The Universe Season 5 Episode 4 – Time Travel HD. One of the Universe’s most enduring mysteries is Time Travel. In this episode, we explore the possibilities.
Discover why Time Travel into the future is unavoidable in the Einsteinian world of Relativity. As for the past… the laws of physics do not tell us it’s impossible, but the bizarre consequences of going into the past and altering the future make for mind-bending science. Finally, we go for the future by traveling to the nearest star, 4.3 light years away… in only 45 days.
Our destination may be an Earth-like planet; a planet scientists are now hunting for, and may find in the next 3 to 4 years.
Everywhere we look, life exists in both the most hospitable of environments and in the most extreme. Yet we have only ever found life on our planet. How did the stuff of stars come together to create life as we know it? What do we really mean by ‘life’? And will unlocking this mystery help us find life elsewhere?
About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system resembled a giant cloud of swirling cosmic dust, hydrogen and other gases. As with the thousands of other such clouds in our galaxy, some of these molecules began condensing, gathering and creating their own gravity.
Eventually these small clumps formed what became our sun — a star surrounded by a quickly moving, flat disc made up of the cloud’s leftovers. These leftovers also developed into our solar system’s planets, asteroid belt and other interstellar bodies.
Earth’s relative proximity to the sun meant that gases were largely burned away in those early days, leaving a rocky, metal-rich planet made from planetesimals, or smaller cosmic bodies. These same planetesimals also may have brought water and gases later. Often made of ice, they helped to plant the seeds for what would become a fertile, water-rich planet with a healthy atmosphere, capable of protecting life from the sun’s harmful rays.
Are we alone? Where did we come from? Is there life on other planets? From the latest work at NASA and private enterprise facilities to the latest theories from futurists and physicists, this series looks at black holes, colonizing the planets, string theory and more. Science Channel invites viewers on the journey as Morgan Freeman picks up where Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" left off and explores the new frontiers of what is beyond earth.
Every cosmologist and astronomer agrees: our Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Using cutting-edge technology, scientists are now able to take a snapshot of the Universe a mere heartbeat after its birth. Armed with hypersensitive satellites, astronomers look back in time to the very moment of creation, when all the matter in the Universe exploded into existence. It is here that we uncover an unsolved mystery as old as time itself — if the Universe was born, where did it come from? Meet the leading scientists who have now discovered what they believe to be the origin of our Universe, and a window into the time before time.
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