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We are not that special.
Every time we look at the universe,
we learn there is much more out there than we thought.
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The Hubble Telescope can only see what you can see with your eye.
The James Webb Telescope looks at areas
that the Hubble could never see.
Another Earth is undoubtedly out there.
It's inevitable that we have to leave our home.
But where do we go?
Whenever you go into the unknown,
you discover things you didn't expect.
I think that we are going to answer whether or not there is life
on another planet in our lifetime.
It's within our grasp
to make a discovery that will change the world.
As a boy, I was transfixed by a view of the moon
through a neighbour's telescope.
There was so much more to the world than could be seen with my naked eye.
For the past 400 years, telescopes have transformed
our vision of the universe again and again.
Each era sees deeper and further than the one before it.
The Hubble Space Telescope revealed more galaxies
than we ever imagined existed.
It gave us a sense of where we came from.
And also, where we are going.
We are on the verge of answering questions that have haunted us
since the time of the ancient Greeks.
Are we alone in the universe?
Is there another Earth-like planet out there among the stars?
To answer these questions, we need new telescopes.
Bigger telescopes.
Who better to tell me the story of telescopes
than the people working on the most powerful instrument ever built?
The James Webb Space Telescope.
We'll see the first galaxies, the first stars.
If we're really lucky, it's going to find
the first evidence of liquid water,
which is the first thing we need for life.
We are on the verge of having the technological capability
to find another Earth.
It's going to seek deeper into space than any other telescope in history.
The James Webb Space Telescope is not just a machine.
It's taking humanity on a journey.
So, as the ancients looked up at the sky,
it was obvious that everything went around us.
We see the sunrise in the east, and set in the west.
We see the moon go across the sky.
We were centred, we were the centre of the universe.
The problem was, that model got a little complicated.
If you observe the planets over weeks and months,
they were making little loops.
They weren't just going round in beautiful arcs,
they were doing little loops.
The model became more and more complicated.
But it had us at the centre of our universe.
Then Copernicus comes along, and said,
'This is a really complicated model.
You know, it's much simpler if we put the sun in the middle.'
Born in 1473, mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus,
had no way to prove his theory,
because he had no way to make the observation.
Afraid of clashing with the church, and other astronomers,
he didn't publish his theory until the year he died.
50 years later, in 1609, an Italian scientist hears about
a Dutch invention, that makes objects appear closer.
Within a day, Galileo builds his own telescope.
So, Galileo looks at the moon.
The moon was supposed to be this perfect orb.
And he sees for the first time, the moon is not perfect.
It has mountains. It has craters.
He sees the Milky Way.
The Milky Way is not just this cloud,
made up of individual stars.
The most important observation, the one that was truly revolutionary,
he looked at Jupiter.
And he saw four pinpricks of light. And he assumed they were stars.
Went back the next night, and saw there were only three,
and they've moved. The next night, they moved again.
Every night, the pinpricks are changing.
And then he realised, that these were not stars,
they were moons going around Jupiter.
Everything was supposed to be going around the Earth.
And here was proof that it wasn't.
And he realises the ancients were wrong. The church was wrong.
Copernicus was right.
The whole world collapses into this beautiful simplicity.
And we're going around the sun.
A telescope really is quite simple.
If you take this lens here, and the light comes in this way,
and you take a second lens here, you have a telescope.
That simple device, just these two lenses. That's all it took.
That idea changed the world.
The Webb Telescope is 100 times more powerful than Hubble.
The mirrors are so perfect, that if you imagine spreading
that mirror out from New York to California,
there would be no deviation, no Hiller Valley
across it more than three inches.
Galileo's telescope gathered 100 times more light than the human eye.
I'm told the James Webb Space Telescope will gather
a million times more than the human eye.
To gather its light however, Webb doesn't use Galileo's lenses,
but the technique of a different genius.
By the time he was 26, in 1668,
Isaac Newton had invented calculus, and the law of gravitation.
He'd also devised a new kind of telescope. The reflector.
Newton pointed out that if you used a mirror, not a lens,
all the wavelengths get reflected off the mirror
in exactly the same way. So all those colours would come through,
and they would all come to exactly the same perfect focus.
And allowed us in the end, to make bigger and bigger telescopes.
Able to collect more and more light, and see further and further
and further into the universe.
Ever since, the most powerful telescopes
have used this basic design.
The great Palomar 200 inch. The Keck 10 metre telescope.
