- 19 hours ago
Embark on a captivating journey as we delve into two contrasting worlds. Join us as we discover the connections between past and future, unraveling the secrets that lie within these fascinating ruins.
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00:00Imagine you could spend an entire week scanning ancient ruins
00:03and taking photographs of the world's most surreal archaeological sites.
00:08Would you be up for it?
00:11So, let's do some digging!
00:15The first stop on your busy itinerary is Southeast Asia.
00:20It's home to some pretty cool ruins.
00:23You start in Bagan, located in the hinterlands of Myanmar.
00:27There are many ways to visit the site, and you're glad you've booked two different experiences.
00:33The first one is a hot air balloon trip at sunrise.
00:37Right before dawn, you board the balloon, and as soon as the sun starts to appear on the horizon,
00:42you begin your flight over the marvelous area.
00:47As the sun rises, it glistens on more than 2,000 conic-shaped golden structures.
00:52The hot air balloon ride is quick, but it gives you unparalleled views of all the 40 miles over which
00:59the site sprawls.
01:03Back on land, you rent a bicycle and roam the village of ruins.
01:08Some of them are open and allow you to peep inside.
01:11These magnificent ruins were built between the 11th and 13th century CE and were mainly places of worship.
01:19There were originally over 10,000 buildings, but they were gradually deteriorating over time due to earthquakes.
01:26Thankfully, the site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site back in 2015 and has since been preserved.
01:36Up next, you catch a flight to Cambodia.
01:39You take some time to visit Angkor.
01:43The world-famous archaeological site nestled deep within the jungle.
01:47Good thing you've brought bug spray with you.
01:49The city of Angkor was once the capital of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to 15th century.
01:55FYI, the word Angkor means capital city in the Khmer language.
02:00The city was founded by King Yassavarman I, and it became one of the largest cities in the pre-industrial
02:06world.
02:07Researchers say nearly 1 million people lived there.
02:11Until today, Angkor is admired for its stunning architecture.
02:15The Khmer style is recognized in the use of huge blocks of sandstone.
02:20The towers are believed to have been once decorated with gold.
02:24But today, the site is a maze of vine-covered temples.
02:27The city was abandoned in 1431 and wasn't rediscovered until the 1840s.
02:34Oh, and just so you know, this is also a UNESCO Heritage Site.
02:38It became one in 1992.
02:40In case you want to brag to your friends about your culturally rich adventures in the future.
02:47Now, your trip continues in Egypt.
02:50You're here to visit the Karnak Temple in the city of Luxor.
02:53You opt for the most unusual way to get to Luxor.
02:56That is, a boat ride down the Nile River.
02:59Leaving Cairo, you head south until you reach the famous ancient city.
03:04Luxor was once the capital of Egypt and a true hub of power and wealth.
03:09That is why the Karnak Complex is such a great archaeological site.
03:14You choose to visit it at night.
03:16And still at the entrance, you are struck by the site's beauty.
03:19In the evening, artificial lights cast a golden glow on the temple's statues in stone columns.
03:26The temple is huge and was built mainly around the 18th and 19th centuries BCE.
03:32Each Egyptian pharaoh from that period left their own architectural mark on the site.
03:37The highlight of this tour is taking a walk through the Avenue of Sphinxes and discovering the Great Hypostyle Hall.
03:43This hall is filled with towering pylons and solid sandstone columns.
03:49A true wonder!
03:52From Egypt, you head down to Jordan.
03:54Now, if you like terracotta landscapes, you've come to the right place.
03:58The city of Petra is a marvel of the ancient world.
04:02Located in Jordan's Desert, the city was a commercial hub back in the 4th century BCE.
04:07The Nabatians, an Arab Bedouin shrine, lived in the so-called Rose City and thrived for many years,
04:14having accumulated a significant amount of wealth.
04:17The city was known for its innovative water management system, which made the region inhabitable.
04:23And yes, you'll catch a glimpse of its ruins on your tour.
04:26The rock-carved, gate-like structure Petra is famous for what is called the Pharaoh's Treasury.
