From time immemorial,
we humans have looked up at the night sky,
marveling at billions of tiny specks.
Settling on distant planets was once the domain
of poets and dreamers.
But with every leap in technology,
we come closer to realizing their dreams.
Today, techies and entrepreneurs
plan to colonize faraway planets.
The first step on this journey to conquer the galaxy,
will be our own solar system.
Incredibly, scientists are even working on voyages
to planets around other stars.
They see us as an interstellar species,
that will spread across the cosmos.
So have we humans outgrown our little planet?
Or do we need to seek our destiny among the stars?
We're off on a sweeping quest
to discover the cutting-edge projects
driving today's space revolution.
On our voyage, we will learn that the most ambitious ideas
are sometimes found in the remotest places.
Our travels begin in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho,
where America's disaster preppers go off-grid.
We want to meet the world's most fervent prophet of space colonization.
Leading futurologist Marshall Savage
penned Colonizing The Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps.
He's mapped out humanity's exit from Earth.
This is an instinctive urge of our species
to migrate into space.
The way salmon return upstream.
You know, this is something we're going to do,
and you can see people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are actually doing it,
and they're an expression of that urge of the human race
to spread itself, ultimately, among the stars.
And if we survive, that will happen.
and if it doesn't happen, we probably won't survive.
I've lived out west all my life, and we've always had forest fires.
But never anything like this.
Whole towns are being burned to the ground.
And it makes you wonder what is next year
and the year after going to be like.
Marshall Savage has observed that our climate is at a tipping point.
There is a catastrophe in the making.
We've already advanced too far,
in terms of changing the underlying climate to prevent it.
Marshall fears that our planet may soon become uninhabitable.
I can't tell you when it's going to happen.
But we should go as soon as we're capable of going.
In Copenhagen, Anna Olsen has heard the call to go to space.
It might be an unlikely place.
But a harbor warehouse is where the biology student
wants to take on an immense challenge.
She's determined to be the first astronaut
of a group of weekend rocketeers...
The Copenhagen Suborbitals.
As motley as this crew of students, electricians and engineers may seem,
their technology is highly sophisticated.
Anna and her team want to go down in history
as the first amateur group to complete a human spaceflight.
Before going into space,
I think I will need to prepare by exercising,
because you are exposed to a lot of G-forces.
So you have to be some kind of physically fit.
I think it will be a quite an unpleasant journey up there,
but once you reach zero gravity,
I think it'll be amazing.
Meanwhile, Anna's father, Carsten Olsen, is another astronaut hopeful.
I actually love space flights.
I love the idea of going to another planet.
It's a great adventure.
It's like dreaming about new worlds,
and I have a huge dream in my life.
Looking at the moon from space,
that would be...
Really, really beautiful, I think.
Financed entirely by donations,
the Suborbitals are already launching self-built rockets,
from this platform in the Baltic Sea.
The Danish Coast Guard closes the area for boat traffic,
when the scaled-down rockets hurtle thousands of feet into the sky.
Encouraged by their successes,
the Suborbitals are now building a full-sized rocket.
Anna is personally seeing to the details.
I am painting the tanks for the Spica rocket,
which is the rocket that will hopefully go into space.
And it is one meter in diameter
which is also the space that I will be sitting in.
So I will be sitting in a cannonball position,
with my knees up to my ears.
So, that's not a lot of space.
Unfortunately, cramped conditions
aren't the only danger DIY astronauts might face.
And we have splashdown.
Some of the unmanned tests didn't turn out well,
with engines failing and tanks running out of fuel.
And that's why before Anna and Carsten lift off to the stars,
this gentleman will have to complete some successful flights.
This is Rescue Randy, our crash test dummy.
He is our first flight astronaut.
He has been flying several times in our capsules.
And not each flight has been very good.
Once he flew in one of the capsules
where the parachute didn't fall out as it was supposed to.
And he lost his leg during that.
Our doctor of medicine, he told us
that he would have survived, but...
He wouldn't be in a very good condition.
But you can still be a good astronaut without a leg.
Undaunted by such incidents,
we found Anna lost in her own universe.
I dream of going to space.
And just floating around in zero gravity.
I would love to experience the silence on another planet.
For instance, on Mars.
And just see how red it is.
And experiencing the totally uncolonized planet.
Anna and Carsten are ready for takeoff.
And they are not the only enthusiasts
looking forward to the conquest of space.
There is a race going on,
faster and more ambitious than ever before.
Billionaire entrepreneurs are venturing out into space
in a testosterone-fueled competition.
With the survival of humankind at stake,
they're pushing for the colonization of our galaxy.
What is your vision for the future of space exploration?
What we wanna see is millions of people living and working in space.
Space is a...
Is an adventure.
It has limitless resources that--
You know, we're finding that the Earth is a very finite place.
And we humans need to go into space
if we're to continue to evolve our civilization.
We have to drive innovation hard to make life multi-planetary.
