the sky calls to us if we do not destroy

ourselves we will one day venture to the

stars there was a time when the Stars

seemed an impenetrable mystery today we

have begun to understand them in our

personal lives also we journey from

ignorance to knowledge our individual

growth reflects the advancement of the

species the exploration of the cosmos is

a voyage of self-discovery

when I was a child I lived here in the

Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in the

city of New York

I knew my immediate neighborhood

intimately every candy store front stoop

back yard empty lots and wall for

playing Chinese handball

it was my whole world

but more than a few blocks away north of

the raucous traffic and elevated railway

on 86th Street was an unknown territory

off-limits to my wanderings it could

have been Mars for all I knew even with

an early bedtime in the winter you could

occasionally see the Stars I would look

up at them and wonder what they were I'd

ask

other kids and adults and they would

answer there are lights in the sky kid

well I could tell there were lights in

the sky but what were they there had to

be some deeper answer

I remember I was issued my first library

card I think it was some library over

there on 85th Street anyway it was in

alien territory and I asked the

librarian for a book on stars she gave

me a funny kind of picture book with

portraits of men and women with names

like Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd I

explained that wasn't what I wanted at

all

and for some reason then obscure it to

me she smiled and got me another book

the right kind of book I was so excited

to know the answer that I opened the

book breathlessly right there in the

library and the book said something

astonishing a very big thought stars it

said were sons but very far away the son

was a star but close-up

how I wondered could anybody know such

things for sure how did they figure it

out where did they even begin

I was ignorant of the idea of angular

size I didn't know a thing about the

inverse square law of the propagation of

light I didn't have the ghost of a

chance of calculating the distance to

the Stars but I could tell that if the

stars were Suns they had to be awfully

far away further away than 86th street--

further away the Manhattan further away

probably than New Jersey the universe

had become much grander than I had ever

guessed

and then I read another astonishing fact

the earth which includes Brooklyn was a

planet it went around the Sun but there

were other planets they also went around

the Sun some closer to the Sun some

further from the Sun but planets didn't

shine by their own light the way the Sun

does no planets simply reflected the

little bit of light that shines on them

from the Sun back to us if you were a

great distance away from the Sun you

wouldn't be able to see the earth or the

other planets at all well then it stood

to reason I thought that those other

stars ought to have their own planets

and some of those planets ought to have

life why not and that life ought to be

pretty different from life as we know it

life here in Brooklyn Ganymede look at

this amazing as a child it was my

immense good fortune to have parents and

a few teachers who encouraged my

curiosity this was my sixth grade

classroom I came back here one afternoon

to remember what it was like I brought

some of the breathtaking pictures of

other worlds that had been radioed back

by the Voyager spacecraft and their

encounters with Jupiter and its moons

this is Callisto which is what is it

Callisto I want to Callisto

what is it it's it's the outermost big

moon of Jupiter Europa another Europa a

black-and-white picture of a ring of

Jupiter there you go nice a prize for

honesty you didn't get a second you're

right we're talking would you like

every one of us begins life with an open

mind a driving curiosity a sense of

wonder now had some questions why is the

earth round why isn't it square or any

other shape that's a good question I

like that question it's a question I

have asked myself and the answer has to

do with gravity the earth has a strong

gravity if you were to make a mountain

very high higher than Everest you know

it's the biggest mountain on the earth

it would be crushed by its own weight

you see gravity pulls everything towards

the center so any really big bump on the

earth is crushed but if you had a small

object a tiny world the gravity is very

low and then it can be very different

from a sphere I think I have here a

world that isn't a sphere here look at

this one see it's lumpy

it's a lumpy world looks like a potato

there's a large potato orbiting the

planet Mars this is one of the moons of

Mars and that's perfect example of you

can you can have big departures from a

sphere if your gravity as well now a

question in the front ok considered part

of the Milky Way galaxy you're

considered part of the Milky Way galaxy

everything except other galaxies it's

part of the Milky Way galaxy the Sun is

one star there is a few hundred billion

stars in the Milky Way around each star

maybe it's a whole bunch of planets and

on one of those planets is life and one

of the life forms on that planet is you

