Last time, in 29 informative yet accessible minutes, we saw how a
string of breakthroughs led humankind to build the modern world
and create a weapon powerful enough to turn it all to
white-hot, boiling shit.
But that was only part of the story.
The part after that starts now.
It's 1945.
The atomic bomb's just gone off.
The world lies in ruins.
Cloning of Hitler has already begun.
The future looked uncertain,
and it was getting closer every minute, like it always does.
But this was going to be a future unlike any the world
had seen before -
a future of moon men and rock stars,
big business and free love,
computers and the internet.
And a killer robot sent through time to kill Sarah Connor.
Although that bit was just in a film.
Modern civilisation had arrived, but a clash of worldviews meant
that the threat of all-out conflict was never far away.
Could new forms of mass communication help us all to
get along or totally not do that?
Should there be two social medias? You know, one for people who are
right, and one for people who are wrong?
I mean, I know a lot of people I'd put on the wrong one.
Wankers.
So join me now in the last part of human existence as I find out
how we got where I am now and where we'll be tomorrow,
which at the time of filming is Wednesday.
Whenever the future arrives, it'll happen here, on a fragile bauble
I've come to know as Earth.
But my hair looks fucking shit.
Russia, a vast land to the east.
It's the first time we've mentioned it in this series,
but it's been there all along.
At the start of the 20th century, Russia was a vast empire,
just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe is today.
The average Russian was a pheasant, but he dreamt of being a man,
preferably a wealthy one, because while the Russian pheasants
lived in poverty, the rich lived in St Petersburg.
The top Russian was called t'Sar Nicholas,
which is Russian for t'King Nicholas.
He was allowed to rule the country like a dictator,
which I've been advised to say isn't how Russia works today.
A world like this, where the masses toil for pennies
while a tiny elite grow rich, seems so obviously unfair and
unthinkable to us today.
We can scarcely imagine what it must have been like.
One man who thought it was ein load of scheisse
was German thinker Karl Marx.
It's hard to tell, but if you look closely at this photograph,
you might notice he had a beard.
Marx also had a vision which he wrote down in a book called
The Commonist Maninfesto.
Today, it's one of those books that boffins talk about but no-one
actually reads, like all books.
But back then it was a hit, particularly popular amongst the
18-to-35 anti-capitalist revolutionary demographic.
One Russian who read the book was the man currently starring
in this photograph, Vladimir Ilyich John Lennon.
Lennon imagined a world with no possessions.
I wonder if you can.
Nothing to kill or die for, a brotherhood of man.
And he chose to bring it about with a violent uprising.
In 1917, he got his chance.
Thanks to food shortages,
people started rioting for bread, like ducks do.
Lennon and his followers hacked into the Winter Palace and uploaded
a communist government.
Russia changed its name to Usser,
or sometimes Ccccccccpp!
What was the Soviet Onion?
Well, I think you're labouring under a misapprehension
and you probably mean the Soviet Union.
No, it's Onion. I saw it on a bit of paper earlier.
Well, it's probably been misspelt or you can't read very well,
but I think that you mean in historical terms the Soviet Union,
or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Well, I don't want to be rude, but I think you're mansplaining a bit.
Can we stick to the topic of the Soviet Onion, please? OK.
What exactly was it?
If you don't know, it's OK to say. You know, I won't judge you.
Well, if you want to talk about, sort of,
Russian Soviet vegetables, we can.
I mean, it was a deeply agrarian country.
And so there were lots of onions, lots of potatoes,
lots of other things. Did they have turnips? I think so.
Cheap, easy to grow, hardy - great in a stew.
So how come you know so much about vegetables?
Have you got an allotment?
In 1924, Lennon left the band to concentrate on existing only
in an afterlife he didn't believe in.
Lennon's place was taken by Joseph Stalin, who presided
over a ruthless crackdown that killed, starved or exiled
millions of people.
Although, on the plus side, he had a friendly moustache.
Communism and capitalism are natural enemies, like men and women,
and cats and dogs.
But Russia and America had put aside their differences, thanks
to a mutual interest in winning the Second World War.
The end of WWII led to loads of celebrations in black-and-white
as people put years of conflict and misery behind them.
But behind these outdated-looking celebrations, trouble was brewing.
