Morgan Freeman explains, "Transposons are pieces of DNA that sneak in from the outside and insert themselves into our genes."
Neither Martian rocks nor our other neighboring planets seem to contain living organisms. Milton Wainwright says, "The basic idea of panspermia is that life came from space." IceCube is a detector of neutrinos at the South Pole. Upon detection of a neutrino, there is a Glashow resonance event.
Avida is like a computer virus albeit Avida introduces mutations with some copies of itself.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season6
#episode5
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#alien
#humanity
Neither Martian rocks nor our other neighboring planets seem to contain living organisms. Milton Wainwright says, "The basic idea of panspermia is that life came from space." IceCube is a detector of neutrinos at the South Pole. Upon detection of a neutrino, there is a Glashow resonance event.
Avida is like a computer virus albeit Avida introduces mutations with some copies of itself.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season6
#episode5
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#alien
#humanity
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Ever worry about picking up a bug?
00:16What if we have all caught something?
00:21Something unidentifiable and from unknown origins?
00:30Not from each other, from the heavens.
00:36Drops of rain could be bringing us visitors from another planet.
00:40Aliens invading our bloodlines or maybe even infecting our technology.
00:47They could be hidden in packets of digital data in a form we don't even recognize as life.
00:54Alien intelligence may be tracking our every move.
01:00We haven't found any extraterrestrials yet.
01:04But maybe we're looking in the wrong places.
01:08Are aliens inside us?
01:16Space. Time. Life itself.
01:23The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:30The size of the universe is really hard to comprehend.
01:44Hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies beyond.
01:49It seems impossible to imagine that the only place that life exists is here on Earth.
01:58Are we the only intelligent life form in the cosmos?
02:02If not, then where are the others?
02:04If not, then where are the others?
02:06In the past, we've always looked up to the heavens.
02:11But to find alien life, maybe we only need to look down within our world and inside our bodies.
02:20This man has alien intruders inside of him right now.
02:32Cedric Fichat is a geneticist at the University of Utah.
02:36He's well aware that he, like every living being on the planet, hosts foreign viruses and bacteria.
02:45But Cedric is focused on more insidious intruders.
02:48We see them in genome sequences, many copies, but we really don't understand how they got there.
02:56These alien entities are called transposons.
03:01They're pieces of DNA which sneak in from the outside and insert themselves into our genes.
03:06So they copy and paste to new places in the genome.
03:11But this replication is independent from the replication of the host cell.
03:16And they do this much more often than the cell actually replicate.
03:21They're not just invading human cells.
03:24Virtually every living thing on Earth contains transposons.
03:29In fact, they are the single largest component of the genome of many plants, many animals as well.
03:37We like to call them space invaders.
03:40Our DNA comes to us in a direct line from our ancestors, generation after generation.
03:48And that genetic inheritance also includes the transposons that snuck into our ancestors' DNA.
03:57Every once in a while, a new transposon mysteriously finds its way in.
04:02The alien intruders can continue multiplying and passing down to successive generations until a single
04:19transposon exists in the entire population of a species.
04:23And transposons are so good at replicating inside of us that half of our DNA is now alien.
04:41When the transposons jump into the chromosome, it's like a mutation.
04:45Something new was introduced there.
04:46So most of the transposons in your genome don't really affect you.
04:51Just like these bunny ears today won't really affect my scaling.
04:54Other transposons can be helpful.
04:57In fact, one of these intruders became the foundation for our immune system.
05:03It's like a helmet suddenly appearing to protect Cedric's head.
05:07This transposon arrived millions of years ago and gave us the ability to create antibodies,
05:15a crucial line of defense against pathogens.
05:19And without this transposon, we just probably would not be here today.
05:22But transposons can also cause problems.
05:28Sometimes transposons can be harmful too.
05:30Like there's a blindfold on my head.
05:33Can't find my skateboard now.
05:34There's over a hundred different genetic diseases tied to transposition events.
05:41This can really be so bad that it could lead to an extinction of a species.
05:44Just like a virus can spread and turn into a pandemic.
