Faszination Universum - Eine Frage der Zeit [komplette TV-Folge] | Harald Lesch

Where does everything that exists today come from? The Big Bang was the beginning of a development that has lasted more than 10 billion years. Only then did life emerge in our solar system. Couldn't it have been faster? Life seems to be in a hurry these days and many processes are so fast that they escape our perception. But until life can really work, Fascination Universe with Professor Harald Lesch from the great Potsdam refractor Welcome to Fascination Universe What is our most valuable asset? Exactly, our time! But how do we approach it? We put them together, speed them up, seemingly using every technical means possible to try to squeeze the last of our life out of it.

We cannot manipulate nature's clocks. Up in the cosmos or down in matter, in the confines of time, there are no deadlines or time pressure. The stars and planets run back and forth up there, but it takes an eternity and three days before we see any change. And in matter, where we believe it is stable, that is where the devil acts, temporally speaking. And we are in the middle, between the micro and the macro, but we are scoundrels. With practice and technology, we can overcome times we don't really feel. A world to marvel at, like in a fairy tale.

The reality remains hidden, almost literally. We see that we do not see how the acrobats coordinate. Our senses fail us. Even in nature, many processes are too fast for our perception. What is the bat doing on a flower? And how can a bumblebee fly? Questions we cannot answer without tools. A curious puzzle was intended to be an opportunity to expand our visual perception. Can horses fly, that is, have all four legs in the air at the same time? In 1872, a horse lover commissioned British photographer Edward Muybridge to answer the question. He spent five years working on a solution.

You connect many cameras in series and you have a brilliant idea. Using cables on the cameras, a cascade of shots is activated by opening the shutters in front of the lenses. It is the invention of the camera shutter. And, in fact, horses float in the air for a brief moment as they gallop. This is how the first series of photographs was obtained, the first film composed of twelve individual images. Technology makes visible what would otherwise elude perception. Today, special cameras record more than 100,000 images per second and show amazing details. The flower bat's tongue is so long that it can dip into the calyx and lick the nectar.

A mystery for a long time: the flight of the bumblebee. How can such a clumsy animal with relatively small wings even take off? Extremely slow motion reveals how this works. A bumblebee can beat 240 wings per second, three times more than a hummingbird. She rotates her wings with each heartbeat. This creates air vortexes that carry the chubby animal upward. The movement of acrobats can also be studied in detail thanks to sophisticated technology. 64 cameras arranged in a semicircle provide completely new information. Filmed from all angles, you can see every detail of the movements. Thanks to technology, details that would otherwise remain hidden can be studied.

The recordings cannot disenchant the performance: the amazement remains. Wow, a real expert! The juggler just has it. He has so automated his movements that they seem to happen on their own. He doesn't even need to look anymore. However, if he asked her how he did it, his sticks would probably fall to the ground. There are many such machines in the animal kingdom. Here, for example, this house fly is a real expert in observation. Compared to her, we just stare. Why is it like this? Tell me, Til, how do you really do that? Most of the time it goes wrong.

The fly always seems to suspect which direction the attack is coming from. Her brain only weighs half a milligram, but it is a true memory when it comes to processing images. We perceive about 20 images per second, the fly perceives 200. And with its compound eyes it has perfect panoramic vision. He sees the movements around him as if in slow motion and can always take off in time. But there are enemies that can keep up when it comes to detecting movement. We only understand the surprise attack through slow motion. That's how it is in nature, everything optimized to the right level.

Our vision, too slow compared to that of the fly, is completely sufficient for us. But our senses are optimal for us, but of course they are also limited, both up and down. Cosmic periods of billions of years cannot be imagined. But our minds are constantly searching for ways to somehow visualize the unimaginable. We can imagine a year. So let's compress the entire nearly 14 billion year cosmic event into one year and many things will become clearer. On January 1, shortly after midnight, with the first New Year's Eve rocket the Big Bang will occur, the beginning of everything. From now on, each month will correspond to about 1.1 billion years.

The Milky Way forms in early spring. And for the next 6 months, practically nothing will happen in the universe that could be relevant to us. Only at the beginning of September does the sun rise and with it the earth. And we? We only arrive shortly before the end of the year, 15 minutes before midnight, on December 31, when we play with fire and the mental achievements of the human mind, that is, writing, books, pyramids, computers, etc. ., you have to Share the last 30 seconds. Now, between us: that could have been faster, right? There are around 9 million different species in the world.

There are only more than 10,000 species of birds, but they all depend on the same basic elements. When it comes to certain minerals that are not found everywhere, such as table salt, many animals do not like the food. Butterflies also gather in mineral-rich soils. For others, they become a snack in themselves, refined with a savory sauce. Table salt crystals, sodium chloride, are made up of two elements, sodium and chlorine. Without elements like these there would be no life as we know it. But it took time until they finally came into the world. In the Big Bang, day 1 of the universe's calendar, the first elements, hydrogen and helium, were created.

