01x07 - The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth

[bunniefuu]

TYSON: We search the

heavens for signs of intelligent life.

But what would

we do if we found it?

Are we ready for first contact?

Would we be smart enough to even know

if someone was sending us a message?

We've only been able to detect

radio signals for a little over a century.

Extraterrestrial civilizations

could have been bombarding

Earth with radio signals for millions

and billions of years before then,

and nobody here would have had

any inkling that it had ever happened.

And what if we seem

just like ants to them.

We all know how we treat ants.

What if the extraterrestrials

are smarter than we are,

have technology, weapons

that render us helpless?

The history of first contact

among terrestrial civilizations,

the humans of east and west,

north and south, has

been scarred by genocide.

In all of the cosmos,

is there such a thing as a first

contact story with a happy ending?

I know of one

first contact story,

but it's too soon to

know how it will turn out

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(theme music playing)

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This scientific and

architectural wonder of the

world is in Southern China,

it's the largest radio

telescope on Earth,

in fact it's the largest

telescope of any kind.

The Five-Hundred Meter

Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope,

or FAST, as it's known.

This dish is a giant listening

device for detecting radio waves

that propagate

throughout the cosmos.

The mission of this telescope is

to solve unanswered questions

about the origin

of the universe,

and its early history.

It will also search for pulsars,

those rapidly

rotating neutron stars,

and for telltale signs

of gravitational waves,

ripples in the fabric

of space-time

And it will search for

signs of alien civilizations.

Especially those

very far away

I want to take you to a

place where we've begun to

eavesdrop on an intricate

global communications network.

We didn't even know

it existed until recently.

Complex beyond

our wildest imagining,

it was built by a

community whose population

is inconceivably vast.

Our distant ancestors,

tiny shrew-like animals,

came of age in places not

too different from this one.

Forests.

Maybe they knew what

we've only recently discovered.

The secret life of this

place is filled with drama,

abuzz with conversation.

Much of it is spoken in an

electrochemical language,

and it takes place

on a scale too small,

and in motion too slow,

for creatures like

us to even notice.

But there's something even

more amazing that was going

on right beneath our

feet, for the longest time,

and on a global scale,

and we had no

inkling that it was there.

An ancient, subterranean

worldwide web,

a vast neural network is

what binds the forest together,

making it an intercommunicating,

and interacting

dynamic organism.

One with agency, and the power

to influence events above ground.

It's called the mycelium.

It's a hidden matrix, the

creation of an enduring

collaboration among fungi,

plants, bacteria, and animals.

90% of all the trees and

plants on Earth are involved

in the mutually beneficial

relationship made

possible by the mycelium.

They exchange

nourishment, messages,

and empathy with one

another, across species,

and even across

the kingdoms of life.

Mushrooms are the

reproductive organs,

the fruiting bodies

of the mycelium.

To see a mushroom growing

wild in the forest is to know

that the great natural Internet

is online beneath your feet.

Some mushrooms spread

trillions of spores on the breeze,

each spore a paratrooper

carrying life's message.

This is mushroom sex.

After a while, in their

search for moisture,

this new segment of the

mycelium will return down

to the underworld, and link

up to the greater network.

The secret lives of trees

have been long-hidden from us.

For them, the mycelium is

their lifeline to one another.

It makes the forest a community.

They use it to parent,

to nurture each other

and even to devise

a stay of execution,

a reprieve from the axe.

When a tree is cut

down in the forest,

other trees reach out to

the victim with their root tips,

and send lifesaving

sustenance, water, sugar,

and other nutrients

via the mycelium.

This continuous IV drip

from neighboring trees can

keep this stump alive for

decades, and even centuries.

And they don't only

do it for their own kind.

They do it for the

trees of other species.

Why?

Is it because they know

that their lives depend on

the health of the whole forest,

and even on beings very

different from themselves?

Is it possible that the trees can

think in longer terms than we do?

We know they have

excellent parenting skills.