05:50Cedric thinks it's possible that transposons break into our cells by attaching themselves to viruses.
05:57They could piggyback onto a virus and then this virus can infect a new cell.
06:01And then the transposon can infiltrate that new individual or that new species.
06:07As the virus goes about its business disrupting our DNA, the transposon sneaks in too and never leaves.
06:16But the biggest mystery of all is where these bits of self-replicating DNA come from in the first place.
06:24They are so abundant, yet we know very little about them.
06:29In fact, it's really like the dark matter of the genome.
06:38Could the space invaders taking up so much room in our DNA have actually come from outer space?
06:45We still haven't found any other signs of life in our solar system.
06:51That means alien pieces of DNA would have to come from a distant star system.
06:58But how could anything biological survive that kind of trip?
07:04University of Michigan astrophysicist Fred Adams believes he has an answer.
07:14According to a theory known as panspermia, life spreads around the universe when a comet or asteroid hits a planet.
07:24The impact sends debris shooting all the way up into space and eventually onto the surface of another planet.
07:31We see meteorites from Mars on a somewhat regular basis, so we do know that there's transfer from Mars to Earth.
07:39However, Martian rocks don't contain life.
07:43And our other neighboring planets don't appear to have any either.
07:47So Fred started wondering if life could have made a much longer journey to Earth from outside our own solar system.
07:54In order to be transferred the elements of life, basically bacterial kind of organisms have to be encased in rock.
08:03The rock provides protection from extreme cold, heat and damaging radiation.
08:11The shield needs to be a little bigger than this ball.
08:16In order for solar systems to share rocks, two things have to happen.
08:20The first is that the solar systems have to eject rocks from their immediate vicinity.
08:25And the second thing is that another solar system has to capture them.
08:29A large enough impact from an asteroid or a comet could easily produce enough energy to shoot debris out of a solar system.
08:37But whether it can hit a planet orbiting another sun is much less certain.
08:44Space is relentlessly empty, which makes rock transfer between solar systems very difficult.
08:49There's an average of four to five light years between solar systems in our galaxy.
08:55Even if you could launch a space rock that far, what are the chances of hitting another planet up to 30 trillion miles away?
09:02Okay, let's consider a simple analogy. Each of these lacrosse players will represent a solar system,
09:09and the ball will represent a life-bearing rock. As the players throw the ball back and forth to each other,
09:14it's like a rock being transferred from one solar system to another. Let's see what happens.
09:21Suppose the length of a lacrosse field represents a light year.
09:26Even if a player could throw a ball four or five fields away,
09:29consider how unlikely it would be for that player to toss the ball blindly and have it land in the
09:36pocket of a teammate. And distance isn't the only factor. Solar systems in our galaxy are also flying
09:44around each other 120 times faster than the speed of sound. So now the teammate has to be running full speed.
09:53Even when an alien rock's trajectory is on target, it's almost always moving too fast for gravity in
10:01the new solar system to catch it. Imagine the difficulty in catching a speeding lacrosse ball from
10:08hundreds of yards away while running and with a broken net. Not surprisingly, when Fred ran the numbers,
10:17calculating the distance between Earth and other solar systems, factoring in the movements of stars and
10:23planets, it seemed impossible that an alien rock could ever find Earth from so far away. But then
10:30Fred realized something he'd missed, something that suddenly made it a lot more likely that aliens could
10:37have landed here. Four and a half billion years ago, things were a lot different. Alien suns and their
10:45surrounding planets crowded Earth's night sky. Neighboring solar systems were roughly 10 times closer
10:52than they are today. Now the lacrosse players can be dozens of yards from each other instead of hundreds.
11:00In the early part of the evolution of the solar system, the solar system was living in a dense cluster.
11:07And solar systems back then were moving around each other 40 times more slowly than today.
11:14On the lacrosse field, that makes completing a pass a lot simpler.
11:19If the players are close together and moving slowly, it's easy for them to pass the ball from one person to the other.
11:26If Fred is right, billions of years ago, our home planet would have been in position to snare ancient alien organisms.
11:34Could they have seeded life on Earth? This biologist thinks they did and that they're still raining down on us today.
