition to be an astronaut from, you know, as early as I can remember.
I can't remember thinking anything else.
The excitement of, you know, just going way away from Earth.
For the first time in a generation, new designs of manned spacecraft are being tested.
Commercial companies are now developing crafts to get us into space.
The endeavour is never without risk.
It's not an easy thing to do, to escape the Earth's gravity even for a few minutes takes a lot of energy.
Three, two, one.
Release, release.
Quick release.
INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER The future of human space exploration faces enormous challenges and depends on the bravery of test pilots like David Mackay, Peter Siebold and their colleague, Mike Alsbury, who lost his life last week in the pursuit of a dream.
A dream that many of us grew up with as children and never lost.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, this was one of my favourite books.
I got it, I think it was 1979, it was about the same time as my first ABBA album.
And I just read it for years and years and years.
It's a sort of fictional history of spacecraft, 2000 to 2100 AD.
It's got things like, "2005 - work starts on the lunar station.
" Then this is one of my favourite spacecraft, I used to try and build these out of Lego, it's called the Martian Queen and it says, "Early in "2015, fare-paying passengers stepped aboard "the first purpose-built interplanetary spaceliner.
" So they imagined that by 2015, by next year, we'd have spaceliners taking people to the Martian colonies.
And what's interesting is my little boy loves the book as well, he's got it now, and some of this stuff is in his past.
This is a list of things that didn't happen, whereas for me, back in the '70s, it was a list of things that I thought would happen.
Breaking free from Earth's bonds is so difficult that there are only eight people alive that know what it's like to walk on another world.
Hi.
Charlie.
What's your name? Charlie.
Believe it or not, I'm the other half of Judy.
Hello, Charlie.
How you doing? Nice to meet you.
Wonderful to meet you.
Pleasure to meet you.
Good to be here with you.
Have a seat.
INDISTINCT CHATTER Charlie Duke was Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 16 and the youngest person ever to walk on the moon.
How about an extension, you guys? We're feeling good.
Mission objective - to bring back samples from the lunar highlands and test drive new technologies.
And here we go.
We are really going up a hill, I'll tell you.
When I was just becoming aware of Apollo, I thought that I would be able to go into at least into Earth orbit myself.
Yeah, really, my dad was born in 1907 and so he was just right after the Wright brothers and, er, and he could barely believe that his son went to the moon.
And yet at the time my five-year-old, Tom, he didn't think it was any big deal! You know, that everybody in the neighbourhood was going to the moon.
Neil Armstrong was a next door neighbour, Tom Stafford was in the neighbourhood, Frank Borman was in the neighbourhood, the whole neighbourhood was either NASA engineers or astronauts, so everybody's it's natural, "Let's go to the moon, Dad, when you going to do it?" Hey, John, this is perfect, with the LM, and the rover, and you, and Stone Mountain, and the old flag.
Come on out here and give me a salute.
Big Navy salute.
Off the ground a bit more.
There we go.
You're most famous probably for the most famous photograph involving you, it's not you, it's the photograph of your family that you left on the moon.
I asked the boys, they were five and seven, I said, "Would you guys like to be with your dad on the moon?" They said "Oh, yeah, that'd be great, Dad.
" So on the back of that picture we had written, "This is the family of astronaut Charlie Duke, "from planet Earth who landed on the moon in April 1972" and we all signed it and then I dropped the picture on the moon.
It sort of shows the human side of space flight and, you know, we were family men, we were dads, husbands, and so wanted my family to be a part of it.
They'll sit there for millions of years, won't they, they won't go anywhere.
And if you look back to those days, so less than a year from the first test flight, first manned test flight to landing on the moon.
Yeah.
Would that be possible now? No.
Why? We don't have the, er, the schedule, the money to build spacecraft that quickly.
We don't have the, er, the manpower to do it.
I mean, 400,000 people and unlimited budget, you can do a lot, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah! And that's what we had.
After Charlie left, only two men have ever gone back and there's good reason for that.
The energy required to break free from Earth's gravitational embrace is staggering.
This is the spacecraft that took John Young, Ken Mattingly and Charlie Duke to the moon.
There's the Service Module and the Command Module, that's the engine that fired to bring them back from the moon to the Earth, the Lunar Lander sat inside there and this piece is essentially a single rocket motor that fired to take them from Earth orbit to the moon.
So this is the 120 tonne moon spacecraft, if you like.
But from a physics perspective, the difficulty is getting that into orbit, and on Saturn V that was done in two bits and this is stage two and that is the stage two fuel tank.
Inside there are 450 tonnes of rocket fuel.
And this burnt through those 450 tonnes in about 6 minutes, taking the spacecraft from an altitude of 200,000 feet, about 38 miles, up to 114 and a half miles, that's virtually in orbit.
And it did that by burning the fuel in five engines.
Now, at the time, that was one of the most powerful rockets ever built, but not the most powerful - that was this, Stage One of the Saturn V.
There are 2,200 tons of fuel in here, and stage one burnt through that in about two and a half minutes.
To do that they add fuel pumps that were more powerful than a 747 at lift off to pump 15 tonnes of fuel a second into these the F1 engines.
Every statistic about these engines is ridiculous.
In those two and half minutes when this spacecraft was lifting off the power generated was more than the peak electrical power generation capacity of the United Kingdom.
