Imagine if you could halt the constant march of time.
...if you could slow it down... and speed it up.
Imagine if you could stop time... or even reverse it.
The world about us would look quite different.
Imagine no longer... come with us as we go on a journey through time.
Our lives are ruled by the clock.
But our obsession with time
should come as no surprise.
Deep inside us we all have a clock
that regulates our lives.
Can this body clock tell us
when we're most likely to get drunk?
If we all wanted to live forever could this worm
hold the key to eternal life?
In our busy lives
we are always chasing time
always trying to save it.
But in a crisis how can we change time
to help save ourselves?
We think of ourselves as slaves to the clock.
Racing through life at breakneck speed,
has become the norm.
But could our pursuit of speed
be the key to time travel,
letting us visit the distant future?
Will we ever truly become masters of time?
Time is precious.
We never seem to have enough.
We've spent centuries building clocks,
all to more and more accurately
measure the passing of hours, minutes and seconds.
Yet it still doesn't buy us any more of the stuff.
Time has come to mean the straitjacketing of our day -
the constant schedule
that rules our lives.
Yet, if you think about it,
our everyday experience of time
is far from constant.
We all have long, lazy days
when time seems to stand still.
But time doesn't change,
only our sense of it.
This sensation might all be down
to how we process what we see.
We can see the effect at the movies.
A film seems to pass by in a seamless flow.
But what we are really seeing
is a series of static photographs,
one following quickly after another.
When slowed down it's clear
that each one is slightly different from the one before.
Flash twenty-four of them past each second,
and they create a sense of fluid movement.
Your brain works in a similar way.
When you leave the cinema
you're also seeing the world
as a series of pictures.
Your brain does a rapid scan of each new image
to register what's changed.
It's how we avoid
bumping into things.
But, like a film,
we just see the joined-up effect.
If we could reduce the number of images we see each second,
just imagine how our sense of time would change too.
Our lives would appear to flash past
like an express train.
The seasons would whiz past in minutes
rather than months.
Lf, on the other hand,
our brains scanned a huge number
of separate images every second, we'd be swamped with detail.
It would be like living in perpetual slow motion.
And let's face it,
that's just too chilled out.
But not for a fly.
A fly needs exactly this heightened level of awareness
because it hurtles through the world
at such high speed.
Flies see things we don't;
the flickering of a strip-light
and the individual scans on a TV-screen.
Most importantly it can see
the need for a quick escape,
from the fly swat, for instance.
We don't need to see
the world like the fly.
Day to day that level of detail is unnecessary.
The rate at which we clock our surroundings is the one
that best fits our pace of life.
It can vary.
When we're waiting,
time seems to drag.
When we're busy,
time flies.
But we can override all of this.
We have a remarkable,
hidden power over time.
It kicks
in during a crisis.
Faced with extreme danger
the mind enters an altered state.
People report seeing in black and white -
why bother to waste time processing colour
when your brain is on overload?
But most importantly, people say time slows down.
The brain is now on high alert,
processing far more
each second than normal.
It buys you extra time - to think...
and act.
So we can, when necessary,
and without a second thought,
fundamentally control our experience of time.
Why, then, do we feel
we're such slaves to the clock?
Time is organized to a level
that borders on obsession.
We can now measure it
to the nearest billionth of a second.
How did this obsession start?
Well we've come by it quite naturally.
Even though the Egyptians were the first
to formally divide daylight into hours,
we were well equipped
to tell the time way before this.
Our earliest ancestors used the changing seasons
to measure out the years.
The phases of the moon marked out the months.
But it was the daily arc of the sun
that counted most.
Nature follows this rhythm.
So no surprise that the sun's movement across the sky
affects us too.
Although we used the shadows
it cast to mark time,
the sun's influence goes much deeper than this.
It helps our bodies keep time by regulating a clock
that we don't even see.
One that's ticking away deep
inside us.
It's a biological clock
a master clock that's set by the sun
and which controls all aspects of our lives -
when you are most alert,
when you sleep,
and even when you are most likely to visit the toilet.
