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00:00Imagine if you could halt the constant march of time.
00:10If you could slow it down and speed it up.
00:16Imagine if you could stop time or even reverse it.
00:22The world about us would look quite different.
00:30Imagine no longer. Come with us as we go on a journey through time.
00:53Our lives are ruled by the clock.
01:00But our obsession with time should come as no surprise.
01:07Deep inside us, we all have a clock that regulates our lives.
01:16Can this body clock tell us when we're most likely to get drunk?
01:20If we all wanted to live forever, could this worm hold the key to eternal life?
01:32In our busy lives, we are always chasing time, always trying to save it.
01:44But in a crisis, how can we change time to help save ourselves?
01:50We think of ourselves as slaves to the clock.
02:01BELL RINGS
02:02Racing through life at breakneck speed has become the norm.
02:14But could our pursuit of speed be the key to time travel,
02:25letting us visit the distant future?
02:29Will we ever truly become masters of time?
02:34Time is precious.
02:47We never seem to have enough.
02:48We've spent centuries building clocks,
02:56all to more and more accurately measure the passing of hours, minutes and seconds.
03:02Yet it still doesn't buy us any more of the stuff.
03:08Time has come to mean the straightjacketing of our day,
03:11the constant schedule that rules our lives.
03:19Yet, if you think about it,
03:21our everyday experience of time is far from constant.
03:26We have long, lazy days when time seems to stand still.
03:34But time doesn't change.
03:36Only our sense of it, this sensation,
03:39might all be down to how we process what we see.
03:44We can see the effect at the movies.
03:47A film seems to pass by in a seamless flow.
03:52But what we are really seeing is a series of static photographs,
03:56one following quickly after another.
04:02When slowed down,
04:03it's clear that each one is slightly different than the one before.
04:06Flash 24 of them passed each second.
04:09And they create a sense of fluid movement.
04:18Your brain works in a similar way.
04:23When you leave the cinema,
04:24you're also seeing the world as a series of pictures.
04:27Your brain does a rapid scan of each new image to register what's changed.
04:41It's how we avoid bumping into things.
04:43But like a film,
04:44we just see the joined-up effect.
04:46If we could reduce the number of images we see each second,
04:54just imagine how our sense of time would change too.
04:59Our lives would appear to flash past like an express train.
05:09The seasons would whiz past in minutes rather than months.
05:25If, on the other hand,
05:36our brains scanned a huge number of separate images every second,
05:40we'd be swamped with detail.
05:43It would be like living in perpetual slow motion.
05:45And let's face it,
05:56that's just too chilled out.
05:58But not for a fly.
06:03A fly needs exactly this heightened level of awareness
06:07because it hurtles through the world at such high speed.
06:12Flies see things we don't,
06:14the flickering of a strip light
06:15and the individual scans on a TV screen.
06:18Most importantly,
06:20it can see the need for a quick escape
06:22from the flyswap, for instance.
06:29We don't need to see the world like a fly.
06:32Day to day,
06:33that level of detail is unnecessary.
06:35The rate at which we clock our surroundings
06:38is the one that best fits our pace of life.
06:48It can vary.
06:53When we're waiting,
06:54time seems to drag.
06:58When we're busy,
06:59time flies.
07:02But we can override all of this.
07:05We have a remarkable hidden power over time.
07:09It kicks in during a crisis.
07:16Faced with extreme danger,
07:17the mind enters an altered state.
07:19People report seeing in black and white.
07:21Why bother to waste time processing colour
07:24when your brain is on overload?
07:31But most importantly,
07:32people say time slows down.
07:37The brain is now on high alert,
07:39processing far more each second than normal.
07:47It buys you extra time to think and act.
08:02So we can, when necessary,
08:03and without a second thought,
08:05fundamentally control our experience of time.
08:08Why then do we feel we're such slaves to the clock?
08:23Time is organised to a level that borders on obsession.
08:27We can now measure it to the nearest billionth of a second.
08:30How did this obsession start?
