Plot Synopsis

In this five-part series, Professor Brian Cox explores the place of human beings in the universe. Beginning in Ethiopia, Cox discovers how the universe played a key role in our ascent from apeman to spaceman by driving the expansion of our brains. But big brains alone did not get us to space. To reveal what did, Brian heads out of Africa to the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. In the second installment, Cox reveals how the wonderful complexity of nature and human life is simply the consequence of chance events constrained by the laws of physics that govern our universe. But this leads him to a deeper question -- why does our universe seem to have been set up with just the right rules to create us? Then, in the third episode, Cox explores the ingredients needed for an intelligent civilisation to evolve in the universe -- the need for a benign star, for a habitable planet, for life to spontaneously arise on such a planet and the time required for intelligent life to evolve and build a civilization. Next, in the penultimate show, Cox explores our origins, place and destiny in the universe, beginning with a climb to the summit of the spectacular fortified village of Ait-Ben-Haddou in the foothills of Morocco's Atlas Mountains. Here he reveals how, by watching the stars' motion across the night's sky, it was natural for us to believe we were at the centre of everything -- a view that held sway for millennia. Finally, Cox concludes the series by asking what next for the ape that went to space. In northern Spain, he begins in a cave that was once home to our distant ancestors. Here, he discovers some of the earliest art in the universe - a child's hand painted onto the wall that has remained intact for around 40,000 years. That child - if raised today - would be just as bright and just as capable as any modern child. Yet its vision of the future would be very different to ours.
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On Wednesday, June 10, 2015 from 9-11pm ET/PT, Science Channel aired the U.S. premiere of this series, showing back-to-back episodes with the title HACKING THE UNIVERSE instead of the show's original title, HUMAN UNIVERSE.