Hubble Space Telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope. All reflecting telescopes.
If you showed the James Webb Space Telescope to Newton,
he would recognise it as a telescope.
Might be a bit surprised we're flying in space,
but they would recognise it's a classic telescope.
Someone telling us where to stop?
Slow down. Slow down. Slow down. Whoa.
When people think about the telescope,
they think of the huge mirror, right.
That's the iconic part of the telescope.
This is what the astronomers care about.
This is where the data comes from. The detectors and the cameras.
All the images of the spectra, all the good stuff.
It will come from there.
It's $1 billion worth of hardware in there.
We have enough sensitivity with our telescope
and our instruments to detect a child's nightlight...
..from the moon.
You could see things on the order of a candle, a match, a lit cigarette.
I know that if you were to certainly take your radiant heat,
which for a human, is about 80-100 watts,
we would easily be able to detect that.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to see
the earliest galaxies in the universe.
But not so long ago, we didn't know there were
any galaxies out there other than our own.
The Milky Way.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,
most astronomers believed the Milky Way was the entire universe.
But there were some strange, fuzzy objects out there,
that were quite puzzling.
They made countless drawings of these objects, and built bigger
and bigger telescopes, trying to figure out what they were.
If they were outside the Milky Way,
it would mean the universe was a lot bigger than we thought.
At that time, there was a Great Debate in astronomy.
You could Google the word 'Great Debate', you'll think it might be
some Supreme Court case, or some other important historical argument.
But, no, the No.1 hit for Great Debate
is the debate between two astronomers, trying to resolve
what our place in the universe is.
And they couldn't decide. Because they had no evidence.
They couldn't see what was happening.
Settling the Great Debate would require
the biggest telescope yet attempted.
And four and a half tons of smashed French wine bottles.
The mirror for the Webb Telescope is so big we need to fold it up.
What we need to do is basically slice it up into smaller segments,
so we can fold it up, and unfold it on orbit.
We wouldn't build a telescope this big unless we needed to.
You need a telescope this big if you want to look
at the very dimmest, earliest galaxies in the universe.
When the 18 mirror segments are finally mounted
on the carbon fibre backplate,
they will all work together to create a near perfect optical surface,
over 21 feet across.
100 years ago, at the time of the Great Debate,
it was a struggle to make a mirror just eight feet across.
In 1908, the Saint-Gobain Glass Factory cast a 100-inch mirror
out of four-and-a-half tonnes of bottle glass.
The largest ever attempted. The mirror was full of bubbles.
But it was shipped to California anyway, where an American,
George Ellery Hale, was raising millions
to build a new observatory on Mount Wilson, overlooking Los Angeles.
The master polisher complained bitterly,
but the mirror proved good enough to revolutionise
our conception of the universe.
And would force Albert Einstein to revise his equations.
Despite promising his dying father he would become a lawyer,
when Edwin Hubble was discharged from the army,
after World War I, he went to Mount Wilson,
and spent his time looking at the night sky.
Four years later in October 1923,
something caught his eye.
Edwin Hubble began using the 100-inch telescope,
the most powerful telescope of its time.
He goes out, night after night, and takes photographic plates.
One star in particular is changing its brightness about every month.
He's comparing one photographic plate to another.
Everything else is more or less staying the same,
except this one beacon is blinking.
And that blinking is a message to him.
And so, he writes, 'VAR!
'I don't want to lose this spot.
'There is this sea of 100 billion dots, this one's special.'
If you know the brightness of an object when it's nearby,
you can figure out the distance to a similar object,
by measuring how much dimmer it is.
That's what Hubbell did with the Variable Star in Andromeda.
He discovered Andromeda couldn't be part of the Milky Way.
It was, in fact, two-and-a-half million light-years away.
It had to be a totally separate galaxy. An island universe.
It turns out the great challenge in astronomy
is just figuring out how far away everything is.
We see these things with the telescope, but how far are they?
Getting that third dimension, the depth dimension, is so critical.
And for the first time, we have enough depth perception to see,
'Oh, the spiral nebulae, they're outside the Milky Way.'
Hubble looks at one star - Variable 1,
and immediately answers this profound question.
Are we the only galaxy? Or is the universe teeming with them?
I would say, next to the sun, it's my favourite star in the universe.
Ultimately, there was no way to comprehend just how vast space was.
It really did blow people's mind,
when we started to be able to calculate the distances
that we're talking about. Astronomical distances.