08:42Well, we've come by it quite naturally.
08:44Even though the Egyptians were the first to formally divide daylight into hours,
08:49we were well equipped to tell the time way before this.
08:52Our earliest ancestors used the changing seasons to measure out the years.
09:08The phases of the moon marked out the months.
09:11But it was the daily arc of the sun that counted most.
09:28Nature follows this rhythm.
09:30So no surprise that the sun's movement across the sky affects us too.
09:53Although we use the shadows it casts to mark time,
09:56the sun's influence goes much deeper than this.
10:02It helps our bodies keep time by regulating a clock that we don't even see.
10:13One that's ticking away deep inside us.
10:21It's a biological clock,
10:23a master clock that's set by the sun
10:26and which controls all aspects of our lives.
10:29When you're most alert,
10:30when you sleep,
10:31and even when you are most likely to visit the toilet.
10:45The exact location of this clock?
10:48Right in the middle of your brain,
10:50in an area called the hypothalamus.
10:54But like man-made timepieces,
10:58this biological clock loses time.
11:01It has to be reset twice a day by the sun.
11:07It's all done through a hotline of nerves
11:10that link this master clock via the eye to the outside world,
11:15and so to the sun's cycle.
11:16Well done, lads.
11:17Cheers.
11:18Cheers.
11:20Mostly we're oblivious to how our bodies keep time.
11:26And yet we're riddled with different clocks.
11:29Even our liver has one.
11:31The liver does most of our detoxing,
11:32so knowing how it ticks is crucial if you need to stay sober,
11:37or if you really want to get legless.
11:42So what's the low down?
11:43The liver is on go slow,
11:44and least able to break down alcohol around lunchtime.
11:45So drinking then will get you merrier quicker.
11:47So what's the low down?
11:50The liver is on go slow,
11:52and least able to break down alcohol around lunchtime.
11:56So drinking then will get you merrier quicker.
11:59But a few too many does more than make you feel woozy.
12:18It can have some very strange effects on your other cycles.
12:25Your body temperature follows a very strong rhythm,
12:27which is also controlled by a biological clock.
12:31But this is knocked off track after a session at the pub.
12:37Using a thermal camera to monitor the body's temperature,
12:40scientists can track how the normal rhythm is upset.
12:45The changing colours show the temperature seesawing through the night.
12:57It's the disruption to this and other body clocks
13:06that's thought to affect the size of your hangover.
13:12But science isn't revealing all bad news.
13:17Just as there's the best time to drink alcohol,
13:20there is also a prime time to take the cure.
13:23The latest research shows any medicine will most likely work best
13:27if taken at a particular time of day.
13:33It's already known that painkillers do the job best when taken in the morning.
13:37So now you can deal with that hangover a bit quicker too.
13:52There seems to be no escape from the pressure of time.
13:55Our bodies are full of clocks regulating everything we do.
14:00But these in-built time machines have unexpected benefits.
14:05Even though you might sometimes cut things too fine,
14:10your body has an almost miraculous sense of timing.
14:13We are always making split-second decisions.
14:20It lets us juggle, not just fire, but everyday situations as well.
14:26It's something we take for granted, but get your timing wrong and, well,
14:40you might get your fingers burned.
14:41All the time we're controlling when our bodies should move or stay still.
14:54That's fine for a simple routine, but how about this?
14:57To dance the flamenco, you need to be able to measure many different time intervals.
15:15You need to judge the space between claps,
15:17the split seconds between foot stops,
15:24and the intervals between the twists and turns of your body.
15:34Where do you even start?
15:39To judge the next move, you need something like a stopwatch.
15:43In fact, you already have one.
15:44It's phenomenally fast and accurate,
15:47and found in the part of the brain called the basal ganglia.
15:52Our heads are full of electrical impulses
15:54that are all firing off at different rates.
15:58The basal ganglia does the clever bit,
16:01matching up these electrical beats to the rhythms in the dance routine.
