Astronomer Casper Farret Jentink works deep in the forests above Geneva on one of the biggest questions humanity has ever asked itself: are we alone in the universe? We are born alone, we die alone, and in between we try to understand what it means to be there at all. In a workshop, half-observatory, half science fiction decor, astronomer Casper Farret Jentink builds instruments with Swiss precision that can accurately measure light from distant stars to five silicon atoms, in search of a second Earth.

Are we alone in the universe?

The new perspective on our evolution

The dark site of the energy transition

According to former London banker and math genius Gary Stevenson, we are in the middle of a major economic crisis — but not one marked by a sudden shock like a stock market crash. He believes an economic crisis can look like house prices that just keep rising.

The Silent Economic Crisis

Together with political scientist Maria Repnikova, we dive into the world of soft power. In her book *Chinese Soft Power*, she explores how China no longer seeks to persuade the world through force, but through attraction — power that bubbles up from below rather than being imposed from the top down. Soft power is often associated with tender-hearted leaders gently stroking their subjects with a velvet glove. Nothing could be further from the truth.

China’s major charm offensive

According to author and investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, Big Tech and governments will increasingly join forces to control — and ultimately oppress — populations. He argues that all of Palestine has effectively become a laboratory for the surveillance industry. The notion that every Palestinian poses a threat has become so mainstream that everyone must be monitored. To keep that system running, Israel has for years received assistance from Big Tech, including one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies: Palantir — named after a seeing stone with prophetic powers from *The Lord of the Rings*.

Apartheid as a business model

The AI industry is a growing bubble. Investments in companies building AI applications are hot — very hot. The question is where we are on the wave right now. Is it nearing its peak, with the AI bubble about to burst, or are we still far from that point?

From Shanghai, Chinese economist Andy Xie analyzes and comments on the relationship between the American and Chinese financial markets for outlets such as *Bloomberg* and the *South China Morning Post*. His analyses are often seen as contrarian and provocative. “America’s idea of winning is to create a God. That God will live in San Francisco. And the God works for America,” says Xie.

When will the AI bubble burst?

From wrestling character to president of the White House: Trump owes his rise, according to journalist and writer Josephine Riesman, to his experience of show wrestling. She examines the close bond between Trump and the professional wrestling industry. From an early age, Trump has been a fan of professional wrestling: an entertainment sport where everything is about dragging the audience through spectacle and deceit. For Trump, this tactic has become the basis of his political approach.

From wrestling hero to autocrat

For the bystander perhaps a remarkable move: Elon Musk who is encouraging the radical right-wing German party AfD. For Timothy Snyder, as a professor of history specializing in Holocaust and Eastern Europe, anything but surprising. Snyder delves into the train of thought of oligarchs, who increasingly know how to find each other on the world stage.

Fascism is back

American activist and writer Cory Doctorow on why the big American tech companies can criticize their products with impunity and we continue to use them anyway. The endless stream of ads nowadays on Google, Instagram and YouTube not only creates frustration, but also genuine concerns. Doctorow coined the term Enshitfification for what goes wrong with the internet and made a thorough analysis of how that could have happened. Because the classic idea, that if a product or service is no longer good, the free market automatically switches to better alternatives, no longer applies in the digital economy.

The enshittification of the internet

Capitalism has not only been broken, but also replaced by something much worse, according to economist and former finance minister in Greece, Yanis Varoufakis. He has been studying the developments of the market for years and argues that capitalism is on its last legs and has been overtaken by something new. In his book Technofeudalism: What capitalism killed, he calls the new system technofeodalism. A traditional capitalist gave 85 percent of the profits to the employees. At a company like Meta, employees only get one percent.

The murder of capitalism

Ingrid Robeyns (1972) is an economist and philosopher and professor of Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University. She is the founder of limitarism. According to Robeyns, we need to move towards a system in which the strongest shoulders actually carry the heaviest burdens and inequalities are curtailed. The excess money of the super-rich can bring a lot of good to people and society. And in the end, everyone benefits from that, including the super-rich themselves.

Away with the super rich

Not class but merit will determine everyone's position in life. Away with the aristocracy, live the meritocracy, where everyone would have equal opportunities at the start, and those who deserve it all would end up as winners. But according to scientist and political philosopher Michael Sandel, meritocracy is a plausible cause of rising fascism. Because implicitly it means: if you have a hard time and do not obtain a diploma, then that must be your own fault. For many people, this led to resentment and anger.

Get rid of the diploma arrogance

and talk to Mariana Mazzucato about her book The Big Con, about how consultants are weakening our companies, hollowing out our governments and harming our economies. Young talent prefers a consultant job massively over working for the government. As a result, there is little to no knowledge with governments. The consultancy industry is cleverly immersed in that gap, not only issuing advice, but also implementing policy. Large consultancies give the impression that they offer objective expertise, but their goal is mainly to make the government dependent for as long as possible.

Consultant in power

Carlo Rovelli is theoretically physicist and quantum mechanics is his great love. He argues that the reality does not exist, because the reality we experience arises mainly from the interaction we have with it. We create our reality ourselves, and when we come to see that individual, indivisible parts do not exist and everything around us only takes on meaning through the relationships with other things and events, we also see ourselves differently. That insight prompted Rovelli to become political activism, because our thinking and action is changing the world. He is called the poet of physics.

Why reality does not exist

Democracy is under pressure and in the post-truth era, truth has given way to spectacle. How can we, now that reality seems more absurd than ever, best question power? Does this increasingly absurd reality call for a different way of resisting? We follow an action by The Yes Men, American art collective that uses identity theft to question politics. And a meeting with the German art collective Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit that draws attention to the rise of AfD, and how.

Does satire still have a future

French journalist Guillaume Pitron warns of the shadow side of the energy transition and digitization. Rare metals are essential for the production of electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines and solar panels, as well as for our smartphones, computers, tablets and other everyday devices. But most people actually know very little about the way they are extracted, or about the ecological and geopolitical cost of this. Pitron wrote the book The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies.

How did complex life on Earth come about? Thanks to scientists like bioinformist Berend Snel, we know that a unique event has occurred on our planet billions of years ago.

The moment when humanity is on the verge of creating something that can think, learn, feel, or even desire to survive—perhaps at our expense—sometimes seems closer than ever. Can we predict the future to protect ourselves? Or are we in the process of creating something that will surpass our own understanding? Cognitive scientist Marie Safar Postma tries to understand our consciousness by designing and building systems that not only perceive but also anticipate and learn.

Drones that think

Tegenlicht in Dutch or Backlight in English is a series of television documentaries by the VPRO, a Dutch public broadcasting organisation. Backlight "aims to grasp the quintessence of prominent trends and developments" in the practice of critical journalism, and tries to improve understanding of the intricate inner workings of our modern society.

Are we alone in the universe?

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Season 25 Episodes17

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