11:45He says he has proof that organisms from outer space are in our atmosphere right now.
11:53The seeds of life on Earth may have arrived billions of years ago from a distant alien world.
12:04But if life got here by hiding in a meteorite falling from the sky,
12:09could it still be raining down on us right now?
12:14Milton Wainwright is a microbiologist at the University of Sheffield in England.
12:28He believes he's found evidence that extraterrestrial life falls like rain from the heavens.
12:34So the basic idea of panspermia is that life came from space. There was no life on Earth,
12:40that life was delivered by asteroids and comets.
12:43Now, neo-transfermia, neo meaning new, suggests that life is continuing to come from space at this very minute.
12:54In 2013, Milton and his team collected samples from the stratosphere some 16 miles up.
13:02That's three times higher than commercial jetliners fly.
13:05The lower atmosphere is full of life, but Milton thinks the stratosphere is too.
13:15His controversial claim is that it contains life forms from outer space.
13:21The suggestion by the critics is that this material is going up and not coming down from space.
13:26It's just Earth material. Now, there's a number of reasons why we think that's wrong.
13:32Milton counters that his samples came from far too high to have been blown upward by the wind.
13:38Physics tells us that the particles we have are too big to reach the stratosphere.
13:44Now, that's just physics. And you can't argue with physics, you can't argue with Newton's laws.
13:49But Milton is aware that the only way he's going to convince the skeptics is to find more aliens.
13:57If microorganisms or any life is coming in from space, we have to go out and catch it.
14:05And that's exactly what Milton is doing.
14:10He and his team are conducting a new series of high-altitude missions.
14:18Bonvoyeur stratosphere sampler.
14:20The team waits for about 90 minutes while the balloon climbs 80,000 feet.
14:32Once there, a drawer mounted inside the payload opens.
14:37So this is what happens in the stratosphere. The drawer opens. The samples are collected on
14:44electron microscope stubs. We can take those directly from here, under sterile conditions,
14:50into the electron microscope. 16 miles up, the air pressure is so low that the balloon
14:56continues to expand until it ruptures and tumbles back to Earth with this precious cargo.
15:04This is a fishing trip. We're sending these balloons up. We don't know what we're catching.
15:08So on some trips, we'll catch nothing. On some trips, we'll catch something.
15:11And maybe we'll go for five launches with nothing. And then the sixth launch,
15:15we get an amazing array of organisms. He's hoping his latest launch will yield something like this.
15:23These are photos of samples Milton and his team collected on their first mission in 2013.
15:28And Milton believes they contain evidence of extraterrestrial life.
15:36This is the first amazing organism we found. If we go to a textbook for algae, bacteria,
15:43we don't see something like this. Milton's supposed aliens are only about 30 microns across,
15:49roughly twice the thickness of a human hair.
15:52At first, I was very upset about this structure because I thought it was a pollen grain. But when
15:58we do the chemical analysis, we found it was primarily titanium. And you can see that there's
16:03material coming out of the ball. And when we analyze this, it turns out to be biological.
16:08This is carbon and oxygen. It's biological.
16:10No life form yet discovered has a titanium shell. This might be the first and more crucial to Milton's
16:19case. No earthly organism would be moving fast enough to leave an impact crater on the collector.
16:26We see that there's an impact crater here. So this ball was coming in from space,
16:31impacted the sampler and caused a crater. The impact event means it's coming from outside.
16:37It is not lazily drifting up from the earth. It's coming in at great speed.
16:44Milton thinks comets might be the source.
16:48The temperature is right. The amount of water is right. The amount of carbon and organic material is
16:52right. Debris from their frozen tails could be littering our atmosphere with alien organisms.
17:02Hoping to replicate the success of his first launch, Milton has another half dozen planned.
17:07The big fear I have is that we got these amazing images and we never repeat it. Now in science,
17:13of course, a one-off is nothing. We need to get a repetition of something.
17:18Wow. Even if Milton does find more alien microbes,
17:22he cautions that they might look more familiar than we expect.
17:27If they've been arriving for eons, we may already share a lot in common with their biology.