16:06That's how we keep in time to the music.
16:15So, top dancers' brains are working flat out too.
16:25But we all have the same basic kit,
16:28so don't plead two left feet.
16:30Sign up for that flamenco class.
16:32From flamenco to footy, this in-built precision timing controls every move we make.
16:51Great timing is one thing, but what we really want is more time.
16:58And the only way to achieve that is to stretch the lifetime we've got.
17:03When our biological clock stops ticking, so do we.
17:21Is there anything we can do to keep it going?
17:23Scientists have always been searching for life's holy grail, immortality.
17:35But now nature is giving them some clues.
17:38For most living things, freezing is deadly.
17:45But insects such as this weta, some amphibians and even a species of reptile,
17:52survive months of extreme cold by doing just this.
17:57They put time on hold.
17:59Ice crystals usually destroy living cells.
18:09But not in these animals.
18:11When warm weather brings a thaw, they're back in business.
18:14How they do this might prove useful one day, but some people can't wait.
18:26They've been frozen in the belief that solutions to ageing and disease will be found.
18:35The catch is you have to be dead first.
18:38After dying, these optimists are suspended head first in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees centigrade.
18:53And there they remain, frozen in time, banking on a future when death can be reversed.
19:08Back in the real world, even our attempts to live longer are backfiring on us.
19:16The very air we need to breathe is also killing us.
19:23We breathe in over 10,000 times a day.
19:27And each time something in the air makes us age.
19:31It's oxygen.
19:32Our cells need oxygen to make energy.
19:40But leftover oxygen slips away and starts a kind of rusting from within.
19:50Oxygen isn't the only rogue element.
19:55Sunlight, pollution and tobacco smoke also form these so-called free radicals.
20:02And it's these radicals that do the damage.
20:07The good news is there's something that can stop the rot.
20:11Even though it proves your mum right.
20:15You have to eat your greens.
20:20Vegetables in particular contain antioxidants which help soak up those free radicals.
20:26So broccoli and beans help keep those wrinkles at bay.
20:29If you had thought that was the bad news, well, there's worse.
20:40The human body has a design flaw.
20:43All the billions of cells that make up our bodies contain the genetic instruction manual that makes us who we are.
20:56DNA.
20:58Our cells need constant renewal and they do this by dividing.
21:03Each time the DNA instructions get copied and passed on.
21:07Sadly, the system's got a glitch.
21:14And surprisingly quickly, mistakes start creeping in.
21:22As the cells divide, a bit of DNA information might get lost.
21:26So the new cell isn't an exact copy.
21:30It's a bit like a game of Chinese whispers.
21:35It's why our bodies end up looking very different from how they started.
21:40Ageing seems to be a fact of life.
21:48So how on earth can we stay forever young?
21:54For starters, you could try hiding your age.
21:57But even if all the surgery, creams, supplements and Botox in the world make you look younger, they won't help you live forever.
22:14Still, we are pushing our lifetime as far as we can.
22:18Just a century ago, life expectancy in the West was around 40 years.
22:26But thanks to better diets and medical backup, a child born now can expect to live to a ripe old age of 80.
22:38Today in the UK, there are more centenarians than ever before.
22:42In 1952, the Queen sent 225 telegrams to people on their 100th birthday.
22:53In 2003, she sent almost 5,000.
23:00The limit.
23:03Well, we believe the oldest human ever lived to 122.
23:08So can we buy ourselves more time?
23:12Some scientists think we can.
23:17They've increased the life of one animal to the human equivalent of 500 years.
23:23Admittedly, it's only a worm, but it has genes that control ageing.
23:32By fiddling with these genes, scientists have turned the worm, on the right,
23:36into a very ancient specimen indeed.
23:41Maybe, with a similar genetic nip and tuck, we could one day cheat time and live much, much longer.
23:50But for now, perhaps the best way to buy more time is not with science, but by having fun.
23:56You can grow even older by staying young at heart.
24:11A happy, optimistic person could dramatically extend their life by over 20 years.