Building a vehicle powerful enough to accelerate three men to escape velocity was a triumph of human ingenuity.
But the technology at the heart of any rocket is essentially ancient technology, the release of energy by combustion.
We used fire to release energy from the Sun stored in the wood from trees.
Then we discovered better things to burn.
Energy-packed ancient sunlight buried underground.
Burning that has set us free.
But fire has surely taken us as far as it can.
The reason we aren't flying to other planets is the same reason we're endangering this one.
Every day we burn the equivalent of all the plants growing on this planet over a year to meet our energy needs.
But that's not to say that energy use is of itself necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed by many measures it's an extremely good thing indeed.
In every country where the per capita energy use is greater than about half the European average then adult life expectancy is greater than 70 years, literacy rates are greater than 90%, infant mortality rates are low and more than one in five of the population are in higher education.
So the story of energy use is a complicated one.
On the one hand, obviously, energy use is important and to be valued, it's the foundation of our modern civilisation, and on the other hand, if we generate our energy mainly by burning fossil fuels then it can be a bad thing.
Now in the short-term of course we can increase the efficiency of our energy usage.
But in the long-term, if we aspire to continue to advance as a civilisation, if we want to give every citizen of the world a quality of life that is as good as or even better than mine, and if ultimately we want to build a space-faring generation and journey to the stars then we have to find a better way.
In the short-term, we can move to cleaner electric motors, but because we burn fossil fuels in power stations, that simply moves the problem upstream.
So what we face is not an energy crisis but an energy conversion crisis.
Renewable energy might be part of the solution, but I believe there's a far more promising long-term alternative.
If you could do one thing, if you could wave a magic wand and do one thing, what would you do? If you could produce abundant clean energy, it would solve many problems.
It's a grand challenge of our time, and I truly am committed and proud to be part of it.
Can we for the first time bring a star to Earth? Here at the National Ignition Facility in California they're trying to create man-made stars.
It's a big laser.
It's the biggest in the world by probably a factor of 50, or maybe even 100, so in size and in energy.
How much power's in there? If you look at all the electricity that's produced in the United States, this is about a thousand times more power than that.
But of course only for a fraction of a second, a few billionths of a second.
In a star, fusion begins when the gas cloud that forms the star collapses under its own gravity, heating the core to many millions of degrees.
Here at NIF, it's coaxed into life in the laser's target chamber encased in two metre thick walls and 47 of the biggest glass doors I've ever seen.
Ah, yeah.
So this is the sharp end of the whole system, if you like, this is where the lasers come down and start to get focused into the chamber.
And each one of them has to be synchronised to a few trillionths of a second to arrive at exactly the same time and of course in exactly the right spot.
It's worth sort of stepping back and realising what's happening here cos you said 192 of these laser beams, which are not small.
Indeed.
In the middle of that which is definitely not small.
Absolutely.
What's the target? It's about that big.
It's about a millimetre wide.
But it's the level of precision and power that you're able to achieve.
And if you can do it uniformly then you can create a little star.
It reminds me a little bit of Apollo in a sense cos you just think, you know, look what we can do if we try.
So you see there, there's a gold cylinder and in the middle a little red ball, that's the fusion fuel.
One of those pellets, when all of the fusion happens just right, could power my house for a day.
So you imagine having a little bag of those pellets, let's say you three or four hundred of them, you could fit them in your pocket, then that would power your life for a year.
Thousands of these little pellets could power a spacecraft to the Moon.
Hundreds of thousands could power a spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system or perhaps outward to the stars.
And one of the interesting things about fusion technology is that there's no waste, right? What happens when you release all the energy in that pellet of fuel is you produce helium, so you get your electricity and you get your party balloons, and that's pretty much it.
So it's an inherently clean, safe and extremely efficient technology.
ALARM BLARES TANNOY: May I have your attention.
Preparations for shot operations in laser bay two are under way.
Leave laser bay two now.
I repeat.
Leave laser bay two now.
This is the NIF control room, this is the heart of all operations, and the reason I have to be quiet is because they're getting ready for a shot.
Main laser operation will begin in approximately one minute.
It's a bit like charging a flash gun.
Banks and the capacitors store electric charge, getting ready to discharge all this energy into the lasers.
Amplify, amplify, amplify, bang.
WOMAN: It looks like it just turned green.
Are you comfortable with us going forward? I don't see a problem.
OK.
We're ready to proceed if you're OK with it.
There's the countdown.
Start sequence on my mark.
COUNTDOWN BEGINS 255 seconds.
In 255 seconds time, a thousand times the power generating capacity of the United States of America is going to be fired down into something a few millimetres across.
It's cool.
Brilliant that we can do this, isn't it? By "we" I mean them.
Yeah, "we", it's our civilisation.
Five, four, three, two, one, shot.
That's a bang and that's the future.
Commercial fusion power stations are still a long way off, but NIF has proved that it can be done in principle.
If fusion can be made economically viable, it would end the days of fire and it would do much more than power our cars and cities, it would provide a new foundation for our civilisation, it would even open up the road to the stars.
I think we expect, in fact, we demand that the future is going to be better than the past, but it seems to me that we're not prepared to pay for it.
So how might things change? Well, we're fortunate enough to live in democracies, and in democracies things change when people have access to knowledge, when they understand facts and when they can make informed decisions.