17:33Everyone expects something from space to be special. There's not necessarily anything special about them.
17:39If they're coming in, they've been coming in for millions of years. They're here.
17:43We are part of space. These organisms are part of our biology.
17:46If alien microbes are capable of reaching Earth from across the galaxy,
17:55then could intelligent extraterrestrials also come here?
17:59We've seen no sign of them. Or are we searching for the wrong kind of signal?
18:12If intelligent aliens were to send us a message from a distant planet, would we hear it?
18:18What? 200 years ago, no one would have picked up a moist code on a telegraph wire,
18:26much less a voice on a cellular network.
18:30Perhaps we just don't have the technology yet to answer a call from an alien.
18:35University of Hawaii physicist John Learned thinks alien messages may be within our reach.
18:46We cannot guess what some extraterrestrial intelligence may be having in mind
18:52for why they would communicate or how they would communicate.
18:55So the best we can do is just look to see what is there.
18:59If extraterrestrials are out there and can send messages throughout the galaxy,
19:04John says they'll be using communications technology very different from our own.
19:12When we send messages over long distances on Earth, we rely on pulses of light or radio waves.
19:19However, using light for interstellar communication would be spotty at best.
19:28There's a lot of dust and gas out there in the universe, and that scatters light.
19:34So it wouldn't do to try to have light signaling from even our own galactic center.
19:41And messages sent with radio waves would have a lot of interference to fight through.
19:46There's hiss coming from all over the universe, from all the stars and galaxies.
19:53So there's background noise that you have to get around.
19:58If I'm tuning around with this radio, there's all kinds of noise that comes and goes.
20:04You have to find a frequency where the extraterrestrials would be choosing to communicate.
20:11The problem in tuning in is there's no schedule and no list of stations.
20:16So we don't know quite where to look.
20:19John thinks there's a better technology to send messages across the galaxy.
20:24Aliens might be using a tiny particle called a neutrino.
20:31They're subatomic particles produced by nuclear reactions like those in our sun.
20:35And violent events like exploding stars and gamma ray bursts.
20:43The most intriguing property of neutrinos is that they are so small,
20:47they can pass through matter as if it wasn't there.
20:50The kind of dense matter that stops all light and most radio waves can't stop neutrinos.
20:56They pass right through things, coming through the walls, coming up out of the ground here.
21:04We're in a breeze of about a million neutrinos through your thumbnail per second.
21:09In fact, if there was such a thing as a sunblock for neutrinos,
21:14a neutrino protection factor of one trillion or more wouldn't suffice.
21:19Even though just a thin layer of this on my hand is good enough for photons,
21:27it would have to be vastly, vastly thicker for stopping neutrinos.
21:32And in fact, this umbrella, which stops the photons from the sun just fine, wouldn't do the job.
21:39It would have to be a lead umbrella a light year thick to do the job.
21:42John thinks an alien civilization might decide to create a beam of neutrinos and pulse them,
21:51manufacturing a message in a kind of cosmic Morse code.
21:59But because neutrinos are so ghostly, they're extremely tough to detect or measure.
22:05The largest detector on Earth, called Ice Cube, lies buried under nearly three kilometers of ice
22:12at the south pole.
22:14Eighty-six strands of sensors wait for one of the neutrinos streaming through Earth
22:19to bump into one of the electrons in the surrounding ice.
22:24Ice Cube picks up only a handful of neutrino collisions each year.
22:30Neutrinos vary in energy. The highest energy neutrinos are the most rare.
22:36There's a great controversy going on right now about what are the source of these? What,
22:44what are the mechanisms that produce these high energies?
22:48Because they are so rare, John believes they could be great communication tools for aliens.
22:55If one of these high energy neutrinos makes contact with an electron inside Ice Cube, we'll know it.
23:02It'll make this little explosion, which is so characteristic that we could identify it uniquely.
23:12If you saw one, it would certainly get your attention.
23:16Physicists call this characteristic burst the glass shower resonance.
23:21The way a high energy neutrino interacts with an electron is similar to what happens when music meets a wine glass.