24:26Instead of reaching just 85, you could laugh your way to 106.
24:39No.
24:41So, keep on smiling.
24:44Oh, and remember to eat those greens.
24:48No.
24:49No.
24:51No.
24:57Although our time eventually runs out, we're finding ways of pushing life spans to the limit.
25:04Look after your body, and it will look after you.
25:07Our brains can change how we experience time and avoid disaster.
25:11And with a little help from the sun, our body clocks keep ticking over nicely.
25:18So, without even realising, our bodies already master time.
25:24But we're not content with this.
25:27We expect more and more from the time we've got.
25:30Which means everything else has to speed up.
25:33How has this race against time changed the world around us?
25:54One of the biggest repercussions from doing things more quickly may have been triggered over 50,000 years ago.
26:00This was when man first set foot in Australia.
26:05The first people brought something that helped them to survive here.
26:09But it was something that may have changed the landscape forever.
26:17Fire.
26:18With fire, they may have set off a chain of events that they knew nothing about.
26:33It's just one example of how we humans cannot see the results of what we do.
26:39Not because the events aren't dramatic, but because they happen on a timescale way, way beyond our own.
26:46To see what happened in Australia, we first have to appreciate how fire transformed these people's lives.
27:07Fire is destructive, so why torch the very land they lived on?
27:11It was all done to save time. With fire, they could clear the land faster than ever before.
27:34And despite appearances, the devastation was short-lived.
27:39The bare ground was quickly filled with fresh new growth.
27:43These tender shoots attracted grazing animals.
27:45It made hunting quicker and easier.
27:46It made hunting quicker and easier.
27:47Saving time is all part of the human drive to save time.
27:48It's all part of the world.
27:49It's all part of the world.
27:50It's all part of the world.
27:51It's all part of the world.
27:52And despite appearances, the devastation was short-lived.
27:57The bare ground was quickly filled with fresh new growth.
28:01These tender shoots attracted grazing animals.
28:04It made hunting quicker and easier.
28:14Saving time is all part of the human drive to survive.
28:18But now there's a suggestion that these small-scale fires did more than just scorch a few plants.
28:33Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, can we see how the dramatic changes here in Australia might have begun.
28:40Fire was such a great time-saver that the early people relied on it more and more.
28:51As the blazes became more frequent, the plants had less and less time to grow back.
29:01Thousands of fires over thousands of generations may have changed the relationship between the plants and the climate.
29:10Eventually, some of Australia's annual monsoons just dried up.
29:22The skies cleared and the rivers ran dry.
29:40Gone was the water from in front of their eyes.
29:58But because it disappeared little by little, drop by drop over thousands of years, they never saw it happening.
30:04Some believe this continental-scale change in the weather dried up Australia's largest lake.
30:15When the first people arrived, Lake Eyre covered a vast area in the middle of the country.
30:21Its disappearance coincided with man's arrival.
30:24Tiny bits of time-saving, the use of fire to clear the land and speed up the hunt for food, added up, over time, to this.
30:43Australia turned into the largely desert continent we know today.
30:47And a once-massive lake is gone.
30:50And a once-massive lake is gone.
30:52Fire is one of the first time-saving devices, but it certainly wasn't the last.
31:05We humans will do anything to cut corners.
31:10But even as we settled into the fast lane, we discovered something that took us up a whole new gear.
31:27The fire is one of the first time-saving devices, but it certainly wasn't the last.
31:31We humans will do anything to cut corners.
31:34But even as we settled into the fast lane, we discovered something that took us up a whole new gear.
31:38The sun once ruled our day.
32:02Here we're turning the sun's heat into round-the-clock energy, electricity.
32:08And with it, we are changing our whole perspective on time.
32:13Since we discovered electricity, time itself has been given the shock treatment.
32:27Life today would be impossible without electricity.
32:36Everything happens with the flick of a switch.
32:48Electricity has pushed everything into overdrive.