The conditions simply did not allow for anything else. And there is a reason for this: hydrogen atoms have only one nucleus, helium atoms have four. But many of life's basic materials are significantly heavier. Sodium, for example, has 23 basic components. The problem: positively charged atomic nuclei repel each other. In order to weld them together and form heavy elements, extreme conditions are needed, conditions that had not yet arisen. One hundred million years after the Big Bang, on January 4, the first stars formed. Your own gravity presses on matter. The pressure and temperature inside increase. Only at more than 3 million degrees does a transcendental process begin.

The heat causes the atomic nuclei to collide with such force that they fuse. Little by little, increasingly heavier elements are created, including the components of salt. But the new elements are initially trapped in the star. Only when its fuel is exhausted does the star release new building blocks. In a gigantic explosion, a supernova, especially large stars throw material into space. In this way, the gas between the stars is inoculated with heavy elements. But first the building blocks are lost in the vastness of space. It will take billions of years until the building materials of life come together to form new forms.

Millions of stars have yet to form in our galaxy and more building blocks have yet to be hatched. The sun only emerges in the autumn of the cosmic calendar. Now the universe has cooled enough for rocky planets like our Earth to form. And only now the amount of heavy elements that life needs is sufficient. Without billions of years of stellar life, the building blocks of life would not exist. Man also owes his existence to cosmic processes. Time that was necessary to create the right conditions. With the exception of hydrogen, which was created throughout the universe in the first 3 minutes, all living things are made of chemical elements called stardust.

The calcium in our bones, the carbon in almost all molecules, the oxygen we breathe or drink in the form of water, the iron in the blood that carries and binds oxygen. All of them are created in stellar incubators by fusing small atomic nuclei into increasingly larger ones. And our Earth could only exist because enough heavy stars in the Milky Way exploded. The remains of the explosion inoculate the interstellar medium, that is, the gas between the stars, with the periodic table of chemical elements. However, researchers have been puzzled about how life emerged from this for centuries, at least by Earth standards.

England, mid-17th century When asked about the origin of life, people often turn to a single source: the Bible. According to her, God created the world and all life about 6,000 years ago. The natural sciences are still in their infancy. Longer periods of time seem unthinkable. And yet, a man should manage to break the biblical time horizon. Robert Hooke The English scholar is considered a weirdo, unsociable and always absorbed in his studies. Nothing can escape his scientific curiosity. He is one of the first to turn the telescope, invented almost 100 years earlier, to closely observe everything that crawls and flies, or ever crawls and flies.

He records his observations meticulously. Thanks to his artistic talent, Hooke's knowledge of the microscopic world remains impressive today. But simply documenting his observations with drawings does not satisfy him. Robert Hooke compiled his observations in his book "Micrographia" and drew wonderful pictures of a completely new world. And he has published his thoughts on fossils. Because Robert Hooke was not only a very accurate observer, but he also drew the right conclusions. He was one of the first to have doubts about the biblical calendar of the origin of life. No wonder, after all, the Bible is not a science textbook.

And even if some US senators or even the vice president see it differently, ammonites from ancient times, 350 million years ago, can still be found today in beautiful Oklahoma. However, during Robert Hooke's lifetime, such periods of time were unimaginable. For Hooke, as for many of his contemporaries, ammonites are mysterious objects. By comparing them to living species, it was clear back then that they were once marine creatures. But that contradicts the locations. Ammonites have been found not only on the coasts, but also in the interior and even on the highest peaks in the world, in the Himalayas. How did the Ammonites get there?

Back then no one had any idea that the continents were changing. The Church's Explanation: The flood swept sea creatures into the caves. But Hooke can't believe it. He knows: ammonites have been found in layers of soil that are often more than 100 meters thick. The flood is said to have lasted 400 days. Too short for such huge deposits to form. There must be another cause. Hooke's conjecture is revolutionary. He believes that the land itself has changed. Even then we knew processes that were constantly reshaping the country. Ocean currents, climate, volcanism and earthquakes. Some forms even suggest that layers of earth were lifted, folded and displaced.

The ancient seabed could also have become mountains. But such processes, Hooke reasoned, take a long time. The ammonites, and therefore all life on Earth, must be much older than the biblical 6,000 years. Hooke's thoughts open up periods of time that were previously unthinkable. However, he can't name them exactly. In Hooke's time, the age of the rocks could not yet be determined. And the stones are still. They don't say anything. They certainly don't talk about his age. And these chasms of time that we now associate with the age of rocks would have been dismissed then as pure nonsense.