Take this fir tree.

This younger tree

here is its offspring,

and it requires

constant attention.

It's hardly young by our

standards, 60 years old.

But young trees don't know

that if they grow up too quickly,

there will be too much air

in the cells of their trunks.

Later, when the stormy

winds and predators come,

they'll be weak and vulnerable.

Like the young

of other kingdoms,

the fir wants to grow into

the light as soon as possible.

But the mother fir shades

it with her branches so that

it cannot binge on sunlight,

and grow up too

fast for its own good.

How many forests have I

been in without any awareness

of what was really

happening all around me?

Who are we to search for alien

intelligence when we can't even recognize,

or respect, the

consciousness all around us,

and even beneath our feet?

This stately maple senses

that the tiny caterpillar

is nipping at its leaf.

A signal is sent

through the tree,

just as it would go through

our own nervous system.

But not nearly so fast.

Again, the trees live on

a much slower time scale.

The speed of "ouch"

for a tree is only an inch,

every three minutes.

So, it will take at least

an hour for the tree to react

by generating the chemical

that will chase this pest away.

When a predator strikes,

the first thing a tree does

is to take a saliva sample in order to

sequence the DNA of the invading species.

It then tailors its chemical

response to the special

vulnerability of its enemy.

In certain cases, it releases

the precise pheromone that

will attract its enemy's enemy

to do the tree's fighting for it.

Is it fair to say that the

trees have a deep knowledge

of chemistry, entomology,

and other earth sciences?

How exactly is their

knowing different from ours?

Is it any different when we

humans do these things?

Throughout nature, we

find these electrochemical

conversations between

the life-forms of different

species and kingdoms.

But what of a conversation

between different worlds?

What might we share with the

intelligent civilization of another world?

Science and mathematics.

The symbolic languages of

the scientist, mathematician,

and the engineer avoid

those things that are lost

in translation from

one culture to another.

Symbolic languages, including

those used in programming,

have a much higher degree

of precision than words do.

They are not as open

to misinterpretation.

I know of only one

nonhuman symbolic language,

and only one instance when

we humans made contact with

the life-form that uses it.

Their knowledge of astronomy and

mathematics would astonish most of us.

Their commitment to resolving

their differences democratically,

and reaching the broadest

possible consensus through debate,

is unparalleled by any

human society that I know.

Tens of millions of years ago,

they had been carnivores,

but they gave that

up to become vegans.

It changed their world,

and resulted in surpassing

beauty wherever they wandered.

They are explorers who

use their symbolic language

to tell each other about the things

they have discovered on their travels.

This is their night sky.

I want to tell you their story.

TYSON: This is the shore

of the Panthalassic Ocean,

a sea that covered Earth's

entire Northern Hemisphere

in a period named

the Ordovician.

We've compressed all of

the time from this very second,

back to the beginning

of the universe,

into a single calendar Earth

year, a Cosmic Calendar.

Every month represents a

little more than a billion years.

Every week, nearly

300 million years.

Every day, about

40 million years.

The Big Bang is the first

moment of New Year's Day.

Our present, right now, is

at the stroke of midnight on

New Year's Eve.

I'm standing on the morning of

December 20th on the Cosmic Calendar,

480 million years

ago in Earth's history.

This was the time when

life began to diversify.

It's remembered as the Great

Ordovician Biodiversity Event.

It came 40 million years

after life's first big leap

into diversification known

as the Cambrian expl*si*n.

This was the dawn

of the arthropods,

the invertebrates who wear

their skeletons on the outside,

instead of on the inside,

as we would one day do

hundreds of millions of years later.

The arthropods of the

Ordovician pioneered the most

successful body plan

ever evolved by life.

Even today, more than 80% of

all living animals are arthropods.

But around the time the

plants began to venture out

of the waters, a crustacean

staggered ashore,

and made a home in

the new world of the land.

Insects evolved

from the crustaceans.