32:51It's the power behind the world's fastest-growing city, Las Vegas.
32:55One minute, there's an empty plot of land.
33:11Then a timber frame.
33:13Turn the corner, and the walls go up.
33:15Next street, the tiles go on.
33:17Opposite, the houses are finished.
33:21And round the corner, people have already moved in, ready to live the dream.
33:26There can be a thousand new people a week riding in on this power surge.
33:38It's taken just decades to turn a vast area of desert into downtown.
33:43But it's not just Vegas.
33:46It's everywhere.
33:51Electricity hasn't just transformed the world.
33:55It's turned night into day.
33:58In Vegas, buildings go up even in the dark.
34:18When the sun goes down, the city lights up.
34:21The effect is like a whoop of victory over our age-old slavery to daylight.
34:43Now there's no need to wait for anything.
34:46The slot machines, one-armed bandits, restaurants, are all open 24 hours a day.
35:03Dinner time is any time.
35:06Here you won't run out of time.
35:08Only money.
35:12This round-the-clock existence is not just changing our habits.
35:16Many of the animals that share our cities have always been nocturnal.
35:23But 24-hour light is making some of them behave in strange ways.
35:33Birds come into our cities for warmth from the lights, especially at Christmas.
35:37But the light has also meant that some birds are singing their dawn chorus in the middle of the night.
35:47The trees are confused too.
35:54Longer nights in autumn signal the shedding of leaves.
35:58But trees growing by street lamps are now keeping their leaves longer than those in the dark.
36:04We can only wonder what this is doing to our own body clocks.
36:15Electricity has encouraged us to expect more and more from our day.
36:18We're burning the candle at both ends.
36:28Electricity hasn't just accelerated changes to the landscape.
36:33It's given us control over the night as well as the day.
36:36It's changed our whole attitude to time.
36:46Not even nature has escaped our frenzied attention.
36:50Nature takes its time.
36:52It changes slowly over many, many generations.
36:55So no wonder we got impatient.
37:08Nature may well be inventive.
37:11But these creations take thousands of years of step-by-step change.
37:16And natural selection isn't just slow.
37:24It's haphazard.
37:25You never know what you'll get.
37:31But we haven't got thousands of years.
37:37We want things now.
37:39So we've performed some unnatural selection to move nature along.
37:54So who got the fast-track treatment?
38:05Our best friend, the dog.
38:07This is a standard poodle, although there's little standard about this one.
38:18It's at the top of its league.
38:20A purebred pedigree.
38:22100% poodle.
38:28If you don't like poodles, don't worry.
38:30There are plenty of other dogs to choose from.
38:37And the choice is staggering.
38:44There are over 400 different breeds.
38:56But whatever their shape or size, at one time all dogs resembled one very distant and long-lost cousin.
39:03Compared to the wolf, our pink poodle seems light-years away.
39:13But without the wolf, there would be no poodle, pitbull or Pekingese.
39:18Way back we spotted that the wolf has some rather useful skills.
39:28They're team players and superb hunters.
39:31So we bred wolf pups, selecting and reinforcing the tricks that would serve us best.
39:36Over generations we took a wild predator and moulded its descendants into working dogs.
39:48Animals that could speed up our hunts, guard our livestock and protect us.
39:53But why breed a poodle?
39:58Well, originally they were working dogs.
40:05They're good in water and help their masters retrieve game from marshes and rivers.
40:10So, for a poodle, bath time's a doddle.
40:16After all, its name comes from the German word poodle, which roughly translated means to splash around.
40:24There's nothing these pooches are afraid of. Mud, water, even pink dye.
40:35We've all seen a red setter. Why not a pink poodle?
40:39We've hijacked nature and steered it down a crack of our own making.
40:46And at what speed many of the weird and wonderful dogs that exist today have been fashioned by us in just a few centuries.
41:09What next? Perhaps we'll even breed them pink.
41:22We've become masters of evolutionary time.
41:25We've taken natural selection by the scruff of the neck, controlled it and put it into fast forward.
