What Are We?

S1 E5: The series continues as Hawking takes three ordinary people on a journey of discovery; to show them how inspiring it can be to think like a genius, and work out what we humans really are. The audience will want to play along and see if they can think like a genius too. By the end everyone will have an entirely new appreciation of themselves. In this episode a new set of volunteers take on some more extraordinary tasks. They begin with a crazy Rube Goldberg chain reaction machine, and from there the realizations come thick and fast. Self-assembling machines, light-up bacteria and the world’s first physical demonstration of evolution in action conspire to totally revolutionize their view of life. We discover not only that our bodies are machines of incredible complexity, but how they came to exist and how long it took for our lives to come about. Along the way the show also explains how the great geniuses of history made their breakthroughs about life and how we came to understand not just who we are but the processes that produced us. At the end of the film, an epic CGI sequence reveals the amazing age of life – and how tiny a blip is the whole of human history. We have truly thought like geniuses...