Now they'd run out of baddies to blow up or shoot,
East and West grew suspicious of each other.
It was the beginning of a whole new conflict -
World War Cold.
The Cold War is quite complicated, isn't it?
Should we definitely bother mentioning it in this,
or could we just give it a miss?
It defines most of the second half of the 20th century, so I think
you should probably include it.
Oh, right, OK.
As the Soviet Union expanded, the animosity between
East and West deepened.
The division was symbolised by the construction
of the Berlin Wall, a sort of divorce made of bricks.
There was a terrible atmosphere of mistrust, like I had with my ex
when I saw he had 28 missed calls from a contact he'd labelled
"Claudia Tits" on his phone.
He claims she was just a rep from Fitness First
and that that was her real name.
Well, I'm sorry, Sean.
I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.
I hope your mum's well.
Soon there was so much paranoia between East and West,
they started spying on each other, stockpiled nuclear weapons
and fought a series of proxy wars.
So Russia and America had proxy wars where they'd use other countries
to fight with.
Is that a bit like picking a character to do your fighting
with in Street Fighter II?
Well, I think throughout human history, there's been a tendency to
try and use other forces, fighters from other lands
to help do the fighting. Right.
So exactly like Street Fighter, then.
If this was Street Fighter II
and the Americans chose the character Ken, would the Russians
pick Zangief because he's from the Soviet Union?
Or would they go for someone like Dhalsim?
Obviously he'd be a better choice because he can dive-kick
over Ken's fireballs.
Well, I don't know. I mean, you'd have to ask, I think President Putin
for the definitive answer on that.
I suppose they'd go for the ones that had the most chance
of beating Ken.
Meanwhile, East and West were also competing to be the first
to explore the stars.
The rivalry became known as the Space Race
because that rhymes, although probably not in Russian.
We don't know what they called it, and to be honest, we probably
should have found out before recording this bit.
The first launches were considered complete disasters
at the time, but we now know they make for soothing viewing
when cut to light jazz.
Today, a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere placed
in orbit by a Russian rocket.
Finally, in 1957, the Russians became the first to pull off a
successful launch.
Why did the Russians launch Spunk into orbit?
Well, first of all, when you're looking at Russian words,
the name of the world's first satellite was Sputnik 1,
and the Russians launched... Is that Russian for "Spunk"?
No, it's Russian for "Traveller".
I suppose spunk in orbit would just sort of float
around in globules, like it does in a bath. Sorry.
Should I change the subject?
Hot on Sputnik's heels was this Soviet space dog,
known on Earth as Laika, who blasted into space in November 1957.
What happened to Laika?
I expect they gave her a bone and a rub on the tummy when she got back.
Well, Laika, unfortunately, never made it back to Earth
because shortly after launching, she overheated and she tragically
passed away just a few hours after being launched.
You're fucking joking!
I wish I was. No, this was... She was launched on
a flight that was pretty much one-way.
There's a dead dog in space?
So there's a dead dog somewhere in the back of a frame of every film
shot in space, like Star Wars?
I wouldn't say... There are dead dogs in Star Wars?
Uh... That is unacceptable!
Well, Laika's satellite eventually burned up in the Earth's atmosphere,
but this was well after she'd passed away.
As I say, it was just a few hours after launch
that she died, I think, of heat stress. Sorry, can we just
have a minute's silence for Laika?
OK.
SHE EXHALES
There's a dead dog in space.
Away from the Space Race, everyday Russians often had
hard lives, while Americans, in contrast,
appeared to enjoy a life of carefree luxury and hats.
Was the 1950s real?
Yes, it was certainly real. Are we sure?
Because it looks like it was made up when you see it.
It's all men in hats, and housewives smiling in kitchens.
Were those people real and was all that really happening?
Well, a lot of that is what you see in advertising.
The '55 Chevrolet is lower,
lighter and longer-looking.
The most popular drama on 1950s television
was a show called Adverts.
Adverts told the story of a man or woman who wanted a thing
and then bought it and then was happy -
the first-ever example of a three-act narrative structure.
Why, that's amazing! Right.
Adverts was so influential
it made viewers at home
want to be the sort of person
who bought things too.
They'd work hard to get money to buy a car
so they could drive to the shops
and buy more things, which they'd have to pay
for by going back to work, which made them miserable.