41:31But it's not just animals that have been subjected to our need for speed.
41:38We want fast food too.
41:41With so many of us all chasing the clock, we must get our food from plant to plate as quickly as possible.
41:52How have we done that?
42:01Take rice. Across Asia, it's the staple diet for two billion people.
42:15It feeds over half the world's population.
42:22In Indonesia, the landscape is dominated by it.
42:25Huge tracts of the jungle have been replaced by rice fields and terraces.
42:39Devoting large areas of land to one single crop is the only way to feed so many people quickly and easily.
42:56But this is just the start of high-speed farming.
43:00Rice growing still needs a large workforce.
43:13And despite many hands making light work, it still takes a lot of time to grow and harvest.
43:18So what can be done to speed things up and save time?
43:33Where possible, machines take over.
43:40This is how we get our daily bread.
43:42Huge combine harvesters clear wheat fields quickly and efficiently.
43:58But there's another, bigger problem.
44:01Nature controls the speed at which food plants grow and ripen.
44:06And, of course, that dictates when they hit the shops.
44:08About 30 years ago, tomatoes were only available in the summer.
44:14Now they're in our shopping trolleys year-round.
44:17There are plum tomatoes, vine-ripened tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, Vittoria pomodorino.
44:23We have an insatiable appetite for them.
44:27The British alone consume 420,000 tonnes every year.
44:32What happened to the humble tomato?
44:34The tomato plant fell under our complete control.
44:39And what helped us to do this was the glasshouse.
44:57With glasshouses, tomato growth went high-tech.
45:00In a short space of time, the greenhouse has gone from rustic garden potting place to megalithic tomato factory.
45:17This one covers over 11 hectares of the English countryside.
45:24But it's about as far from nature as you can get.
45:28Is this a window on the future?
45:30It's a precision-controlled world within a world where growing time is compressed and tomatoes hurtle through their cycle at unnatural speed.
45:48They're grown in a special mineral base and drip-fed the water and food they need.
45:54As the temperature gets too hot, the windows open automatically and once the best growing temperature is reached, they close.
46:02This is performance growth.
46:0724 hours a day, 7 days a week.
46:11Seasons are a thing of the past.
46:14There's even a boiler which kicks in to stop the tomatoes catching a chill.
46:19Nothing is left to chance.
46:20They ripen double quick and then they're picked.
46:33Even this happens round the clock.
46:35And although it's done by hand, it's made as easy as possible.
46:39So no time is wasted.
46:40Demand is rocketing.
46:51It might not be long before we're eating more tomatoes than any other fruit.
46:55No wonder we're doing all we can to grow them as fast as possible.
46:59To speed up nature, we have created artificial worlds.
47:13Is it only a matter of time before all we grow comes under our control?
47:18The tomatoes rise from market garden fruit to techno plant is just one of the many ways in which we've taken time and shrunk it.
47:34If you drive down time, you drive down cost.
47:37Time is now money.
47:39Time is now money.
47:41Time is now money.
47:43Time is now money.
47:45Time is now money.
47:47Time is now money.
47:49Time is now money.
47:51Time is now money.
47:53Time is now money.
47:55Time is now money.
47:57Time is now money.
47:59Time is now money.
48:01Time is now money.
48:03Time is now money.
48:05Time is now money.
48:07Time is now money.
48:09¡Suscríbete al canal!
48:39This iron ore mine in Australia is one of the most enormous holes in the ground we've ever created.
48:57But where are the miners? Who's doing all the work?
49:04Men have been replaced by monster machines.
49:09One 40-ton scoop does the work of hundreds of men in a fraction of the time.
49:19The ultimate labor-saving device.
49:35Back-breaking work that used to take one man one month now takes one minute.
49:41We have the power to move mountains.
49:50And what's more, we can do it with breathtaking speed.
50:06A mine that today takes 30 years to dig might in the future take only 30 days.
50:16But what's behind the rush?