so you're a part of the Milky Way galaxy

sometimes I think how lucky we are to

live in this time the first moment in

human history when we are in fact

visiting other worlds and engaging in a

deep reconnaissance of the cosmos but if

we had been born in a much earlier age

no matter how great our dedication we

could not have understood what the stars

and planets are

we would not have known that there were

other suns and other worlds

this is one of the great secrets rested

from nature through a million years of

patient observation and courageous

thinking human beings have always asked

questions about the Stars it's as

natural as breathing but imagine a time

before science had found out the answers

imagine what it was like say hundreds of

thousands of years ago soon after the

discovery of fire we were just as smart

just as curious then as we are now

sometimes it seems to me that there were

people then who thought like this we are

wandering hunter folk fire keeps us warm

it's light makes holes in the darkness

it keeps hungry animals away in the

darkness we can see each other and talk

we take care of the flame the flame

takes care of us

the stars are are not near to us when we

climb a hill or a tree they are no

closer they flicker with a strange cold

white faraway light many of them all

over the sky but only at night I wonder

what they are one night I thought the

stars are flames they give a little

light at night this fire does maybe the

stars are campfires which other

Wanderers light at night the stars give

a much smaller light than campfires so

they must be very far away I wonder if

our campfires look like stars to the

people in the sky but why don't those

campfires and the Wanderers who made

them fall down at our feet

why don't strange tribes drop from the

sky those beings in the sky must have

great powers

I don't suppose that every

hunter-gatherer had such thoughts about

the Stars but we know from contemporary

hunter-gatherer communities that very

imaginative ideas arise the Bushmen

of the Kalahari Desert in the Republic

of Botswana have an explanation of the

Milky Way at their latitude it's off and

overhead they call it the backbone of

night they believe it holds the sky up

they believe that if not for the Milky

Way pieces of sky would come crashing

down at our feet so the Milky Way in

their view has some practical value the

backbone of night

later on metaphors about campfires or

backbones or holes through which the

flame could be seen were replaced in

most human communities by another idea

the powerful beings in the sky were

promoted to gods they were given names

and relatives and special

responsibilities for the cosmic services

they were expected to perform there was

a God for every human concern gods ran

nature nothing happened that the direct

intervention of some God if the gods

were happy there was plenty of food and

humans were happy but if something

displeased the gods and it didn't take

much the consequences were awesome two

routes flood ins storms Wars earthquakes

volcanic eruptions epidemics the gods

had to be propitiated and the vast

industry of priests arose to make the

gods less angry but because the gods

were capricious you couldn't be sure

what they would do

nature was a mystery it was hard to

understand the world our ancestors

grouped in darkness to make sense of

their surroundings powerless before

nature they invented rituals and myths

some desperate and cruel others

imaginative and benign

the ancient Greeks explained that

diffuse and brightness in the night sky

as the milk of the goddess Hera squirted

from her breasts across the heavens we

still call it the Milky Way

in gratitude for the many gifts of the

gods

our ancestors created works of

surpassing beauty

this is all that remains of the ancient

temple of Harrah Queen of Heaven a

single marble column standing in a vast

field of ruins on the Greek island of

Samos it was one of the wonders of the

world

built by people with an extraordinary

eye for clarity and symmetry

those who thronged that temple were also

the architects of a bridge from their

world to ours we were moving once again

in our voyage of self-discovery on our

journey to the stars

here 25 centuries ago on the island of

Samos and in the other Greek colonies

which had grown up in the busy Aegean

Sea there was a glorious awakening

suddenly there were people who believed

that everything was made of atoms that

human beings and other animals had

evolved from simpler forms that diseases

were not caused by demons or the gods

that the earth was only a planet going

around a Sun which was very far away

this revolution made cosmos out of chaos

here in the 6th century BC a new idea

developed one of the great ideas of the

human species it was argued that the

universe was knowable why because it was

ordered because there are regularities

in nature which permitted secrets to be

uncovered nature was not entirely

unpredictable there were rules which

even she had to obey

this ordered and admirable character of

the universe was called cosmos and it

was set in stark contradiction to the

idea of chaos this was the first

conflict of which we know between

science and mysticism between nature and

the gods but why here why in these