I think this is very important to secure the future of life as we know it,
to ensure that the light of consciousness does not go out.
Landers and starships are being built.
Not only to take astronauts to other planets,
but to transport hundreds of thousands of settlers
to inhabit vast space cities imagined by Elon Musk and others.
But what does colonizing the dark desolation of space really mean?
In Creede, Colorado, we seek out a man who can shed light on the matter.
Mike Foale spent more than a year away from our home planet.
For him, it was an eye-opening experience.
When you think about what's out there,
and what we're a part of in terms of being the speck.
The speck
in this universe.
It's... It's pretty cosmic.
It's a mind-altering experience.
It's very exciting.
Mike Foale was once a commander of our lone outpost in space.
The International Space Station is one of
mankind's greatest achievements.
It's something equivalent, I think, to the pyramids.
It's one of those great wonders of the world.
And that contribution, I think, to you know, to human posterity
is the beginning of settlements in space.
But venturing out like this comes at a price...
Mike Foale is a survivor of a collision on the Russian space station, Mir,
one of the worst accidents in space history.
He knows from personal experience
what navigating outer space really means.
Space is a hard environment.
A vacuum at a temperature on average ranging from
minus 200 Celsius all the way up to plus 200 Celsius.
That's a huge variation of temperature.
And, of course, there's no air.
And if you go near a window that doesn't have ultraviolet protection,
you get burned, sunburned in 30 seconds.
And you'll also, occasionally, look out at your spacecraft,
and you'll see holes in--
In the solar arrays, and you go, "Oh, wow!
That was a rock that went through."
If things go wrong in your spacecraft,
of course you're on a knife's edge there.
All of your life support systems have to work.
Your oxygen has to be produced.
Your carbon dioxide has to be scrubbed.
Your water has to be supplied and your food needs to be present.
So, that's the hard part of space.
Despite all this, Mike Foale remains unfazed.
And there are a number of humans like me,
men and women, who are driven by the same motivations that I have.
So, they will suffer well the difficulties, the challenges, the deaths,
the disease, all of the problems
of exploring and going beyond the Earth to settle in space.
But it won't be 99.99% of humanity, it'll be a tiny fraction.
With that just 100 or 1,000 out in space,
then humans will survive the asteroid impact that's bound to happen.
Or the ecological disasters that are bound to, you know, bound to happen.
Humanity as it...
Not as it is today, but as it will evolve,
will continue beyond the Earth.
There will always be people like Mike Foale
who want to venture out into the unknown,
no matter how hazardous it might be.
It's the human pioneering spirit
that will drive us into the solar system.
To find out what a space colony might look like we've come to the Ramon Crater
some 120 miles south of Jerusalem in the Negev Desert.
There are few places on Earth that are as geologically similar to Mars.
And that's the reason why
a precious cargo is being transported to this remote region.
Whoa, look at that. Welcome to the desert.
Welcome to Mars.
That is the helmet
of the experimental spacesuit simulator, Aouda.X.
We've been working for more than ten years
on this spacecraft that we're in.
It's able to mimic all the major limitations
in actual space it would have,
so seeing this here means we're almost good to go.
Astrophysicist Gernot Gromer,
is the director of the Austrian Space Forum.
His organization is simulating a possible colony on Mars.
NASA and the European Space Agency are also involved,
making it the most elaborate project of its kind in the world.
Today they are testing a state-of-the-art spacesuit
with sensors and bio-feedback systems.
Ultimately, after 30,000 generations of Homo sapiensas a species,
we are one of the first ones who have the technological means to do that journey.
We are, I think, a migratory species.
And I believe there will be cities on Mars,
for sure, it's just a matter of time.
It will be a statement to the universe, we are out there.
This might be the first glimpse
of our future as space colonists.
But what challenges will we have to overcome to realize this dream?
There is a man who is more acquainted than most with the challenges of Mars.
Doug Hofmann works for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab,
which has sent several rovers to the red planet.
He knows all about conditions on this alien world.
So, we have several landers and rovers
on the surface of Mars,
and honestly, for human habitation,
Mars is pretty inhospitable.
So, it's cold for starters.
We also have, you know, virtually no atmosphere,
which contributes to it being cold.
And of course we don't see any living things
on the surface of Mars due to those harsh conditions.
Even getting there would be fraught with danger.
Astronauts would travel outside the protection
of the Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere that shield us from radiation.
Solar eruptions randomly fling charged particles into space.
Such a solar storm could wipe out a crew headed for Mars.
If you're traveling between Earth and Mars, out in deep space,
and there's a significant solar event,
that can create sort of an enormous amount of radiation
which would be very hard to shield against and would be
potentially life-threatening to a crew.
On top of that, astronauts would have to endure
a bombardment of galactic cosmic radiation.
These are very high-energy particles,
and so you really need, you know, maybe 10 meters or more
of liquid water or liquid hydrogen to protect you.