Did you know, for example, that Americans spend ten times more money each year on pet grooming than they do on nuclear fusion? Now I think that if you said to someone, "Well, actually, why don't you brush your own cat, "and take the money you were going to spend having somebody else brush it "and give it to those people who are trying to find a way "of generating unlimited access to clean energy?" Then people would say, "Well, yeah, that's a good deal.
" See, in democracies things change when people like you and me want them to change.
I'm optimistic about the future.
No matter how deep we keep digging our hole right now, I feel like there is hope.
You know, I look at my life and I think, "it's almost over," when in fact with the advances in healthcare and such it may not be.
Fundamentally, I think we all want the same thing, we want our children and their children to have a future.
And that requires us to plan for that future.
Hello.
Hello.
Nice to meet you.
This place addresses a fundamental human need that we're going to face in the future, which is how are we going to feed ourselves? The tunnel itself runs about 130 metres downwards on this gentle gradient, and by the time we get to the vaults at the end, it's going to be 160 metres of solid rock up to the surface.
Buried down here is a priceless treasure, and everything about this building is designed to keep it safe.
This arc that you see, this curve here, is deliberate, it's in case there's a blast, some kind of explosion up at the surface.
And this is designed to reflect the blast back.
An extremely precious place covered in ice.
Then we have to go through this airlock and into the vault.
The treasure in here is not currency, not gold, not rare jewels but something important, it's the future of our food.
Here are the seeds, the food crops of virtually every country in the world.
These are from Mexico.
There are India.
There are Nigerian seeds next to Germany, Australia.
There are over 800,000 different populations of seeds collected here from virtually every country in the world.
These here are from Syria.
These were taken out just before recent troubles, so they're out there, they're protected there in case the Syrian seed vaults are lost.
And then there are some strangest of all countries you wouldn't believe would cooperate in such an international endeavour.
Look at this here - box number 5DPR of Korea, these are North Korean seeds.
And just over there are the South Korean seeds next to them.
Canada.
Philippines.
This represents, as a library of life, just the whole of civilisation rests with the genetic codes contained in these boxes.
Our future might just rest on these seeds squirreled away in the Global Seed Vault, drilled into the top of the world.
The driving force behind its construction was agriculturist, Dr Cary Fowler.
So why did you decide to take this project on? Well, I've spent all of my life working on trying to conserve crop diversity, and those of us in my field, we live in a world of wounds.
We see the injuries, we see the loss of diversity, the extinction.
And at a certain point, you know, enough is enough, and you, you try to figure out, well, what can we do that's not just stopgap? Cos we know we're going to need this crop diversity in the future, it's the biological foundation of agriculture.
We're going to need it as long as we need agriculture.
Which is as long as civilisation exists, I suppose? Exactly, after that we're not worried about it, are we? Some of the seeds in this vault will still be viable in 20,000 years.
When you look at this achievement, how do you see it? When I walk in here, I see a history of agriculture, all the way back to Neolithic days.
So our ancestors, yours and mine, have been saving these seeds in a successful, unbroken line until today.
They're every option that we're going to have for the future, so any and everything we want and need - rice and wheat to be in the future is represented, is made possible by this diversity.
Some people call this The Doomsday Vault.
Yeah.
Seems to me to be a rather, er I don't know, grim Apocalyptic? Yeah.
Yes.
Is that a, a reasonable description? For me, when I walk down here I get this immense feeling of happiness and frankly, hope that, OK, here are 800,000 crop varieties that are not going to become extinct.
So to me, this represents a problem that didn't happen.
Also seems to me, it's an example of genuine long-term thinking, this transcends political cycles, it transcends lifetimes.
Yeah, when I look at this place, I see about the only structure in the world that I know of that's built essentially for eternity, for as long as we can imagine, involving all the countries of the world in something that's long-term and positive.
That's hopeful, to me.
I came here to tell a story of an uncertain future, but I found something else under the permafrost of Svalbard optimism.
We have the privilege to live in a very special and unique time, because for the first time in the history of life on Earth, there's a species that at least in part is masters of its own destiny - has its survival in its own hands.
It's true to say that because there's an unbroken line of life stretching back from me to the origin of life on earth 3.
8 billion years ago, that at any point in that long history, something could have happened to wipe us out, and something could happen tomorrow to wipe us out, but increasingly, we can see those threats coming.
So, we have a chance, the possibility, of prolonging our existence into the indefinite future, if we can just find a way of taking that responsibility seriously.
Today, we are writing our chapter in the human story.
But as we do so, we must keep in mind the future and learn lessons from the past.
Back in the darkness of the El Castillo caves, there may be a stark reminder of life's perilous existence.
More accurate dating of the paintings suggests that the story of our young artist might have a sting in its tail.
If this art is not just around 40,000 years old, but over 43,000 years old, not much of a difference, then this is not human.
Because there were no humans in this area of Europe 43,000 years ago.
If that's the case, this art was created by Neanderthals, a completely different species.
Just think about that.
Neanderthals were pretty much as capable, mentally, as we are.
So if they'd been given enough time, given the pressures that we humans felt, then there's no reason why they couldn't have developed a civilisation.
But they didn't have time.
Instead they disappeared, they became extinct, leaving perhaps, these signs of the beginnings of their culture on the roof of a cave.
But our species didn't die out - we worked together, held on and then flourished.
