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(eerie music)
- [Johnny Carson] Would you welcome, please, Dr. Carl Sagan.
Well what's new in space, Carl?
- [Carl Sagan] Think of a civilization
on a different planet evolved under
quite different circumstances than here.
What is their art like, their music?
Think of how we'd be able to view ourselves in a new way.
There's another aspect to it, too, and that is
we are at a very dangerous moment in human history.
We're in the process of inadvertently altering our climate
and exhaustion of fossil fuels, all kinds of problems
which come with technology.
- [Johnny Carson] Is it true that all television radio shows
that are sent out travel forever through the void?
- [Carl Sagan] Yep, they do, signals that are sent out,
including this program.
(overlapping voices)
- [Meteorologist] Here's a look at our seven-day forecast
for the beaches, the valleys, and the metro area.
Take a look at that, 70s, 80s, and valleys next weekend...
- [Martha] I would come to your home every single week,
to teach you how to cook.
- [Television Host] Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome our next bachelor, Peter!
(car horns honking)
- [Reporter] Argue that a lack of genetic diversity,
naturally occurring pests and the rigors of
being trucked from crop to crop
could all be to blame for the death of bees.
(music, helicopter whirring)
- [Reporter 2] The Brazilian government decided that
saving a rainforest should take a back seat
to their economic development.
- [Reporter 3] Marches occurred one week
after the earth day marches for science,
which has demanded respect for
fact-based, scientific research.
- [Chairman Smith] The Committee on Science,
Space and Technology will come to order.
Welcome to today's hearing titled
"The Search for Biosignatures
in our Solar System and beyond."
(gavel)
- Do you think there's life out there?
(laughing)
And are they studying us and
what do they think about New York City?
(laughing)
- Well, let me just say that in our own Milky Way Galaxy
there are a hundred billion stars and we now believe
in our universe we have more than
a hundred billion galaxies.
So if you just do the math, the chance that there's a planet
like earth out there with life on it is very high.
- I just want you to speculate.
Do you think, in what timeframe might we
expect to find some evidence of, say,
microbial life elsewhere in the universe?
- I always like to start by saying
scientists never like to speculate.
(laughing)
We always like facts.
- [Chairman Smith] But they always do.
But we always do, correct.
So we now finally know that exoplanets exist and are common
but on the other side lies the possibility
to find the true earths with signs of life.
The point I want to make is this is the first time
in human history we have the technological reach
to cross the great threshold
with the James Webb Space Telescope.
- Most optimistic, then, next 5 to 10 years?
- Yes, the most optimistic is within a decade.
- [Chairman Smith] Okay.
(epic music)
- [Technician] Slow down, slow down.
- [Technician 2] Slow down, slow.
- [Technician] Got it.
Keep pushing.
- [Technician 2] Good speed, guys, good speed.
Someone telling us where to stop?
- [Matt Mountain] This is the largest space telescope
humanity has ever conceived of.
We're never done anything this audacious in space before.
We have a thousand people working on this project right now.
If it works, it's going to see deeper into space
than any other telescope in history.
- This is the largest mission,
non-human space flight that NASA has ever done.
- It looks at areas that the Hubble could never see.
- The James Webb Space Telescope certainly is
the most complex telescope anyone's ever built.
- This is a chance to measure myself
against one of the hardest problems
man has set himself the goal to do.
- This is the huge eye in the sky and it's going to capture
the very first light of the universe.
- [Matt Mountain] We're going to test it.
We're going to pack it up in a rocket, shoot it out
and we don't know what we're going to find.
But the slightest thing that could go wrong
could actually mean this mission could fail.
(birds chirping)
- [Nathaniel] So you've loved astronomy
since you were a kid, right?
- Yeah, I got into it as a child.
My dad won a cottage in a crap game.
The attraction of going down there
and having these light pollution-free skies
and seeing the summer Milky Way,
you know, the odd satellite.
And I was old enough to be around when
Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
- [Nathaniel] That made a big impression on you?
- Yeah, that whole space race
and the fact that we stepped on another planet.
That we left this earth and all that.
Yeah, it left a huge impression on me.
- [Nathaniel] How do you think the seeing will be tonight?
- It's supposed to clear up later.
I don't know if the transparency is going to get any better.
Hopefully we can see something.
You know, I think everyone is intrigued by astronomy
because it's about the big questions.
Where did we come from?
How did the universe begin?
Are we alone?
An amazing thing right now is that we're on the verge
of really being able to answer these questions.
It's an exciting time.
- [Johnny Carson] It's still mind boggling.
You're involved now with looking for
extraterrestrial intelligence, right?
How do you go about looking?
- [Sara Seager] Why do children learn how to walk?
I don't know, I mean, they just do.
They're driven somehow by
a force inside of them that they can't identify.
I don't know why I'm doing this.
I just feel compelled to go forward.
When I was a small child,
I went with my dad on a camping trip.
It was his first and last camping trip.
But fortunately, you know, he made it happen.
And I remember waking up in the middle of the night
and stepping outside the tent and I looked up
and it was my first ever view of a truly dark sky.
And I saw so many stars.
I went, "Wow."
I had never imagined that was possible.
I couldn't even count them.
And they were so bright.
And a little later my father took me to a star party
and I remember looking at the moon through a telescope
and I went, "Wow."
I couldn't believe that the moon that I had seen
so many times actually had craters on it.
I saw an unbelievable amount of detail.
I just didn't know it existed.
And at some point I realized,
I don't know how I had the foresight at a young age,
but I thought, "You know I'm not going to study physics,
I'm not going to be a doctor like my father wanted me to be.
I'm going to apply for graduate school in astronomy."
Great. - It's called Fernando.
- Wow, I didn't even realize it was this portable.
- We're going to move it into the dark room.
- [Sara] I started out working on exoplanets.
- [Nathaniel] You mean not Jupiter, Venus, Mars, et cetera?
- Yes, planets orbiting a star other than our sun.
What's so cool is you can build your own space satellite.
At the time, people really didn't
think that was a good idea.
People would come up to me and say,
"You can talk to my advisor.
He thinks exoplanets are nothing.
You shouldn't be doing this, he'll tell you."
Professors would say,
"Look, I see people are finding planets.
I kind of believe them but we'll never
be able to study their atmospheres."
And when I was on the job market as a junior faculty
there was one single transiting planet known.
HD-209458B.
And they'd say, "Look, Sarah, I get there's this one object.
I think it's a one object, one method, success.
I don't know if this field's going to go anywhere."
- Hey!
(epic music)
- [Lee Feinberg] The Webb Telescope is a hundred times
more powerful than Hubble.
The telescopes keep getting bigger because
the bigger the telescope the better the resolution.
You know, we wouldn't have built a
telescope this big unless we needed to.
And you need to build a telescope this big
if you want to look at the very dimmest,
most earliest galaxies in the universe.
- The James Webb Space Telescope
is not just a machine built by engineers
and scientists to look out to the universe.
it's taking humanity on a journey.
We're going to enter a completely new
part of observational space where we've never trod before.
And every time we've done this as a species
we've discovered new things.
- We have just received the 18 hexagons that
make up the big mirror that collects
the starlight and focuses it on the camera.
- [Lee Feinberg] Gold has very unique properties
in terms of reflecting infrared light.
And this is an infrared telescope.
So that's why we choose gold.
- I think people want us to build this telescope
because they want to know how we got here.
I want to know how we got here.
- You know, we started the James Webb Telescope
to look at the cosmos and the early universe
but we've discovered that it's so much more powerful.
that it can do new things.
And we're seeing teams of people led by women
taking that scientific direction somewhere else.
Taking it to try and understand,
could there possibly be life out there.
- [Elinor Gates] Do you have any estimate for
how many nights you spent up at the Crocker Dome?