So, essentially the way I like to think about this is,
you're essentially putting your spacecraft into a fish tank.
You've got a big fish tank and you're the goldfish sitting in the middle.
Once astronauts have arrived on the surface of Mars their troubles won't end.
Radiation is more than 12 times that of Earth,
not counting deadly solar storms.
The reality of a life on Mars would be sobering.
A crew of hardy astronauts would hunker down in radiation-proof bunkers,
enjoying drinks of recycled urine.
While cities on Mars seem fantastical,
this kind of rugged outpost could be within our reach.
There is someone who thinks it's possible.
But if they ask you to be a Mars settler, you had better flee.
Space anthropologist, Taylor Genovese
asked to meet us in an abandoned missile site,
the most depressing place he could find.
The reality of going to another planet
in our current environment, I think is probably most...
The best analogy is an Amazon fulfillment center.
You won't be able to actually see where you are.
You're gonna be inside of a factory.
And you're not going to experience
what you think you're going to be experiencing.
That is, the kind of awe of being on another planet,
and experiencing being off of Earth.
No, you're gonna be working inside of a cubicle.
Despite this grim outlook,
corporate businessmen have intensified their mission,
forging ahead with private space programs.
The privatization of space flight has become the norm now.
You know, Blue Origin is an offshoot of Amazon.
And we have Virgin Galactic as an offshoot of the Virgin conglomerate.
So, instead of pushing into space to explore,
now we're seeing space corporations wanting to go into space
solely to exploit the resources that are there,
wanting to push people into space,
so that they have a workforce to control and maintain
their corporate executives' vision of what space needs to be.
Taylor is concerned about the implications
of commercial settlements on Mars.
Let's say we have a community on Mars.
Musk Town, we'll call it, is on Mars.
And Elon's back on Earth because he knows that it's better to be on a planet
you can breathe on, and kind of direct
the people that are in Musk Town.
Let's say they're mining rare Earth minerals.
Something that would be quite valuable.
And they're starting to get fed up with
the 12-hour work shifts or whatever.
The problem that we face with a private corporation in that instance
is that they're in sole control of that settlement.
What's stopping Papa Elon from turning off the oxygen?
Or from restricting food shipments
or restricting water shipments?
The reason I'm so cynical about this,
and why I'm talking about that specifically,
is we're seeing similar tactics used today in,
for example, Amazon fulfillment centers.
These same tactics are being used
in order to quash justifiable worker grievances.
The difference, of course, is that
they're here on Earth, and they can go home.
On Mars, you can't do that.
And with a little bit of...
you know, turning the screws by Elon Musk,
he can essentially turn his free-market paradise into a feudal slavery system.
In space terms, Mars may be close.
But it's fraught with challenges.
Perhaps it would be more promising
to look for a more hospitable place beyond our solar system.
There might be stars out there orbited by planets like our own.
We travel to Mauna Kea, a volcano in Hawaii,
site of cutting-edge telescopes.
Its dizzying altitude and pitch-dark nights
have made it the mecca of stargazers.
We meet a former advisory board member
of Mauna Kea's Gemini telescope,
renowned astronomer, Lucianne Walkowicz.
Lucianne is one of the world's foremost planet hunters.
We look for things that are maybe the size of Earth.
So, places that could have these nice, rocky surfaces
that, you know, have oceans on them.
We look for places that are the right temperature,
not too hot, not too cold.
We often compare it to the fairy tale of Goldilocks
and her porridge, right? Not too hot, not too cold.
And that's 'cause we want the water to exist in liquid form.
And that's because liquid water
is one of the best solutions for the chemistry of life.
And then we look for the atmosphere,
and whether the atmosphere would be likely to have
things like oxygen, or a balance of different kinds of atmospheric gases
that would be conducive to life surviving.
Until the late 2000s,
only a few planets outside our solar system had been discovered.
And nobody knew whether any were like Earth.
But then, everything changed.
One of the most transformative things
for the discovery of planets around other stars
was really the Kepler mission, which launched in 2009.
And I had the great fortune to be part of the Kepler science team.
I joined just before launch, so I got to be present
and experience this nerve-wracking experience of seeing your future career
be put on top of an exploding rocket
that is going to hurtle it into space.
Lift-off for the Delta II rocket with Kepler,
on a search for planets in some way like our own.
The launch of the Kepler space telescope
might just be remembered as the beginning of the biggest discovery
in astronomy in our lifetime,
peering further into space than any optical telescope on Earth.
Kepler began its search for faraway worlds.
And it was really Kepler that opened its eye,
and then suddenly started to find
world after world, these thousands of planets that we never knew existed,
and that imply the existence of billions of planets more.
So it really, really changed the game
and really opened up the universe to us.
Kepler discovered that many of these countless exoplanets
looked strangely familiar.
Nobody could tell you whether there were other planets
that were even potentially like Earth out there.
And now, it seems that that is probably the most common kind of planet that there is.