And yet, many scientists have asked: how old is the Earth? In 1862, the great Lord Kelvin concluded: 25 million years, but at most 400 million years. In 1869 he declared that this time would never be enough in a lifetime for Darwinian evolution. Life must have reached Earth through a meteorite. It would be another five decades until a method that made rocks and fossils talk would finally be discovered. And they even talk about their age, of course without words. At the beginning of the 20th century, the world witnesses mysterious discoveries. Invisible rays. At fairs, X-ray machines are admired. They make it possible to miraculously see inside the body.

And some elements, such as uranium, can blacken photographic plates without any light involved. They are radioactive. On the contrary, the possible dangers are not yet known. More yearsLater, the radioactive element radium was still considered a miracle cure. The innocence is understandable, because radioactivity was then an inexplicable phenomenon. one man is especially fascinated: Ernest Rutherford What the New Zealander does not know is that his research on uranium will revolutionize the determination of geological age. His hypothesis: to produce radioactive radiation, the elements themselves must change. Precise analyzes of substances could provide evidence, but the physicist lacks the experience to do so.

But he has good contacts and asks a chemist for help. Frederick Soddy The idea that elements could be transformed then belonged to the magical world of alchemists. The two researchers are amused by the idea that they could be mocked as such. It takes a year and a half before they have the test. In fact, uranium decays into other elements and, ultimately, lead. Highlights: Decline is like a clock ticking on a geological time scale. After four and a half billion years, exactly half of the uranium atoms in the rock have decayed into lead. The discovery of this half-life gave geologists a new tool to determine age.

Because uranium is present, at least in small quantities, in many rocks. If you compare the amount of uranium to the amount of lead, you can calculate how long it must have taken until this exact ratio is reached. Thanks to Rutherford's ambition, silent ammonites are now revealing their age: until 400 million years ago Ernest Rutherford had a vocal organ so powerful that there were warning signs in his laboratory: "Please speak quietly!" . He is the ancestor of age determination; the atomic nuclei spoke to him first. And since Rutherford, we have gotten closer and closer to the history of life and its origins, because we can date smaller and smaller fossils.

Here, for example, these microfossils, half the width of a human hair, from hematite rocks in northern Canada. They show structures that we otherwise only know from bacteria. Age: between 3,800 and 4,400 million years. Here we have the first indications of when life on Earth may have originated. And now we have the next puzzle. In our cosmic calendar, the Earth forms on September 2 and bacteria in mid-September. But animals and plants on land last until September 20. 4 billion years pass, why does it take so long? Well, the answers are profound. The depths of the sea are a place of extreme conditions.

And yet, in the last 40 years, an unimaginable diversity of species has been discovered here. Deep-sea creatures feed on bacterial mats that thrive in hot springs. It could all have started here. Researchers suspect that bacteria are the original form of life. They settle for the volcanic cocktail of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and sulfur for food. This fundamentally differentiates them from most living beings today. For most living species, volcanic gases are poisonous. They depend on another substance: oxygen. Its metabolism is up to 10 times more efficient than that of deep-sea bacteria, but it took eons for life to learn to use this substance.

At the time of the first bacteria, in mid-September of the cosmic calendar, the atmosphere was composed mainly of water vapor and carbon dioxide. There is also no oxygen in the oceans. Only a biological revolution finally heralds change. Cyanobacteria emerged three and a half billion years ago. They are the first to use light energy to produce sugar from carbon dioxide and water. The invention of photosynthesis A byproduct: oxygen But although cyanobacteria multiply splendidly, oxygen remains scarce at first. It immediately comes back together because a lot of iron is dissolved in the ancient oceans. Reacts with oxygen to form oxide.

Traces of that time can still be found today in the iron mines. The rust-red deposits show that oxygen could not develop its effect on life for a long time. Only in the autumn of the cosmic calendar, a billion years after the emergence of photosynthesis, does oxygen gradually accumulate. It is a poison for the first years of life. Now is the time to perish or adapt, but it will be another 2 billion years before oxygen-breathers can take advantage. Then, starting in mid-December, life explodes. In the so-called "Cambrian explosion" an incredible diversity of species emerged in just over 20 million years.

Oxygen is considered one of the prerequisites for this development. Now oxygen has also accumulated in the atmosphere. The conquest of the country is now just a blink of an eye geologically. Organisms that know how to use oxygen are spreading rapidly on earth. Efficient metabolism is the successful model of evolution. However, the duration of each species depends on many factors and a series of coincidences. Life is interconnected, it is complex, it is an extremely sensitive matter. No wonder something like this takes time for the interaction of adaptation and improvement to become unsurpassed diversity. Normally the evolution is calm and slow, but from time to time it receives a push.