And so they resolved the Great Debate in astronomy.
And the scale of the universe is just dramatically increased.
The history of telescopes is to teach us we're not that special.
It makes us less and less special every time we look at the universe,
and we learn there is much more out there than we thought before.
And then Hubble showed us that the universe
was also expanding. That was an incredible thought.
Because Einstein had told us it wasn't.
He felt the universe couldn't be expanding,
and readjusted his equations to make it static.
Edwin Hubble showed that the galaxies in fact, were flying apart.
So, Einstein, as he admitted, this is his biggest blunder ever.
The expanding universe was a revelation,
because it implied an earlier time
when all the galaxies were closer together.
It implied a big bang.
Edwin Hubble made that discovery when he first had access
to the biggest telescope in the world.
So, the obvious thing to do was to build a 200-inch telescope.
The Palomar Mirror weighed roughly 14 tonnes, which is huge.
The largest piece of mirror ever made.
Palomar became the ultimate observing machine.
And they called it The Big Eye.
But this amazing machine, that nobody could think
of how to make it any better, had one fundamental problem.
It was sitting here on Earth.
You know, you'll only hear an astronomer say this,
but the air that we breathe, right, it sucks.
We want to get rid of it. Because the air makes the images
from stars that we're observing blurry.
So, Lyman Spitzer suggested taking a giant telescope,
and putting it in space.
Above the atmosphere of the Earth. He proposed space telescopes.
1948. We hadn't even successfully got rockets working.
So, it was an incredibly imaginative leap.
It would take more than 40 years, but Lyman Spitzer's dream
of an astronomical telescope in space
finally came true on April 24th, 1990.
We finally got our space telescope. It was put on the shuttle.
It was launched into orbit.
Everybody waits for the first results to come down.
There is big trouble with the $2 billion
Hubble Space Telescope tonight.
Grim-faced officials had to reveal that the photo system
on board the Hubble telescope is sick.
But Hubble doesn't focus properly.
One of the mirrors on the Hubble Space Telescope
was designed to the wrong specifications.
The images were blurry. The mirror was fatally flawed.
We'd blown billions of dollars on a flawed space telescope.
At the edge of this 94-inch mirror,
the mirror was off by a fraction of the width of a human hair.
That's all it took.
Fortunately, Hubble's only eight minutes away.
It only takes the shuttle eight minutes to get to the orbit.
And so, you can go fix it.
And in fact, astronauts went back several times, to do so.
At one point, Story Musgrave and Jeff Hoffman had to close the doors.
And they wouldn't close. They ended up taking one of these come-a-longs,
one of those straps that you crank. And they tried to crank it together.
They could have broken Hubble. If those doors had broken,
that would've been the end of Hubble, right there.
But fortunately they sort of locked into place.
When those first images came down,
they were better than we could have even imagined.
And that started Hubble's journey to change the world.
Witnessing the births and death of stars.
Finding black holes at the centre of galaxies.
Measuring the age of the universe.
Confirming the existence of dark energy.
What is Hubble's greatest achievement?
Ask that in a room full of astronomers,
and you'll start another great debate.
But everyone agrees, Hubble is one of the greatest scientific instruments
in history.
The Hubble Space Telescope is the Holy Grail for astronauts,
but especially for astronomers.
I spent three of my five space shuttle missions going to
the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, the last three.
And at the end of the last space walk, I gave it a pat,
and a little salute, and said, 'Good luck, Mr Hubble.'
Because I knew I would never see it again.
Are there images from Hubble that mean a lot to you?
Personally, do you have a favourite?
I've lots of favourite images.
My favourite images are the first images that come back
after the missions I had gone to do the servicing,
to prove I didn't break the Hubble.
For me, Hubble's most awe-inspiring image
is a long-time exposure,
known as the Deep Field.
Hubble Deep Field was a pure discovery.
It was, 'We don't know what's there, let's see if we can see something.'
The second director of the Hubble Space Telescope said, 'You know,
Hubble is looking deeper and deeper in the universe.
I wonder what happens if we just stared
at a completely blank piece of sky? Just see what we find.'
And so, he decided to point the telescope
at a single blank piece of sky, no bigger than a drinking straw.
That's the area of the sky he decided to look at
with the Hubble Space Telescope. And just stare at
that single, blank spot, for ten days.
And see what would happen.