And we still don't know whether those planets are really like Earth,
in the sense that we mean it, where we can walk around
and enjoy the sunshine and the breeze
and the wind in our face.
But it does mean that
there are a lot of places to look for life.
Most exciting of all, exoplanets have been detected in our neighboring system,
Alpha Centauri.
One of them, Proxima Centauri b, is 4.2 light-years away.
In the vastness of the universe, that's almost next-door.
But even if this exoplanet turned out to be habitable,
a flight there would take 5,000 years.
I think one of the challenges
with the ideas that are out there for traveling through space,
these huge distances that, you know,
we don't have great solutions for
human beings travelling within their own lifetime
to even the closest neighboring planetary systems.
So, there are these ideas that you could put people
on what we call generation ships,
where many generations of people
would live on those ships, and then perhaps not you, but your descendants,
or your descendants' descendants,
would one day arrive at this planetary system.
For this mission to succeed,
successive generations would have to live and die in transit.
Unless science can find a better solution.
In the movies, interstellar astronauts are deep-frozen
and resuscitated when they reach their destination.
There are major institutions around the world
who are taking this cue from science fiction.
At the European Space Agency's medical lab in Cologne,
space surgeon, Adrianos Golemis
is at the forefront of how to ready astronauts for interstellar voyages.
Wouldn't it be great when humanity ventures further into the cosmos,
to use the concept of hibernation?
This is something we observe in the animal kingdom.
And there's definitely a lot we can learn from nature.
So, what we know is that when animals hibernate, they use less energy,
and for a long period of time,
with less energy, they can survive.
That's very practical for space flight.
Because imagine if you want to go on a very long-duration mission.
Then if you are in a hibernated state, you would need less food.
So, the device I am in right now,
it's based on the concept of indirect calorimetry.
What does this mean?
Calorimetry, so it measures how much energy does my body need per day.
It's indirect, because this is actually measured
by the air that I breathe in and out.
That's why I'm in this canopy.
In the future, we can assume that
we will use the same concept to calculate how much energy does the body need
also for hibernation.
We know it's gonna be less than the energy we use in everyday life.
But as every person is different,
so one astronaut is different to another one,
we need to calculate precisely how much energy would I need to fly
or much energy would you need, actually, to fly in space, in a hibernated state.
Lifeless like Snow White in a Perspex box,
one wonders what the astronauts might feel.
Essentially it's like a state of deep sleep.
But, again, this is what we know from researching animals,
and people that, for example, go into major surgery.
I do not know if we will have dreams.
We have to ask the future astronauts on that.
The next step sounds straight from a Hollywood script.
Interstellar travelers could be put into suspended animation.
Incredibly, this is already being done today.
But the people pioneering these radical methods
have nothing to do with space exploration.
...0.50 now, he is not breathing.
One, two, three.
At the Maryland Medical Center,
pioneering surgeons have masterminded
an innovative procedure for severe gunshot wounds.
We have a young male, multiple gunshot wounds,
penetrating injuries to the right shoulder region
and two penetrating injuries to the lower abdomen.
-Could we please order a massive transfusion?
Patients with extreme bullet injuries have a survival rate of just 7%.
There just isn't enough time to fix their wounds.
I think he's in hemorrhagic... Oh, he's arrested.
Asystole.
Doctors are working on ways around the problem.
In order to buy 40 minutes of time,
they have devised a procedure to slow down the metabolism of their patients.
By cooling patients rapidly, they protect the whole body.
The unique aspect here is that we're preserving not only specific organs,
but the entire body and multiple organs,
including the brain, liver, heart, lungs
and all the other essential organs, including the intestines.
Okay, we're gonna cool him down to 20.
Doctors replace the blood with a saline solution,
cooled to 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
Within minutes, the patient has entered a state of hypothermia.
This procedure could be the nucleus of a revolution in space travel.
I think we're doing the groundwork, the fundamentals here,
so I do think that cooling would be a part, for sure, of any prolonged
suspended animation or travel of some sort.
If you can reduce the body's demand
for oxygen and food and stuff like that,
then you can go further and further out
in a space situation, by doing that, so...
It may not end up being the final result,
but I think that that temperature will play a role in that.
On interstellar space missions,
the suspended animation would have to last for months, even years.
But there is a problem.
So there's a buildup of a lot of potassium and acid.
And to successfully navigate that,
there would need to also be a process to manage that
and remove the potassium and neutralize the acid.
To use this method for long-term space flights,
scientists need to control the buildup
of acidic waste products in the cooled astronauts.
So far, this seems to be impossible.
Even if you could find a way to freeze humans,
a trip of many millennia would be far from plain sailing.
Some crew members would have to be awake to watch over the spacecraft
and the passenger support systems.
To keep the mission going across the centuries,
the crew would have to renew itself by having children.
But conceiving offspring in space is challenging.
In the confines of a spaceship,
astronauts would have a limited choice of partners.
Back in Colorado, there's a man with concerns about procreating like this.