The exact location of this clock?
Right in the middle of your brain
in an area called the hypothalamus.
But, like man-made timepieces,
this biological clock loses time.
It has to be reset twice a day by the sun.
It's all done through a hotline of nerves that link this master clock,
via the eye, to the outside world
and so to the sun's cycle.
Mostly we're oblivious
to how our bodies keep time.
And yet we're riddled with different clocks.
Even our liver has one.
The liver does most of our detoxing,
so knowing how it ticks is crucial
if you need to stay sober,
or if you really want to get legless.
So what's the low-down?
The liver is on go-slow and least able
to break down alcohol around lunchtime -
so drinking then will get you merrier, quicker.
But a few too many does
more than make you feel woozy.
It can have some very strange effects on your other cycles.
Your body temperature follows a very strong rhythm,
which is also controlled by a biological clock.
But this is knocked off track after a session at the pub.
Using a thermal camera to monitor
the body's temperature
scientists can track
how the normal rhythm is upset.
The changing colours show the temperature
see-sawing through the night.
It's the disruption to this, and other body clocks,
that's thought to affect the size of your hangover.
But science isn't revealing all bad news.
Just as there's the best time to drink alcohol,
there is also a prime time to take the cure.
The latest research shows any medicine
will most likely work best
if taken at a particular time of day.
It's already known that painkillers do the job best
when taken in the morning.
So now you can deal
with that hangover a bit quicker too.
There seems to be no escape from the pressure of time.
Our bodies are full of clocks
regulating everything we do.
But what we really want is more time
and the only way to achieve
that is to stretch the lifetime we've got.
When our biological clock stops ticking, so do we.
Is there anything
we can do to keep it going?
Scientists have always been searching
for life's holy grail - immortality.
But now nature is giving them some clues.
For most living things,
freezing is deadly.
But insects, such as this weta,
some amphibians,
and even a species of reptile,
survive months of extreme cold
by doing just this.
They put time on hold.
Ice-crystals usually destroy living cells.
But not in these animals.
When warm weather brings a thaw,
they're back in business.
How they do this
might prove useful one day,
but some people can't wait.
They've been frozen,
in the belief that solutions to ageing
and disease will be found.
The catch is: You have to be dead first.
After dying these optimists
are suspended head first in liquid nitrogen
at minus 196 degrees Centigrade.
And there they remain, frozen in time,
banking on a future when death can be reversed.
Back in the real world,
even our attempts to live longer
are backfiring on us.
The very air we need to breathe,
is also killing us.
We breathe in over 10,000 times a day
and each time something
in the air makes us age.
It's oxygen.
Our cells need oxygen to make energy,
but leftover oxygen slips away
and starts a kind of rusting from within.
Oxygen isn't
the only rogue element.
Sunlight, pollution and tobacco smoke
also form these so-called free radicals.
And it's these radicals that do the damage.
The good news is there's something that can stop the rot.
Even though it proves your mum right.
You have to eat your greens.
Vegetables in particular contain antioxidants,
which help soak up those free radicals.
So broccoli and beans help keep those wrinkles at bay.
If you had thought that was the bad news,
well, there's worse.
The human body has a design flaw.
All the billions of cells that make up our bodies
contain the genetic instruction manual
that makes us who
we are DNA.
Our cells need constant renewal
and they do this by dividing.
Each time the DNA instructions
get copied and passed on.
Sadly the system's got a glitch and,
surprisingly quickly,
mistakes start creeping in.
As the cells divide, a bit of DNA information
might get lost.
So the new cell isn't
an exact copy.
It's a bit like a game of Chinese whispers.
It's why our bodies
end up looking very different
from how they started.
Ageing seems to be a fact of life,
so how on earth can we stay forever young?
For starters you could try
hiding your age.
But even if all the surgery, creams,
supplements and Botox in the world
make you look younger,
they won't help you live forever.
Still, we are pushing our lifetime as far as we can.