So they'd cheer themselves up by going out and buying more things
which they'd have to work to pay for.
Why, that's amazing! Right.
The only time they weren't working or buying was when they were
watching TV, and it was on these airwaves that a new kind
of culture was born - popular culture.
Unlike normal culture, which was paintings and Beethoven, this was
stuff people actually enjoyed.
For decades, pioneering black artists had steadily built on each
other's work to develop an exciting new musical form for white people
to pass off as their own.
Why do people say Elvis Presley appropriated white music?
They don't say that.
What they do say is that he appropriated black music.
He was... he was a white man that sang music of black origin.
Did he have to apologise on social media?
No, because there was no social media then.
Why doesn't Elvis apologise now?
Because Elvis is dead.
So he's appropriated dead people's lifestyles now?
What a fucking thief!
Having overcome childhood poverty and a hip impediment, Elvis
benefited from mass media, which broadcast him to an audience
of millions in sanitised form.
Why was it so dangerous to show Elvis from the waist down?
Was he naked underneath, like a pervert on a Zoom call?
He wasn't naked.
He moved his hips around a lot in a... in a very, sort of,
sexual manner,
and there was a lot of anxiety that young women
might be... might be a little bit too turned on by Elvis.
People were prudish back then, weren't they?
If they saw his penis, they'd probably
have a stroke, wouldn't they?
Probably. I don't think that would have made it onto the media...!
Oh, God.
That's not a joke.
What's funny about that?
If they saw his penis, they'd have a stroke.
That's no laughing matter.
We're talking about people's lives here.
Elvis was so dangerously explosive, he was requisitioned by the US Army
for military use.
And little wonder, considering what was going on.
Both Russia and America were building up huge stockpiles
of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the entire planet several
times over, in case they missed the first time.
It seemed the planet was headed for World War III, and in the early
'60s it teetered up to the edge of the brink of the precipice
and gazed straight into an abyss of no return.
Crisis.
The word suddenly springs alive ominously in the newspapers
across America...
In the Cube And Missile Crisis, which was more dangerous -
the cubes or the missiles?
You're thinking of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which refers
to Cuba, which is a country off the coast of the United States,
near Florida. Isn't a cube a terrible shape for a missile?
It'd be more like a brick.
In 1959, there had been a Communist revolution in Cuba.
A man called Fido Castrol rose to power and immediately made
friends with Russia.
Then, in 1962, America discovered the Soviets were going to use Cuba
as a base for nuclear missiles, and those missiles could make
it to Florida in just 20 minutes,
if the wind was fair and they could find somewhere to park.
American president and pin-up John Effing Kennedy demanded
the Russians remove the missiles.
Otherwise, war was inevitable,
or worse still, possible.
For six days, the world held its breath, meaning it might die
from asphyxiation before the bombs even went off.
In the end, Soviet Emperor Nikita Khrushchev backed down like a
shameful fucking chicken, and his missiles went home
with their tails between their legs.
Kennedy was victorious.
John F Kennedy won the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Why did he shoot himself afterwards?
Well, he didn't.
He negotiated a settlement to the Cuban Missile Crisis
with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.
And then after that, he ended up being assassinated
in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, unfortunately.
But he didn't fire the bullet. Right.
It's ironic that he was so concerned about Cuban missiles
when it was a gun in Texas he should have been worried about.
I bet he was kicking himself after he was shot.
Having dodged Armageddon,
the world was hungry for change, and a young generation who wanted
to give peace a chance rose up.
Their heroes weren't politicians but countercultural musicians whose
works defined the era.
The Rolling Stones were huge in the 1960s.
Would it be fair to say they were the Beatles of their day?
Well, I thought... They were contemporary.
So there was always a jostle between the Stones
and the Beatles. Right, but the Beatles were already
the Elvis of their day.
So there's a spare Beatles.
Can we give that to the Rolling Stones, even though
they're happening at the same time?
Well, I think people had their... have their preferences
between the style of the Beatles and the style of the Stones. OK.
So which of the Beatles of their day was best?
Beatles 1 or Beatles 2?
I think Beatles 1 is the preferred. Beatles 1? Or Beatles, the first...
The Beatles. Next question.
Of all the bands of the 1960s, which ones was The Kinks?
Meanwhile, the Space Race was still being run.