23:29All matter has a natural frequency.
23:39When energy from an outside source matches that natural frequency, the object will vibrate much more than usual.
23:48That's known as resonance.
23:49So what we've got here is a glass, hopefully a nice resonant glass.
23:57And we've got a speaker, which is attached to an amplifier.
24:02And we're driving acoustic energy, sound, very high intensity sound toward this.
24:07And we'll try to hit the resonance in the glass and break the glass.
24:12You can think of each note as a different energy level neutrino.
24:15And the wine glass as the electron.
24:23First, John tries various notes on an organ.
24:37Now, the singer.
24:38Finally, the guitar player.
24:52It's a matter of getting the right frequency, getting enough energy right on the right frequency.
25:19Man, it's gone.
25:20The glass shower resonance is the explosion that results when just the right type of high energy neutrino arrives.
25:30John thinks a string of these rare explosions wouldn't be a coincidence,
25:35but rather a sign of an extraterrestrial intelligence.
25:38And if we see those neutrinos coming from the same direction, then we certainly know that that is not a natural phenomenon.
25:47It would be the greatest discovery ever.
25:50I can't think of anything that would be a more amazing discovery than to find the first signs of extraterrestrial life.
25:58It would change our world.
26:00As exciting as it would be to find an alien message, the simple act of reading it could threaten our existence.
26:10The moment of first contact with an alien civilization will be the most important event in human history.
26:26But what if we already missed it?
26:32What if an alien message has arrived and we didn't notice?
26:36Maybe it's here right now, hiding inside our technology.
26:43Andrew Semien specializes in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence at UC Berkeley's SETI Research Center.
26:55He and his colleagues are looking for unusual signals in outer space, hoping to find one that might come from an alien civilization.
27:08I think that our first encounter with very advanced life probably will not come in a spaceship landing in Golden Gate Park.
27:18It's quite likely that it will come via a signal that we just happened to eavesdrop on.
27:22But it may be that aliens are already listening to our radio signals.
27:28If there were very advanced life nearby to Earth, they've monitored our radio signals that have left this planet.
27:35And so they almost certainly know quite a lot about us.
27:38Since the 1960s, communications satellites have been relaying information from one computer to another.
27:46And that information has been leaking out into space.
27:53If aliens understand how our computer networks operate and know that we're actively listening for them,
28:00Andrew believes they could take advantage of the situation.
28:04They could deliver a digital virus and know that we'd scoop it right up.
28:10We gather millions of radio signals from space each year in our search for intelligent communication.
28:17Those signals go straight to our computers so researchers can analyze them.
28:22We're looking for that one small nugget that stands out from the landscape.
28:35The signals that we look for are very, very weak, so we have to sift through all of the noise.
28:41Noise produced from other astrophysical sources, quasars and pulsars.
28:46Once CETI researchers gather potential alien signals, they take a closer look.
28:52But analyzing the signal on one of our computers wouldn't be enough to unleash an alien virus.
28:58Researchers would have to run the code.
29:01We have to take that data and we have to run it on a computer.
29:04And that's sort of akin to opening one of these eggs.
29:09Advanced alien hackers would probably know this.
29:12And they'd like to know there's another way into our networks.
29:17A way that wouldn't be dependent on a decision by one of us to run their code.
29:23Hundreds of radio antennas on Earth are specifically designed to exchange computer code with each other
29:29and immediately run those programs.
29:33A signal that was sent by another species to one of those antennas could be received
29:38and executed in the same way that it executes code that it receives from human transmissions.
29:46In fact, an alien code could already be here, operating undetected in our networks.
29:55The whole idea of a virus or a Trojan horse is to run some code on a computer or on a computer network
30:01that no one knows anything about.
30:03It runs itself surreptitiously under the radar.
30:09Human hackers have already shown it's possible to hide computer viruses for long periods.
30:15This Duxnet virus, developed in secret by the U.S. and Israel, lurked in the network
30:21of an Iranian nuclear facility for over a year, slowly damaging hundreds of uranium centrifuges.
30:28The virus sent signals to the plant's control room, indicating everything was normal.