Should we send these up to Grandad? Yeah, let's send them up to Grandad.
In the face of adversity, we adapted and used our brains to develop technologies.
In time, we built mighty civilizations with science as their foundation.
And then, within the blink of a cosmic eye, we journeyed to other worlds and we glimpsed the very nature of reality itself.
Right, let's send these to Grandad.
Going to put them in the envelope.
LOUD RUMBLING We even have an outpost of our civilisation living beyond Earth.
Science is unreasonably effective, it's generated knowledge beyond all expectation.
It's also delivered perspective.
Yes, we are an insignificant speck in an infinite universe, but we're also rare.
And because we're rare, we're valuable.
So what are we to do to secure our future? Well, we must learn to value the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, and not just because it grows our economy or allows us to build better bombs.
We must also learn to value the human race and take responsibility for our own survival.
Why? Because there's nobody else out there to value us or to look after us.
And finally, most important of all, we must educate the next generation in the great discoveries of science and we must teach them to use the light of reason to banish the darkness of superstition, cos if we do that, then at least there's a chance that this universe will remain a human one.
There's a card in here.
It's got "Grandad" written on it.
Are you a grandad? I'm not a grandad.
Hey, Alex, you a grandad? No, not that I know of.
I guess it's me.
Since then, we've learnt to think, to dream, to work together.
And today our human civilisation spans the globe and beyond.
But our planet is a tiny fragile speck of life in a vast, uncaring universe.
So what next for the apes who went to space? LOW VOICES SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE This cave mouth in northern Spain has been inhabited for 150,000 years.
There's basic shelter here and safety.
But from time to time, they left the light behind and headed into the dark.
In these caves you see the transition from just surviving to living, to observing the world, to enjoying it.
There were gatherings here, people coming together to make art and not just any old art, but specific representations of particular animals and particular symbols.
So in these caves we see the beginnings of superstition, the beginnings of an appreciation that there's not just a present but there's a past and there's a future.
These early artists were leaving messages to future generations.
And the one that speaks loudest lies far deeper into the darkness.
This handprint was made by a child at least 35,000 years ago and it's thought it was made by a little girl.
She'd have done the painting by taking paint and blowing it through her hand onto the wall of the cave.
Now, she would have had a basic understanding of her future, she'd have known that the seasons pass and maybe she even looked forward to coming back to this cave one day.
Leaving her mark upon the wall suggests she had started down the road of understanding time and how it stretched out into the future.
In 40,000 years, we've learned to see further ahead than she could possibly have imagined.
We've walked out into a wider world and made it our own.
And right now we are at a crossroads.
Our civilisation holds the power to shape the future of the whole planet.
I think we pay far too little attention to the future and the ability to illuminate it, to predict it is unique to us and our prosperity, and our very survival depend very much on what we glimpse out there in the dark.
Science and reason are the flames and in this film I want to convince you that we must use them to make the darkness visible.
THEY CHAT QUIETLY In late June, Earth's most northerly community are preparing to celebrate an important turning point of their year.
It's midsummer in the Arctic, and the people of Svalbard are approaching the moment when the sun rides highest in the sky, the summer solstice.
If I were in Manchester I'd say this was the longest day, but that kind of language doesn't make sense here, 78 degrees north and midway between northern Norway and the Arctic Circle cos this day, summer's day, began on April the 20th and it will end on August the 23rd.
We can predict exactly the moment that the solstice arrives.
So as strange as this long day feels, there is no mystery as to why it takes place.
THEY SING The reason for that long polar night and the months of midnight sun is the geometry of the solar system.
Svalbard is quite literally on top of the world and you feel it when you're here, it's obvious.
The sun doesn't set, it's somewhere over there at the moment and throughout the course of the day it just moves along the horizon right round, 360 degrees as the Earth rotates with the North Pole pointing directly towards the sun.
And when this place was discovered back in the 1590s, people didn't know that, or at least it wasn't agreed upon, it was still possible and indeed argued, back down there towards the equator in Italy, that the Earth was at the centre of the universe.
It's obvious that it isn't when you come up here.
I wonder what would have happened if Galileo and Copernicus and Bruno and others had visited Svalbard.
I think that everything would have got worked out much earlier.
After thousands of years of observation, our inquisitive minds began to develop models of the universe.
The full explanation for the clockwork of the solar system came in the 1680s, with Isaac Newton and his universal law of gravitation, which is the first modern law of nature.
What Newton's laws allow you to do is to predict the future given a knowledge of the present.
Newton's laws describe a clockwork universe.
Planets orbiting stars, stars orbiting galaxies.
And galaxies falling through a possibly infinite space.
One day, in our own sky, we'll see the galaxy Andromeda heading our way.
In four billion years' time, it will collide with The Milky Way.
For a billion years, our sky will be filled with cosmic choreography.
And we know that because we can predict the future.
So the laws of physics, in that sense, are little time machines.
They allow you to predict with precision what will happen in the distant future given a knowledge of the present.
We even see the sun ends its days as it swells into a red giant, some five billion years from now.
So we can be sure that we, along with all other life on Earth, will not survive into the far future.
Extinction is a necessary part of the evolution of life on Earth.
99.
9% of species that have ever existed have become extinct and that's a good thing, because when a species goes, there's a niche available in the ecosystem for other species to colonise - that's how evolution works.