remote islands and inlets of the eastern

Mediterranean

why not it's in the great cities of

India or Egypt Babylon China Mesoamerica

because they were all at the center of

old empires

they were set in their ways hostile to

new ideas but here in Ionia were a

multitude of newly colonized islands and

city-states isolation even if incomplete

promotes diversity no single

concentration of power could enforce

conformity free inquiry became possible

they were beyond the frontiers of the

empires for merchants and tourists and

sailors of Africa Asia and Europe met in

the harbors of Ionia to exchange goods

and stories and ideas there was a

vigorous and hid the interaction of many

traditions prejudices languages and gods

these people were ready to experiment

once you are open to questioning rituals

and time-honored practices you find that

one question leads to another

what do you do when you're faced with

several different gods each claiming the

same territory the Babylonian Marduk and

the Greek Zeus were each considered king

of the gods master of the sky you might

decide since they otherwise had rather

different attributes that one of them

was merely invented by the priests but

if one why not both

and so it was here that the great idea

arose the realization that there might

be a way to know the world without the

god hypothesis that there might be

principles forces laws of nature through

which the world might be understood

without attributing a fall of every

sparrow to the direct intervention of

Zeus this is the place where science was

born that's why we're here this great

revolution happened between 600 and 400

BC it was accomplished by the same

practical and productive people who made

the society function political power was

in the hands of the merchants who

promoted the technology on which their

prosperity depended the earliest

pioneers of science were merchants and

artisans and their children

the first Ionian scientist was named

Bailey's it was worn over there in the

city of my Letus across this narrow

strait he had traveled in Egypt and was

conversant with the knowledge of Babylon

like the Babylonians he believed that

the world had once all been water to

explain the dry land

the Babylonians added that their God

Marduk had placed a mat on the face of

the waters and piled dirt on top of it

Bailey's had a similar view but he left

Marduk out yes the world had once been

mostly water but it was a natural

process which explained the dry land

Bailey's thought it was similar to the

silting up he had observed at the Delta

of the River Nile

whether thing eases conclusions were

right or wrong is not nearly as

important as his approach the world was

not made by the gods but instead was the

result of material forces interacting in

nature

Bailey's brought back from Babylon and

Egypt the seeds of new Sciences

astronomy and geometry sciences which

would sprout and grow in the fertile

soil of Ionia Anaximander of Miletus

over there was a friend and colleague of

Bailey's one of the first people that we

know of to have actually done an

experiment by examining the movie shadow

cast by a vertical stick he determined

accurately the length of the year and

the length of the seasons for ages men

had used sticks to Club and spear each

other

Anaximander used a stick to measure time

in 540 BC or there abouts on this island

of Samos there came to power a tyrant

named Polycrates he seems to have

started as a caterer and then went on to

international piracy his loot was

unloaded on this very breakwater but he

oppressed his own people he made war on

his neighbors he quite rightly feared

invasion
so Polycrates surrounded his capital

city with an impressive wall whose

remains stand till this day to carry

water from a distant spring through the

fortifications he ordered this great

tunnel built a kilometre long it

Pierce's a mountain two cuttings were

dug from either side which meant almost

perfectly in the middle the project took

some 15 years to complete it is a token

of the civil engineering of its day and

an indication of the extraordinary

practical capability of the Ionians the

enduring legacy of the Ionians

is the tools and techniques they

developed which remain the basis of

modern technology

this was the time of Theodorus the

master engineer of the age a man who is

credited with the invention of the key

the ruler the Carpenters square the

level believed bronze casting why are

the known monuments to this land those

who dreamt and speculated and deduced

about the laws of nature talked to the

engineers and the technologists they

were often the same people the practical

and the theoretical were one this new

hybrid of abstract thought and everyday

experience blossomed into science

when these practical men turned their

attention to the natural world they

began to uncover hidden wonders and

breathtaking possibilities Anaximander

studied the profusion of living things

and saw their interrelationships he

concluded that life had originated in

water and mud and then colonized the dry

land human beings he said must have

evolved from simpler forms this insight

had to wait 24 centuries until its truth

was demonstrated by Charles Darwin

