In a few weeks, probes will land on Mars and use robots to study our neighboring planets. The hope of some scientists is not to find the Martians there, but perhaps traces of primitive life. For this current occasion, the first episode of the series deals with this topic. Another exciting question is how did life ever come to life on earth? Surprisingly, Indian tribes in South America are important in solving this puzzle. Joachim Bublath traces these traces of the past in the Amazon region and thus reveals surprising insights into the history of the origin of humans. Warlike Indian tribes and gold diggers play an important role in the resolution of this puzzle. In this episode, a logically compelling circle closes from the expanse of the universe to the humid primeval forests of the Amazon. How this surprising relationship is achieved is resolved in this first episode of the series "Faszination Universum".

There is no doubt that space and time are immovable and experienced by everyone. But, modern science once again shows a surprising aspect of the world in which we live. In airplanes, space stations and satellites times go by at different speeds and technicians have to take this into account in their developments, like the GPS system. We can also make our time run faster or slower so that we age differently than usual. How this trick works, shows Joachim Bublath in this episode of the series "Faszination Universum". An exciting question is also how each one of us experiences time and how our brain creates a sense of the passage of time. It comes to bizarre situations that each of us has already experienced. For example, you think you have experienced something in certain situations that is happening just now. Or you are wrong - depending on the environment - in the speed with which time runs out. This is explained in this episode with amazing experiments.

Nothing in the universe is eternal. The view into the quiet night sky deceives us about the true processes in the depths of the universe. On a journey through the universe we encounter exploding stars, white dwarfs as remnants of red giants and swirling plasma streams. In addition, the universe continues to expand and we can look deeper and deeper into its evolutionary history. Why this is so and what surprises are everywhere in the universe, shows Joachim Bublath in this episode on his exciting journey through space and time. The death of the stars affects us on earth in a special way, because even the sun is only a star and from this glistening gas ball, we can learn a lot about the life cycle of the other unreachable stars. Ultimately, our Milky Way will be the depressing predictions of astronomers alone in the universe, surrounded by the solitude of the dark universe. Dark energies and dark matter are dramatically changing the fate of the universe.