You know, if the dinosaurs hadn't become extinct, it's very likely that we wouldn't exist.
So when considering the ultimate destiny of our species the answer seems obvious - extinction.
But I'd argue this doesn't have to be the case.
We are different to the other species on this planet because we're intelligent.
Intelligence matters and it's extremely rare, in fact you can argue that intelligence may be extremely rare in the universe.
It is possible that we're the only intelligent species in the Milky Way galaxy amongst 400 billion suns and countless billions of worlds.
And that makes us extremely valuable and worth protecting.
I think the way to keep this light alive is for humans to continue to venture out.
And explore.
To this end, we've built a ship large enough for six astronauts to train in.
This is Aquarius, which is used by NASA as Nemo, the Nemo missions.
And the reason this place is extreme, if you look here is because we're below the ocean.
The pressure in here is two and half to three times atmospheric pressure, which is why I sound like a Munchkin.
50 metres below the surface, Aquarius offers a unique training facility for deep space exploration.
This is, er, this is brilliant cos you can play at being an astronaut, I mean, you'd have six astronauts in here.
The reason that they use this as a mission simulator is because the environment is as close as you can get to space on Earth, you have to live here for weeks.
And if you stay here for more than one hour - so we've got one hour - you have to stay here for a further 17 hours to decompress, so you can't just run away if you, you know, psychologically feel a bit claustrophobic and you think "I don't like it," you can't just leave, it's one of the few places on Earth where that would be the case.
CHATTER OVER RADIO In recent months, Nemo has been tasked with a very specific type of deep space exploration.
They're developing methods to space walk onto asteroids, where gravity will be a fraction of that experienced on the moon.
Whilst at times dreaming of an asteroid encounter is a lot of fun, the motive behind the mission is deadly serious.
MAN SPEAKS ON RADIO In 2013, on a wintry morning in Russia, a massive fireball cut the sky.
RUMBLING TYRES SKID Seconds later, it exploded, with 20 to 30 times more energy than the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.
EXPLOSION COMMOTION Earth had been hit by the largest asteroid in more than a century.
And no-one had seen it coming.
It seems our powers of prediction failed us and that's because, in reality, nature can be chaotic.
I can demonstrate that with a simple experiment.
These are magnets, so let's say that this is an asteroid, then watch what happens when I set the pendulum off, let's say from this point here.
So I'm going to release it, I've got a laser there.
From exactly that point, I'm just going to let it go.
We see the laser tracing out the path on this photo paper, this is asteroid orbiting the solar system, gravitationally interacting with the Earth, the sun of course, let's say a massive planet like Jupiter.
There you go, it's collided with the yellow one, the sun.
I can do it again and what I'm going to try and do is line it up in exactly the same way and let it go.
In this case it's radically different, that's because this is what is known as a chaotic system, there you go, and it's hit the Earth, so that will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
The point is that the orbit is critically dependent on what we call, what physicists call, the initial conditions.
That's how precisely did I line this up, how precisely did I release it, what precisely happens as it sets off on its path through the solar system? In here are the little air currents that deflect it a little bit, all those infinitesimally small changes can be amplified in a complicated system such as this.
And that's why it's not good enough to just discover the asteroids that come near to the Earth, it's not good enough because one of those tiny nudges could take something that you might think was safe, just using Newton's laws very naively, and in fact nudging it onto a collision course with the Earth.
This fundamental feature of nature means that we may get little warning when the next one comes our way.
So we must continue to track threatening asteroids and develop technologies that will get us out to them at short notice.
In January 2014, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft awoke from a 31-month period of hibernation.
It had travelled four billion miles to intercept a comet.
Throughout August and September, the tiny spaceship made a careful approach, scanning the comet for a place to land.
And next week, it will deploy a probe to attach itself to the surface.
Rosetta will greatly increase our understanding of comets and the early solar system.
It also tests our ability to mount a manned mission to an asteroid if the need arises.
The problem is that even with a sophisticated rocket system, it took Rosetta ten years to reach its target.
To send astronauts that deep into space will require a great leap in our technical ability and our ambition.
I had an ambition to be an astronaut from, you know, as early as I can remember.
I can't remember thinking anything else.
The excitement of, you know, just going way away from Earth.
For the first time in a generation, new designs of manned spacecraft are being tested.
Commercial companies are now developing crafts to get us into space.
The endeavour is never without risk.
It's not an easy thing to do, to escape the Earth's gravity even for a few minutes takes a lot of energy.
Three, two, one.
Release, release.
Quick release.
INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER The future of human space exploration faces enormous challenges and depends on the bravery of test pilots like David Mackay, Peter Siebold and their colleague, Mike Alsbury, who lost his life last week in the pursuit of a dream.
A dream that many of us grew up with as children and never lost.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, this was one of my favourite books.
I got it, I think it was 1979, it was about the same time as my first ABBA album.
And I just read it for years and years and years.
It's a sort of fictional history of spacecraft, 2000 to 2100 AD.
It's got things like, "2005 - work starts on the lunar station.
" Then this is one of my favourite spacecraft, I used to try and build these out of Lego, it's called the Martian Queen and it says, "Early in "2015, fare-paying passengers stepped aboard "the first purpose-built interplanetary spaceliner.
" So they imagined that by 2015, by next year, we'd have spaceliners taking people to the Martian colonies.