nothing was excluded from the

investigations of these first scientists

even the air became the subject of close

examination by a Greek from Sicily named

empedocles he made an astonishing

discovery with a household implement

that people had used for centuries this

is the so-called water thief

it's a brazen sphere with a neck and a

hole at the top and instead of little

holes at the bottom it was used as a

kitchen ladle you fill it by immersing

it in water if after it's been in there

a little bit you pull it out with the

neck uncovered then the water trickles

out the little holes making a small

shower instead if you pull it out with a

neck covered the water is retained

now try to fill it with the neck covered

with my thumb nothing happens

why not there's something in the way

some material is blocking the access of

the water into the sphere I can't see

any such material what could it be

empedocles identified it as air what

else could it be a thing you can't see

can exert pressure and frustrate my wish

to fill this vessel with water if I were

dumb enough to leave my thumb on the

neck

empedocles had discovered the invisible

air he thought must be matter in a form

so finely divided but it couldn't be

seen this hint this whiff of the

existence of atoms was carried much

further by a contemporary named

Democritus of all the ancient scientists

it is he who speaks most clearly to us

across the centuries the few surviving

fragments of his scientific writings

reveal a mind of the highest logical and

intuitive powers he believed the large

number of other worlds wonder through

space that worlds are born and die that

some are rich in living creatures and

others are dry and barren

he was the first to understand that the

milky way is an aggregate of the light

of innumerable faint stars beyond

campfires in the sky beyond the milk of

Hera beyond the backbone of night the

mind of Democritus soared he saw deep

connections between the heavens and the

earth man he said is a microcosm a

little cosmos

Democritus came from the Ionian town of

Abdera on the northern Aegean Shore in

those days Abdera was the butt of jokes

if around the Year 400 BC in the

equivalent of a little outdoor

restaurant like this you told a story

about someone from Abdera you're

guaranteed a laugh it was in a way the

Brooklyn of it's time for Democritus all

of life was to be enjoyed and understood

in fact for him understanding and

enjoyment were pretty much the same

thing he said a life without festivity

is a long road without an amen

Democritus may have come from Abdera but

he was no dummy

Democritus understood that the complex

forms changes and motions of the

material world all derived from the

interaction of very simple moving parts

he called these parts atoms

all material objects are collections of

atoms intricately assembled even we when

I cut this Apple the knife must be

passing through empty spaces between the

atoms Democritus argued if there were no

such empty space is no void then the

knife would encounter some impenetrable

atom and the Apple wouldn't be cut let's

compare the cross sections of the two

pieces are the exposed areas exactly

equal no said Democritus the curvature

of the Apple forces this slice to be

slightly shorter than the rest of the

Apple if they were equally tall then

we'd have cylinder and not an apple no

matter how sharp the knife these two

pieces have unequal cross-sections but

why because on the scale of the very

small matter exhibits some irreducible

roughness and this fine scale of

roughness Democritus of Abdera

identified with the world of the atoms

his arguments are not those we used

today but they're elegant and subtle and

derived from everyday experience and his

conclusions were fundamentally right

Democritus believed that nothing happens

at random that everything has a material

cause
he said I would rather understand one

cause than be king of Persia

he believed that poverty in a democracy

was far better than wealth in a tyranny

he believed that the prevailing

religions of his time were evil and that

neither souls nor immortal gods existed

there is no evidence that Democritus was

persecuted for his beliefs but then

again he came from Abdera however in his

time the brief tradition of tolerance

for unconventional views was beginning

to erode for instance the prevailing

belief was that the Loomis son were gods

another contemporary of the market just

named annex a giris thought that the

moon was a place made of ordinary matter

and that the Sun was a red-hot stone far

away in the sky for this annex Agora was

and them convicted and imprisoned for

impiety a religious crime people began

to be persecuted for their ideas a

portrait of democritus is now on the

Greek hundred drachma note but his ideas

were suppressed and his influence on

history made minor the Mystics were

beginning to win

you see Ionia was also the home of

another quite different intellectual

tradition its founder was Pythagoras who

lived here on Samos in the sixth century

BC according to local legend this cave

was once his abode maybe that was once

his living room many centuries later

this small Greek Orthodox shrine was

erected on his front porch there's a