And then it goes turbo. The reason for this was radical changes. Like an alien hammer hitting the earth, like, literally, a bomb. Until then, lizards were the rulers of the world. Monsters the size of trucks, carnivorous monsters the size of excavators, but they disappeared in a geologically very short period of time, leaving the world to mammals. And we descend from mammals. At first there were a few models of our type, very different, until we reached a certain key event. Then only Homo sapiens remained. Everything was decided, how to say it, somehow by the universe. For a long time it was unknown how fate played the cosmos.

Europe a long time ago A species of human roams the forests: the Neanderthal Hunts, makes tools and makes clothes with animal skins. He even creates jewelry pieces with his craftsmanship. Neanderthals have had much of Europe for themselves for 200,000 years. He still has no idea that his life will soon change drastically. Because a cosmic event opens the door to Europe to a different type of human being. For immigrants from Africa It is a crucial moment in human history in which there will only be one winner. Modern humans and Neanderthals shared living space for a few thousand years, then the Neanderthals became extinct.

But why did modern humans, Homo sapiens, leave Africa in the first place? And what does the cosmos have to do with it? Modern humans have been roaming the savannahs of Africa for more than 200,000 years. He is a skilled hunter and creates sophisticated tools. Its settlement area extends to the southern tip of the Sahara. Then, as now, the Sahara is a desert. But that should change. The reason: Earth's orbit around the Sun. The orbit changes over time. Sometimes it is elliptical, sometimes more circular. This cosmic cycle repeats approximately every 100,000 years and influences the Earth's climate. About 70,000 years ago, the Earth traced a clearly elliptical orbit.

It is now comparatively close to the sun during some months of the year. The sunlight is particularly strong during this time. As a result, much larger amounts of water evaporate. Moisture rises from the sea and forms thick rain clouds. The humid air now rains over the desert. The seeds sown here germinate and the desert turns green. The additional moisture causes the monsoon band in Africa to widen. Currently it extends further north and, therefore, to the entire Sahara. Rivers emerge and soon true waterways pass through the once sandy barrier. Along the rivers new paths open for modern people.

Roads north, to Europe. The cycles in the cosmos played fate. They made modern humans competitors of Neanderthals. Why the immigrant remained the winner remains a topic of debate among researchers. However, something of the Neanderthal remains. Today we know that the meeting was not hostile from the beginning. Between 2 and 5 percent of Europeans' genes come from Neanderthals. Cosmic forces play destiny. And it is not only the shape of the Earth's orbit that plays a role, but also the fact that its axis of rotation sometimes tilts more and sometimes less and also wobbles in a cycle of several thousand years.

The interaction of these cosmic cycles causes cold and warm periods to alternate on our planet. Without us, we would long ago return to an ice age. It has now just become clear, as published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, that with the level of greenhouse gases we have today, it would naturally be much lower, and due to our influence it has become so high that this level leads to the next ice age will be another 30,000 years, possibly 50,000 years from now. Human beings have become a stronger climate factor than natural cosmic rhythms. And how did we do that?

Making the past and the future the present. We condense time by any means possible. Although before it was said: “Everything takes time”, today the effort consists of squeezing more and more into the same unit of time. 100 years ago, a train journey from Munich to Berlin lasted more than 15 hours. Today there are 6. 100 years ago a trip to New York was only possible by boat. It lasted more than a week. Today you can reach the city by plane in 8 hours. Technical progress makes it possible. Nature has its own rhythm. People have always observed regularly repeating processes in nature.

They began using them about 12,000 years ago. They knew that a plant grows from a seed. And that the grains take a certain time to mature. And nothing could speed things up. Even today, in modern agriculture, everything takes time. Fertilization, highly cultivated seeds and mechanization have increased yields. But it still takes months from planting to harvest. Nature's processes cannot be compressed into shorter units of time. Thousands of years ago, a pregnancy lasted nine months. Today, although we travel from one continent to another in a much shorter time, it still takes nine months for a child to develop in the womb.

It took the universe billions of years to create the elements that make up everything. Billions of years until galaxies formed and our solar system formed. And billions more years until oxygen and diverse life reached the world. With our progress we have accelerated many things, but not the course of nature. My God, how time flies! We have now covered 14 billion years of cosmic history in just under three-quarters of an hour. Time, we all believe today that we can control it, that we can condense it, that we can save it, that we can even make it work for us.

This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of all time. In ancient Rome, Caesars had to be whispered in their ears at the moment of their greatest triumph: "Memento mori": remember that you are mortal. Because in the end we are all children of time and not its owners. Time is only given to us and gifts do not bend. And you don't pressure them either. Every day brings 24 new and unused hours. What opportunities! We should treat this, our own time, as a treasure. And what is the best way to do it? In short: forgetting about them at least occasionally and simply enjoying them.

Have a lot of fun with it!