- [Natalie Batalha] Oh my gosh, between 2000 and 2003
we spent so many nights up here.
And it's quite remote, right?
- [Ellie] That's the thing, there's no bathroom.
- Right - There's no internet.
- [Natalie] There were so many creatures along this path.
When I started in the late 1990s
we were trying to find planets using
this small telescope up at Lick Observatory.
We were using this new technique.
It had never been done before.
And people were very skeptical.
In fact, the whole thing was built on a shoestring budget.
But it was so compelling to work on a project
that had the possibility of detecting
an Earth-like planet in the future.
I do remember this padlock.
- [Ellie] Yeah.
- Is it possible to get in?
- No, unfortunately I don't have the key right now.
- Oh. - I wasn't prepared.
- All of the instruments have been taken out, right?
- Yeah, there's nothing in there
It's just some empty shelves.
This is not the astronomer's ideal weather conditions.
- [Nathaniel] Isn't this a way to understand
why we had to go to space?
- You know, to find planets, you need to stare unblinkingly.
So besides the fact that the sun gets in our way sometimes,
we have day, the weather does too.
So no observations are going to be done tonight.
- [Nathaniel] You spent a lot of years
up here at Lick looking for exoplanets.
Did you find any?
- We found hundreds of periodic dimmings of light,
but none of them turned out to be bonafide planets.
The analogy I'd like to use is to imagine a skyscraper
80 stories high in New York City,
and you've got all of these windows and it's nighttime.
All the windows are illuminated.
And one person goes to one window
and lowers the blinds by about a centimeter.
That's the change in brightness we had to be able to detect.
- [Sara] In the beginning, it was a lonely field.
Very few planets were known.
Months would go by and not a new planet would be discovered.
Nevertheless, I knew the field would explode and I'd say,
"Look, I know there's going to be
so many planets transiting we're
not gonna be able to count them all.
And they'd be, "No, I don't believe it."
And so they didn't believe it, they didn't hire me.
And then came Kepler.
- [Launch Announcer] Three, two, one, zero.
And liftoff of the Delta 2 Rocket with Kepler
on a search for planets like our own.
- [Sara] The Kepler Space Telescope
monitored one small section of the sky
and it found thousands of planets.
Another Earth is undoubtedly out there.
In our own Milky Way Galaxy we have
hundreds of billions of stars.
Our own universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies.
To me personally, it is definitely there.
(phone ringing)
- [Natalia G.] Oh there you are.
There you are.
- Good morning everyone, sorry I'm late.
- [Natalia G.] Hey, Natalie.
We have a good group in the room today.
- All right.
Well, the last few meetings we've had
one planet candidate in each batch.
- [Leader] Yeah.
- [Sara] We rely on a few core experts.
Natalie's one of them.
- Natalie was one of the leaders of the Kepler mission.
- [Sara] Kepler was so pioneering.
It opened our eyes for the first time.
And TESS is now just finding objects
around closer stars and smaller stars as well.
- Okay.
- [Leader] Okay.
- [Nathaniel] How are you detecting these exoplanets?
- Well, nowadays, the best way to find planets
is by the transit technique.
If this represents our star and this blue
represents a planet, if you're lucky,
the planet will orbit such that it
passes in front of the star as seen from the telescope.
Then the starlight drops by a tiny amount.
Thousands of planets have been detected this way.
They range from smaller than Earth size to Jupiter size.
- So Aylin showed me this one yesterday.
- [Sara] I like this one.
Look how long the transit duration is, too.
- This one also has century offset.
- [Sara] We're hoping to find and identify
the pool of transiting planets
in the habitable zones of small stars.
Not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life.
The Goldilocks zone.
- [Natalia G.] Onto the next one.
- [Natalie] Next one looks great.
One system that had two viable planet candidates
that were very exciting, so it was super--
- [Nathaniel] So you want to study these candidates
with the James Webb Space Telescope?
- [Sara] Yeah.
Actually the question often comes up.
How much time are we going to get for exoplanets?
You know, if we find a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere
in the habitable zone of an M star, do you have any idea
how much telescope time we're going to need
to look at that planet's atmosphere?
- [Leader] We have five more to go, or six.
- [Natalie G.] Yeah, let's kill it.
- [Clara] Given that our own atmosphere
contains thousands of gases, we expect alien atmospheres
to also contain thousands of gases.
And my job is to figure out how each one of those gases
interacts with light. And some molecules, like oxygen,
we send out into space, life does, but other things do too.
Some molecules, like phosphine, only life
sends out into the atmosphere.
And so this is one of the reasons I'm so fond of it
because although it's rare, and actually quite poisonous,
only life makes it on Earth.
And so it's an unequivocal sign of life.
- [Sara] My generation, we're betting on
the fact that nature delivers.
That life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance
and we're planning on finding it.
There's no question.
(epic music)
- [Lee] At some point you build a telescope
that's too big to fit in a rocket
and James Webb would not fit in a rocket.
So we had to make the primary mirror
into individual segments.
It's been done on the ground once or twice but
doing it in space as a whole other set of challenges.
- Is it going to hold, is it going to keep it strength?
Is it going to keep its alignment, will it deploy?
- This is a worldwide telescope.
It's the collective investment from the US
and the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency,
that all these countries are willing to make,
to reach the edge of the universe.
- [Jon] Separating from the upper stage.
Separating.
We're going to L2.
- The stakes are tremendous.
If you think back to Mars Science Lab, Curiosity.
That seven minutes of terror waiting for it
to get to the surface, we were all holding our breath.
I didn't hold it for seven minutes
but I held it for a long time
waiting for that signal back from the surface.
In this case we're going to hold out breaths
for a couple of weeks, because that's how long
it's gonna take to get all those
deployments out after launch.
- Adding whatever Delta V we need.
- [Matt] There are over 300 or 400
different operations that have to occur in space
to make this telescope actually come to life.
A huge sunshade has to deploy,
which is the size of a tennis court.
At this point, things get pretty critical
because now everything starts to cool quickly.
- Follow the red for maximum power.
- [Matt] So now we've got to get the telescope unfolded
before it gets too cold and the joints freeze up.
Then we got to get the instruments started.
And each one of these things
has to work perfectly first time.
- [Jon] Hello?
- Hi, how are you?
- Good.
- So about the James Webb, what's new?
What's the latest going on?
- [Jon] It's very exciting.
Lots of things.
The spacecraft structure is moving along like gangbusters.
We're making the flight membranes.
Pathfinder is delivered.
So basically, it's almost all the balls
are in the air at this point.
- Sometimes we hear rumors
of something that's not going so well.
Is there anything like that that you're worried about,
you personally, or is it all under control?
- There are always little problems.
Nothing insurmountable.
- Yeah.
- The thing that keeps me up at night
and prevents my hair from growing back
is the problem we haven't thought of.
That failure of imagination.
Right now we're on schedule and making flight hardware.
- Well, it's so great to hear that
because the entire science community,
you know, in exoplanets, is ramping up here.
Everybody's so excited about the James Webb.
But I don't know if you realize
how much they're counting on this.
- I'm aware that my customers are very anxious
for the Webb Telescope to get on orbit.
- Yeah, it's pressure, but it's also gratefulness
that all you and your team and people are working so hard
to make sure every last thing works.
Okay. - Okay, bye.
- [Jon] Bye bye.
- Good, huh?
That's a great conversation.
He's like basically the brains behind the whole thing.
And you know, sometimes, I didn't ask him this time,
but almost every time I ask him like,
"Well, what if something bad happens to you
and you get hit by a bus, who's the next guy?"
(engine revving)
- [Amy] There's a couple of race series that
got started in the last five years or so.