A lot of people said he was crazy, he was wasting telescope time.
But the telescope oriented,
and stared at that one spot for like ten days,
with our most sensitive cameras at the time.
And to everybody's surprise, when they looked at the image,
out of that dark area of the sky
came 10,000 galaxies in that single point of sky.
Nobody had any idea there was this many galaxies
in the observable universe.
You look at the Hubble Deep Field,
only three of those points of light are stars.
Every other point of light in that image is a galaxy.
So, there are 10,000 galaxies in every spot of the sky
the size of a drinking straw.
Roughly a hundred billion stars in the galaxy.
If you do the maths across the whole sky, it's 10 to the 22 stars
in the observable galaxies.
And I'm not going to work out how many, what that is,
but it's 10 with 22 zeros.
The Deep Field marks the limit of what Hubble can see.
To complete the picture of galaxies
in the universe, we need a new kind telescope.
One that can see beyond the visible.
Fundamentally the telescope is a time machine.
A telescope is always a time machine,
because your eye is a time machine.
You can see things as they were, when they send light to you.
And it takes two-and-a-half seconds for light
to go from here to the moon and back.
You see the sun as it was 500 seconds ago. About eight minutes.
We're six feet apart, so you are seeing me six nanoseconds...
As I was, six nanoseconds before you see me.
So, light travels at the speed of one foot per nanosecond
in round numbers. You're seeing the Andromeda nebula
as it was about three million years ago.
And that's about as far as you can see without a telescope.
But with a telescope, you can see billions and billions
of light-years out in space.
So, billions and billions of years back in time.
Of course, by now, they are much farther away
than they were when we saw them.
So, those things are not there any more.
They have gone on to do something else.
Some parts of the universe we'll never see,
because they are accelerating away from us now.
So, they are going to accelerate away so far
that the light from them will never get here.
As we look deeper and deeper and deeper,
we see fewer and fewer galaxies.
It's not that we're running out of galaxies.
It was the fact that as the universe is expanding,
it's stretching across space and time,
its light is being redshifted, and galaxies
from the very early universe are being shifted
out of view of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Telescope can only see what you can see with your eye.
The wavelengths that your eye is sensitive to,
plus a little bit of ultraviolet, and a little bit of infrared.
Those galaxies are so far away from us,
that as light travels through space, and space is expanding,
the universe is expanding, the light gets redshifted.
So, it changes from blue light into red light,
as it travels through space.
It's so far away from us, and so far back in time,
its light only reaches us via infrared wavelengths.
The Webb is going to give us infrared eyes.
And we'll see a part of the universe we've never seen before.
The Hubble Space Telescope has transformed
our knowledge of the universe.
But we haven't been able to study the first galaxies
that formed in the universe.
We haven't been able to find their light.
And that's what the James Webb Space Telescope would provide.
My team is contamination control.
But there's mechanical, propulsion, the sun shield.
There's the spacecraft. Is this membrane shaped right?
Is the UPS clamshell, that's going around the sun shield
when it's stowed up, is that the right material?
Is it going to hold it in place? To keep the membranes
from wrinkling when you launch.
Are instrument models correct? Are particle models correct?
Cos, of course, I'm thinking about keeping it clean.
This is the first time we've flown mirrors this light.
It's the first time we are building a deployed telescope.
What are our profiles for temperature, for cooldown? Our cryo-strength. Oh, my gosh.
We have actuators on here more precise than we've ever used before.
Because we have to align the individual mirrors.
Is it going to hold, keep its strength? Is it going to keep its alignment? Will it deploy?
The sun shield alone has 137 release devices.
I think the count on the entire spacecraft is 189.
Something like that. That is a lot of single-point failures.
They've looked at every step. But it's so big, you don't know what steps you missed.
And that's the big problem. The unknown unknowns.
Everybody's afraid of the unknown unknowns.
There's nothing I can say that can come close
to describing how technically difficult this telescope is.
The one thing that scares the hell out of me is failure of imagination.
Failure to imagine something that we could have fixed on the ground.
That's my recurring nightmare.
We don't want the telescope portion of the Webb Telescope
to see any of the sun.
The light that we're looking at are in the infrared.
So, in order to detect heat signature, infrared signature,
it obviously needs to be very cold,
or all it's going to measure is itself, basically.
So, we need to keep it very cold. And in space,
really the only thing that will heat you up
is the electronics that you've got, and the really bright source,
which is the sun. We don't want to blind ourselves.