04:32It stands at the main entrance to the site and is said to have a treasure hidden beneath it.
04:37Don't forget to stand right beneath it and take one of those classic pictures for social media.
04:43Once Petra has been ticked off the list, you fly to southern Europe.
04:47More specifically, to the tip of the Italian boot.
04:51You have a day trip scheduled to visit the ruins of Pompeii.
04:55Pompeii can be reached by car from the city of Naples.
04:59It's home to the eerie yet well-preserved ruins of a city that was once engulfed by lava.
05:05When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it left the city of Pompeii completely buried under millions of tons of
05:12volcanic ash.
05:16The ancient city was first discovered by beneath the volcanic rock in the 16th century, but it was first cleared
05:22from debris in the 1870s.
05:25Today, you'll be able to walk down the streets of these ancient Roman ruins and imagine what the town looked
05:30like in its heyday.
05:33Pompeii was a vibrant and rich municipality.
05:36The site's ruins revealed that many areas of Pompeii had boasted impressive bakeries, markets, and even houses with balconies, which
05:44were a sign of great wealth at the time.
05:46And believe it or not, even some artworks survived the eruption.
05:51Archaeologists found well-preserved frescoes in murals with mythological creatures.
05:56All this indicates that members of the high society lived there.
06:00The city even had thermal baths and showers made from luxurious materials.
06:09While you're still in Europe, you'll hop over to visit the iconic Stonehenge.
06:14It's a perfect day trip if you stay in the city of London, just a short train journey away.
06:20Stonehenge dots the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, and is one of the world's most recognized ancient ruins.
06:27More than 5,000 years old, these curious stone rings are some of the oldest stone structures on the planet.
06:33Created out of sandstone, they are shrouded in misery.
06:37Who built them and why is still largely unknown.
06:40Popular theories claim that Stonehenge was used as a great solar calendar, built to help people keep track of days,
06:47weeks, and months.
06:49Hmm, talk about hard work to create a mere calendar, huh?
06:55In the final leg of your trip will take you to explore the Southern Americas.
06:59In Guatemala, in Central America, you'll find ancient Mayan ruins.
07:04The Lost City of Tikal is a city made of 3,000 buildings, the remains of the capital of the
07:10Mayan Empire.
07:11You can compare its importance to such cities as London or New York today.
07:15The North Acropolis is Tikal's most ancient complex of monuments.
07:20Built solely by human hands in 350 BCE, it served as the resting place of kings and chiefs.
07:26Back in the day, the Steppe Pyramid Temples were painted a beautiful red.
07:31Mayans love that color.
07:34Today, of course, you'll only see the limestone.
07:37You might wonder, what made such a great city turn into ruins?
07:41Well, archaeologists have no clue about the cause of Tikal's decline.
07:45Until today, this question remains unanswered.
07:48Was it a drought? Disease?
07:51Maybe we'll never know.
07:54Are you in the mood for some Mayan ruins?
07:58Chichen Itza is an archaeological site with the best preserved pyramids on Earth.
08:03Located in Mexico's Yucatan State, this Mayan city is well over 1,500 years old.
08:09At its peak, it was home to 35,000 people.
08:14The site covers 1.9 square miles and has many ruins spread throughout it.
08:18The highlight is El Castilla, a tremendous steppe temple, rising 80 feet above the ground.
08:26Its most peculiar feature is that it has 91 steps on each of its four sides,
08:31including the upper platform, which makes for 365 steps,
08:36the same as the number of days in the solar year.
08:41Phew! What an intense trip!
08:43Time to head home now and soak it all in!
08:46See you next time!
08:4715,000 years after the construction of the first space colony.
08:51Planet Kepler, 452b.
08:541,400 light years from Old Earth.
08:57Hello, first-year students.
08:59We're glad to welcome you to the Intergalactic University.
09:03Endless space is now home for us humans.
09:06But thousands of years ago, we used to live on just one planet we now call Old Earth.
09:12Yes, I understand. It's difficult to believe.
09:15Today, it's one huge nature reserve.