My husband and I, we go on Craigslist,
look for a really cheap car and then
drag it home and fix it up, race it.
Being a system engineer for the Webb Telescope
I don't really get to touch a lot of this hardware.
So working on cars is pretty satisfying
because it lets you actually
put your hands on something.
I'm not strong enough.
(laughing)
- [Amy's husband] Those races are 14 or 15 hours long.
And usually we break down before we get to 14 or 15 hours.
And the James Webb, it's a very different problem.
You know, I mean, James Webb has to work first time.
It is too far away from the Earth.
Where we're putting the Webb Telescope
is a place called L2 and if you think of
here's the Earth, here's the sun, L2 is on the other side,
a million miles away from the Earth.
The full moon is between us and L2.
That's where James Webb will be.
It's four times the distance to the moon.
(soft piano music)
- [Astronaut] Oh my God, look at that picture over there.
- [Astronaut 2] Hand me a roll of color quick, will you?
- [Astronaut] Oh, man.
- [Astronaut 2] Quick.
- [Astronaut] I'm looking for one.
- [Astronaut 2] That went from here.
- [Astronaut] Hey, I've got it right here.
- [Astronaut 2] I got it right.
Oh, I got a beautiful shot.
You got it?
- [Nathaniel] 50 years ago, they say, we went
looking for the moon and we found the Earth.
- [Maggie] Yeah, that's true.
That picture of the Earth.
That was really the beginning of
the modern environmental movement right there.
(water running)
This is one of my favorite little lakes.
There's an eagle circling around in front of us.
(birds singing)
In grad school I asked the question,
"What does the Earth look like
from very far away when you can't
see the continents and the oceans?
And can you actually tell that
there is life on that planet?"
So we looked at the moon not too many days after new moon
when you can just first start to see
that thinnest crescent right at sunset.
You'll notice that the dark part of the moon
is also visible because the Earth is shining
on that part of the lunar surface.
So if you take a telescope and you look at that light,
it's Earth light, all jumbled up together.
It's the land, it's the ocean, it's the clouds, the air.
And when you spread that light out and look at it
you can plainly see the squiggly line, that
this is a planet that has a definite clear oxygen line.
And there's definitely carbon dioxide and there's methane.
Those signals were all tangled up together
in the colors of the Earth.
And that was what we called
the spectrum of a habitable planet.
(soft guitar music)
When I first heard of the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence,
I thought that this was by far
the most interesting thing to study in all of astronomy.
Finding out that there are other civilizations
in the observable universe would be pretty much
right there at the top of things you could find out.
- [Nathaniel] You're working with
Jill Tarter and the SETI Institute?
- [Maggie] Yeah, absolutely, Jill was the SETI pioneer.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
I met her shortly after the movie "Contact" came out
and I had never heard of Jill before.
I didn't know there was a connection
between that movie and her.
- [Nathaniel] Yeah, the Jodie Foster
character is modeled on her.
- [Maggie] Yeah, Jill is one of my longest mentors.
- When we started, SETI was considered pretty fringy.
We didn't even know if there were
any planets beyond our solar system.
And we spent a lot of time building up credibility.
Making a distinction between ourselves
and the folks who report seeing
little green men in spaceships and being abducted.
I mean, people would be writing books about
the SETI pioneers and it would be,
"What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this,"
sort of questions.
It was really hard.
- [Nathaniel] Do you think there is life out there?
- You know, Nathaniel, whatever I think
about life beyond Earth doesn't matter a bit.
For millennia, we asked the priests, the philosophers,
whoever we thought was wise, what we should believe.
Well, we can now change that verb
into the verb "to explore."
Anything else is religion and we're not doing religion here.
We're doing science.
- [Nathaniel] What's going on with this one?
- The birds love to nest here
and they will chew on this
and they will chew through it.
These dishes pick up radio frequencies
and we're listening for broadcast signals
from a distant civilization.
We're looking for signals that are engineered.
Things that mother nature can't do, but we can.
And presumably they can.
- [Nathaniel] But we have looked a bit.
And so far we haven't found anything.
- [Jill] We just haven't looked far enough.
That volume of search space,
set it equal to the volume of all the Earth's oceans.
And then ask yourself how much of
the Earth's oceans have we searched?
And the answer is one eight ounce glass.
Now, if your question was not,
"Are there extra terrestrials,"
but "are there fish in the ocean?"
And you did that experiment and you
dipped your glass in and you looked at it and,
"Well, no fish in there."
I mean that experiment could have worked
but there aren't any fish in there.
I don't think that you're going to conclude
there are no fish in the ocean.
You're going to say, "I got to fish a whole lot more."
And that's where we are.
We have a lot more searching to do.
- [Matt] Ultimately science is about observation.
Because it's only observation
which actually gives you the truth.
As the ancients looked up at the sky,
it was obvious that everything went around us.
We were the center of that universe.
And then Galileo lifted his telescope to the stars.
He looks at the moon.
The moon was supposed to be this perfect orb.
And he sees for the first time, the moon is not perfect.
It has mountains, it has craters.
But the most important observation,
the one that was truly revolutionary,
he looked at Jupiter and he saw four pinpricks of light.
And he assumed they were stars.
And then he realized they were moons going around Jupiter.
Everything was supposed to be going around the Earth.
And here was proof it wasn't.
And he realizes that the ancients were wrong,
the church was wrong, and we're going around the sun.
(bells tolling)
Observation overthrew ancient wisdom.
This was the very first time anybody took
two lenses and lifted them to the sky.
And it revealed a universe that nobody had ever seen before.
Once he'd done this, and he wrote it down,
you can see from his book here, he wrote down what he saw.
Other people could build their own telescope.
And suddenly these ideas could actually flood out.
Galileo was locked away for 10 years
because the church claimed that this wasn't true.
400 years ago, it started there.
400 years later, we're actually taking a mirror
which is 250 times, roughly, bigger than this,
And we're going to fold it up and launch it into space
to give it even more sensitivity
to actually see to the edge of the known universe.
(car horns honking)
- Wow, traffic is crappy.
I think everybody can agree
we're wasting a lot of energy and effort here.
There's a lot of people around and we're not being
as responsible as we can with everything that we have.
Actually, I grew up in Taiwan, in Taipei.
It has some of the worst pollution.
Oh, it was hard to see the stars.
- [Nathaniel] with all our problems on the Earth,
should we really be spending so much money on a telescope?
- Our almost reason for being, you know,
one of our reasons for being is so that we can do these
good and interesting things that
move us forward as a species.
I think everybody wants to do something,
be a part of something greater than just
what they can do alone.
Building something like the Webb Telescope is that.
So you know, I mean I don't know
what else would you want to do with your life?
(upbeat string music)
- [Man] Hey Jon.
- Kevin! - Good to see you again.
- Hi, Amy Lo.
- Amy, nice to meet you.
We've never met before.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ignore you.
Jon and I have known each other for a long time.
- [Amy] Jon's got a big presence.
So he grabbed my attention when I saw him.
- [Jon] We've come a long way.
- [Kevin] And your timing's perfect.
We're just about to run a test.
This has got to work like all the other major elements.
We have enough sensitivity with our telescope
and our instruments to detect
a child's nightlight located on the moon.
I know that if you were to certainly take your radiant heat,
which for a human is about 80 to 100 Watts
and stick it on the moon, we would easily
be able to detect that.
- When people think about the telescope,
they think of the huge mirror, right?
That's the iconic part of the telescope
but this is what the astronomers care about.
This is where the data comes from.
- Our telescope is so sensitive that it could
pick up the heat of a bumblebee
if the bumblebee were as far away as the moon.
That is completely astonishing to me,
even knowing that that's our telescope
and we built it that way.
- Yes, I've heard that.
