Stephen Hawking presents a survey of cosmic questions built around heavy CGI: how the universe began, how stars and black holes form, whether alien life exists, and whether time travel is possible. He walks through the sequence from the Big Bang to the birth of galaxies and stars, then turns to the search for life elsewhere, using computer animation to picture what alien organisms adapted to methane seas or crushing gravity might look like. The time travel segment lays out the physics of warping space and time and confronts the grandfather paradox directly, weighing what it would mean to travel back and prevent your own birth. Hawking narrates throughout, translating general relativity and astrophysics into plain claims about what is possible and what current physics rules out. The film moves between animated recreations of cosmic events too large or too old to film and Hawking's own commentary on what the evidence supports, treating each topic, origins, aliens, and time travel, as a distinct question with its own physics rather than a single unified argument.