Simon Dube, a leading space sexologist,
is worried about interstellar inbreeding.
If we don't have enough people on these space flights or colonies,
it's going to create a situation where
some individuals will have to reproduce
with people who have DNA that are closely related to one another.
This increases the risk of genetic diseases or congenital malformation.
In a situation where we have long-term
multi-generational space flight,
we need to find ways to bring enough genetic diversity to our sample.
Refreshing the gene pool would be essential.
Or, after 5,000 years of inbreeding,
the crew would arrive transformed into bizarre mutants.
Estimates vary as to how many colonists
would ensure a healthy gene mix.
Researchers have estimated
that we might need up to 40,000 individuals or maybe even less than 100.
Those who argue for small numbers
usually take into account that in these situations,
we might wanna use genetic technology.
So, for instance, bringing with us a bank
of fertilized eggs that will be progressively implemented
to provide that genetic diversity in the colony or aboard the spaceships.
But genetic health isn't the only sex issue we need to deal with in space.
Space imposes all kinds of challenges on human sexuality,
including partnered sex.
So one of them is the fact that there's no gravity,
so in zero gravity or microgravity,
it might be difficult to bring partners close to one another,
because each time one pushes the other, or makes a movement,
it will propel the other person away.
So we need to find contraptions, garments, or technical systems
to keep people close from one another,
so that they can enjoy sexual activities together.
Undeterred by such perplexing matters,
Simon thinks one shouldn't view space sex as a problem.
Imagine what it would mean to be weightless for human sexuality.
You could move around.
In zero gravity, you can enjoy sexual activities,
including with multiple partners,
in total weightlessness.
What would that mean for our sexual behavior,
our preferences and our fantasies?
I think in a space context, it would completely change them
and enable new frontiers for human sexuality.
Despite these hopeful prospects,
scientists sending out colonists in generation ships
will have to deal with our bodies.
We are just too frail to thrive away from Earth.
But, astonishingly, there is a man in New York City
who's certain he can overcome this obstacle.
We meet the NASA geneticist Christopher Mason
in his laboratory at Weill Cornell Medical College.
He knows what he's up against.
The human body was never built for space.
There are extraordinarily difficult terrains
and environments that we would have to survive in,
so, sulfuric acid rain or crushing gravity or radiation,
that would kill a person in less than a day.
Even within our solar system, there's places we've already seen
that are completely inhospitable to human life
and we have to find a way around them.
For every astronaut that's gone into space, ever,
we have considered physical protective measures, pharmacological measures,
to keep them safe and keep them healthy and active.
But we now are on the cusp of actually implementing
genetic measures, actually, cellular changes, that can keep them safe.
So, instead of just having defenses on the outside of the body,
we can activate defenses that are already present on the inside of the body
and even add new ones.
Up until a few years ago,
editing the human gene was science fiction.
Today, geneticists are on the verge
of making humans fit for interstellar travel.
The most damaging threat is radiation.
The biggest risk of radiation is that it damages your DNA and proteins
and doesn't let your cells survive.
So, what we do is take proteins from our own DNA,
our own genome and also from other creatures, like tardigrades
and take those snippets of genes we know that give additional protection
and we basically copy them out, clone them
and then put them into human cells.
Christopher Mason particularly enjoys snipping genes
from these droll micro-animals, tardigrades.
Tardigrades are these cute little tiny water bears, they're often called,
because they look like a little bear.
And they are a species that is found in soils
and surfaces all over the Earth.
They're just small, little multicellular little bears,
that can survive almost anywhere.
High radiation, they can survive the vacuum of space,
even come back and then be rehydrated.
They can survive dry conditions.
So they're really extraordinary creatures.
So, now let's go see if we can check on the cells.
Now, let's see how the tardigrade and human cells are doing.
Take a peek at Craig, who should be in here.
-Hey, Craig. -Hey.
All right, so how do they look?
Yeah, we're just spinning them down right now.
Allowing the centrifuge to spin down, great.
These cells floating in this pink bath
of nutrients, belong to no species ever known.
They are a completely artificial blend of water bear and human.
We've made human cells that carry the lessons from the tardigrade
inside their DNA and enable it to resist
up to 80% more radiation than they could before.
All human cells which carry the radiation-resistant gene
of tardigrades will light up under the microscope.
Christopher Mason is delighted to see
that the experiment has worked out.
Opening up a pathway to even more fanciful genetic modifications.
One of the challenges is that you have very low light in long space flight,
you have limited resources.
So what if you captured every photon and turned it into food?
Or what if we could have chlorophyll inside human cells?
Really like chloro-humans, or plants, basically.
What if we could just lay out in the sun when you're hungry,
get enough nutrients and then go back in the shade when you're all full.
To do this in space, you would need about two tennis courts' worth of skin
to lay out and get enough sunlight,
on Earth at least, to get enough food for one day.
So if you could imagine having that much skin you could kind of roll it out,
let it absorb and then roll it back in, kind of like a portable solar panel.