09:19Mammoths and stegosaurs walk on its surface, and pterodactyls fly in its skies.
09:24It turned out to be easier to recreate animals that roamed it millions of years ago
09:29than to understand how our ancestors lived.
09:32The Great Cataclysm made them abandon the planet in a hurry, leaving much of its legacy behind.
09:38And now, we're studying it anew.
09:41But our excavations leave more questions than answers.
09:46Skyscrapers, highways, shopping centers, coffee shops.
09:50Everything is buried under sand and soil.
09:53Rust has eaten away the metal.
09:55And time turns concrete into dust.
09:59Even the Hoover Dam and the Three Gorges Dam in China have crumbled.
10:03The colossal structures turned into heaps of stones.
10:06The remaining buildings have become overgrown with plants and turned into a home for millions of living creatures.
10:13Mountain is granite, and this rock is one of the hardest on Old Earth.
10:17For over 15,000 years, the faces of U.S. presidents have deteriorated by only two inches.
10:24The monument will stand for millions of years.
10:27And the latest expedition to the Sahara Desert managed to dig out the Great Pyramid from the sand.
10:34Now, any tourist can buy a ticket and look at that wonder, which even earthlings considered very old.
10:41Surprisingly, ruins and crumbling walls of medieval castles in Europe have survived.
10:46They're built of massive stones and without metal fittings, which expand and destroy the stone when rusting.
10:53Our ancestors left behind a huge amount of garbage.
10:57Empty bottles, plastic packaging, wrappers.
11:01All this helps scientists to recreate the consumption patterns of people of the past.
11:07Thanks to this, we know for sure that in the 2000s, almost 8 billion people ate mostly chips, chocolate bars,
11:15and pizza.
11:16And they rarely drank ordinary water.
11:19They loved coffee, though.
11:2260% of earthlings lived on the internet for 7 hours a day.
11:272 billion websites worked 24-7.
11:30At first, information was stored on hard disks, flash drives, and compact disks.
11:36But this kind of storage went obsolete after a couple of years.
11:39The cloud took their place.
11:42It was an online storage with servers connected to the global network.
11:46They recorded the entire life of Earth's civilization and were stored in data centers.
11:53In space, the Earth's internet didn't work well.
11:56Apparently, huge distances and lack of technical knowledge did their job.
12:01Imagine that a Pluto resident wants to know the difference between margarita and calzone pizzas.
12:07They clicked the link and wait for a couple of hours for it to open.
12:12If the dough's already in the oven, no good.
12:15Each colony organized its own internet by sending satellites to orbit their planets.
12:21It took time to connect thousands of colonies into the intergalactic web we now know as Uninet.
12:29When the cataclysm struck, people had to escape, leaving their planet to its fate.
12:35Electricity went out, no one maintained the servers and data centers, and lots of info about their civilization was lost.
12:42We've scanned miles deep into the Earth and found many interesting artifacts.
12:47Students, I invite you to look at this amazing thing.
12:51The Earthlings called it a camera.
12:54People took pictures of their food, morning runs, and new shoes on it.
12:59One thing our scientists couldn't comprehend, though, is that ancient people used to communicate with its help, too.
13:06One of the main mysteries of the past are the dishes of different sizes.
13:11Archaeologists find them in almost every home.
13:13They bear these names.
13:15Buddy, Cosmo, Rex, Princess.
13:19We know these were the things from which dogs and cats ate.
13:22But we don't know why people pampered these animals so much.
13:26For example, archaeologists recently unearthed a beauty salon for poodles in San Francisco.
13:32I also love my dragon from the jungles of Gliese 832C.
13:37But I don't perm its fur and manicure its claws.
13:41And this is my favorite artifact.
13:44A book.
13:45There's nothing more valuable in the universe.
13:48There's only one sample in my antiques collection.
13:50It's a cooking recipes anthology.
13:53I paid a fortune for it.
13:56The ruins of museums are treasures for archaeologists and all the new humanity.
14:01These buildings collapsed a long time ago and now look like ordinary hills, overgrown with trees and grass.