30:36Until the centrifuges finally broke in 2010.
30:41A program from an advanced civilization could go unnoticed for much longer and be far more destructive.
30:49We might not be able to recognize it because it would be a piece of computer code that we had never
30:54seen before that was devised by a completely different species.
31:00Could alien programs already be inside our technology, preparing an attack on our networks?
31:06Or is there perhaps an even more unnerving possibility?
31:14The aliens themselves may be in our networks as digital life forms.
31:20If so, this man believes he knows how to find them.
31:24Could alien visitors have already arrived on Earth?
31:33Perhaps they have, and we just don't recognize them.
31:37Maybe they aren't made of flesh and blood, or metal, or anything we can touch.
31:43What if aliens are digital life forms?
31:55Chris Adame of Michigan State University is an evolutionary biologist and a computer scientist.
32:03He studies the border between life as we know it and life as it might be.
32:08What we really want to do is have a definition that does not depend on the very specifics
32:15of the form of life that we encounter here on Earth.
32:18What is life?
32:20The dictionary will say it involves metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.
32:28So plants and animals are obviously alive.
32:31But what about a robot?
32:33We could imagine a robot like that to be alive if, in fact, it could not only build another robot just like it,
32:41but also, in fact, makes copies of the programming and inserts that into the baby robot that it made.
32:51If it is doing that, it would be able to create a population of robots.
32:56But this thing is actually not alive.
32:58It was programmed by the people who built this plant.
33:01It does not actually have the capacity to self-perpetuate.
33:08Because a robot's operating instructions come from an outside entity,
33:12it can't adapt or evolve on its own.
33:18But that doesn't mean that something artificial can't be alive.
33:22Chris believes alien digital life forms could do everything we do,
33:26consume resources, reproduce, evolve, all inside a computer.
33:32He knows because he and his colleagues created organisms just like that.
33:39Their digital organisms live in a virtual environment called AVIDA.
33:42Each dot is a NVIDIA.
33:48Different colors represent different species.
33:52They're more like computer viruses that can replicate and make copies of themselves.
33:57Except these are special in the sense that when they make copies of themselves,
34:01they might make flawed copies in a sense of mutations.
34:05So these copies can actually evolve in a Darwinian manner,
34:09just like you would be doing in a Petri dish.
34:10But in this case, they are digital organisms.
34:14The survival of any species depends on having just the right rate of mutations.
34:20Zero mutations would mean AVIDIans could only copy themselves and never evolve.
34:26With too many mutations, the new version would no longer be a program,
34:30just random bits of data.
34:34Chris programmed his virtual organisms to mutate every generation.
34:38In other words, AVIDIans evolve.
34:43I'm standing in the middle of a grid that is going to help us understand how AVIDA works,
34:47and I'm going to be playing the role of digital organisms, and I'm going to do it like this.
34:52The different color shirts that I wear represent different digital organisms.
34:58The grid represents a limited amount of computer processing power over which the AVIDIans compete.
35:05AVIDA is designed to reward complex calculations, which we can represent with movements.
35:12Make a simple, fairly useless movement, like raising one arm,
35:16and the program doesn't replicate.
35:19Make a complex, useful movement, like going from sitting to standing,
35:24and the program can copy itself.
35:27The more copies of a certain program there are,
35:30the more computing power they can grab.
35:32Just like real life, AVIDIans pick up new movements and new combinations through trial and error.
35:42Going from sitting to jumping is a highly complex movement.
35:47That represents a complex calculation.
35:50You start with simple calculation, maybe an addition, maybe a small subtraction.
35:56If you could do multiplication, you can actually do better than these poor adders and subtractors.
36:01Then somebody doing square roots or logarithms or integrals
36:04would dominate over those that are just the pure multipliers.
36:07The red AVIDIans look like they're going to take over.
36:12But then, yellow stands up and executes a new, highly complex jumping jack move.
36:19Suddenly, yellow starts replicating faster than the other colors.
36:23Very quickly, you'll see a yellow type taking over, which then is followed by a red type,
36:30and then an orange type, and you'll see many different colors emerge, take over,
36:34and then go extinct again in a long, long period of evolution.