Except it's your own skin.
This new space superhuman would know no limits.
It will breathe helium and dive into the Boomerang Nebula.
That is, if it ever sees the light of day.
Our lab has a 500-year plan to enact this dream
of having humans survive under the light of a new sun.
I will be dead for the vast majority of this plan,
but the point is that we've laid out
what can happen and I think should happen.
We've learned a lot about genetics in the past ten years,
that's phase one.
In the next 20 years, we actually take these lessons and knowledge of genetics
and engineer these cells, engineer genomes
to contain lessons from other creatures
to help them survive extreme environments.
And by phase ten, in 500 years, we actually launch.
We will have had the knowledge of genetics to know what to do to protect the astronauts
and we'll have the exoplanets discovered so we know to where we can send them.
But if genetically enhanced humans ever ventured out to conquer the galaxy,
they would have to adapt not just their bodies but their minds.
And that might be an even more vexing issue.
Our challenge would be to stay sane.
locked for generations in a ship on course into the unknown.
Space anthropologist, Taylor Genovese,
is convinced we'd be at each other's throats
before we even reached halfway.
The day-to-day of living, as anyone who has cohabited knows,
the smallest of irritants
can explode into dramatic fights.
Somebody clinks their fork on a plate the wrong way,
can explode into a fight.
The problem becomes you can't escape it,
you can't remove yourself to cool down,
because you're always in close proximity.
The Antarctic stations are really great
because you can see how people are going to react
within a very hostile environment.
In the past few years there was an apparent issue that someone on a Russian crew
was giving away the endings of the books from the library
to another Russian crew member on purpose,
maliciously telling him the ends of books.
So much so, that then the other crew member could no longer take it,
went into the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife
and stabbed the other crew member.
And they needed to then, of course, evacuate them out.
But in outer space, you're not gonna be able to have that.
Even more dangerously, if somebody gets very angry
and decides to, say, open an airlock or puncture something
in the settlement or the spacecraft
then that endangers everybody on board.
There are going to be problems.
There are going to be issues between people.
And how are we going to deal with this? It's not being talked about.
While mental health on long-term space missions is a taboo subject
it has been researched in the past.
In New Jersey, we meet someone who was a guinea pig
in a Moscow isolation experiment in the 1990s.
For the first time, Canadian nursing professor Judith Lapierre
breaks her silence on the Russian study
that was to create an international scandal.
I was very enthusiastic about getting involved in such a big project
because at that time, it represented the longest confinement studies
with an international crew and a mixed-gender crew.
So I was really excited and proud. This was a dream come true, actually.
The experiment involved Judith being locked up
in a large, metal barrel for 110 days.
She and the group of men would live there confined and observed around the clock.
Judith Lapierre felt primed for the challenge.
I'm the woman taking part in this crew
so we are training now for the starting of the experiment.
I would have loved, of course, there would be more women
because I think it would be great for me as support, also,
and real life is involving both genders, so there should be more,
but unfortunately, there's only one so far.
On December 4, 1999, Judith was ready to be locked in the barrel
as part of an international crew that was to join a Russian crew inside.
I remember following each other in a line and going inside the chamber,
closing the doors and there we were starting our 110 days' mission.
And it was a very intense schedule, we had over 100 studies to run.
and the days would last from 8:00 until 10:00 at night.
Judith settled into her new life,
comfortably dropping into a work routine with her colleagues.
From the control room the supervisors witnessed how the crew bonded.
Nobody had the slightest notion that the experiment was to go disastrously wrong.
The ambience and the dynamic of the chamber changed
that evening of New Year's, 2000.
It was a kind of a celebration of course,
we had an initial meal together
and a little after midnight, there was a fight between Russian crew members.
It was a very violent and aggressive fight
that left one crew member very injured.
Judith expected the men in the control room to intervene...
but no one came.
This was just one part of an evening
that was to spiral much further out of control.
We couldn't sleep after those incidents
so we stayed in the living room.
And then the Russian crew member was starting to make jokes
about doing an experiment that would involve myself.
He had stopped smoking and he wanted to test kissing without smoking,
in front of everybody. So I said, "No way,
I'm not gonna take part in any of this, what do you mean?"
And he pulled me up from my chair. I sat down again.
He pulled me again and I looked at my friends, my commander, saying,
"What's he doing now, he's pulling me out?"
you know, to go in the kitchen area again.
That's when he decided that he would kiss me forcibly
and I pushed him away, he did again and I pushed him.
And I left the kitchen, went back to my colleagues
and I was in shock because that whole evening
had a whole atmosphere already and I couldn't believe it.
The next day we did write to mission control
and to our respective space agencies.
And it took until four to five days,
they sent to us a paper through the hatch doors
and they told us you should sign this
or you may leave, you're free to go.
And so we were kind of forced to sign if we wanted to stay.
And, of course, I wanted to stay.
