One Strange Rock (2018) s01e01 Episode Script

I'm gonna tell you about
the most incredible place.
It might be the weirdest place
in the whole universe
Full of liquid rock, crystal
caves and alien landscapes
And you know what?
You're walking on it.
We think we know our home, but once
you've seen it from space it hits you
I really wish that everyone
could see the world
the way that I've had
a chance to see it.
First you look at it and really are wondering
what it even is that you're seeing.
Just like I lived my whole
live in a semi dark room
and somebody flipped
on the lights.
A living, breathing,
working planet.
It's all just so
wonderfully unlikely,
and yet it's here.
Eight astronauts, with over 1,000
days in space between them,
can tell us how
being up there
Helped them to truly understand
what goes on down here.
The weird connections.
The near misses.
The lucky breaks.
That built our amazing world.
The strangest place in the whole
universe might just be right here.
Oh, you ready this morning, huh?
Here you go.
Let's have some fun.
There you go.
We take Earth for granted.
Come on, come on. Come on.
We take so much for granted.
Hey, come on.
In fact, there's one thing
that comes so naturally
we don't even think about it.
Breathing.
Yes, come on. Come on, come on.
But if you knew even half of what it
takes to make the oxygen we need,
it would take your breath away.
You wanna know about breathing?
Ask this guy.
My first space walk,
holding on to the outside
of the spaceship,
with nothing
except the sound of
my own breathing.
In my one hand,
is my entire link
with my own history.
Everything that's human,
every story that's going on down
on the surface of the world,
everybody I've ever met,
with the whole universe
in the other direction.
And then
I let go.
That's when you really
appreciate the significance
of that thin blue line.
It contains everything
that's important to us.
It contains life.
And then Houston called to get back to
work, I grabbed back onto the handrail
but while I was working,
suddenly
I had a searing pain
in my left eye.
Like somebody had
just stabbed me.
My eye just snapped shut
and it started tearing up.
But the trouble is,
without gravity
tears don't fall.
The tear just gets
bigger and bigger.
It got big enough
that it became a little
lake of water that went
across the bridge of my nose
into my other eye.
So I call down to Houston,
'Houston, I'm having
a problem here.'
'I can't see. I'm
blinded in both eyes.'
'What did he just say?
He's blind?'
Houston looked at what all the
symptoms were and said
'Maybe it's the
worst-case problem.
You may have contamination
in your suit.'
'And you're gonna have
to flush it out.'
I reached up, turned
this little valve,
popped it and
suddenly could hear,
'Ssssss, sssss'.
As my precious supply of oxygen,
hissed out into the
empty vacuum of space.
There is nothing more
natural than breathing.
Yet as far as we know,
this is the only planet
where that happens.
The only planet with an
oxygen-rich environment.
Without that,
life would be something
very different indeed.
This is Felipe's
favourite place.
Even though the air is toxic.
The ground spits acid,
and there is no fresh water.
No birds sing here.
No insects fly.
No plants grow.
It's hard to imagine
anywhere less inviting
But Felipe has found one thing
that calls this hell hole home.
And it doesn't use oxygen.
It lives in a lake of acid.
It's hard to imagine sometimes just
how important oxygen is to us,
as the way to release energy.
Every time I breathe in,
oxygen-rich air mixes
with the food I've eaten
and creates energy.
Power that enables larger, more
complex creatures to exist.
Our planet is literally
bursting with life,
so how on earth is there
enough oxygen for everyone?
The answer takes in some
pretty surprising stuff.
Giant dust storms,
tiny snowflakes,
flying rivers;
and the most important living
thing you've never heard of.
But it begins in a desert.
A desert made of salt.
The people here rely
on this desert,
and so do we.
But not because of the salt.
Dust storms can be pretty amazing
when you see them from space.
And sometimes they're huge.
You know, I had seen little dust storms
blowing and you kinda look hard.
This you didn't
need to look hard.
It was a continent
of Northern Africa,
basically obscured
by thick brown dust.
And as I orbited, I
couldn't wait to come back.
And then when I did,
I saw that dust storm
that was over Africa
now over the Atlantic Ocean.
And my next orbit I see it hitting
the coast of South America.
Every year
about 27 million tons of that
African dust we can see from orbit
drops out of the sky
into the Amazon Basin.
And it turns out, it's
the perfect fertilizer.
And as they grow, the plants and
the trees turn carbon dioxide,
into oxygen.
One single tree can produce enough
oxygen to support two people.
And the Amazon Rainforest
Is ten times the size of Texas,
producing 20 times more oxygen
than all the people on the surface
of the Earth could consume.
But, not one breath of
it leaves the Amazon.
There are so many animals living in
the Amazon Basin that the life there
uses all that oxygen up.
For all these years I've been
thinking the rainforest is
the lungs of the planet.