A thought I do my best to

hold at bay whenever I'm dining

in a seafood restaurant.

We think that the insects

and the plants colonized

the land at about the same

time, 400 million years ago,

or December 21 on

the Cosmic Calendar.

This was a time when giant

mushrooms towered over the world's trees,

which were then no

more than a few feet high.

Mushrooms this gigantic

make you wonder just how big

the underground network that

supported them must have been.

And this was the time on Earth

when life learned how to fly.

The insects would have it all to

themselves for another 90 million years.

No flying reptiles, no birds,

no bats to gobble them up,

just other bugs.

Powered flight was a huge

evolutionary leap for insects,

allowing them to

spread all over the planet.

The insects put human

pretensions to shame.

Their tenure on Earth is

hundreds of times greater than ours.

They look much

the same to us today,

as they did to the dinosaurs

in the late Cretaceous.

Even back then, you didn't

want to mess with a wasp.

They've always been

voracious hunters.

Yes, there were giant redwoods

on the Earth 240 million years ago.

That wasp is out hunting

for food for her young.

Wasps did their thing for

another 100 million years.

And then, something happened

on an almost microscopic scale

that would paint the Earth in a

whole new spectrum of colors.

Back then, there was no such

thing as an animal partner to

aid the plants in

their fertilization,

to efficiently transport their

seed to the reproductive

organs of distant

plants, in other words,

to play cupid for them.

The drama unfolding here

is not the struggle between

the spider and the wasp,

it's those tiny particles

sticking to the wasp's legs.

Nothing much to look

at, just a few grains,

but this magic

dust, called pollen,

contained the power

to transform the world,

and to make possible

some of the most beautiful

sights ever seen on this planet.

Even today, more than

100 million years later,

this is still true.

Each grain of pollen sculpted

differently by evolution,

each a novel

strategy for survival,

sharpened by vast

expanses of time.

Pollen is tough.

It has to be.

It's so well-built that

you can fire it from a g*n,

and it will emerge unscathed

with its identity fully intact.

The wasps had nurtured their

young during their helpless,

larval stage by bringing home

game for them to feast on.

The pollen was rich in protein,

a meal for the grubs when

Mom came home without any kills.

Over the eons, a new

kind of life-form evolved,

one that stopped bringing

meat home for dinner.

This new creature brought only

the magic dust that the flowers made.

Bees.

They had no appetite for the

mangled parts of dead insects.

They went on the all-pollen

diet, and it was no fad.

The bees became fully

committed pollinators.

The plants rewarded them

handsomely by evolving

evermore alluring

female sexual organs,

in outrageous colors

and seductive forms.

They concocted delicious

secretions, sweet nectars,

that would keep the bees

coming back for more,

again and again.

The Age of the

Flowers had begun.

Bees are masters of time,

traveling across

100 million years,

and they are none

the worse for wear.

These beings did more

than anyone else to fill the

Palace of Life with

sustenance and beauty.

We will explore its treasures

and mysteries later on our voyage.

TYSON: For thousands of years,

bees have been symbols

of mindless industry.

We always think of them

as being something like

biological robots, doomed to

live out their lives in lockstep,

shackled to the dreary roles

assigned to them by nature.

This is our first contact story.

It happened in a place called

Brunnwinkl in rural Austria,

in the early 1900s.

From the time Karl

von Frisch was a child,

he longed to understand

what the other animals knew,

how they perceived the world.

He wanted to know

if tiny fish saw color,

or had a sense of smell.

He invented experiments

to explore animal experience,

and he filmed them.

Starting in the

early 20th century,

he was the first to use the

new medium of motion pictures

to create popular science

entertainment and communication.

For thousands of years,

humans have noted the

eccentric dances of the bees.

But no one had ever looked

at them with the kind of respect

that assumed there was

a reason to their dancing.

Before Karl von Frisch,

no one ever thought to ask

why they moved this way and

that way in a succession

of elaborate figure eights

Von Frisch studied

every tiny bee gesture,

and became fascinated by a

mystery he couldn't explain.