continuity of tradition from Pythagoras

to Christianity

Pythagoras seems to have been the first

person in the history of the world to

decide that the earth was a sphere

perhaps he argued by analogy with the

moon or the Sun maybe he noticed the

curved shadow of the earth on the moon

during a lunar eclipse or maybe he

recognized that when ships leave Samos

their masts disappear last

Pythagoras believed that a mathematical

harmony underlies all of nature the

modern tradition of mathematical

argument essential in all of science

owes much to him and the notion that the

heavenly bodies move to a kind of music

of the spheres was also derived from

Pythagoras it was he who first used the

word cosmos to mean a well-ordered and

harmonious universe a world amenable to

human understanding

for this great idea we are indebted to

Pythagoras but there were deep irony's

and contradictions in his thoughts many

of the Ionians believed that the

underlying harmony and unity of the

universe was accessible to observation

and experiment the method which

dominates science today however

Pythagoras had a very different method

he believed that the laws of nature can

be deduced by pure thought he and his

followers were not basically

experimentalists there were

mathematicians and they were

thoroughgoing mystics they were

fascinated by these five regular solids

bodies whose faces are all polygons

triangles or squares or pentagons there

can be an infinite number of polygons

but only five regular solids four of the

solids were associated with earth fire

air and water the cube for example

represented earth these four elements

they thought make up terrestrial matter

so the fifth solid they mystically

associated with the cosmos perhaps it

was the substance of the heavens this

fifth solid was called the dodecahedron

its faces are pentagons twelve of them

knowledge of the dodecahedron was

considered too dangerous for the public

ordinary people were to be kept ignorant

of the dodecahedron in loving with whole

numbers the pythagorean's believed that

all things could be derived from them

certainly all other numbers so a crisis

in doctrine occurred when they

discovered that the square root of two

was irrational that is square root of

two could not be represented as the

ratio of two whole numbers no matter how

big they were irrational originally

meant only that that you can expressed a

number as a ratio but for the

pythagoreans it came to mean

something else something threatening a

hint that their worldview might not make

a sense the other meaning of irrational

instead of wanting everyone to share and

know of their discoveries the

pythagorean's suppressed the square root

of two and the dodecahedron the outside

world was not to know the pythagoreans

had discovered in the mathematical

underpinnings of nature one of the two

most powerful scientific tools the other

of course is experiment but instead of

using their insight to advance the

collective voyage of human discovery

they made of it little more than the

hocus-pocus of a mystery cult science

and mathematics were to be removed from

the hands of the merchants and the

artisans this tendency found its most

effective advocate in a follower of

Pythagoras named Plato he preferred the

perfection of these mathematical

abstractions to the imperfections of

everyday life he believed that ideas

were far more real than the natural

world he advised the astronomers not to

waste their time observing the stars and

planets it was better he believed just

to think about them Plato expressed

hostility to observation and experiment

he taught contempt for the real world

and disdain for the practical

application of scientific knowledge

Plato's followers succeeded in

extinguishing the light of science and

experiment that had been kindled by

Democritus and the other Ionians

Plato's unease with the world as

revealed by our senses was to dominate

and stifle Western philosophy even as

late as 1600 Johannes Kepler was still

struggling to interpret the structure of

the cosmos in terms of Pythagorean

solids and platonic perfection

ironically it was Kepler who helped

reestablish the old Ionian method of

testing ideas against observations but

why had science lost its way in the

first place

what appeal could these teachings of

Pythagoras and Plato have had for their

contemporaries they provided I believe

an intellectually respectable

justification for a corrupt social order

the mercantile tradition which had led

to Ionian science also led to a slave

economy

you could get richer if you owned a lot

of slaves Athens

in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a

vast slave population all of that brave

athenian talk about democracy applied

only to a privileged few Plato and

Aristotle were comfortable in a slave

Society they offered justifications for

oppression they served tyrants they

taught the alienation of the body from

the mind a natural enough ID I suppose

in a slave Society they separated the

thought from matter they divorced the

earth from the heavens divisions which

were to dominate Western thinking for

more than 20 centuries the pythagoreans

had one
in the recognition by Pythagoras and

Plato that the cosmos is knowable that