In fact, I was asked about it.
I'd have to sit down and do the math very, very carefully.
I've learned one does not argue with Nobel Prize winners.
I heard about this calculation.
I checked it myself.
I believe it's correct.
Yeah.
- If we had the moon here and the Earth 250,000 miles...
What you'd do first is calculate the area of the sphere.
Frequency times Planck's constant.
(continues indistinctly)
- [Nathaniel] A bumblebee gives off how much energy?
- Well, it gives off about 50 milliwatts of power.
- It does seem reasonable that we could
see a bumblebee on the moon with our telescope.
That's a bumblebee as opposed to a yellow jacket
as opposed to a hornet but we could collect the light.
Should know better than to argue with our chief scientist.
- [Maggie] These are all worker bees, which are female.
There will typically be some drones in here too,
bigger males.
They aren't essential to the survival of the hives.
- [Nathaniel] Hm, the males are not essential?
- [Maggie] No, in the fall
all the drones are going to get kicked out.
They're going to be begging to stay
and the workers are gonna be like,
"Sorry, we do not have resources to feed you all winter."
They're going to kick them out
and they will go freeze and die.
And these girls will stay together all winter long
beating their wings and making enough heat.
I'm living in Wisconsin because I really wanted to be
closer to the natural world in my daily life
in a way that an office couldn't do for me personally.
- [Nathaniel] It reminds me of the shape of the mirrors
on the James Webb Space Telescope.
- [Maggie] It does, yeah.
The hexagons are just a really efficient way
of packing together a bunch of cells in one place.
So that is a shape you will find in nature.
And in mechanical engineering.
I already know which of these hives
isn't going to make it through the winter.
It's hard on them.
There is colony collapse because of
chemicals that's going on fields.
There's a farm field right there
that's obviously not being sprayed.
The bees probably love that
and they need diversity of resources.
It's fascinating to see how that social structure operates.
And one does kind of wonder,
is there another civilization of that type
out there that is more collectively minded than we are?
If there are other civilizations that could be
really useful information because we're
at this point where we don't know
if we can survive the emergence of technology.
- [Johnny Carson] If you think it would happen,
when would it happen?
Within a period of 10 years, 20, 50 years?
- [Carl Sagan] Depends on how much of an effort we make.
If we make no effort the possibility of
detecting such signals is small.
- We are one step closer to answering the age old question,
"Are we alone in the universe?"
NASA announced the discovery of seven Earth-sized planets
around a star about 40 light years away from Earth.
- This is the latest revelation in a wave of discoveries
over the past 25 years of new worlds
that exist in solar systems beyond our own.
- Astronomers call the discovery the Trappist-1 system.
Sarah Seager of MIT is one of the researchers.
- We've made a giant accelerated leap forward
in the search for habitable worlds.
- These planets are among the best
of all the planets we know to follow up
with the James Webb Space Telescope.
The discovery gives us a hint that finding a second Earth
is not just a matter of if, but when.
- [Natalie] Wow, Trappist-1 is all over the news.
I mean, look at it.
Nothing else comes close.
- [Natasha] Yeah.
- And look at the TESS predictions.
I mean, even the simulated sample
from TESS doesn't reach down there.
I mean, Trappist, I think unless we get
extraordinarily lucky, Trappist is going to remain this
singular system, completely unique.
- Trappist is just so cool.
Especially if some of those planets
could have water features.
- All right, we'll pick this up later.
- Okay.
- You can leave that.
It's nice that my daughter is actually involved with this.
So I do feel like I'm passing something on.
- [Natasha] I am designing the observing program
that we're going to use with the James Webb Space Telescope
to observe Trappist-1E.
- [Nathaniel] And 1E is what?
That's one of the planets?
- Yes, the Trappist star is much redder
and only about half the temperature of our own sun.
B and C are probably far too hot
to be able to sustain surface liquid water.
The habitable zone,
which is also sometimes called the Goldilocks zone,
is right about here.
And E really sits right in this region
where surface liquid water could potentially exist,
which is what we think we need for life.
And I can actually show you this on a travel poster.
And so here you can actually see what you would be seeing
if you were sitting on the surface of Trappist-1E.
- [Nathaniel] How do you mean a travel poster?
What does it come from?
What is this?
- So this is an artist's rendering of Trappist-1E.
It says, "Voted best hab zone vacation
within 12 parsecs of Earth."
- [Nathaniel] And below it, does it describe it at all?
- It says, "Some 40 light years from Earth
a planet called Trappist-1E offers heart-stopping view.
Brilliant objects in a red sky looming like
larger and smaller versions of our own moon."
- [Nathaniel] You're part of a team,
right, that's doing this?
- Right, right, right.
So when James Webb is launching
we will be able to measure the atmosphere composition
of some of these planets.
- [Nathaniel] So tell me,
how did you come to study exoplanets, then?
- When I was really little,
probably eight or nine, my mom had
me and all my siblings draw pictures of astronauts.
And I was so proud to show her and she looks at it
and she goes, "Oh yeah, you know, that's awesome.
Why did you draw a white man?"
You know, my mom is a female scientist.
My dad is a Latin scientist
and I had drawn this white man.
And I was so shocked and I think moving forward
I was always conscious about that.
And instead of being some, you know,
being something that kind of discouraged me,
I think that that kind of empowered me.
(man speaking indistinctly over radio)
- We all have the same desires and wants and
and generally science and NASA missions
brings those things to the table.
Unfortunately, in the space science community
it hasn't been as diverse as it should be.
And one of the things with exoplanets, it's newer.
Generally the newer sciences attract more diverse teams.
So yes, that really excites me and
we're scientists and engineers, right?
So certainly we follow the data.
All of the data supports that, that teams are
far more successful and better when they're more diverse.
So I always say, "Now's the time."
And I think now's the time.
- [Technician] Nothing?
Okay, let's get started.
Any questions guys?
- Only four more to go.
(laughing)
- We don't want the telescope portion
of the Webb Telescope to see any of the sun
because we're trying to keep it very, very cold.
In order to detect heat signature, infrared signature,
it obviously needs to be very cold
or all it's going to measure is just itself.
- Minus J mid, MTS full deployment, layer one.
- In space, really the only thing that will heat you up
is the electronics that you've got
and a really bright source, which is the sun.
And that's the purpose of the sunshield.
The sunshield keeps the telescope
from getting all that sunlight.
So it stays cold.
- [Technician] Nice and slow, guys, nice and slow.
- What's particularly challenging is the fact that
we have to fold it up and deploy it once we get on orbit.
- [Technician] Oh, stop.
- [Technician 2] Hold that.
What happened?
- [Technician] We just lost the cable.
- [Jim Flynn] If you could talk to Jon about that?
- Yeah, you know, I'm gonna go get him
while we're doing layer four.
- [Technician] Okay.
- [Amy] We'll come back and do layer five.
Brian, are you ready?
- [Brian] Ready.
- [Technician] You ready?
- [Brian] Yeah.
- [Technician] Going up.
- Layer one's running about 212 degrees Fahrenheit
and layer five on the cold side is running
about minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
So it's approximately a million SPF.
- [Jon] I'll tell you what,
you go and you kind of pooch that up,
you're not going to come anywhere close.
- [Technician] I can take a look at it.
- [Jon] That's what I need somebody
to explain to me, how that's going to be okay on flight.
I've always set my sights on big goals.
I'm a very competitive person by nature.
I don't like to lose.
I like to prove myself equal to any challenge.
- [Archival Newscaster] America's first attempt
to launch a satellite.
- [Jon] When I was a little boy.
My father told stories.
- [Jon] He worked on Vanguard
and it blew up on national television.
Just blew up, twice.
- [Trainer] Give me one more, there you go.