The paper Judith signed
said that the incident was just a cultural misunderstanding.
And I can't say no to that. It was a sexual interest that he had in me
and he forcibly kissed me twice and I rejected him.
But it was not recognized as such
and it was just minimized as a cultural misunderstanding.
Saying that I wasn't open enough to cultural diversity.
When that mission finished,
it really influenced my whole career,
because I thought this would be the start of my research project
with the Space Agency or the start of my field of work.
But I was just totally pushed out of the system.
And I have not been involved in any space work ever since.
Drawing on the experience of Judith Lapierre,
one concludes that hurtling through the centuries
in a spaceship, would end in strife, crime and depravity.
If we are to stand a chance to reach exoplanets,
we need to figure out how to get there in a lifetime.
But could we invent a spacecraft fast enough?
In Idaho, we are back with Marshall Savage,
visionary science educator and futurologist.
Marshall has an idea how we can supercharge future spacecraft.
Einstein taught us energy and matter are inter-exchangeable,
and a very little bit of matter is a huge amount of energy.
But the only real, viable way to make that conversion,
to get all the energy out of a piece of matter,
is by having antimatter.
Because when matter and antimatter meet,
they annihilate each other and the result is pure energy.
So, if you could manufacture and store enough antimatter,
it then becomes possible to have energy on the scale of photon propulsion.
What that means is that instead of hot chemicals coming out of the rocket,
or fast fusion particles coming out of the rocket,
you have photons coming out of the rocket,
and they're traveling at the speed of light.
Antimatter fuel would get us around the galaxy in no time.
As impossible as it may sound,
antimatter is both already manufactured and stored on Earth today.
In Geneva, physicist Michael Doser harvests antimatter
at the particle accelerator, CERN.
It's actually pretty easy to make antimatter and to work with it.
All you need is a Proton Synchrotron,
where you accelerate particles to very high energies,
smash those into a block of iridium,
and if you're really lucky, one in a million,
you get a pair of a proton and antiproton.
These antiprotons are moving almost at the speed of light,
rush into this building,
and are then slowed down in the structures that you can see here.
So, there's a big decelerator surrounding the building itself,
underneath the concrete blocks.
Then they go down into this little ring here,
which is the final stage,
which slows them down to such low energies that we can catch them.
Making antimatter is easy, if you happen to be at CERN,
the world's largest nuclear research facility.
The center hosts scientists from 85 nations
and consumes more electricity than 300,000 homes a year.
CERN might be the home of some of the biggest hardware ever built,
but in particle physics some of the most impressive gear
can be quite unassuming.
This is the heart of the matter, or of the antimatter.
This is what an antimatter trap looks like,
and this is, in fact, a trap that we used about 10,15 years ago.
And what you see here is
something that will hold antimatter without touching any matter.
Because, of course, when antimatter and matter touch, they annihilate.
So we need to hold the antimatter in vacuum,
and only touch it with electric fields and magnetic fields.
Unfortunately, the amount of energy required
to make antimatter is enormous.
120 gigawatts are needed to create even the tiniest amounts
of this mysterious substance.
And the output is ridiculously low.
All the antimatter produced at CERN
wouldn't power a single lightbulb.
Michael Doser works with only minute quantities of antimatter.
And there is another problem.
The sheer amount of time required to manufacture antimatter.
At CERN, if the accelerator were to give us antiprotons every second,
and we could cool them down that fast,
we'd end up with something of the order of a tenth of a nanogram per year.
Which means, that in order to get one gram of antimatter you need 10 billion years,
which just happens to be the age of the universe.
So if you'd started collecting antiprotons at the beginning of the universe,
at the moment of the big bang,
we'd now have 1 gram of antimatter.
Even if this lengthy production process were practical,
could we ever generate enough fuel to get us to the next solar system?
Now, to get to Alpha Centauri, my reference is Star Trek, which has the Enterprise.
And in the Enterprise there's this huge warp core running with antimatter.
That's a couple of tons' worth of antimatter,
but we can be a bit more economical than that, and call it a few kilograms.
Which means that, not only do you need 10 billion years,
you actually need something like a factor of 1,000 or 10,000 more than that,
which is probably longer than the age of the universe into the future.
And that's the amount of time you need, under current technological conditions
to make enough antimatter to get to Alpha Centauri.
You'd be faster off walking to get there.
For now, interstellar space travel
remains in the realm of science fiction.
Unless, of course, we get help from outer space.
If there were technically-advanced aliens out there,
we could just ask them to let us hitch a ride.
Those of us hoping to get a lift from a UFO
should best direct their request to this colony of extraterrestrials on Earth.
In the Valley of the Dawn, in Brazil, live people who believe they are
the descendants of an alien species from the planet Capella.
The knowledge about the extraterrestrial history of the valley
goes back to this woman, Tia Neiva.
Born Neiva Zelaya, Tia Neiva was a truck driver and single mother of four.
When she died in 1984, her followers preserved her house as she had left it.