And this makes us put the satellite far enough away from the Earth
so that it is not influenced by the heat coming from the Earth.
We're not going in and out of the sun.
And so, this drives us to orbit the so-called Earth-sun L2 point.
One million miles away from the Earth and away from the sun.
So, we can't afford a mistake.
Because out at L2, repair man doesn't make a house call.
We don't get that second chance.
It's a one strike and you are out of business.
Have to hit the pitch out of the park.
All the way out of the park. A million miles out of the park.
This is an engineering marvel.
It's not actually, necessarily just a scientific marvel.
Because we've built big telescopes before.
I built an eight metre telescope on the ground.
We used 300 tonnes of steel to build this telescope.
But there's no way to launch a telescope of that scale into space.
The James Webb weighs six metric tonnes.
We have to go from 300 tonnes, down to six tonnes.
There's no rocket big enough to launch anything this big.
So we then have to work out how to fold this telescope up.
We had to create this origami telescope.
There are over, you know, 300, to 400 different operations
that have to occur to make this telescope actually come to life.
A huge sunshade has to deploy, which is the size of a tennis court.
At this point, things get pretty critical,
because everything starts to cool quickly.
Now we have to get the telescope unfolded
before it gets too cold, and the joints freeze up.
Then we've got to get the mirrors unfolded.
We've then got to get the instruments started.
And each one of these things has to work perfectly first time.
We get one shot to get this telescope right.
The slightest thing goes wrong, and this mission could fail.
From its vantage point, at L2, Webb will do more
than see the first galaxies.
It will also be able to peer through the dust clouds,
to where stars are being born, and it will investigate
small objects of particular importance for us.
Exoplanets.
There are five naked-eye planets:
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
With telescopes, three more were discovered. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
Then Pluto got demoted.
So, counting the Earth, we know of eight planets in the entire universe.
The idea of an exoplanet, a planet outside the solar system
was the realm of science fiction.
But then, all that changed.
I started out working on exoplanets in graduate school.
At the time, there was one single transiting planet known -
HD 209458(b).
But I knew the field would explode.
I said, 'Look, I know there's going to be so many planets transiting,
we're not going to be able to count them all.'
The first exoplanets were discovered from the ground.
We saw...
..just stars wobbling.
And we convinced ourselves that the wobbling of stars
was due to planets around them.
The early planets found were the Jupiters.
Which really made their star wobble. That's how we could detect them.
Then the Kepler Space Telescope went up.
Nowadays, the best way to find planets is by the transit technique.
If you're lucky, the planet will orbit,
such that it passes in front of the stars.
Then the starlight drops by a tiny amount.
If it's a Jupiter-sized planet,
Jupiter is a 10th the size of our sun,
it will block out one 100th of the brightness of the star.
Now, if it's an Earth in the sun, it's one 10,000th.
Tiny. But measurable.
The Kepler Space Telescope monitored one small section of the sky.
And it found thousands of planets.
While space telescopes have the sharpness
needed to find an exoplanet,
ground telescopes can still be made much larger.
And with new adaptive optics,
to compensate for the Earth's atmosphere,
they can gather enough light to study the exoplanet in more detail.
I think one of the, for me, the most magnificent moments,
was very recently, when we managed to image an exoplanet.
We managed to block the light of the star, and there it appears.
We see it moving, actually. It's fantastic.
We see here, as humans, for the first time,
another planet moving around its star.
It looks so harmless. A few pixels.
You realise what it means for humankind
to actually see another planet moving around the sun.
It's incredible, I think.
The segmented mirror of the Keck Telescope was the model for Webb.
And points the way to larger telescopes,
on the ground, and in space, that will be needed
to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets for signs of life.
We'd like to find water vapour.
Because water vapour in a small planet
indicates a liquid water ocean.
All life on Earth needs liquid water.
It's a great place to start to identify habitable worlds.
We'd like to see carbon dioxide, indicates it's truly a rocky world.
But beyond water vapour and carbon dioxide,
what we'd really like to find are gases that don't belong.
Here on our own Earth we have oxygen.
But without plants, and other photosynthetic life,
we would have virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere.
If we found a planet with life, honestly, any life,
it would be very exciting.
But the most exciting thing is intelligent life.
Personal guess is that there's life in many places elsewhere universe.
And I have one bit of observational evidence.