Done, done, done, done, done
- [Jon] By the time I'm done
I will have been on the program 12 and a half years
and it will all come down to that very short period of time
between launch and when we complete deployment about here.
It's not unlike training for a meet.
I would train for months.
- [Trainer] Yeah, nice.
- For what literally was a few seconds of activity.
We're all very well aware that we have to
get this right the first time, the only time,
because out at L2, repairman doesn't make a house call.
We don't get that second chance.
It's a "one strike and you're out" business.
(upbeat synth music)
- Sometimes I put music on, like 80s music typically,
and just let my mind wander to like what's out there.
- [Nathaniel] That's your favorite music?
- [Sara] I just kind of like the 80s, what about you?
- [Nathaniel] Oh yeah, well that's my era too.
- The 80s is big now, you know?
Even my kids know all the 80s songs, lots of kids do.
- [Nathaniel] Really?
- Apparently, yeah, apparently the 80s,
the beat is still very popular.
Interesting, right?
- [Nathaniel] Yeah, that's interesting.
Where does the drive come from?
- I mean, the drive is really the end goal,
which is finding another Earth, a true Earth.
But, that's the drive, right,
but the joy is in the every day.
- [Nathaniel] And if we could find another Earth
what do you think that would mean for us?
- It's a tough one.
What do I think it'd mean?
Well, I don't know, I feel like I have to ask
you and everyone else what it would mean.
- [Nathaniel] Yeah.
- It would mean that we're not alone.
It would mean that we're not the center of the universe
and it would really expand our horizons
as to what's out there and who might be out there
as well as who we are.
- [Nathaniel] Who we are, yeah.
- [Loudspeaker] The time is now 7:35pm
and the reservation is now closed.
Please kindly gather your belongings
and return to your vehicles at the main exit gate.
Again, thank you for visiting Walden Pond
and have a great evening.
- [Nathaniel] What's that?
- [Charles] So this axis here has to
point to Polaris, basically and--
- [Nathaniel] Polaris is the North Star?
- Yeah, North Star.
Now the cameras.
So this is a one-shot color.
- [Nathaniel] What do you think about,
you know, finding another Earth?
- Yeah, I understand the drive,
I understand the curiosity and the journey of discovery
and the importance of discovery.
And that will change things if we do find
another world that has biosignatures
or evidence of life on it.
But we have life here.
And we have love here and everything that matters to us,
really, and is important to us,
is right here on this earth.
And, you know, that's what's important, you know, to me.
- [Nathaniel] You actually found
the love of your life through astronomy.
At an astronomy meeting.
- Our eyes met at the wine and cheese reception before
her talk and I was just wondering who this person was.
And I didn't know she was the keynote speaker.
And then the next day she gave another talk
just before lunch and after that, I decided,
which was probably the most important decision
I made in my life was to be healthy.
And I decided to get a soup and a salad.
And I walked into the line,
there was a bit of a line and she turned around
and I asked her, "Would you like to join me for lunch?"
And she said yes and we got a table
off to the side by ourselves and, you know,
five minutes into that conversation
I knew my life was going to change.
I knew something was going to happen.
- [Nathaniel] Don't let me interrupt you
from continuing with the telescope.
- Okay, let's get back at this thing
and we'll see what we can...
- I don't really know why anyone wants to know
why there's life out there.
I guess cause we're kind of a lonely species.
I think loneliness is a human condition
and everyone's sort of trapped in their own head.
And we try with our lives in various ways to be not lonely.
We find friends, partners, mates, family, you have children.
We're trying to find life elsewhere
because we have a need and a desire to communicate
and then to connect in any way possible.
- [Technician] Ready?
Okay, Brain, ready.
- [Jon] Okay, we'll try this again.
- Layer five on three, two, one.
10 inches of travel.
20 inches of travel.
30 inches of travel.
65 inches of travel.
80 inches of travel.
190 inches of travel.
197.
198.
Fully deployed.
(cheering)
- [Jon] This is hundreds of man years of work.
I don't think it's possible to overstate
how exciting this is.
It's another step, just like completing the back plane
and completing the mirrors.
I'm going to have a hard time concentrating
when I take Mom to dinner tonight.
- [Technician] Yowza, wow.
- [Technician 2] Wow, it looks good.
- [Technician] It looks fantastic.
- All right, imagine you are the Telescope
looking out on the universe, looking out on the stars.
It's going to be dark and cold out there where this is.
Imagine yourself frozen.
- [Technician 2] It has no company out there,
out there in orbit, it's all by itself.
If we see life on another planet,
I mean, we have to motivate to go say hello.
That's it.
They're there, we're here.
- [Nick] Just animals.
Everything in this whole museum is basically animals.
Even the tiny ones, but this is just
a tiny fraction of biodiversity.
This kind of complexity doesn't happen easily.
- [Nathaniel] How did it happen?
Did it happen here?
- [Nick] Some people think life started on the land.
I think it started down at the bottom of the ocean
in hydrothermal vents down across the sea floor.
The one that most people know about
is a really dynamic system called black smokers.
They were amazing because nobody
expected to see so much life down there.
Weird forms of life.
Giant tube worms that don't have a mouth or an anus
and enormous clams the size of dinner plates and--
- [Nathaniel] A worm that has neither mouth nor anus?
- Yeah.
- [Nathaniel] How does it eat?
- It doesn't eat.
I mean, it basically uses the bacteria
that grow inside it to provide it with organic molecules.
Well, there's another kind of vent,
which I personally think is the answer.
I like to think of them as Gothic cathedrals.
Beautiful architecture in the rock.
They're actually formed by a much more gentle process.
Water will percolate down beneath the ocean floor
and there's a particular type of mineral.
It's called olivine.
You find it as dust throughout interstellar space.
This is a really common mineral.
And the thing is it will react with water
bubbling hydrogen gas out.
And that's basically an environment
that's giving rise to life.
- [Nathaniel] Do you think that
there's life out there beyond the Earth?
- I think we hope that there's going to be
lots of amazing complex life out there,
kind of semi human in the way that it interacts with us.
And I think we're likely to be
quite disappointed about that.
You know, maybe we should be interacting with
life on our own planet in a more meaningful way.
- How far can you push a planet
in one direction or the other and
still have it capable of sustaining life?
During graduate school I would walk from
the astronomy department down to family-student housing.
We were studying comparative planetology
and my head was full of these images of
Mercury, Mars, Venus, even the moon,
all of these lifeless worlds.
And so walking from the department, you come up a knoll
and you all of a sudden emerge from the redwood forests
open up onto this big meadow, but you're up high.
So you see it as this very thin veneer
of life stretched out before you.
It looked like I could just reach out and wipe it away
with a sponge, you know, like cleaning the kitchen counter.
And I just had that feeling that
the difference between a living world
and a lifeless world was a small,
tiny difference, like an accident, you know.
(thunder)
- It's been a rough spring start but we had
a lot of heavy snow in February.
I mean a lot.
It was like every other day.
It would snow about 10 to 12 inches.
And the disasters are getting worse
and they're getting stronger.
There's so many people who don't...
they're like, "This is how it is."
- [Nathaniel] You mean climate change deniers?
- Well, like there's more fires.
There's more earthquakes.
They're happening more frequently.
There's more tornadoes.
- It's like, a couple blocks away
there's big trees that are down, roots up.
- And there's another cell coming
that looks just as bad as last night's.
- It's bad.
- And there it is.
- Yeah, there's another storm coming, yeah.
- [Maggie] Yeah, another one.
We're battening up the hatches.
Hi, I'm just leaving the farmer's market.
Could you look at the radar
and plan what to do with the bees?
- We're on the blue dot and it's moving in our direction.
It looks pretty bad.