Nasa had spent billions of dollars developing a rocket powerful enough
to reach the moon, but not so powerful it'd blow up
when it got there.
Onboard were Neil Armstrong, Alan Alda and another man who asked
to remain anonymous.
On July 20th, 1969, the whole world was watching on television to see
if the moon would blow up,
and also because there was nothing else on.
The global audience must have been genuinely astounded
by the appalling picture quality,
which was terrible even for the time.
I mean, just look at it.
Looks like they've flown to the blur dimension
to intercept a smudge.
That's one small step for man...
..one giant leap for mankind.
The sound quality was terrible, too,
but what he said was, "That's one small step for man, one bionic leap
"for mankind," thereby declaring the moon for men.
Which is why, to this day, women have been denied entry to the moon.
With the moon landings,
man had achieved greatness, transcending earthly limits
and exploring the heavens themselves -
assuming any of this actually happened.
A lot of people on the internet say the moon landings were faked.
How right are they?
They are completely wrong.
No historian has ever questioned the reality of Project Apollo
because not one piece of so-called evidence that the
conspiracy theorists put forward has
ever stood up to peer-review scrutiny.
Right, but obviously it is fake because how could they have landed
on the moon if the moon isn't real?
What makes you think the moon isn't real, though, Philomena?
It isn't.
I don't know if you've done your own research, but my mate Paul sent me
a video that exposes the whole thing.
Can you prove the moon exists?
You can't, can you?
We see it in the sky.
We have sent spacecraft to the moon.
We've brought samples back to Earth.
No, watch the video.
It'll open your eyes.
You probably believe in night-time, too, don't you?
I experience it, as do billions of people around the world,
so, yes, I believe in night-time.
I believe that when the Earth rotates, then we have a period
of dark that we call night-time. Wake up. It's all in the video.
They just make us think the moon is real and that night is real,
just to keep us obedient.
Think about it.
Babies haven't been indoctrinated yet, so they know there's no such
thing as night. That's why they wake up screaming.
Right, let's move on.
The Space Race was over,
America had won, and the prize had turned out to be
the worst holiday destination in history, which they couldn't even
warn people about because TripAdvisor didn't exist.
But there was a consolation prize - the best holiday snap in history,
taken on Apollo 8 and known as Earthrise.
Today, it's too boring to hold your attention in a landmark
documentary for more than eight seconds,
but back then, this photograph made people think.
And not just a small thought like, "That looks nice,"
but a big thought.
It made us realise our planet is fragile.
The ecological movement had always been popular with hippies,
but people ignored them because of the way they were dressed
and because they were too stoned to make their point coherently.
But now scientists began to worry about the state of the planet,
and so no-one would mistake them for hippies
they wore clean white coats and glasses
to deliver their warnings.
But we ignored them, too, because they looked like nerds.
The problem was progress.
All the modern gadgets we'd got so hooked on ran on electricity,
which came from power stations, which burn fossil fuels,
which creates a gas called CO-2,
which flies out of chimneys
and stops the sky working properly.
One solution to all this environmental damage was to build
nuclear power stations, which don't emit anywhere
near as much harmful material, unless they blow up,
which never happens.
Until it did in 1986 at Chernobyl.
The radiation from Chernobyl turned a huge area into
a deadly no-go zone, even worse than Reigate town centre.
The fallout wafted across thousands of miles and had one
unforeseen side-effect.
It made the bricks of the Berlin Wall extremely brittle -
so brittle, it began to collapse.
Desperate locals rushed to the wall's assistance and tried
to make it better with hammers and fists,
but it was no use.
As the wall died, so did communism.
Capitalism had won, with financial markets embracing globalisation
to the toe-tapping sound of Belgian techno anthem Pump Up The Jam.
Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic
Suddenly, everybody, apart from poor people, was making so much
money that there wasn't room to store it all in coins.
Instead, it had to be stored in numbers on a screen, surrounded
by men shouting at it to keep it inside.
To keep track of all this money,
the world needed a special kind of mega abacus, and luckily
it had one - the computer.
Today, computers are everywhere but they used
to be a cumbersome rarity.
In the '50s and '60s, one computer would take up a whole room.
But in the 1970s, engineers made a startling discovery.