there is a mathematical underpinning to

nature they greatly advanced the cause

of science but in the suppression of

disquieting facts the sense that science

should be kept for a small elite the

distaste for experiment the embrace of

mysticism the easy acceptance of slave

societies their influence significantly

set back the human endeavor the books of

the Ionian scientists are entirely lost

their views were suppressed ridiculed

and forgotten by the Platonists and by

the Christians who adopted much of the

philosophy of Plato finally after a long

mystical sleep in which the tools of

scientific inquiry lay moldering the

Ionian approach was rediscovered

the Western world reawakened experiment

and open inquiry slowly became

respectable once again forgotten books

and fragments were read once more

Leonardo and Copernicus and Columbus

were inspired by the Ionian tradition

the pythagoreans

and their successors held the peculiar

notion that the earth was tainted

somehow nasty while the heavens were

pristine and divine so the fundamental

idea that the earth is a planet that

we're citizens of the universe was

rejected and forgotten this idea was

first argued by Aristarchus born here on

Samos three centuries after Pythagoras

he held that the earth moves around the

Sun he correctly located our place in

the solar system for his trouble he was

accused of heresy from the size of the

Earth's shadow on the moon during a

lunar eclipse he deduced that the Sun

had to be much much larger than the

earth and also very far away from this

he may have argued that it was absurd

for so large an object as the Sun to be

going around so small an object as the

earth so he put the Sun rather than the

earth at the center of the solar system

and he had the earth and the other

planets going around the Sun he also had

the earth rotating on its axis once a

day these are ideas that we ordinarily

associate with the name Copernicus but

Copernicus seems to have gotten at least

some hint of these ideas by reading

about Aristarchus in fact in the

manuscript of Copernicus book he

referred Eris darkness put him in the

final version he suppressed the citation

resistance to Aristarchus a kind of

geocentrism in everyday life is with us

still we still talk about a Sun rising

and the Sun setting

it's 2200 years in Tharus darkest and

the language still pretends that the

earth does not turn that the Sun is not

at the center of the solar system

Aristarchus understood the basic scheme

of the solar system but not its scale

he knew that the planets move in

concentric orbits about the Sun and he

probably knew their order out to Saturn

but he was much too modest in his

estimates of how far apart the planets

are in order to calculate the true scale

of the solar system you need a telescope

it wasn't until the 17th century that

astronomers were able to get even a

rough estimate of the distance to the

Sun and once you knew the distance to

the Sun what about the Stars how far

away are they

there is a way to measure the distance

to the star ISM the Ionians were fully

capable of discovering it Aristarchus

had toyed with the daring idea that the

stars were distant Suns now if a star

were as near as the Sun it should appear

as big in as bright as the Sun everyone

knows that the farther away an object is

the smaller it seems this inverse

proportionality between apparent size

and distance is the basis of perspective

in art and photography so the further

away we are from the Sun the smaller and

dimmer it appears how far from the Sun

would we have to be for it to appear as

small and dim as a star or equivalently

how small a piece of Sun would be as

bright as a star an experiment to answer

this question was first performed in

17th century Holland by Christiaan s

Huygens and is very much in the Ionian

tradition Huygens drilled a number of

holes in a brass plate and held the

plate up to the Sun he asked himself

which hole seemed as bright as he

remembered the bright star Sirius to

have been the previous evening well the

hole that matched was effectively 128

thousandth the apparent size of the Sun

so serious he reasoned must be twenty

eight thousand times further away than

the Sun or about half a light-year away

it's hard to remember just how bright a

star is hours after you looked at it but

Huygens remembered very well in fact if

he had known that Sirius was

intrinsically brighter than the Sun he

would have gotten the answer exactly

right

Sirius is 8.8 light-years away from us

between Aristarchus and Huygens people

had answered that question which had so

excited me as a young boy growing up in

Brooklyn the question what are the stars

and the answer is that the stars are

mighty Suns light-years away in the

depths of interstellar space and around

those Suns are there other planets and

on those other worlds are there beings

who wonder as we do

here is a light bulb which is supposed

to represent a nearby star and next to

it and very hard to see because the

bright light is a planet NOW will need a

volunteer we would like to come on fees

ordinarily you would have a hard time

seeing the planet because it's so close

that the star washes out the planet but

if we were able to put something in