Which is that here on Earth, as soon as
the bombardment of comets and asteroids came to an end,
we have evidence of fossil life here.
That's evidence that it happened quickly.
So if it happened quickly, maybe it happens easily.
Can we find them? I think we will. In my lifetime? God, I hope so.
Because that's... I want to know. You know?
I am pretty much convinced there is life beyond the solar system.
There are so many places where it could occur.
If you look at the ten most common chemical elements in our bodies,
they are the ten most common chemical elements in the universe.
The ingredients which make life on Earth are ingredients
which are the most common in the universe.
We have the ingredients, we just need the one spark
to ignite life at some point.
There are just so many types of planets just waiting to be found.
The James Webb Space Telescope is our first shot
at studying atmospheres of small planets.
If we are really lucky, that would be literally
like winning the lottery five times in a row.
If there are planets around every small star.
And there are many, many of those in the habitable zone,
and all of those have life on them. And if that life,
half of it, let's say, produces gases,
we actually have a shot of detecting that.
We have the shot at finding life for the first time
in human history, with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Layer five. On three, two, one.
We're entering a new era. We're actually building telescopes,
not just to satisfy our curiosity, but ultimately for our survival.
We are building a telescope in Chile to scan the sky
with a massive camera, that will actually be able
to characterise asteroids. The kind of things
that wiped out the dinosaurs. We want to catalogue all of those,
so we get a heads-up if one's coming our way.
We're building a telescope on Haleakala, in Maui.
A four-metre reflecting telescope, just to look at the sun.
Our sun is at about the same stage in its life
as I am in my life. OK.
It's about a third, a little bit more than a third
of the way through its life.
But when I'm 10% older, I'm going to be 40.
I'm going to be about the same, hopefully.
But our sun, when our sun is 10% older,
it's going to be 10% brighter.
Our atmosphere's going to start drying out.
When the sun is 30% older, it's going to be 40% brighter.
That's enough to dry out the oceans on our planet.
Eventually, the sun is going to expand, and balloon.
It's going to run out of hydrogen, its outer layers are going to expand
to a distance that encompasses the orbit of the Earth around the sun.
So, it's going to obliterate the inner solar system.
So, it's inevitable that we have to leave our home.
But where do we go?
We now know there are at least 100 billion
other planetary systems in our galaxy.
So, an obvious question becomes,
is there another home for the human race?
Another Earth is undoubtedly out there.
In our own Milky Way galaxy, we've hundreds of billions of stars.
Our own universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies.
To me, personally, it is definitely there.
We believe every star in our Milky Way galaxy
should have at least one planet.
And we're hoping to find and identify a pool of transiting planets
in the habitable zones of small stars.
We call it the Goldilocks Zone.
Not too hot, and not too cold, but just right for life.
We're betting on the fact that nature delivers.
That nature has created many rocky planets.
And we are planning on finding it.
Airspeed is live. 40 knots.
It is amazing that in just a little over 100 years, we have gone from
watching birds fly, to having got to the moon.
We've launched 135 shuttles.
We are doing the preliminary exploration
to find out where are we going.
When you're flying, it seems almost like being over the horizon.
Makes me think about what other worlds
are out there that are like this.
That have water and land.
The James Webb Space Telescope will go where no Hubble has gone before.
But the next step is to go where people have never gone before.
To send women and men off to Mars.
And I do believe that 100 years from now, or 1,000 years from now,
we're going to be looking to go to some nearby star
that has an Earth 2.0 around it.
These are real worlds that are out there right now.
These are planets, orbiting stars, with moons,
and water, and weather,
and clouds, and sunsets, and moonrises.
All of the things that we see on Earth that we love
almost certainly exist elsewhere in the universe.
If we had a starship today that would take decades,
or even centuries to get to Earth 2.0,
I'd volunteer to go up, knowing that
it's great grandkids that will make it.
Because of telescopes, it's a special point in human history.
We can see the whole landscape, the cosmic landscape, laid out.
From the very beginning in time,
from the present, and into our future.
Out into the stars.
Looking at the night sky is different for me now.
Changed by knowing that virtually every star
has at least one planet around it.
It's a shift of perspective as big as Galileo finding evidence
that the Earth wasn't at the centre of the universe.
Maybe knowing that other worlds exist out there
can unify us, inspire us to work together.
We may not be the ones who will venture to the stars.
But with the telescopes we are building, and that we will build,
we can be the ones who begin that great journey.
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