They even turned her bathroom into a shrine.
Photographs show how from the 1960s onwards,
she started receiving cosmic energy.
The energy is sent down from the alien mothership
that hovers invisibly above the valley.
Tia Neiva's followers are still harvesting healing rays today
transmitted down by benevolent aliens.
So could this energy be used to whisk us away to faraway planets?
The aliens of the valley are stuck on Earth.
In the course of millennia, their bodies have adapted to our environment,
so there's no way back to their home planet.
Watching them draw energy from outer space,
we were mystified by the experience.
Which seemed at times as perplexing as gazing at a faraway galaxy.
We left the aliens of the Valley of Dawn
with a certainty that they would not be able
to whisk us away in their spacecraft.
Our journey has shown us
that we humans should not behave like interplanetary locusts
grazing our planet empty
and then moving onto the next.
But should we be sad about that?
Since his journeys to the stars,
astronaut Mike Foale looks at our planet differently.
I've always loved astronomy. I've always loved the galaxy.
I've always loved the idea of being on other planets around other stars.
But in the end the thing that drove me the most was looking at Earth.
The Earth is always changing and so the light changes,
the seasons change, the seasons are always different.
And it's so fascinating, it's utterly absorbing.
Coming over the southern tip of South America, and almost always,
the lighting is pretty low-angle.
So it has a sort of deep dark blue.
Almost a mysterious...
It looks cold, it is cold.
But then you notice...
I could see waves.
And you go, "Waves?
From this altitude? No, no, that can't be right."
Yes, you can see waves, South Atlantic waves
going all the way around the planet at that latitude.
Because they're so huge driven by the winds down there,
you can actually see the combined froth of all the breaking waves
from space, from orbit, from hundreds of miles away.
I appreciate the Earth, and the ecology of the Earth.
And as something I need to communicate as being worthwhile looking after,
far more after being in space.
Back at Mauna Kea, Hawaii,
the telescopes are trained into the skies
searching for undiscovered worlds that might one day be colonized.
Down on the plains, native Hawaiians have a very different idea
of what humanity's place in the cosmos should be.
This is a highly symbolic place.
In this black wasteland Nobel Prize-winning science
collides with indigenous knowledge.
Hawaiian activist Lanakila Mangauil pays reverence to the volcano.
For him, Mauna Kea is a holy mountain
not to be disturbed by humans.
Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz has come down from the peak
to listen and learn about the Hawaiians' beliefs.
Lanakila has agreed to show Lucianne how Mauna Kea is honored.
The Hawaiians have their own cosmology
expressed in these traditional songs and dances.
Every little step and gesture has a significance
connected with the sacred volcano.
Here on the mountain, too much human footprints, or walking,
or shifting of the land
disrupts the natural cycles of the hydrology.
From the snow, the ice,
and how it needs to percolate and move.
So we have to allow the forces of nature to do its thing.
So that very simple hula, where you see us dancers
retreating with this very light tapping
of their fingers and light tapping of their feet,
and the backward motion is to show we should be exiting these places,
and leave as little to no imprint at all.
Not even our footprints.
Lanakila sees humans as a part of creation
and we ignore this at our peril.
When you break away from that thinking
or if you think yourself outside, or worse,
you think yourself superior to that,
well, this is what you get.
This is not the indigenous ecosystem of this land.
This is after human impact.
Has all the native forests of this mountain be decimated.
So what do you think when you hear people
saying that, you know, now that they have used the Earth,
they're going to go to other planets?
Say, planets around other stars or Mars, or wherever it happens to be?
It's a scary thought for me
to think of people wanting to go and their whole mission
just to go and continue the extraction process on other planets.
Absolutely not.
You know, there's so much more to learn right here.
And so in many cases, I think it's important
that we need to protect the rest of the universe from us.
Lucianne Walkowicz has drawn conclusions from this message.
I think the problem that I have with colonization
as described by Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos,
is that it really does describe colonization.
The idea of going places
and extracting and exploiting.
The same kind of colonization projected into space
that many people have experienced here on Earth.
Now on Earth, we do face existential threats.
We do have things like climate change
that are creating a less habitable world than the one
that has raised our species thus far.
And we can't afford to treat our planet
as though we can just use it up,
eat everything up, and throw it away.
We have one home.
Looking at this world I see such unbelievable, soul-drenching,
life-supporting richness and lushness
that exists on no other planet that we know of.
And that even if we were to find a planet around another star
that we think, might potentially be like this,
we would have no way of knowing,
we have no way of human beings reaching there in our lifetimes.
And yet here we are surrounded by a paradise.
I just feel so humbled by the planet that we live on.
Especially as someone who thinks often of other worlds.
That I can swim in the ocean.
That I can drink from streams.
That I can sit out and feel the sun on my face.
And I know that it doesn't just not harm me,
it actually sustains and nourishes me
and everyone I know,
and everyone in all of humanity that has ever lived.