Just a century ago life expectancy in the West
was around 40 years.
But thanks to better diets
and medical back up,
a child born now can expect to live to a ripe old age of 80.
Today in the UK
there are more centenarians than ever before.
In 1952 the Queen sent 225 telegrams to people
on their 100th birthday.
In 2003 she sent almost 5000.
But what's our limit?
Well we believe the oldest human ever lived to 122.
So can we buy ourselves more time?
Some scientists think we can.
They've increased the life of one animal
to the human equivalent of 500 years.
Admittedly it's only a worm.
But it has genes that control ageing.
By fiddling with these genes scientists have turned the worm,
on the right, into a very ancient specimen indeed.
Maybe, with a similar genetic
nip and tuck,
we could one day cheat time
and live much, much longer.
But for now, perhaps the best way to buy more time
is not with science,
but by having fun.
You can grow even older - by staying young at heart.
A happy, optimistic person
could dramatically extend their life
by over twenty years.
Instead of reaching just 85,
you could laugh your way to 106.
So, keep on smiling.
Oh, and remember to eat those greens!
Although our time eventually runs out,
we're finding ways of
pushing life spans to the limit.
Look after your body and it will look after you.
Our brains can change how we experience time
and avoid disaster.
And with a little help from the sun,
our body clocks keep ticking over nicely.
So without even realising,
our bodies already master time.
But we're not content with this.
We expect more and more from the time we've got.
Which means everything else has to speed up.
How has this race against time
changed the world around us?
One of the biggest repercussions
from doing things more quickly
may have been triggered over 50,000 years ago.
This was when man first set foot in Australia.
The first people brought something
that helped them to survive here,
but it was something that may have changed the landscape forever.
Fire.
With fire they may have set off a chain of events
that they knew nothing about.
It's just one example
of how we humans cannot see
the results of what we do.
Not because the events aren't dramatic,
but because they happen on a timescale way,
way beyond our own.
To see what happened in Australia,
we first have to appreciate how fire
transformed these people's lives.
Fire is destructive,
so why torch the very land they lived on?
It was all done to save time.
With fire they could clear the land faster than ever before.
And despite appearances
the devastation was short lived.
The bare ground was quickly
filled with fresh new growth.
These tender shoots attracted grazing animals.
It made hunting quicker and easier.
Saving time is all part of the human drive to survive.
But now there's a suggestion
that these small-scale fires
did more than just scorch a few plants.
Only now, with the benefit
of hindsight,
can we see how the dramatic changes,
here in Australia, might have begun.
Fire was such a great time-saver
that the early people relied on it more and more.
As the blazes became more frequent,
the plants had less and less time to grow back.
Thousands of fires over thousands of generations
may have changed the relationship between the plants and the climate.
Eventually some of Australia's annual monsoons just dried up.
The skies cleared and the rivers ran dry.
Gone was the water from in front of their eyes.
But because it disappeared little by little,
drop-by-drop over thousands of years,
they never saw it happening.
Some believed this continental-scale
change in the weather dried up Australia's largest lake.
When the first people arrived,
Lake Eyre covered a vast area in the middle of the country.
Its disappearance coincided
with man's arrival.
Tiny bits of timesaving
the use of fire to clear the land
and speed up the hunt for food
added up,
over time, to this.
Australia turned into the largely desert continent we know today.
And a once massive lake is gone.
Fire is one of the first time
saving devices
but it certainly wasn't the last.
We humans will do anything to cut corners.
But, even as we settled into the fast lane,
we discovered something
that took us up a whole new gear.
The sun once ruled our day.
Here we're turning the sun's heat
into round the clock energy
electricity.
And with it we are changing our whole perspective on time.
Since we discovered electricity,
time itself has been given the shock treatment.
Life today would be impossible without electricity.
Everything happens with the flick of a switch.
Electricity has pushed everything into over-drive.
It's the power behind the world's
fastest growing city
Las Vegas.
One minute
there's an empty plot of land,
then a timber frame,
turn the corner and the walls go up.