And what's interesting is my little boy loves the book as well, he's got it now, and some of this stuff is in his past.
This is a list of things that didn't happen, whereas for me, back in the '70s, it was a list of things that I thought would happen.
Breaking free from Earth's bonds is so difficult that there are only eight people alive that know what it's like to walk on another world.
Hi.
Charlie.
What's your name? Charlie.
Believe it or not, I'm the other half of Judy.
Hello, Charlie.
How you doing? Nice to meet you.
Wonderful to meet you.
Pleasure to meet you.
Good to be here with you.
Have a seat.
INDISTINCT CHATTER Charlie Duke was Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 16 and the youngest person ever to walk on the moon.
How about an extension, you guys? We're feeling good.
Mission objective - to bring back samples from the lunar highlands and test drive new technologies.
And here we go.
We are really going up a hill, I'll tell you.
When I was just becoming aware of Apollo, I thought that I would be able to go into at least into Earth orbit myself.
Yeah, really, my dad was born in 1907 and so he was just right after the Wright brothers and, er, and he could barely believe that his son went to the moon.
And yet at the time my five-year-old, Tom, he didn't think it was any big deal! You know, that everybody in the neighbourhood was going to the moon.
Neil Armstrong was a next door neighbour, Tom Stafford was in the neighbourhood, Frank Borman was in the neighbourhood, the whole neighbourhood was either NASA engineers or astronauts, so everybody's it's natural, "Let's go to the moon, Dad, when you going to do it?" Hey, John, this is perfect, with the LM, and the rover, and you, and Stone Mountain, and the old flag.
Come on out here and give me a salute.
Big Navy salute.
Off the ground a bit more.
There we go.
You're most famous probably for the most famous photograph involving you, it's not you, it's the photograph of your family that you left on the moon.
I asked the boys, they were five and seven, I said, "Would you guys like to be with your dad on the moon?" They said "Oh, yeah, that'd be great, Dad.
" So on the back of that picture we had written, "This is the family of astronaut Charlie Duke, "from planet Earth who landed on the moon in April 1972" and we all signed it and then I dropped the picture on the moon.
It sort of shows the human side of space flight and, you know, we were family men, we were dads, husbands, and so wanted my family to be a part of it.
They'll sit there for millions of years, won't they, they won't go anywhere.
And if you look back to those days, so less than a year from the first test flight, first manned test flight to landing on the moon.
Yeah.
Would that be possible now? No.
Why? We don't have the, er, the schedule, the money to build spacecraft that quickly.
We don't have the, er, the manpower to do it.
I mean, 400,000 people and unlimited budget, you can do a lot, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah! And that's what we had.
After Charlie left, only two men have ever gone back and there's good reason for that.
The energy required to break free from Earth's gravitational embrace is staggering.
This is the spacecraft that took John Young, Ken Mattingly and Charlie Duke to the moon.
There's the Service Module and the Command Module, that's the engine that fired to bring them back from the moon to the Earth, the Lunar Lander sat inside there and this piece is essentially a single rocket motor that fired to take them from Earth orbit to the moon.
So this is the 120 tonne moon spacecraft, if you like.
But from a physics perspective, the difficulty is getting that into orbit, and on Saturn V that was done in two bits and this is stage two and that is the stage two fuel tank.
Inside there are 450 tonnes of rocket fuel.
And this burnt through those 450 tonnes in about 6 minutes, taking the spacecraft from an altitude of 200,000 feet, about 38 miles, up to 114 and a half miles, that's virtually in orbit.
And it did that by burning the fuel in five engines.
Now, at the time, that was one of the most powerful rockets ever built, but not the most powerful - that was this, Stage One of the Saturn V.
There are 2,200 tons of fuel in here, and stage one burnt through that in about two and a half minutes.
To do that they add fuel pumps that were more powerful than a 747 at lift off to pump 15 tonnes of fuel a second into these the F1 engines.
Every statistic about these engines is ridiculous.
In those two and half minutes when this spacecraft was lifting off the power generated was more than the peak electrical power generation capacity of the United Kingdom.
Building a vehicle powerful enough to accelerate three men to escape velocity was a triumph of human ingenuity.
But the technology at the heart of any rocket is essentially ancient technology, the release of energy by combustion.
We used fire to release energy from the Sun stored in the wood from trees.
Then we discovered better things to burn.
Energy-packed ancient sunlight buried underground.
Burning that has set us free.
But fire has surely taken us as far as it can.
The reason we aren't flying to other planets is the same reason we're endangering this one.
Every day we burn the equivalent of all the plants growing on this planet over a year to meet our energy needs.
But that's not to say that energy use is of itself necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed by many measures it's an extremely good thing indeed.
In every country where the per capita energy use is greater than about half the European average then adult life expectancy is greater than 70 years, literacy rates are greater than 90%, infant mortality rates are low and more than one in five of the population are in higher education.
So the story of energy use is a complicated one.
On the one hand, obviously, energy use is important and to be valued, it's the foundation of our modern civilisation, and on the other hand, if we generate our energy mainly by burning fossil fuels then it can be a bad thing.
Now in the short-term of course we can increase the efficiency of our energy usage.
But in the long-term, if we aspire to continue to advance as a civilisation, if we want to give every citizen of the world a quality of life that is as good as or even better than mine, and if ultimately we want to build a space-faring generation and journey to the stars then we have to find a better way.