Now sure, it makes a lot of
oxygen, but it uses it all.
The rainforest does
help us breathe,
but not because of air.
There's a river in the Amazon,
no, not that one,
there's another river,
a river in the sky.
For the most part, I know this world
from standing on its surface.
I mean, I've been up to the top
of the Empire State Building,
put my quarter in the scope,
and I've even jumped out
of planes a couple times.
But that's nothing.
The International Space Station
clocks in at 1 million feet.
Whenever there's a free
moment on the spaceship,
we try and get to the
window to take pictures.
And during my three
space flights,
I took about 45,000 photographs.
And some parts of the world are
easy to take pictures of
Like the outback of Australia.
It's always a sunny day there.
But there are parts of the world
that you almost never
get a good picture of.
One of those is
the Amazon Basin.
So it makes ya think
What's going on down there?
For the last ten years,
Rosa has been working
in the Amazon,
uncovering the surprising way
the rainforest helps the
whole planet breathe.
She's not kidding about special.
This is the tallest structure
in all South America.
Rosa has tried to climb
this tower twice before,
but she's never
made it to the top.
Now that's a pretty cool climb,
but something else
is rising too.
If you could look
inside the trees
You'd see water sucked up
from the forest floor.
When the water hits the top,
the combination of
sun and wind
Turns it into a mighty river.
A flying river.
This river of cloud flows
across South America,
obscuring everything
beneath it
Until it runs into a brick wall.
5,500 miles long and
up to 4 miles high.
The Andes.
The clouds condense
into raindrops,
which then race down the slopes
and flow directly back
into the Amazon Basin
Eroding the rock and turning
it into sediment
until all those nutrients
are dumped into the ocean
and a whole other world.
And waiting for those sediments
is an extraordinary organism,
four times thinner
than a human hair.
It's called a diatom.
Diatoms are the secret to
the Earth's oxygen supply.
They use silica from the ground
up rock to create new shells,
which allows them to reproduce.
Their population
doubles every day
and they begin to
photosynthesise
Each one starting
to produce oxygen.
Take a breath.
Now take another.
Now think about this:
one of those breaths
was entirely provided
by those little
fellas under the sea.
Looking at the
oceans from space,
sometimes you see
a local area that's an
entirely different colour.
And amazingly enough, what you're
looking at is microscopic life.
Diatom blooms that reflect
the light differently,
so that they show up from space.
Biggest one I think I
ever saw was huge.
It covered hundreds of miles.
You know, when you
swim in the ocean,
you don't notice the
diatoms around you.
But when you're in space, you see
the vibrant colours of life.
It's just so stunning,
the blues and the greens.
But also, like, wow, those
things are keeping us alive.
But you know what?
Diatoms are important not just because
of what they do when they're alive,
but also what they do
once they're dead.
I spent 166 days off the world.
Underneath you,
the planet is silently,
intimately revealing
itself to you,
more and more, every
single time around.
And from a spaceship,
Earth is definitely
the Blue Planet.
And pretty much everywhere that
there's water, there's diatoms.
There are trillions of
them in every ocean,
and they can't all
rely on flying rivers.
So diatoms around the world
have to get their nutrients
in different ways.
Some about as far away from tropical
rainforests as you can get.
Okay guys, off you go.
Okay, yeah, slow down
You can stop right there, yeah.
Okay.
These glaciers are unusual.
They can slide in sudden spurts.
Still too slow to
see in real time,
but fast enough to hear
if you know how to listen.
Sometimes they move 300 times faster
than their normal glacial pace.
Heidi can hear them crushing
a huge amount of rock,
as they grind their
way down the valley.
And when ice meets sea,
it makes a familiar sound.
The popping is a heads
up for the team.
The ice face is about to crash.
I'm hearing increased activity,
you need to come back, okay?
Wow!
Diatom dinner time.
Now sometimes these
glaciers move really fast,
dumping tons and tons of
nutrients into the sea.
Boom!
Sparking a feeding frenzy
and a population explosion.
But then,
just as quickly as it started,
dinner time is over.
The glaciers come
to a grinding halt
and lie dormant,
sometimes for decades.
Boom becomes bust.
When the nutrients run out,
the blooms fade and most
of the diatoms die.
Their carcasses slowly
fall to the ocean floor
where they carpet it in a
layer half a mile thick.
We call it 'marine snow',
and that's exactly
what it looks like.
Snowflakes.
But unlike snowflakes,
they never melt
and over millions of years
the sea beds rise
The ocean levels fall
and the ocean floor
becomes a salty desert.
The desert that blows all
the way to the Amazon
that was once a sea bed.
And the dust that makes
the rainforest grow?
Diatom shells.
It just goes to show how incredibly
interlinked everything is.
There is absolutely nothing
on one side of the planet
that isn't connected in some way
with the other side of the planet.
