Cosmos A Spacetime Odyssey

Episode 11 Summary

Must we die? Are there beings in the cosmos who live forever, travelling on an endless journey down the river of time?

Our quest begins on the royal flotilla of the young Akkadian Princess Enheduanna, as it drifts down the Euphrates River on a night in 2300 B.C.E. She is the first person in history with a byline, the first author whose name is attached to the particular words she wrote.

More than 5,000 years after her death she still has the power to speak tous. One of Enheduanna’s poems is a vision of the goddess of love conquering the universe. She is our starting point for a meditation on the forms that immortality can take.

The majestic walls of Uruq (Iraq) rise again as we meet the world’s oldest surviving hero, Gilgamesh. Prototype of all superheroes, his journey is a search for immortality. He encounters the wise man, Utnapushtim, whom the gods instructed to build an ark and gather up all the animals, a thousand years before Noah.

They all still live thousands of years after their deaths, but life itself sends its own messages across billions of years. It is written within us, inside us in our DNA.

The peace of an Egyptian village is shattered on a morning in the early 20th century by a meteorite. There was a message inscribed inside it that could not be read for another seventy years – not until we sent our robots to Mars.

Life as a traveller on a heroic journey: Its various strategies for moving around the planet, between the planets and perhaps, between the stars and galaxies.

Actual footage from 1946 of the first deliberate attempt by intelligent life to communicate with another world — and the cosmic fate of that message.

Do civilizations have finite lifespans? What happened to Uruq? Why did the great ancient civilizations perish?

Red dwarf stars live for trillions of years. What would intelligent beings do if they had an eternity to develop their understanding of the universe?

A trip to the Cosmic Calendar of the Future and the historic events on Earth that might happen in the first seconds of January 1st of the new Cosmic Year.