In the short-term, we can move to cleaner electric motors, but because we burn fossil fuels in power stations, that simply moves the problem upstream.
So what we face is not an energy crisis but an energy conversion crisis.
Renewable energy might be part of the solution, but I believe there's a far more promising long-term alternative.
If you could do one thing, if you could wave a magic wand and do one thing, what would you do? If you could produce abundant clean energy, it would solve many problems.
It's a grand challenge of our time, and I truly am committed and proud to be part of it.
Can we for the first time bring a star to Earth? Here at the National Ignition Facility in California they're trying to create man-made stars.
It's a big laser.
It's the biggest in the world by probably a factor of 50, or maybe even 100, so in size and in energy.
How much power's in there? If you look at all the electricity that's produced in the United States, this is about a thousand times more power than that.
But of course only for a fraction of a second, a few billionths of a second.
In a star, fusion begins when the gas cloud that forms the star collapses under its own gravity, heating the core to many millions of degrees.
Here at NIF, it's coaxed into life in the laser's target chamber encased in two metre thick walls and 47 of the biggest glass doors I've ever seen.
Ah, yeah.
So this is the sharp end of the whole system, if you like, this is where the lasers come down and start to get focused into the chamber.
And each one of them has to be synchronised to a few trillionths of a second to arrive at exactly the same time and of course in exactly the right spot.
It's worth sort of stepping back and realising what's happening here cos you said 192 of these laser beams, which are not small.
Indeed.
In the middle of that which is definitely not small.
Absolutely.
What's the target? It's about that big.
It's about a millimetre wide.
But it's the level of precision and power that you're able to achieve.
And if you can do it uniformly then you can create a little star.
It reminds me a little bit of Apollo in a sense cos you just think, you know, look what we can do if we try.
So you see there, there's a gold cylinder and in the middle a little red ball, that's the fusion fuel.
One of those pellets, when all of the fusion happens just right, could power my house for a day.
So you imagine having a little bag of those pellets, let's say you three or four hundred of them, you could fit them in your pocket, then that would power your life for a year.
Thousands of these little pellets could power a spacecraft to the Moon.
Hundreds of thousands could power a spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system or perhaps outward to the stars.
And one of the interesting things about fusion technology is that there's no waste, right? What happens when you release all the energy in that pellet of fuel is you produce helium, so you get your electricity and you get your party balloons, and that's pretty much it.
So it's an inherently clean, safe and extremely efficient technology.
ALARM BLARES TANNOY: May I have your attention.
Preparations for shot operations in laser bay two are under way.
Leave laser bay two now.
I repeat.
Leave laser bay two now.
This is the NIF control room, this is the heart of all operations, and the reason I have to be quiet is because they're getting ready for a shot.
Main laser operation will begin in approximately one minute.
It's a bit like charging a flash gun.
Banks and the capacitors store electric charge, getting ready to discharge all this energy into the lasers.
Amplify, amplify, amplify, bang.
WOMAN: It looks like it just turned green.
Are you comfortable with us going forward? I don't see a problem.
OK.
We're ready to proceed if you're OK with it.
There's the countdown.
Start sequence on my mark.
COUNTDOWN BEGINS 255 seconds.
In 255 seconds time, a thousand times the power generating capacity of the United States of America is going to be fired down into something a few millimetres across.
It's cool.
Brilliant that we can do this, isn't it? By "we" I mean them.
Yeah, "we", it's our civilisation.
Five, four, three, two, one, shot.
That's a bang and that's the future.
Commercial fusion power stations are still a long way off, but NIF has proved that it can be done in principle.
If fusion can be made economically viable, it would end the days of fire and it would do much more than power our cars and cities, it would provide a new foundation for our civilisation, it would even open up the road to the stars.
I think we expect, in fact, we demand that the future is going to be better than the past, but it seems to me that we're not prepared to pay for it.
So how might things change? Well, we're fortunate enough to live in democracies, and in democracies things change when people have access to knowledge, when they understand facts and when they can make informed decisions.
Did you know, for example, that Americans spend ten times more money each year on pet grooming than they do on nuclear fusion? Now I think that if you said to someone, "Well, actually, why don't you brush your own cat, "and take the money you were going to spend having somebody else brush it "and give it to those people who are trying to find a way "of generating unlimited access to clean energy?" Then people would say, "Well, yeah, that's a good deal.
" See, in democracies things change when people like you and me want them to change.
I'm optimistic about the future.
No matter how deep we keep digging our hole right now, I feel like there is hope.
You know, I look at my life and I think, "it's almost over," when in fact with the advances in healthcare and such it may not be.
Fundamentally, I think we all want the same thing, we want our children and their children to have a future.
And that requires us to plan for that future.
Hello.
Hello.
Nice to meet you.
This place addresses a fundamental human need that we're going to face in the future, which is how are we going to feed ourselves? The tunnel itself runs about 130 metres downwards on this gentle gradient, and by the time we get to the vaults at the end, it's going to be 160 metres of solid rock up to the surface.
Buried down here is a priceless treasure, and everything about this building is designed to keep it safe.
This arc that you see, this curve here, is deliberate, it's in case there's a blast, some kind of explosion up at the surface.
And this is designed to reflect the blast back.
An extremely precious place covered in ice.