front of the star to make an artificial

Eclipse then we might be able to see the

Punnett so I'm gonna stand over here

imagine that I'm a telescope somewhere

near the earth and tab if you'd slowly

move the disk across good a little

faster would be nice but now you're just

beginning to cover over the star I

really can't see the planet at all keep

going good now right there I can't see

the star at all and I see the planet lit

by the light of the star now that is a

method for looking for planets around

nearby stars and that method uses a

spacecraft to hold the disk and scan the

sky for another telescope to see if

there are any planets so tab you have

successfully accomplished your mission

to look for planets around other stars

thank you for being our interplanetary

spacecraft so this is one way and there

are spaceships that will be able to do

this in the next 10 years or so and

there's another way this has already

been tried from the earth imagine that

there's a nearby star that you can see

it's bright and it has a dark companion

a planet shining only by reflected light

near it's so dim you can't see it but

imagine that this planet and its star

are going around each other like that

you can see the star you can't see the

planet so now I'm gonna need two

volunteers one

we do need you to leave because just to

save some time now I need one of you to

turn the star in the planet and another

person to pull the star implant along

and what you will see is that the star

you can make out will be moving in a

funny Wiggly pattern which will be the

clue the evidence for the existence of

the dark planet okay let's have a spin

good and a pull and you see this funny

motion that the star makes because of

the planet thank you very much so that's

so another way of finding out the

existence of a planet that you couldn't

see directly well both of these methods

are being used and by the time that you

people are as old as I am we should know

for all the nearest stars whether they

have planets going around them or not we

might know dozens or even hundreds of

other planetary systems and see if

they're like our own or very different

or no other planets going around other

stars at all that will happen in your

lifetime and it'll be the first time in

the history of the world that anybody

found out really if there are planets

around the other stars now the nearby

star is the ones you can see with the

naked eye those are all in what's called

the solar neighborhood that's really

what astronomers call it the

neighborhood but it's a very tiny place

in the Milky Way galaxy the Milky Way is

that band of light that you see across

the sky on a clear night I can't tell if

they're anymore clear nights in Brooklyn

but you must have seen the Milky Way all

right think the end of life at night

well that's just a hundred billion stars

all seen together edge-on as in this

picture if you could get out of the

Milky Way galaxy and look down on it it

would look like that picture and if we

did look down on the Milky Way galaxy

where would the Sun and nearby stars be

would it be in the center where things

look important or at least well-lit no

we would be way out here in the suburbs

in the countryside of the galaxy we're

not in any important place all the stars

you could see it would be a little

little place like that and the Milky Way

would be this band of light a hundred

billion stars all together the fact that

we live in the outskirts of the galaxy

was discovered long time ago towards the

end of the First World War

by a man named Harlow Shapley who was

mapping the position of these clusters

of stars see every one of these is a

bunch of maybe ten thousand stars all

together it's called a globular cluster

and you can see that they are centered

around the middle the center of the

galaxy people used to think that the Sun

was at the center of the galaxy

something important about our position

it turns out to be wrong we live in the

outskirts the globular clusters are

centered around the marvelous middle of

the Milky Way galaxy and then it turned

out that this isn't the only galaxy we

live in this one but there are many

others and as this picture reminds us

there are many different kinds of

galaxies of which ours might be just

this one they are in fact a hundred

billion of their galaxies each of which

contains something like a hundred

billion stars think of how many stars

and planets and kinds of life there may

be in this vast and awesome universe

as long as there have been humans we

have searched for our place in the

cosmos where are we who are

we find that we live on an insignificant

planet of a humdrum star lost in a

galaxy tucked away in some forgotten

corner of the universe in which there

are far more galaxies than people

we make our world significant by the

courage of our questions and by the

depth of our answers

we embarked on our journey to the stars

with a question first frame in the

childhood of our species and in each

generation asks anew with undiminished

wonder what are the stars

exploration is in our nature we began

this Wanderers and we are Wanderers

still

we have lingered long enough on the

shores of the cosmic ocean

we are ready at last to set sail for the

stars