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 civilization 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,
one for people who are right and one for people who are wrong?
I know a lot of people I'd put on the wrong one, like 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.
-[director] Okay, cut. -My hair looks fucking shit.
[epic music playing]
[contemplative music playing]
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 Czar Nicholas, which is Russian for 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 Commonest Man in Festo.
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.
Lenin 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.
Lenin and his followers hacked into the Winter Palace
and uploaded a communist government.
Russia changed its name to USSR, or sometimes CCC…P!
What was the Soviet onion?
I think you're laboring under a misapprehension
and you probably mean the Soviet Union.
No, it's onion, I saw it on a bit of paper earlier.
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.
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?
-Okay. -What exactly was it?
If you don't know, it's okay to say, 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? -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, Lenin left the band
to concentrate on existing only in an afterlife he didn't believe in.
Lenin'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 you should probably include it.
Oh, right. Okay.
As the Soviet Union expanded,
the animosity between East and West deepened.
The division was symbolized 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.
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.
[light jazz playing]
[dramatic fanfare]
[Ed Herlihy] Today, a new moon is in the sky,
a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.
[Philomena] 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--
Is that Russian for "spunk"?
No, it's Russian for "traveler."
I suppose spunk in orbit would just sort of float around in globules
like it does in a bath.
Sorry, shall 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!
-Um… -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.
Sorry, can we just have a minute's silence for Laika?
Okay.
[exhales sharply]
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.
[announcer] The '55 Chevrolet is lower, wider 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! -[announcer] Right!
[Philomena] 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! -[announcer] Right!
[Philomena] 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 a white man that sang music of Black origin.
Did he have to apologize on social media?
No, because there was no social media then.
-Why doesn't Elvis apologize 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 sanitized 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 very sort of sexual manner.
And there was a lot of anxiety
that young women 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…
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.
[announcer] 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 Fidel Castro 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 F'ing 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 have their preferences
between the style of the Beatles and the style of the Stones.
Okay, so which of the "the Beatles of their day" was best:
Beatles one or Beatles two?
I think Beatles one is the preferred… 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 that it would blow up when it got there.
On board 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.
[Neil Armstrong] 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.
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, 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 nighttime too, don't you?
I experience it, as do billions of people around the world.
So, yes, I-I believe in nighttime.
I believe that when the earth rotates,
then we have a period of dark that we call nighttime.
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.
And that's why they wake up screaming.
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 realize 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 CO2, 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 globalization
to the toe-tapping sound of Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up the Jam."
[techno music playing]
♪ Pump up the jam, pump it up ♪
♪ While your feet are stomping ♪
♪ And the jam is pumping ♪
♪ Look ahead, the crowd is jumping ♪
♪ Pump it up a little more ♪
♪ Get the party going On the dance floor ♪
♪ See, 'cause that's Where the party's at ♪
♪ And you'll find out if you do that ♪
♪ I want a place to stay ♪
♪ Get your booty On the floor tonight ♪
♪ Make my day, I want-- ♪
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 the 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.
[cheering and applause]
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 revolutionized 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 already happened
and that all of human civilization 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?
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?
[contemplative music playing]
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 civilization?
Or not, I don't know.
And nor do you.
But whatever happens, it'll happen right here on Earth.
[director] Okay, that was great, we've got that.
-Yeah? -Yeah, all done. Thank you.
-Is that it? -Yeah. That's it. Nice one.
-So we're done? -Yeah, great work.
Oh, great. Are you sure you can make it look like I've been to these places?
-Yeah. Don't worry about that. -Really?
We do it on the computers afterwards. It's amazing these days.
Brilliant, see you then. Bye!
[director] Cut there, guys. Thank you, well done!
That was pretty good I think.
Great. Thank you.
[crew pacing, chatting indistinctly]
[microphone cover crinkling]