It's astounding how all
the systems down there
must work together in order
for us to breathe.
Which is great
But you only have to mess
with oxygen a little bit
for things to start
going really wrong.
Three, two, one.
Lift off, lift off.
Though I've flown 100,000 miles,
I'm feeling very still.
Planet Earth is blue and
there's nothing left to do
I love the fact that the
Earth has a blue sky.
You can look up
and all of the various
shades of it,
you know, the deepness of it
and the way the colours
change close to the horizon
and that's everything
that we breathe, and
keeps us alive.
And you sort of fool
yourself into thinking,
it's really, really deep.
Like it goes on sort of forever.
But when you're on
board a spaceship
and you look straight down,
you hardly see the
atmosphere at all.
It's only when you
look to the horizon
that you can see just how
thin our atmosphere truly is.
The thinnest of
delicate blue lines.
It's because the
gravity of the Earth
is pulling every single one
of those air molecules
and pressing it
against the ground.
But the further up you
go, the thinner it gets.
It's sort of like if you pluck
a string on a guitar
When does the note stop?
And our atmosphere is
like that guitar string.
It just gets less and
less the higher you go.
But what's surprising is,
how fast that happens.
That blue line is so thin
that you can walk
to where the oxygen
starts to run out.
Being a doctor in La Rinconada
means that you have
25,000 patients,
living year-round in a town
as high as Everest base-camp.
When Spanish settlers
first arrived here,
the lack of oxygen
killed many of their
babies at birth.
Yet, people still live here.
They still work here.
Because in these mountains,
there's something that's lured
people through history.
The promise of gold.
This is the limit though.
Humans can't live any higher.
Without enough oxygen,
our organs can start
shutting down
And it can happen
surprisingly quickly.
So astronauts actually train
to recognize their own symptoms
of a lack of oxygen.
Of hypoxia.
In my case,
there's a slight dizziness.
My vision starts to get
a little bit narrow.
The colours become a
little more brittle,
like maybe a certain
type of painter's way
of using only the
primary colours.
Sound changes a little for me.
It becomes a little
bit more staccato,
sort of a snappy sound to everything
that's going on around me.
And as soon as I put all those
things together, I realize
I'm running out of oxygen.
Houston, I'm having a
serious problem here.
Serious problem.
Blinded in both eyes.
'What did he just say?'
Can't see, purge your oxygen.
My precious oxygen.
I wasn't really sure how
that was gonna turn out,
but as the oxygen hissed through
and out my purge valve,
the tears that were coming
out of my tear ducts
slowly started evaporating.
My vision began to
return, bit by bit,
and what had caused
it was pretty simple.
It was the anti-fog on my visor
had been picked up by
floating water in my suit
and gotten into my eye.
With confidence, I could
reach up and close the valve
and stop venting
my precious oxygen
out to the rest of the universe.
It's vital that we
get enough oxygen;
but too much
can be just as dangerous.
You see it when you blow
on a little tiny fire.
Just blowing that
little bit of oxygen
turns that tiny
spark into a flame.
And it's exactly the same
for the whole planet.
A rise in oxygen levels can
threaten life on Earth.
300 million years ago,
there was a lot more
oxygen in the atmosphere.
So much that the
planet just burned.
But don't think that
danger's all in the past.
Too much oxygen and we fry.
Too little and we choke.
We're walking a tightrope
with death on either side,
and just like a tightrope walker
the only thing that can
save us is balance.
Balance is crucial
For the make up of
the atmosphere,
and for life itself.
The thing is, we don't fully
understand how the Earth manages it.
Despite diatoms having
to wait for glaciers
and South American trees having
to wait for African dust,
and despite the fact
that human population
has been steadily increasing,
the relative amount of
oxygen in the atmosphere
has been surprisingly constant.
For millions of years,
oxygen has made up 20.95%
of our atmosphere.
Exactly 20.95%.
Every thing's somehow
buffering out
and keeping things
pretty darn stable.
100,000 Buddhists gather here
for the festival of Magha Puja.
Each one lights a candle.
They celebrate with their flames
at a temple made from
a million Buddha's.
Every breath we take,
16 breaths a minute,
23,000 breaths a day,
every inhale, every exhale
of that precious oxygen
couldn't happen without earth,
water,
wind
and fire.
The whole planet works as one
to create that thin blue line.
The mark of a living world
we've seen nowhere
else in the universe.
I really wish
that everyone could
see the world
the way that I've had
a chance to see it.
You have to wrench yourself away
from the wonder and the
strangeness of it.
And the beauty of space flight
is you come back
with a real sense
that this Earth is one place.
One shared place.
We're all crew mates
on the same ship.
We're not just rare,
we're not just special,
we are unique
and that's what makes this
One Strange Rock.
Next time on One Strange Rock
our paradise planet came from
collisions, carnage and chaos.
And the impact is
still shaping us.