If they got rid of all those pointless flashing lights
and spinning tape reels, they could make computers much smaller -
small enough, in fact, to fit on the tip of your finger.
This was the microchip and it was amazing.
Thank you.
Give you the little fella back now.
The microchip couldn't actually do anything until you shoved it
into a big machine like this.
But in terms of floor space alone,
it was still a big improvement.
Now computers were small enough to share a house with,
loads more people wanted one.
Silicon Valley was born - a computer heartland that would be defined
by the rivalry between two men, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Their names might have been boring, but the things they said
were more boring.
Gates founded Microsoft and hit the big time with a baffling,
unofficial sequel to Ms Pac-Man, called Ms Dos.
Meanwhile, Jobs created the Apple Macintosh, the world's
first inherently smug computer.
While their rival systems kept computer users apart,
something else was trying to bring them all together -
WWW - the Web Wide World.
The internet was so modern and interesting, it seemed humankind
might never get up from its desk again.
Then, in a dramatic and momentous keynote presentation, Steve Jobs
revealed he'd discovered how to put the internet
inside a portable rectangle,
changing history forever.
And we are calling it iPhone. APPLAUSE, CHEERING
Its success inspired tons of imitators, like that one your
mum uses, and soon smartphones were so ubiquitous, you're probably
looking at one now instead of me while I'm saying this.
Smartphones revolutionised the way humans interact
by providing a socially acceptable way to ignore everyone around us.
But we're not lonely.
Thanks to social media, it's quicker and easier than ever to bond
with millions of others over something as simple as a cat photo
or the ritual shaming of a stranger.
It's easy to see why the smartphone has become the most popular
invention this century.
It's incredibly advanced,
yet at the same time so simple a child can make one.
In fact, not just one, but about 50 of these an hour,
if it wants to avoid another night in the punishment block.
Sadly, Steve Jobs died before he could witness Apple's success,
apart from the first few hundred billion dollars.
On his deathbed, he made Apple engineers promise to change
the iPhone's headphone jack every three years,
then uploaded himself to the cloud.
Meanwhile, Gates wasted his fortune eradicating malaria
in the Third World.
But despite Apple and Microsoft's total failure, computers continue
to go from strength to strength.
Some believe we're heading for an event known
as the singularity, where artificial intelligence becomes too clever
for our own good.
While others believe this has already happened
and that all of human civilisation exists only
inside a computer simulation.
How do we know we're not in a simulation?
We don't know.
There are lots of smart people who think it is possible that we live
in a simulation.
If this is a simulation,
why is the computer making me ask you this?
Well... from my perspective, you are asking a question,
so I could imagine that you are being controlled by a computer,
but you may well feel that you have free will and you're asking
those questions yourself.
Why do I have to actually come and film this?
Couldn't a computer just show it on the telly in the simulation?
Or is that where I am? You know, do I exist at all?
Why is this happening?
Why isn't it just me eating a chocolate eclair in a loop,
like in a gif? I'd swap for that.
Actually, are people in looping gifs caught in a simulation?
Is that what's happened to them?
Where do wasps fit into the simulation?
I'm not quite sure how...
Sorry, there's a lot to unpick, isn't there?
In this series, we've taken you from our primitive beginnings
through spiritual awakenings, cultural explosions
and major scientific breakthroughs.
Now, in the present moment, humankind sits impaled
on a crossroads, facing an uncertain future.
Will we rise to the challenge of climate change...
Or the opposite of that?
Will computers learn to delete us?
And if they do, how will we get ourselves out of the recycle bin?
Can humankind learn to exist at peace with itself?
Or are all of us right now living through the final hours, minutes
and seconds of civilisation?
Or not?
I don't know.
And nor do you.
But whatever happens, it'll happen right here on Earth.
OK. That was great. We've got that, Philomena. Yeah? Yeah, all done.
Thank you. Is that it? Yeah, that's it. Nice one. Is that me done? Yeah.
Great work. Oh, great. So, are you sure you can actually make it look
like I've been to these places?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't worry about that. What, really?
We do all that on computers afterwards. Oh, OK. All right.
It's amazing these days. Brilliant. See you, then. Bye.
Cut there, guys. Thank you. Well done.
That was pretty good, I think.
Great. OK.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
SHUFFLING, RUSTLING
SOUND DROPS