- [Alex Jones Radio Announcer] The latest climate data
that broke last week proved that
the whole environmental movement is a power grab.
The global warmists are a cult.
- Thanks for being open. - Yeah.
- Amidst the storms here.
So this is beautiful.
- [Salesperson] We can put it together for you.
- [Maggie] It's been a while since I've
been shooting and I really miss it.
- Yeah, you used to shoot a lot.
- [Maggie] I need to do it again.
- Before, didn't you?
- [Maggie] Yeah, I've been writing proposals
to the federal government to fund my teams to fly
space missions and look for life on other planets and--
- [Salesperson] Yeah, have you found it yet?
- No, but we're getting ever closer.
- [Salesperson] Do you believe there's life out there?
- I feel like, how can there not be?
This one planet is so full of it.
It's hard to imagine how that could happen here,
so richly, and then everywhere else
in the whole universe is just a sterile rock.
Surely life arises when the conditions are right.
- Hmm, it's interesting topic.
- [Maggie] Yeah.
- Yeah, I started listening to some podcasts.
I know he's very controversial,
but I was listening to one with Alex Jones
and some of the stuff he talks about
was like really, really interesting.
If there is other life forms,
not just humans or aliens or
it could be plants or anything, you know,
just something else out there besides our Earth.
- [Alex Jones] San Francisco is the main project site.
Literally have an alien base and they are
literally communicating and they've got like
astronaut level people taking super hardcore
levels of drugs and going into meetings with these things
and making intergalactic deals.
- [Alien] You didn't actually think you were
the only inhabited planet in the universe?
- Shh, listen.
- Uh, I'm from SETI,
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
(Jill laughing)
- [Nathaniel] So if the aliens get here,
are they going to wipe us out?
- Well, I think that if they can get here,
that means that their technology
is significantly in advance of ours.
So they're older than we are.
And how did they get to be old?
Because they outgrew all of the aggression
that was probably part of their evolution
to become intelligent.
We show many different indications that we won't make it.
That we will in fact do ourselves in before
we become an old technological civilization.
So if they can get here, I'm more inclined to
talk with them rather than worry about
them eating me for breakfast.
I was sent last night, a link to an old Johnny Carson show,
from the late 70s, with Carl Sagan.
- I mean, here he is, a professor of
astronomy and space sciences at Cornell.
Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Study.
Would you welcome please Dr. Carl Sagan.
- [Jill] This is just about reaching the Trappist system.
- [Johnny Carson] You're looking for
extraterrestrial intelligence, right?
How do you go about looking?
- It's little like this. If you're an
advanced civilization and you wish to communicate
to a backward civilization, you talk slow and simple.
- [Johnny Carson] And obviously we would be
the backward civilization because
we do not have that capability.
(audience laughs)
People are going to ask you, "What is the value?"
- We are at a very dangerous moment in human history.
We are in the process of inadvertently altering our climate
and all kinds of problems, which come with technology.
We are not certain that we will be able to survive
this period that I like to call technological adolescence.
But were we to receive a message from somewhere else,
it would show that it's possible
to survive this kind of period.
- [Johnny Carson] Now wouldn't that be something.
In other words somebody has solved
a particular problem we are still wrestling with.
- [Carl Sagan] It's good to know the problem can be solved.
I think it would be very useful.
- [Nathaniel] We going to find them in your lifetime?
- [Jill] I don't know how long I'm going to live.
I know we're going to try and look.
- [Nathaniel] We keep trying.
- [Jill] We do keep trying trying.
(epic music)
- [Jon] The James Webb Telescope will achieve its mission,
but we have to go through all of the engineering
and all the checkouts to make sure
that that is indeed a fact.
Eventually we'll go all the way through the Panama Canal
to French Guiana where the Europeans have their launch site.
And they're providing the rocket and the Telescope
will go up from there a million miles
out into space and get ready to work.
- [Jon] This is where we're going to test the telescope
and its detectors in a space-like environment.
Chamber A was originally built for the Apollo program
to test the command module with the astronauts in it.
We're here building on the legacy that
the country built in the 60s.
- Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Webb,
the director of the space program.
- Ladies and gentlemen--
- James Webb was the administrator early on in NASA's life,
during the early stages of the Apollo program,
working with Kennedy to establish that program
to get us up to landing on the moon.
It was that commitment to science that he had.
Now, we still have a bunch of
environmental testings that we have to do,
vibration testing and acoustics testing,
because what we want to do is make sure
now it survives the rocket launch,
which is still the most violent environment that we see.
- [Scott] We bring it in here,
the sunshield in its stowed cocoon state.
We subject this to the sound noise of the rocket.
Because when the rocket launches it doesn't just vibrate,
it also hits you with sound waves.
And it pushes on you with pressure.
And we need to prove that our vehicle will survive that.
So we hit this thing with what's called
protoflight acoustic test levels
and we run it across a frequency spectrum.
(oscillating sound)
(alarm blaring)
- We found a screw and a nut.
We had a few dozen that actually separated in this test
because there's a thousand of these little screws.
You know, there's probably a lot of people on
high floors of buildings waiting to hear
that Webb has made it today.
We're kind of in, say, one of the
more humbling points on a career,
when you know you have to go tell people
that test wasn't successful.
(gavel banging)
- The Subcommittee on Space will now come to order.
Today's hearing we'll focus on the serious issues
associated with the James Webb Space Telescope.
- When we integrated the spacecraft element and did testing,
we made all kinds of discoveries that were unfortunate
and not just unfortunate, problematic.
- Although I've heard testimony how important it is.
I understand that.
It's very frustrating to me and other taxpayers
that this is so much of a cost overrun.
- Every screw has to have its quality tested.
I can tell you, this is about the
biggest screw job I've ever seen.
And it's the taxpayers who are getting screwed here.
- We want to make these mistakes here on Earth
because that mistake, if it was in space,
it would be too late.
It can't be fixed.
(soft music)
- Once we install it, it's there
for the rest of the mission.
So we've got to get it right the first time.
- And then it gets ready to go?
- [Jon] It's still got a lot more testing.
- Oh.
- And assembly to withstand launch.
- [Jon's Mom] Now all I have to do is live to see it go.
- [Jon] No, you got to make it till your
grandchildren get out of college.
And that will happen after we launch.
- That's true.
- [Nathaniel] What do you think about when you
contemplate our cousins and our ancestors?
- Mortality.
- [Nathaniel] Well, as a species?
- Well, I mean it's more and more clear that
you know, looking at these skulls,
that there have been numerous human species
and they've all gone extinct apart from us,
usually because of us, usually after interbreeding with us.
Do you feel some guilt when you look into those ice sockets?
I do.
Why?
Because we know about this history.
There's some guilt in human history in the way
that we've dealt with other human species.
Our own history dealing, different racial history and so on.
We need to learn.
How do we bring the best side out in our own societies?
You know, we're within touching distance of
at least finding out.
And the idea that we might find life is an exciting one.
Though, what do we expect to see out there?
If it's not nothing,
the overwhelming likelihood is it's bacteria.
And if we see somehow that we've got way beyond bacteria
to large complex life, that means this.
It means microscopic life.
It means tiny animals.
It's a wealth of life.
And yet, somehow I think most people will be disappointed
if all they found was microscopic sludge.
- [Nathaniel] Would you be disappointed?
- No, I think I would be astonished to find that.
To find anything more than bacteria, I would be astonished.
Perhaps part of the point of looking out there for life
is to realize just how valuable
the life is that we have here.
(haunting music)
- Physically, evolution made us, biology made us
but the things of biology were created in stars.
The water, the carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen.
All of that was created in stars.
People will say, "Well, if there are
10 to the 22 stars out there,
there must be more life than just us."
