← The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology

Two printed sides. Print double sided, or print the back separately.

Name: Period: Date:

Movie: The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology

Directed by Veritasium (Derek Muller and Casper Mebius) | Veritasium (2025) | Rated Not rated | 55 minutes

There are two sides to this worksheet. Do both sides!

Part 1: Watch and Learn (answer while watching)

Circle the best answer.

  1. What is Moore's Law?

    • A) Chips must be made in clean rooms
    • B) The number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles about every two years
    • C) Computers get cheaper every year
    • D) Every chip must be made of silicon

  2. How are computer chips made?

    • A) They are carved from one block by a robot
    • B) They are built up in layers: coat a wafer with a light-sensitive material, shine light through a mask, then etch and add material
    • C) They are poured like concrete
    • D) They are cut from large circuit boards

  3. Why can the machine not use ordinary lenses with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light?

    • A) Lenses are too expensive
    • B) Almost every material, including glass, absorbs EUV light, so mirrors in a vacuum are used instead
    • C) The light is too bright
    • D) Lenses are too heavy

  4. How does the machine make EUV light?

    • A) It uses a normal light bulb
    • B) A powerful laser hits tiny drops of tin about 50,000 times every second
    • C) It heats up silicon chips
    • D) It uses sunlight

  5. Which two companies built the machine's light system and mirrors together?

    • A) Intel and Apple
    • B) ASML (Dutch) and Zeiss (German)
    • C) Google and Microsoft
    • D) Samsung and Sony

Part 2: Think Like a Computer Scientist

  1. Moore's Law: Chip makers kept making transistors smaller so more could fit on a chip. Why does it matter to you that chips keep getting smaller? Name one thing a phone or computer can do now that would not be possible with older chips.

  2. Light and Mirrors: Explain in your own words why the engineers needed a new kind of light to make smaller chips, and why they had to use mirrors in a vacuum instead of lenses.

  3. Problem Solving: Pick ONE problem the engineers faced (the dust, the tin leftovers, the shape of the droplet, the mirrors). Describe the problem and explain step by step how they solved it.

  4. Teamwork Across Countries: Building the machine took companies and governments in several countries. Why do you think one company could not do it alone? What are the risks of the whole world depending on one company for these machines?

  5. Personal Connection: Which job in the video would you most like to try (laser engineer, optics scientist, chip designer, project manager, or another) and why?