He would set out a dish of

sugar water for a bee from

his experimental hive.

The bee would feast upon

it before flying back home.

The marked bee would

later return to dine on

the delicious sugar water.

Von Frisch noted

that in just a few hours,

a multitude of other

bees would join her there.

They were always

her fellow hive mates.

But here was the

really amazing thing,

von Frisch knew that

the other bees had not

followed the marked

bee to the feeding place.

How?

Because he had the hive

closely watched at all times.

He had been careful to use

sugar water, and not honey,

so that the bees' sense of smell

could not guide them to the reward.

He continued to move the

dish of sugar water farther away,

until it was several

kilometers from the hive.

Still, the hive mates

would find their way to it.

So, how did the painted

bee reveal the exact location

of the sugar water with such

precision that her hive mates

could unerringly

find their way there?

There was a secret

message in her choreography.

What had seemed to countless

generations of observers

to be nothing more

than the meaningless,

spasmodic motions of a dumb animal

was actually a complex message,

an equation informed by

mathematics, astronomy,

and an acute knowledge of time,

all synthesized to convey

the location of the riches

she hoped to share

with her sisters.

The dancer used the

angle of our star, the sun,

to indicate the general

direction of the food's location.

Von Frisch noted that when

a bee danced straight upward,

she meant, "fly toward the sun."

And when she moved downward,

she meant, "fly away from it."

Her swivels left and right conveyed

the food's exact coordinates in space,

sometimes kilometers away.

The duration of her dance,

down to a fraction of a second,

indicated the length of time it would

take her fellow bees to get there.

She even factored in wind speed to more

finely calibrate the message she danced.

And this was true at

any time of the year,

and from hive to hive,

from continent to continent.

Bees can do the math.

Why do I call this

a first contact story?

Two species as different

as any you can imagine,

humans and bees, evolved

on evolutionary pathways that

diverged 600 million years ago.

And yet, these two species

and as far as we know,

only they and we on this planet,

managed to create a

symbolic language written

in mathematics and science.

We lived side-by-side

with the bees for millennia,

never dreaming of the

complexity of their communications.

What we've learned about

bee society in the decades since

von Frisch puts some of our

loftiest human aspirations to shame,

and changes forever our

idea of intelligent life on Earth.

TYSON: We live in a time

when the world's democracies are

even more fragile than ever.

But there are places on

Earth where that's not true.

Where every

individual has a voice.

Where corruption is unknown.

Where the community

acts only when it has arrived

at consensus through

reason and debate.

This is one of those places.

Contrary to popular belief,

the hive is no monarchy.

The queen is no absolute

ruler controlling the other bees.

The queen's role is

almost entirely reproductive.

Any female bee, and that's

what the vast majority of bees are,

can ascend to the throne given

the right food and the space to grow.

When the weather

warms, and the trees bloom,

she graciously passes her scepter

to a new generation of queens.

That's the time

in the life of a hive,

in late spring or early summer,

when about half the hive's

bees, around 10,000 of them,

grow restless.

They decide it's time

to leave the mother hive,

to found a new colony,

they know not where.

Once they depart,

there's no turning back.

It takes courage to leave

home with no way back,

to risk everything, and

choose the unknown.

That pushing and shoving

is not meant to be hostile.

The workers are putting

the queen on a rigorous

exercise program so

that she can lose weight,

and get back into flying shape.

When everything's ready,

it's time for the first

leg of their odyssey.

It's time to swarm.

With a new queen now installed

on her throne in the original hive,

the old Queen Mother has

pride of place at the very

center of the swarm

of adventurers.

Hundreds of their most

senior members, scouts,

are dispatched on missions of

reconnaissance over

a five kilometer radius.

The scouts reconnoiter the local

trees for the best possible new home.

And they're extremely picky.

Not just any place will do.