50:27This iron ore is the essential ingredient in our drive to beat time.
50:40It goes to make steel and beyond that, all the tools that save us precious minutes.
50:46But one product above all has changed our experience of time.
51:04This train is carrying enough ore to make 15,000 of them.
51:09The most revolutionary time-saving machine ever invented.
51:14The car, perhaps more than anything else, has accelerated the way we live.
51:35It's possibly our first ever time machine.
51:38It gives us the freedom to travel further, faster than ever before.
51:48The first ones didn't exactly take your breath away.
51:54Though at the time, people thought you'd suffocate if you went much faster.
51:58But that didn't hold us back, top speeds have gone from barely more than walking pace to over 300 kilometres per hour in less than a century.
52:28A century ago, most people never left their own village.
52:35Today, we can get to anywhere on the planet in less than 48 hours.
52:39Because we can get about so fast, we're always on the move.
52:57Speed is how we beat time.
53:16And speed may be the key to our ultimate dream, time travel.
53:22Imagine being able to turn back the clock and relive your life.
53:34Imagine turning your car into a time machine and taking a journey through time.
53:43Well, today, we are much closer to turning this dream into a reality.
53:49And that's because we now know there's no such thing as the constant march of time.
54:01In 1905, Albert Einstein suggested the mind-bending theory that time varies with speed.
54:09He proved that the length of one second depends on how fast you're moving.
54:13The faster you travel, the slower that second would take.
54:19So what would this mean in practice?
54:27Take these twins.
54:29One travels into space at phenomenal speed, leaving his brother behind on Earth.
54:39Neither will notice a change in time.
54:41But when they meet again, they'll see a big difference.
54:46When our space traveller completes what was, for him, a four-month trip,
54:51he finds his brother on Earth has aged over 40 years.
54:57The younger twin has time-travelled into his brother's future.
55:01So how fast would he have been going?
55:10Something close to the speed of light.
55:13That's around 300,000 kilometres per second.
55:21But is this actually possible?
55:24Well, in just 100 years, we've gone from top speeds of 12 kilometres an hour
55:28to seven times the speed of sound.
55:31The speed of light is still a long way off.
55:34But new breakthroughs could find us hurtling towards it faster than we ever imagined.
55:41However far-fetched time travel may seem, don't brush it off as a dream.
55:46Lots of things once seemed impossible.
55:53A little over 100 years ago, the idea of talking to someone on the other side of the world
55:59would have been laughed at.
56:02Today, a telephone call to New Zealand, where words move at the speed of light,
56:08is taken for granted.
56:09So time travel might happen sooner than you think.
56:12But what about the time travel we see in science fiction,
56:19going back as well as forward in time?
56:26Scientists have discovered tunnels that connect two areas of space,
56:30which might just do this.
56:33These tunnels, called wormholes, are a shortcut between two points in time.
56:39At the moment, it is still a theory.
56:42But, given time...
56:46So, if you could become a time lord,
56:49what power would you have?
56:52Just imagine the options.
56:55You could head into the future to visit your great-grandchildren,
56:59perhaps even see their children's children.
57:03What kind of world would they be living in?
57:06You might prefer to take a trip into the past.
57:16Visit the world of the ancient Egyptians and see how they built the pyramids.
57:21Would you tell the early firemakers of Australia the consequences of their actions?
57:37Maybe you'd go to see the spectacles of the world,
57:40witness the creation of the Grand Canyon.
57:42You could even walk with dinosaurs.
57:54Would you go back into the unknown over 15 billion years
57:59to witness the creation of the universe and the very beginning of time?
58:05If you could become a true master of time,
58:12where would you go?
58:14What would you dare to change?
58:16Well, OK, how about going back
58:22to visit some of the greatest heroes of Greek mythology,
58:25starting with Jason and the Argonauts?
58:28Greek Gods and Goddesses is new to BBC One at 8 next Sunday.
58:32Next tonight, it's Waking the Dead.
58:34Next tonight, it's Waking the Dead.
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