36:39Studying AVIDIans makes Chris feel confident that if digital aliens are hiding inside our networks,
36:46he'll be able to find them.
36:48He's found a telltale signature of life, whether it's biological or digital.
36:57Like all life forms, AVIDIans are born with a finite set of instructions.
37:03If Chris removes the rewards that cause AVIDIans to evolve,
37:07then each instruction will be used at roughly the same frequency.
37:12But living AVIDIans find certain instructions more valuable than others,
37:16and use them far more often.
37:19That is Chris's signature of life.
37:22Biological life has an equivalent signature.
37:25The pattern of amino acids used in our bodies is very different
37:29from the random pattern in non-living matter.
37:36But could aliens be even closer to us than inside our technology?
37:41This physicist believes an endless variety of aliens may be only a fraction of an inch
37:50away from every part of our world, but could remain forever out of reach.
37:55We assume that if alien life is already on Earth, it had to have traveled here from somewhere else.
38:10Whether primitive microbes or advanced beings, the assumption is they had to cover vast distances.
38:17But what if aliens have always been right next to us, living on a different plane of reality?
38:33Theoretical physicist Alejandro Jenkins is constantly amazed by the diversity of life in his native Costa Rica.
38:46But he's noticed that the seemingly endless variety of plants, animals, and insects tend to cluster in separate domains.
38:54Think of the difference between the canopy ecosystem that you have on the treetops,
39:01and then there would be an entirely different ecosystem right here on the beach floor.
39:06Maybe you can also think of another ecosystem on the surface of the ocean.
39:15Alejandro believes our universe may be like one of these ecosystems.
39:20He thinks the aliens could be within fractions of an inch of you, me, this spider, everything.
39:40If that's true, then where exactly are they?
39:44They would be displaced in another additional dimension that is not one of the three dimensions
39:50that we see in our everyday life.
39:54Many physicists are convinced there are dimensions of space and time that we cannot detect.
40:02Could aliens be living right among us, yet still out of reach?
40:08It's hard to think in terms of more than three dimensions.
40:10So let's suppose that instead of living in three dimensions, we lived in two.
40:13So the surface of a playing card is two-dimensional.
40:18But if you have an additional third dimension, you can stack as many cards as you want.
40:25So I can have this card, but right below it, I can have a different one, and so forth.
40:31So perhaps our world, our universe, is just one particular slice through that higher dimensional space.
40:38You would have to move only a very tiny distance in this other additional direction in order to get there.
40:44Alejandro believes the life that may exist in these extra dimensional universes
40:50could be in a form that's hard for us to recognize.
40:53We would expect on theoretical grounds that a lot of these other universes would have
40:59different matter contents and different kinds of forces between the particles upon the matter.
41:05Perhaps in some cases, even though the forces are different,
41:08you would still be able to get a form of life.
41:15In this wild section of Costa Rica, most creatures in one ecosystem
41:20are unaware that living things in an adjacent ecosystem exist.
41:27What we have here is a line of ants that's carrying leaves back to its nest.
41:31And I imagine that as they move
41:34down the trunk, they're only aware of the fact that they can move up or down to the left or to the right.
41:39And we know that there is another dimension in which the ant cannot move.
41:44Because an ant, like say a butterfly, cannot fly away in that direction.
41:48So maybe they're not aware of the fact that there's something else out there.
41:53We might be like the ants, unable to see other universes around us.
41:57Could we ever find another dimension or even travel there?
42:03Alejandro thinks probably not.
42:06It would seem like we would never be able to see those other universes,
42:09because light would not be able to cross that divide.
42:17The old saying about the search for aliens was,
42:20the truth is out there.
42:23Well, there's a good chance that they're also in here.
42:28When we discover aliens, will we also discover a completely new concept of life,
42:34consciousness, and intelligence?
42:36I certainly hope so.
42:38The only thing we really know for sure is that our civilization is just a tiny speck in
42:44the greater scheme of things.
42:46And we'll never stop wondering who else might share this universe with us.
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