However, it turns out the number of coincidences
that have to occur for life to emerge
is also a very large number.
We have to have a star like our sun
that lives at least 10 billion years old.
It has to be in exactly the right
part of the galaxy to start with.
We might need to have a moon.
We might need to have geothermal,
cause we need a magnetic field to protect us.
And then evolution had to happen.
And then you keep on going and, well,
you know, the dinosaurs evolved and they were around for,
I don't know, 100, 200 million years.
Nothing happened.
They didn't evolve into anything.
They got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then the meteor came and wiped them all out.
And then these small warm blooded animals evolved to us.
But that was an accident.
How many accidents need to happen
for intelligent life to form?
We just don't know because we only have us, the one example.
It might only be one part in 10 to the 22 that life emerged.
So we could actually be alone.
- And you know, I had all these accomplishments
I became a professor and then I got married.
I had like the perfect husband,
perfect kids and the perfect house.
I had everything.
And I had such a great life.
And then my husband got sick and he died.
And so after that, what do you do?
What do you do next?
Like you can't return to your everyday existence
and just like cook dinner.
Which I never did and I still don't.
But it's just the sort of thing that you can relate to.
You know, I just can't explain it
but the everyday normal things you do,
they're just meaningless.
I went to my book club and the women were
complaining about their husbands.
Like, "Who's gonna pick up the kid?"
And I'm like, "Give me a break."
You know, I just couldn't live with normal people anymore.
I realized that whatever I was going to do next
would be impactful.
Why waste time?
Out of all my accomplishments in life,
helping my husband have a death,
like a perfect death, was probably my biggest one.
It was really sad when I, when he,
it's sort of funny but sad, but I told him
before he died his death would have meaning and that,
you know, I'm trying to describe it in a way that
will be funny, but it's too hard.
Well, just give me a second cause I
really want to tell you, it's really funny.
It was like, "Mike, you know your death has meaning.
I'm going to do big things because I've realized
it's, you know, things that matter."
And he just like, it was funny cause he could barely talk.
Like if you know anyone who's dying,
they're not able to communicate.
And he just looks at me and goes,
"Sarah, you would have done it anyway."
And that was one of our last conversations.
It's not that I have to
find the Earth and name it after him.
It's more of the search for meaning
and how to live a meaningful life
and how to do something that actually makes a difference.
That's his legacy.
I have to have meaning.
I have to do something that has some importance
as seen by myself because otherwise I have nothing.
Does that make sense?
- So, can I just be really blunt with you?
- [Nathaniel] Sure.
- While I understand there's a longer story arc to this,
this very complicated and very expensive mission
that has been delayed yet again.
I can shoot bull's eyes all day and then
as soon as somebody comes along and says,
"Oh, you're doing really well," it's over.
No, I won't hit a thing.
At some point, the only thing that can save you
would be somebody high level in the administration
who just says, "We're devoting the resources."
And Congress would have to back that up.
If you're going to do something, just do it right.
- [Visitor] Now, see there's, that's good, that's good.
- Yeah, so that's more accurate and precise.
We only have, not only just one precious planet,
it's this time, the specific time of now,
where we have to live.
What are you tasting?
Tasting something?
It's taking the salt off my fingers right now.
I hope, you know, for the sake of all of us,
I hope that JW just gets off the ground, flies,
and does well at everything that it does
and performs all of its objectives.
(bird chirping)
(phone ringing)
- [Natasha] Hey.
- [Hannah] Hello.
- So it sounds like we should stick with
Trappist-1E and then look at this plan in detail
and make sure that we have it finalized.
- This is our observation plan, you mean?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
It's going to be a really good test of the telescope itself.
- I'd be really interested to understand, you know,
if they are tidally locked, like the moon.
Like, what that means for having
a permanent day and a permanent night side.
- There would be some people who would constantly be
living in daylight and then other people
who would be constantly living in darkness?
- Right and the best place to be on these planets
would probably be perpetual twilight, right?
Or right around the-- - Right, right at the rim.
- [Nikole] And what that would be like,
because living in the arctic and you living through
perpetual twilight, it's a very strange experience.
- [Natasha] Do we know what
the temperature differences would be?
- [Nikole] As long as there's air.
Air is very good.
They have substantial atmospheres.
- [Hannah] My favorite thing about Trappist
is that if you're on the surface of one of the planets
you can see the other planets resolved in the sky.
- [Natasha] Yeah, bigger than the moon, right?
- So it would never have been a question of,
you know, is the Earth, the center of the universe?
I mean, it's crazy to think that
Trappist being 39 light years away
means that they can hear what we were doing
on radio and television 39 years ago.
The first years of Reagan, Madonna.
What do you think they think about us?
Do you think that they would think
that we're going in the right direction?
- [Hannah] Interesting question, I like that one.
- Well, so if they're monitoring our culture,
they're also monitoring like any sort of
atmospheric signals as well, right?
- [Nikole] Yeah.
- So they're probably watching, you know,
our carbon dioxide emissions and all of this
and probably thinking--
- "What are they doing down there?"
(indistinct radio chatter)
(haunting music)
- [WHO Director General] We cannot say this loudly enough
or clearly enough or often enough.
All countries can still change the course of this pandemic.
(haunting music)
(protesters chanting)
- [Protesters] There is no planet B!
There is no planet B, there is no planet B!
- If we destroy this planet,
there is no other planet to go to.
We only have one planet.
- I want to be able to have kids.
I want my kids to be able to swim in the ocean,
climb mountains, be in nature.
- Even if there was an inhabitable planet,
we're just gonna ruin it like we're ruining this one.
(protestors chanting)
- This is an emergency.
Our house is on fire.
(crowd cheering)
We deserve a safe future and we demand a safe future.
Is that really too much to ask?
- [Crowd] No!
- [Matt] Hello, nice to meet you.
- [Director Fausto] Nice to meet you.
It's a pleasure to have you here.
- [Matt] Thank you so much.
- [Nathaniel] But this was the place that he was under--
- [Matt] He was under house arrest for
starting a revolution that people didn't want started.
- [Nathaniel] They were afraid of it.
- [Matt] They were afraid of what he saw.
They were afraid of the fact that he
used observation to upturn ancient wisdoms.
It isn't just that we're trying
to do amazing things with telescopes,
look for other planets,
I mean, our generation, my children are facing
real challenges on this planet.
How do we tackle these global problems
which actually will affect our own survival as a species?
It's going to take a collective endeavor
with the type of groups we're
putting together around the James Webb.
These are collaborative groups.
These are people who want to work together.
It gives me hope that we can change
the way we operate in the world.
Change the way we do science, using data to say,
"Look what is happening," and not just
going back and saying, "I don't want to hear,"
or "I don't want to see."
Well, you know, they said to Galileo,
"I don't want to hear, I don't want to see."
And yes, they sequestered him here
for the last 10 years of his life,
but here we are 400 years later
and we all know about Galileo
and we have to look up in our history books to remember
who the Pope was that actually put him away.
We remember Galileo.
I mean, Carl Sagan said it best.
It's going to take us centuries to get
to the stars as a species.
And it's going to have to be a better version of ourselves
to actually get that far on this planet.
- Good morning, and welcome to
the second day of the hearing entitled
"James Webb Space Telescope Program
Breach and its Implications."
- We've had a lot of discussion about cost
and the cost matters, but I will tell you taxpayers
and all of us are way more concerned about
value than cost at the end of the day.
- James Webb should continue based on its
extraordinary scientific potential
and critical role in maintaining
US leadership in astronomy and astrophysics.
Let's finish this incredibly important project.
- Inspiring and challenging projects such as the
James Webb Space Telescope are an investment in our future.
We must not lose sight of the importance
of bringing the James Webb Space Telescope
to a successful outcome.
