In the vast darkness, the earliest stars came together to form galaxies, and in one of those galaxies, our planet bore intelligent life. In the final scene of the episode, we witness the formation of stars, which are born from the remnants of their deceased stellar predecessors. Turning to a more optimistic tone, Tyson offers us a way to improve those odds: "It's about taking what science is telling us to heart." How would our "planetary dossier" look to an outsider? Our probability of survival according to this fictional entry is a mere 50% per 100 years. We arrive at our own planet and Tyson wonders how we'd define our entry in this great "cosmic encyclopedia." In these final moments, we return to the questions asked at the beginning of the series, about how we can understand our universe. Another planet, whose civilization depleted their fuel sources and now depends on the solar power produced by a red dwarf, only has a 33.9% chance of survival per one thousand years. Such a planet has a high chance of survival: 99% per one million years, Tyson says.
These alien beings disassemble other planets in their system and reassemble them around their world in a ring, to provide more room and resources. Together, we skim its entries and come across an exoplanet with a civilization far more advanced than ours. Tyson asks us to picture an "Encyclopedia Galactica," a constantly evolving open-source reference work containing every world and star in existence. Despite having few surviving remnants of their civilization, "they were as real as we are - their moment as real as ours," Tyson says.įinally, we arrive at "The Pavillion of Worlds Still to Come." In this imagined future, we search for other worlds, home to other forms of intelligent life. Their engineers forged new ways to work with iron, yet we have almost nothing of theirs to study. Very little survives of the Tartessians, much like the nameless settlers who around that same time period lived in modern-day Nigeria in a place called Nok. To that end, Tyson takes us to the "Pavillion of Lost Worlds," where we remember civilizations long gone, like the wealthy and vibrant Tartessians who lived on the Iberian peninsula in the first millennium BC and who had their own language and culture. Related: Top 10 emerging environmental technologiesĪ crowd gathers to watch the great story of the universe revealed by the generations of scientific searchers in the night sky above the 2039 New York World's Fair. "Nature offered us a second chance a shot at undoing the damage we'd done but how do we keep from doing it again?"
In Tyson's ideal future, bioremediation - a waste management technique that relies on microorganisms like yeast - will neutralize and degrade these pollutants and clean up the environment.Īgainst the backdrop of this possible future, Tyson asks us to think about how we can avoid repeating these mistakes. These are "shameful artifacts of our technological adolescence," he says, but in the future humans will hopefully have found a way to deal with its self-imposed problems, like the massive amounts of waste from nuclear power plants and weapons, as well as toxic garbage from electronic toys like lead, cadmium, and beryllium. "Life finds a way into the future," Tyson says as he describes how in his imagined future, we've found a way to deal with the consequences of our more brutal past, like landmines and indiscriminate pollution.