Next street, the tiles go on.
Opposite the houses are finished.
And round the corner people have already moved in
ready to live the dream.
There can be a thousand new people a week,
riding in on this power surge.
It's taken just decades to turn
a vast area of desert into downtown.
But it's not just Vegas.
It's everywhere.
Electricity hasn't just transformed the world.
It's turned night into day.
In Vegas buildings go up,
even in the dark.
When the sun goes down, the city lights up.
The effect is like a whoop of victory
over our age-old slavery to daylight.
Now there's no need to wait for anything.
The slot machines, one-arm bandits,
restaurants, are all open 24 hours a day.
Dinnertime is anytime.
Here you won't run out of time
only money.
This round-the-clock existence
is not just changing our habits.
Many of the animals that share our cities
have always been nocturnal.
But 24-hour light is making
some of them behave in strange ways.
Birds come into our cities
for warmth from the lights,
especially at Christmas.
But the light has also meant
that some birds are singing their dawn chorus
in the middle of the night.
The trees are confused too.
Longer nights in autumn signal the shedding of leaves.
But trees growing by street lamps
are now keeping their leaves longer than those in the dark.
We can only wonder what this is doing to our own body clocks.
Electricity has encouraged us
to expect more and more from our day.
We're burning the candle at both ends.
Electricity hasn't just accelerated changes to the landscape.
It's given us control over the night as well as the day.
It's changed our whole attitude to time.
Today our need for speed means
we want everything now.
And with so many of us all chasing the clock,
we must get our food
from plant to plate as quickly as possible.
How have we done that?
Take rice - Across Asia
it's the staple diet for two billion people.
It feeds over half the world's population.
In Indonesia
the landscape is dominated by it.
Huge tracts of the jungle have been replaced by rice fields and terraces.
Devoting large areas of land
to one single crop is the only way
to feed so many people,
quickly and easily.
But this is just the start of high-speed farming.
Rice growing still needs a large work force.
And despite many hands making light work -
it still takes a lot of time to grow and harvest.
So what can be done to speed things up
and save time?
Where possible machines take over.
This is how we get our daily bread.
Huge combine harvesters clear wheat-fields quickly
and efficiently.
But there's another, bigger problem.
Nature controls the speed at which food plants grow and ripen.
And of course that dictates
when they hit the shops.
About 30 years ago tomatoes were only available in the summer.
Now they're in our
shopping trollies year-round.
There are plum tomatoes, vine-ripened tomatoes,
cherry tomatoes, vittoria, pomodorino.
We have an insatiable appetite for them:
The British alone consume 420,000 tonnes every year.
What happened
to the humble tomato?
The tomato plant fell under our complete control.
And what helped us do this was the glasshouse.
With glasshouses,
tomato growth went high-tech.
In a short space of time
the greenhouse has gone from rustic garden potting place
to megalithic tomato factory.
This one covers over 11 hectares
of the English countryside.
But it's about as far from nature as you can get.
Is this is a window on the future?
It's a precision-controlled world within a world,
where growing time is compressed
and tomatoes hurtle through their cycle
at unnatural speed.
They're grown in a special mineral base
and drip-fed the water
and food they need.
As the temperature gets too hot the windows open automatically
and once the best growing temperature is reached,
they close.
This is performance growth
24 hours a day,
7 days a week.
Seasons are a thing of the past.
There's even a boiler,
which kicks in to stop the tomatoes catching a chill.
Nothing is left to chance.
They ripen double-quick
and then they're picked.
Even this happens round the clock.
And although it's done by hand,
it's made as easy as possible
so no time is wasted.
Demand is rocketing.
It might not be long before we're eating
more tomatoes than any other fruit.
No wonder we're doing all we can to grow them
as fast as possible.
To speed up nature
we have created artificial worlds.
Is it only a matter of time before
all we grow comes under our control?
The tomato's rise,
from market garden fruit
to techno-plant,
is just one of the many ways in which we've taken time and shrunk it.