Then we have to go through this airlock and into the vault.
The treasure in here is not currency, not gold, not rare jewels but something important, it's the future of our food.
Here are the seeds, the food crops of virtually every country in the world.
These are from Mexico.
There are India.
There are Nigerian seeds next to Germany, Australia.
There are over 800,000 different populations of seeds collected here from virtually every country in the world.
These here are from Syria.
These were taken out just before recent troubles, so they're out there, they're protected there in case the Syrian seed vaults are lost.
And then there are some strangest of all countries you wouldn't believe would cooperate in such an international endeavour.
Look at this here - box number 5DPR of Korea, these are North Korean seeds.
And just over there are the South Korean seeds next to them.
Canada.
Philippines.
This represents, as a library of life, just the whole of civilisation rests with the genetic codes contained in these boxes.
Our future might just rest on these seeds squirreled away in the Global Seed Vault, drilled into the top of the world.
The driving force behind its construction was agriculturist, Dr Cary Fowler.
So why did you decide to take this project on? Well, I've spent all of my life working on trying to conserve crop diversity, and those of us in my field, we live in a world of wounds.
We see the injuries, we see the loss of diversity, the extinction.
And at a certain point, you know, enough is enough, and you, you try to figure out, well, what can we do that's not just stopgap? Cos we know we're going to need this crop diversity in the future, it's the biological foundation of agriculture.
We're going to need it as long as we need agriculture.
Which is as long as civilisation exists, I suppose? Exactly, after that we're not worried about it, are we? Some of the seeds in this vault will still be viable in 20,000 years.
When you look at this achievement, how do you see it? When I walk in here, I see a history of agriculture, all the way back to Neolithic days.
So our ancestors, yours and mine, have been saving these seeds in a successful, unbroken line until today.
They're every option that we're going to have for the future, so any and everything we want and need - rice and wheat to be in the future is represented, is made possible by this diversity.
Some people call this The Doomsday Vault.
Yeah.
Seems to me to be a rather, er I don't know, grim Apocalyptic? Yeah.
Yes.
Is that a, a reasonable description? For me, when I walk down here I get this immense feeling of happiness and frankly, hope that, OK, here are 800,000 crop varieties that are not going to become extinct.
So to me, this represents a problem that didn't happen.
Also seems to me, it's an example of genuine long-term thinking, this transcends political cycles, it transcends lifetimes.
Yeah, when I look at this place, I see about the only structure in the world that I know of that's built essentially for eternity, for as long as we can imagine, involving all the countries of the world in something that's long-term and positive.
That's hopeful, to me.
I came here to tell a story of an uncertain future, but I found something else under the permafrost of Svalbard optimism.
We have the privilege to live in a very special and unique time, because for the first time in the history of life on Earth, there's a species that at least in part is masters of its own destiny - has its survival in its own hands.
It's true to say that because there's an unbroken line of life stretching back from me to the origin of life on earth 3.
8 billion years ago, that at any point in that long history, something could have happened to wipe us out, and something could happen tomorrow to wipe us out, but increasingly, we can see those threats coming.
So, we have a chance, the possibility, of prolonging our existence into the indefinite future, if we can just find a way of taking that responsibility seriously.
Today, we are writing our chapter in the human story.
But as we do so, we must keep in mind the future and learn lessons from the past.
Back in the darkness of the El Castillo caves, there may be a stark reminder of life's perilous existence.
More accurate dating of the paintings suggests that the story of our young artist might have a sting in its tail.
If this art is not just around 40,000 years old, but over 43,000 years old, not much of a difference, then this is not human.
Because there were no humans in this area of Europe 43,000 years ago.
If that's the case, this art was created by Neanderthals, a completely different species.
Just think about that.
Neanderthals were pretty much as capable, mentally, as we are.
So if they'd been given enough time, given the pressures that we humans felt, then there's no reason why they couldn't have developed a civilisation.
But they didn't have time.
Instead they disappeared, they became extinct, leaving perhaps, these signs of the beginnings of their culture on the roof of a cave.
But our species didn't die out - we worked together, held on and then flourished.
Should we send these up to Grandad? Yeah, let's send them up to Grandad.
In the face of adversity, we adapted and used our brains to develop technologies.
In time, we built mighty civilizations with science as their foundation.
And then, within the blink of a cosmic eye, we journeyed to other worlds and we glimpsed the very nature of reality itself.
Right, let's send these to Grandad.
Going to put them in the envelope.
LOUD RUMBLING We even have an outpost of our civilisation living beyond Earth.
Science is unreasonably effective, it's generated knowledge beyond all expectation.
It's also delivered perspective.
Yes, we are an insignificant speck in an infinite universe, but we're also rare.
And because we're rare, we're valuable.
So what are we to do to secure our future? Well, we must learn to value the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, and not just because it grows our economy or allows us to build better bombs.
We must also learn to value the human race and take responsibility for our own survival.
Why? Because there's nobody else out there to value us or to look after us.
And finally, most important of all, we must educate the next generation in the great discoveries of science and we must teach them to use the light of reason to banish the darkness of superstition, cos if we do that, then at least there's a chance that this universe will remain a human one.
There's a card in here.
It's got "Grandad" written on it.
Are you a grandad? I'm not a grandad.
Hey, Alex, you a grandad? No, not that I know of.
I guess it's me.