- All right, see you.
- See you, have a good day.
- I will.
- [Nathaniel] So this is like
the biggest day of your career in a way.
(Amy laughs)
- [Amy] It's pretty big.
Been working seven years towards this day.
So yeah, yeah, this is going to be now
the James Webb Observatory.
Before, you know, it was like this piece or that piece,
where now it's actually all together one piece.
You can see the way it's going to look when it's operating.
So yeah, it's kind of a big deal.
Everyone's really excited.
The entire team's kind of vibrating a little.
Ready.
- [Nathaniel] I'm not allowed to follow you.
So this is goodbye, I guess.
Good luck.
- See you in a bit.
Ah, come on.
Dennis, I can't get in.
Thank you, see y'all.
- You know, Amy has worked with me
since she joined the company
and I wanted her taking over alignments
because it requires attention to detail and people skills
and innate genius that's necessary to do it.
And today is the culmination as we
see the system go together but
it's going to go together precisely
and it's got to end up where it's supposed to be.
And that's the job to which she
has been devoted for these last seven years.
Every piece of hardware, 500 odd pieces of ground support,
have a story, have a team that's been devoted.
When I mean an act of collective genius, I mean it.
- Many people have spent a big chunk of their careers
developing this system, done a tremendous job,
and they're ready to go and I'm ready to go.
It's just in our DNA to explore.
So as far as we send satellites out,
I think we should be willing to send humans out
but we have to learn how to do it.
It takes putting our minds and heads together
around a common goal, and I think we can do anything.
And human space flight is always pretty special.
And Webb is certainly in the same category
as human space flight in my mind.
So this is my capstone.
The Webb is my capstone.
- [Natalie] You know, I'm moving.
So cleaning out my garage I found this
old binder paper that's from high school
and the theme was the American frontier.
You have to remember this was the 80s
so the backdrop of this was the space shuttle program.
And so I titled this speech, "Would You Go?"
"The year is 2010.
America has just begun the settlement of a new state.
But where is this state?
On a distant planet where only a few have ventured before."
- [Nathaniel] And it's called "Would you Go?"
- It's called "Would You Go?"
With a question mark and everything.
Yes.
(laughing)
- [Natasha] So would you?
- Well, here's the thing.
My current adult thinking is that
as important as exploration is,
love is probably even more so.
- [Nathaniel] What about you, Natasha, would you go?
- I don't know.
I think I'd have to take my posse,
all the people that I love with me.
I wouldn't be able, it wouldn't be
a thing that I would do alone.
I would have to take a,
I would have to take my crew, you know?
- [Nathaniel] What about you, Ellie, would you go?
- You know, it's a good question.
I waffle on it all the time.
Going to Mars, you know?
It's tempting.
But still, I'd miss nature
in the way we have it here on Earth.
- [Sara] For whatever reason there's this thing.
I don't know if this is true or not,
but you know if you meet someone
within two years of when your husband died,
like two years is some kind of magic number,
I don't know why.
And I was thinking, "My two years is basically up.
So I guess it didn't work for me."
Right?
So just before my two year anniversary,
I was going to Canada.
I'd been invited to give a keynote talk.
So I go to the opening reception,
I see this guy across the room and I'm like,
"Wow, who's that guy?
I have to meet him."
And after my talk, I go to the cafeteria a little bit late
and there he is in the cafeteria
and he's with only one other person.
And he's like, "Oh, do you want to have lunch?"
I'm like, "Sure."
So we go and sit down for lunch and I'm thinking to myself,
"Wow, I can't believe I finally get to talk to this guy."
I left to go home and then we skyped.
In the very beginning it was like,
"I don't know what to do with this cause it's far away."
And then I'm thinking, "You know, this is good for me.
I can crush on a guy.
I can just shut the computer
if I don't feel like talking to him,
if it gets too personal."
In January, he was going to London for work.
And he's like, "Sarah, I'm going a few days early.
I hope you'll join me, I want to invite you."
And I wasn't sure what to do, but okay.
Of course I'm going to go, right?
So I go to London and I'm like,
"Wow, I don't know, are we boyfriend, girlfriend?"
I'm not really sure.
I'm just like, "Oh my God, like,
when am I going to get my first kiss?"
You know, here I'm like a grownup here.
This is ridiculous, right?
After dinner one night he takes me on a walk.
It's like raining cause you know
in London it's always miserable.
And there we are in front of Buckingham Palace
and I got my first kiss.
And after that, it really was,
it felt like the romance of the millennium.
- Time is a very funny thing.
And particularly the disconnect between human time,
geological time and cosmic time, right?
We don't interface very well with those longer timescales.
And thinking about the far future is really difficult.
But if we're going to have a long future,
we've got to outgrow all the kind of
aggressive tendencies and think about
what kind of place that would be,
where people actually valued
all life and took care of themselves, one another.
(intense music)
- The hardest place is when you have to
just watch it all come to fruition.
It's like when you're kid finally gets
on the field and is swinging the bat.
I mean, you've got to sit there and be a good parent.
I'm sure Amy will be a good parent out there.
- I wonder if Amy had them go check something
because she's staring up at something.
- Yeah.
- [Amy] That one.
- [Technician] Now let's just start
getting everything in position and we'll see...
- [Amy] Then we should come down.
- [Technician] Going down.
(upbeat orchestral music)
(indistinct chatter)
- It's just magic, it's magic.
- [Amy] It'd be awfully, awfully interesting
to look at another place and say,
"Oh, there's signatures of life there."
It may not be conclusive evidence,
but it sure would get people very, very excited.
- [Nathaniel] Do you think there's life out there?
- Yeah, I think there's life out there.
Can we find them?
I think we will.
In my lifetime?
God, I hope so.
Because, I want to know. You know?
(ducks quacking)
- [Sara] Charles.
- [Charles] Oh, hi Sara.
- [Sara] How'd it go?
- Well, I've set up the telescope and I'm just
waiting for it to get dark enough to do an alignment and--
- [Sara] Looks great.
- [Charles] Yeah.
- [Sara] What's up tonight?
- [Charles] Well, as soon as it gets a bit darker,
maybe we'll look at some galaxies.
I don't think Jupiter and any of the planets
are going to be up till later tonight.
- [Sara] Okay.
You see any stars yet?
- Not yet, not yet.
But patiently waiting for at least Polaris to poke out.
- [Sara] Right, right.
- But maybe we can discover some exoplanets.
(laughing)
There's fish jumping out there.
(duck quacking)
- [Charles] There it is.
- [Sara] Wow, that's really pretty.
- [Charles] The Whirlpool Galaxy M51,
one of my summer favorites.
- [Sara] It's amazing that
we can see it with this telescope.
- [Charles] Yeah.
- And just how vast, like that's so huge, that scale.
- [Charles] Yeah, we are tiny, aren't we?
- [Sara] Really tiny.
Maybe there's a planet around a star there looking back...
- [Charles] At our spiral galaxy...
- [Sara] Maybe there are two people like us.
- [Charles] Yeah, maybe.
(chuckles)
It's wonderful to be able to
wonder about the universe together.
- [Sara] It really is.
(soft guitar music)
¶ Fly me to the moon
¶ And let me play among the stars ¶
¶ Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars ¶
¶ In other words, hold my hand
¶ In other words, darling, kiss me ¶
¶ Fill my heart with song and let me sing forevermore ¶
(rocket rumbling)
¶ You are all I long for, all I worship and adore ¶
¶ In other words, please be true ¶
¶ In other words, I love you
¶ Fill my heart with song and let me sing forevermore ¶
¶ You are all I long for, all I worship and adore ¶
¶ In other words, please be true ¶
¶ And in other words, I love you ¶
(haunting music)