If you drive down time,
you drive down cost.
Time is now money.
So, where on earth do we go from here?
Iron-ore, coal, copper and aluminium
are the raw ingredients of our material world.
To get enough of them,
you have to shift shed-Ioads of earth.
This iron-ore mine in Australia
is one of the most enormous holes
in the ground we've ever created.
But where are the miners?
Who's doing all the work?
Men have been replaced by monster machines.
One 40 tonne scoop does the work
of hundreds of men in a fraction of the time.
The ultimate labour-saving device.
Backbreaking work that used to take one man one month,
now takes one minute.
We have the power to move mountains.
And what's more, we can do it with breath-taking speed.
A mine that today takes 30 years to dig, might,
in the future, take only 30 days.
But what's behind the rush?
This iron ore is the essential ingredient
in our drive to beat time.
It goes to make steel
and beyond that, all the tools
that save us precious minutes.
But one product above all,
has changed our experience of time.
This train is carrying enough ore
to make 15,000 of them.
The most revolutionary time
saving machine ever invented.
The car, perhaps more than anything else,
has accelerated the way we live.
It's possibly our first ever time machine.
It gives us the freedom
to travel further,
faster than ever before.
The first ones didn't exactly take your breath away.
Though at the time people thought
you'd suffocate if you went much faster.
But that didn't hold us back!
Top speeds have gone
from barely more than walking pace to
over 300 kilometres per hour, in less than a century.
A century ago
most people never left their own village.
Today we can get to anywhere
on the planet in less than 48 hours.
Because we can get about so fast, we're always on the move.
Speed is how we beat time.
And speed may be the key to our ultimate dream.
Time travel.
Imagine being able to turn back the clock,
and relive your life.
Imagine turning your car into a time machine
and taking a journey through time.
Well today we are much closer
to turning this dream into a reality.
And that's because we now know
there's no such thing as the constant march of time.
In 1905 Albert Einstein
suggested the mind-bending theory
that time varies with speed.
He proved that the length of one second
depends on how fast you're moving.
The faster you travel the slower that second would take.
So what would this mean in practice?
Take these twins.
One travels into space at phenomenal speed,
leaving his brother behind on earth.
Neither will notice a change in time
but when they meet again
they'll see a big difference.
When our space traveller completes what was - for him
a 4-month trip,
he finds his brother on earth has aged over 40 years.
The younger twin has time
travelled into his brother's future.
So how fast would he have been going?
Something close to the speed of light.
That's around 300,000 kilometres per second.
But is this actually possible?
Well in just 100 years we've gone
from top speeds of 12 kilometres an hour to 7 times the speed of sound.
The speed of light is still a long way off,
but new breakthroughs could find us hurtling towards
it faster than we ever imagined.
However far-fetched time travel may seem,
don't brush it off as a dream.
Lots of things once seemed impossible.
A little over a hundred years ago,
the idea of talking to someone on the other side of the world,
would have been laughed at.
Today a telephone call to New Zealand
where words move at the speed of light
is taken for granted.
So time travel might happen
sooner than you think.
But what about the time travel we see in science fiction?
Going back, as well as forward, in time?
Scientists have discovered tunnels that connect two areas of space,
which might just do this.
These tunnels, called wormholes,
are a short cut between two points in time.
At the moment it's still a theory
but, given time...
So, if you could become a Time Lord,
what power would you have?
Just imagine the options.
You could head into the future to visit your great grandchildren,
perhaps even see their children's children.
What kind of world would they be living in?
You might prefer to take a trip into the past.
Visit the world of the ancient Egyptians
and see how they built the pyramids.
Would you tell the early fire-makers of Australia
the consequences of their actions?
Maybe you'd go see the spectacles of the world,
witness the creation of the Grand Canyon.
You could even walk with dinosaurs...
Would you go back into the unknown,
over 15 billion years,
to witness the creation of the Universe and the very beginning of Time?
If you could become a true master of time
where would you go?
What would you dare to change?