Through the Wormhole: What Do Aliens Look Like?

Science fiction writers have always had their little green men. But these humanoid aliens were based soundly on Earth-based life, not any extra terrestrial evidence.
Today, we’ve discovered hundreds of planets around other stars. As we learn what some of these alternative Earths might look like, science and imagination have allowed us to use real science to imagine the biology of their inhabitants.
Will they have two eyes? Two legs? What color will their skin be? Which species on Earth can give us clues about likely biology of aliens?
And what can we learn from how life on Earth developed to help us understand what ET really looks like? List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.

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Through the Wormhole: Can We Live Forever?

Medical advances have doubled human life expectancy in past centuries. But can humans ever beat death altogether?
Can we control and fix the errors that build up in our DNA over the years? Can we find a way to replace the chemistry of life with something more durable?
Death is a humbling reality – but what if life had no end? Cutting-edge science embarks on a bold mission to extend human life and may soon bring immortality within our grasp.
Why do we age? Dr, Michio Kaku explains the second law of thermodynamics states that everything falls apart eventually, including the human body.
This episode wonders into the mystifying definition of eternity as it relates to human lifespan. List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.

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Through The Wormhole: Can We Travel Faster Than Light?

Prior to the day in 1947 when test pilot Charles E. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, people argued it wasn’t possible for a plane to fly that fast. So, perhaps we shouldn’t be deterred by the part of Einstein’s special theory of relativity that seemingly bars traveling at speeds faster than light.
That said, cracking the light-speed barrier is vastly more complicated than going faster than sound. The aircraft that Yeager used to break Mach 1, for example, didn’t have to change form. But according to Einstein, an object that attains light speed would be converted to energy itself.
Nevertheless, as some physicists point out, there are nuances of Einsteinian physics that might permit faster-than-light travel. While an object can’t exceed the speed of light in space-time, space-time itself can be warped and distorted, as if it were a stretched-out bed sheet.
If a spaceship could harness something really powerful – like a bunch of super-dense matter from a neutron star – it might be possible to warp space-time enough to briefly pull two distant points together, the way that the edges of the bed sheet would come together if you dropped a heavy weight in the middle. Such warps in space-time – which are known as wormholes – in theory may occur naturally in some places, and a spaceship might be able to exploit them to travel enormous distances extremely quickly. List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.

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Through the Wormhole: How Does the Universe Work?

With the help of massive machines called particle accelerators, scientists studied the subatomic realm and made discoveries about the forces that operate at that level. But the search for a comprehensive explanation still continues.
In particular, physicists have sought to find a way to reconcile Einstein’s model of space-time, which seems to work best when applied to big objects like stars and galaxies, and the theory of quantum mechanics, which offers an explanation of electromagnetic and nuclear forces that makes sense of reality at the tiniest level.
In recent years, some have proposed a novel solution called string theory, in which tiny particles are loops that vibrate like violin strings in a multidimensional space.
In the mathematical calculations that make up string theory, gravitation is a byproduct of the process. While string theory offers a possible solution to the ultimate question of the ages, there’s a hitch: Scientists have not yet found a way to test the theory experimentally to prove that it’s more than just an elegant idea. List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.

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Through The Wormhole: Are There Parallel Universes?

Since the ancient Greeks first speculated that everything they observed in reality was the result of the interaction of tiny particles they called atoms, great thinkers have tried to find a single mathematical formula that governs and explains the workings of the entire universe.
So far, though, even minds as brilliant as physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have been unable to come up with that single grand equation of everything, also known as the theory of everything, or the final theory. Nevertheless, they continue to try, because without that final piece of the puzzle that is reality, the sum total of what we know falls a bit short of making sense.
Perhaps the most illustrious searcher for the equation of everything was physicist Albert Einstein, who spent the last 35 years of his life trying to uncover such an overarching explanation. Einstein’s own theory of general relativity, published in 1916, explained gravity, one of the strong forces in the universe, as the bending of space-time by matter. But general relativity didn’t explain electromagnetism, another strong force that was even more powerful than gravity.
Einstein wasn’t willing to accept that these two forces were unrelated, and he searched for a single explanation – a unified field theory – that would show how electromagnetism, gravity and space-time interacted. I see in nature a magnificent structure that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility, he once explained. But although he published a number of papers on his ideas about unified field theory, he died in 1955 without solving the problem to the satisfaction of other theoreticians. List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.

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Through The Wormhole: Is there a Sixth Sense?

Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the tools most of us depend on to perceive the world. But some people say they also can perceive things that are outside the range of the conventional senses, through some other channel for which there is no anatomical or neurological explanation. Scientific researchers who study such abilities call them extrasensory perception (ESP), but lay people often refer to them as the sixth sense.
Either term really is a catch-all for a variety of different purported abilities that vary from person to person. Some people claim the power of telepathy – that is, the ability to perceive others’ thoughts, without having them communicated verbally or in writing. Others claim to have the power of clairvoyance, which is the ability to perceive events and objects that are hidden from view because of barriers or distance. Still others claim to be gifted with precognition, which enables them to look into the future and glimpse what hasn’t yet occurred.
The belief in ESP or the sixth sense dates back thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Croesus, who ruled a kingdom in what is now Turkey in the sixth century B.C., consulted oracles – that is, groups of priests claimed to be able to predict the future — before he went to war. In ancient India, Hindu holy men were believed to possess the power to see and hear at a distance, and to communicate through telepathy.
In the late 1700s, the Viennese physician Franz Mesmer claimed that he could give people ESP powers by hypnotizing them. Just before his assassination in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln told friends that he’d dreamed of his own body lying in state in the White House. In the 20th century, Edgar Cayce and Jean Dixon attracted wide followings by claiming that they could foresee future events. During the Cold War, U.S. military and intelligence agencies, spurred by reports that the Soviets had psychics at their disposal, even tried to utilize clairvoyants who claimed remote-viewing powers for espionage purposes. List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.

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Through The Wormhole: Are There More Than Three Dimensions?

For most of our history, we’ve rested easy in the notion that there were three dimensions that have existed throughout time: length, width and height. Ah, the good old days. In the early 20th century, Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein connected our comfortable three dimensions with a fourth, time, defining special relativity using a space-time continuum.
This kind of worked, but still didn’t explain a troublesome new theory of gravity called quantum mechanics that arose around the same time Minkowski and Einstein were working on their theories. Quantum mechanics had its own rules that contradicted the concepts behind the space-time continuum. Scientists treated this incompatibility like the weather for decades, discussing it but not really doing anything about it.
While higher theoretical dimensions began with Descartes in the 1600s, in the 1970s string theory expanded on this idea as physicists attempted to tie everything together in one elegant explanation of the universe. Variations of string theory require the existence of up to eleven dimensions and a slew of universes, with our universe forming a three-dimensional membrane floating around some higher-dimensional donut. According to this theory, each point in space has six higher dimensions wrapped up in super-tiny geometries called Calibi-Yau Manifolds.
One recent string theory suggests that the reason we only experience the three spatial dimensions is that all universes with higher dimensions got into some cosmic car accident and destroyed each other, leaving our measly three-dimensional brane untouched. List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.

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