The front door,

a hollow in a tree,

must be too high for bears

and other marauders to

easily reach in and

plunder their precious honey.

Total square footage

is of critical concern.

Honeybees don't hibernate.

They'll have to heat the

place for the long winter,

and be sure to produce

enough food, honey,

to see them through.

Each scout must measure

the exact dimensions,

height, width, and depth.

If it's even slightly

too small, or too large,

the entire swarm will be

wiped out before the next spring.

When all the scouts return,

the bees are ready to hold

their annual convention.

Each scout finds a place

to stand on the swarm.

There, she presents her

argument for the best site

she has discovered.

This house-hunting

discourse is conducted in

their scientific and

mathematical language.

Hundreds of scouts now use

the waggle dance to advertise

the home that they've found.

At first, opinions vary widely,

as each advocate attracts

her share of followers.

At our political conventions,

people routinely lie.

They press our buttons,

demonizing, scapegoating,

appealing to our fears.

But the bees can't risk that.

In both cases, ours and theirs,

the future depends on

seeing reality clearly.

But for some reason,

we are easily

manipulated and deceived.

The bees somehow know that

they have to stick to the facts.

They have to be accurate.

They can't oversell.

They act as if they understand

that it matters what's true.

That nature won't be fooled.

The scouts who have found

the optimum sites for the

swarm's new home are the

most passionate waggle dancers.

Close scientific observation

over many decades affirms

this astonishing fact,

each bee has a platonic

ideal of home in mind.

Moreover, the members

of the swarm don't take the

testimony of the most

popular dancers on faith.

Many of them go to

see for themselves.

Skepticism is a

survival mechanism.

The fact-checkers fly

off to the site to make

an independent evaluation.

Just think for a minute

how articulate the waggle

dance messaging has to be.

It's the coordinates

for one particular tree in

a whole forest of them.

The scouts make a

beeline for it every time.

If the hollow turns out to

be as good as advertised,

they will return to the

swarm, where they,

too, will dance its praises.

Without deceit, or

violence, or back-hive deals,

the scouts are the first

to arrive at consensus.

But the larger population

remains to be persuaded.

Once they all align

behind one dance,

once they've achieved unanimity

on the best new place to call home,

the great migration can begin.

Within 60 seconds

of the first takeoff,

10,000 bees depart in

formation for their new home.

With the sun as their compass,

the airborne colony turns

to its queen for leadership.

The swarm is a kind of mind,

a collective consciousness to

which every individual

bee makes a contribution.

Now that the move is

complete, it's time to unpack,

decorate the nursery,

stock the pantry,

and make the place their

own, until the weather warms,

and the trees bloom again.

And so it has been for

tens of millions of years.

This intimate knowledge

of the lives of the bees is the

legacy of Karl von Frisch,

who was the first to decrypt

their symbolic language, to

make contact with a completely

different kind of mind.

Today, we study bee brains.

We are building a bridge over

the chasm that has separated

two species for

half a billion years.

And yet, after all that time,

there are places where our

species and theirs converged,

agriculture, architecture,

language, and politics.

We now know that bees sleep,

and some scientists

suspect that they dream.

What knocked us

out of our trance,

so that we could finally

recognize another intelligence

that had always been there?

A few generations

before von Frisch,

one man did more than

any other to open the way.

For me, he was the greatest spiritual

teacher of the last thousand years.

The flowers he planted

here long ago still bloom.

The hive he founded,

and studied with open eyes,

continues to flourish.

It was he who figured out

how the Palace of Life could

evolve from a modest one-room

structure to an edifice of soaring towers,

reaching to the stars

and it was he who

first glimpsed the secret

lives of our fellow earthlings.

,

A shrine to all the broken

branches on the tree of life.

But that tree still lives,

it's seen 4 billion spring times

since it first took root.

Its flowers burst forth with

unforeseeable possibilities.

A tiny, one-celled

organism evolves into you

and everything

else that is Earthlife.

There's just no way of

predicting, for now, anyway,

where life can lead.