14:09Museums are like pearls in the ocean.
14:11They lie at the bottom and wait to be fished from their shells.
14:15And sometimes, archaeologists manage that.
14:19Books, paintings, documents, and clothes have mostly turned to dust.
14:24But we can enjoy the statues that were carved out of marble by masters of ancient Greece and Rome.
14:31On the walls of caves around the world, there are drawings of animals and handprints of the first people.
14:38They didn't know how to read, drive a car, or fly a spaceship.
14:42But their paintings have survived.
14:45It's incredible.
14:47Over thousands of years, time has eaten up huge dams, cities with skyscrapers and bridges.
14:53And the palm of an ancient human still adorns the cold and rough wall of a cave.
14:59Space archaeology is becoming more and more popular.
15:03Thousands of tons of space debris fly around old Earth.
15:07The real sensation is the discovery of the Voyager 1 probe.
15:12Earthlings sent it into space at the very beginning of their development.
15:16I see your condescending smiles.
15:18Today, such a device can be assembled by any first-year student from spare parts in their parents' garage.
15:25But, dear students, let's not laugh at our ancestors.
15:29They tried their best.
15:31Voyager isn't a simple satellite.
15:33The device can be compared to a message in a bottle thrown into the sea.
15:38And the cosmic sea is millions of times larger than the Pacific Ocean of Old Earth.
15:45Engineers of the past left a time capsule with a message in the probe.
15:50It contains photographs of people and the nature of the planet,
15:54as well as scientific information about the Earth.
15:57Ninety minutes of recorded music are of particular interest.
16:01This is a real gift from our ancestors to us, to the people of space.
16:07Radio signals that humankind sent into space have also survived.
16:11We've tracked them.
16:12Radio broadcasts, phone conversations, even music charts continue their journey through space.
16:19Millions of years later, they'll weaken and leave behind only an electromagnetic echo.
16:25In 2020, there were 1.4 billion cars on Old Earth.
16:30Unbelievable!
16:31But they moved along asphalted roads on rubber tires, not in the air.
16:36When humans flew into space, they left their vehicles on the planet.
16:41Within just a couple hundred years, the cars went completely bust and turned into piles of metal, plastic, and rubber.
16:49One that survived for millennia was the lunar roving vehicle.
16:53There's no air, no water, and no earthquakes on the moon.
16:57Anything that comes here becomes kind of suspended in time, and that's what happened to the rover.
17:04Archaeologists have found a lot of other hole and crash spacecraft on the moon.
17:09These devices are priceless artifacts in the Museum of Primitive Earth Technology.
17:14In the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, scientists have unearthed the Global Seed Vault.
17:22Earthlings built it in 2008.
17:25It became a real sensation.
17:27The huge silo contained 4.5 million samples of 500 seeds each.
17:34Billions of seeds have helped provide agriculture for the colonies.
17:37Now you can eat popcorn and hamburgers with real bread rolls, thanks to those.
17:43For thousands of years, the seeds were kept without human attention.
17:48This isn't a miracle, but an accurate scientific calculation.
17:52The vault is built underground at a depth of 390 feet.
17:56There are no earthquakes or floods there,
17:58and the permafrost provided the optimum temperature for the seeds to survive.
18:04Most metals are mined from ore.
18:06These ores don't contain pure metals, but only their chemical compounds.
18:11To get pure iron, the ore must be smelted first.
18:15But there's a problem.
18:17Metals from ore oxidize on contact with water or oxygen.
18:22Simply put, they rust.
18:24This is how metal returns to its natural ore state.
18:27That's why nails, metal fences, bridges, and houses rust and collapse.
18:33But this doesn't happen with gold, silver, and platinum.
18:38Things made from these metals are eternal and will never lose their shape.
18:42Of course, if you don't start hitting the rings and pennants with a hammer.
18:46During excavations, archaeologists find thousands of jewelry items.
18:51Earthlings love to wear them on their bodies.
18:53Crowns, luxurious necklaces, wedding rings.
18:56All this jewelry is now history kept in galactic museums.
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