No way of foretelling the

forms and capabilities that

can issue from simpler organisms

over vast expanses of time.

Life itself can be seen as an

emergent property of chemistry,

science as an

emergent property of life,

a way that life has found

to begin to know itself.

Four billion years.

These are the most

ancient towers that life built.

♪♪

Nobody knew this palace existed.

It was hidden by the mists of

time, and enshrouded in myth.

But one man dared

to part that curtain.

He studied as many

kinds of life as he could.

He sailed to a group of

islands on the far side of

the planet in search

of exotic species.

He studied the bees,

the flowers, the finches,

mollusks, and

earthworms, for 30 years.

A radical pattern emerged,

one that would shake the world.

It still does, he debunked

the story of Adam and Eve.

Humans are not the kings

of life, created separately,

and charged with its

management but instead,

an upstart offspring of

its stately, ancient family.

He waited to tell the world

what he had discovered until

he could demonstrate its truth

beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But then he made

another great leap,

Charles Darwin was also

one of the first to recognize that

if all life is related,

there were certain

philosophical implications.

If we were not created

separately from the other animals,

must we not share more

of who we are with them?

Our awareness, our

relationships with others,

even our feelings?

Instead of a single island of

human perception in the universe,

Darwin realized that we

are surrounded by other

ways of being

alive and conscious.

For Darwin, science was

a pathway to a deeper level

of empathy and humility.

When word reached him that a

local farmer was mistreating his sheep,

Darwin dropped his research

to make an arrest of the man.

He exposed the horrendous

suffering of wild animals

caught in the

jaws of steel traps,

and experimented on surgically

without benefit of anesthesia.

Throughout his entire life,

he was haunted by an image of

the helpless dog who licked

his tormentor's hand while

being dissected by a scientist.

And this compassion extended

even to our own species.

He recognized the blindness of

his 19th century contemporaries.

In his autobiography,

he recounted the story of

an African woman who jumped

off a cliff to her certain death,

rather than submit to being

enslaved by the Portuguese.

Darwin observed that if she had been a

Roman matron from classical antiquity,

she would be viewed

very differently.

We would be naming

our daughters after her.

It was he who began the

scientific study of the hidden

world beneath the forest floor.

Darwin worshipped nature.

His knowledge of science informed

and drove his compassion to new heights.

Behold, Saccorhytus Coronarius.

When it lived, 550 million

years ago, it was microscopic.

But for us now, it looms

large because this creature is

the earliest common

ancestor we've yet found,

a physical connection we share

with almost every animal on Earth.

If we could only take

that connection to heart.

If some day, we could

synthesize all our knowledge

of life, and use it to build

an Arch of Experience,

a way for us to really feel

what it's like to be the other.

What if we could truly know

the joy of a giant condor

riding the thermals

high in the Andes,

or the anguish of a humpback

whale singing to its lover

across the vast Pacific,

or the fear in the heart of

our most hated enemy, how

would that change this world?

And all of them, and each of us,

made from the same

toolbox, with the same genetic

material, but on different

evolutionary voyages.

Are there other possible

worlds in the cosmos where

life's pathways

converge and intersect?

Remember our

friends, the t*rd,

who can rise from the dead

to thrive on Earth in those

hellish places where

no one else can live?

They have survived

all five mass extinctions,

and they can even live in the

vacuum of space without protection.

These creatures, too small

to see with the naked eye,

have been observed

by scientists,

using a scanning

electron microscope,

doing something that we

like to think only humans do.

They're not performing any of

the known biological functions

that organisms need to survive.

They're gently giving

each other pleasure,

affection, tenderness

for its own sake.

If bees dream, and

t*rd snuggle,

are there countless roads

in the universe that life can

take to wonder and to love?

If we could stand beneath

the Arch of Experience,

or build one inside ourselves,

maybe we'd be able to give our

first contact story a better outcome.

(computer signals)

(computer signals)