One Strange Rock (2018) s01e05 Episode Script

Every Fall there
are dead leaves to rake up.
It's inevitable,
from cells to stars,
everything dies in the end.
That's just the way things work.
But here's the thing,
our strange rock itself
can also be lethal.
You know up in space,
you're looking down at
earth and you go 'wow',
what a beautiful spot
that is down there,
that blue orb out there
in the distance.'
But I'll tell you,
it's an angry planet.
We tend to think of earth
as our life support
but it's not there to
support us at all.
And as you look down on it,
it's a place that's violent,
that's beautiful, that's crazy,
that's intense.
Mother Nature
is a serial killer.
No one is better.
Eight astronauts,
with over a thousand days
in space between them,
can tell us how being up there,
helped them to truly understand
what goes on down here.
We think we know our home,
but here's the secret
we wouldn't be here
without mass suicide,
fatal passions,
and an event so devastating
it makes the extinction of the
dinosaurs, look like a tea party.
Earth might be the weirdest
place in the whole universe.
You know I think every
astronaut understands
that going to space is
a high risk endeavour
and that your life
is on the line.
I came to realize
this more than most,
when I spent 5 months
living on another world,
the Russian Space Station Mir,
where survival was
a daily struggle.
Just wanna give you
a little tour of Mir.
I'm Jerry Linenger, of course.
Mir Mission EO-22
would turn out to be the
longest 5 months of my life.
Back on earth sometimes,
I can close my eyes and I
can be back up there again.
Go for shuttle hatch opening,
for Delta P under point two.
We opened the hatch of the old
13 year old Mir Space Station,
and it's kind of like going
down into grandma's cellar.
Stuffed with leftover
equipment, garbage.
I was really shocked.
It took up the
majority of our time
just trying to keep
that thing going.
When you're up there,
trying to use your limited
resources to stay alive,
it finally sort
of hit me as wow,
the survival instinct you know,
is a powerful innate force
within each of us.
I had about a month on Mir and
when I hear that master alarm
going off, blaring,
warning panel just lit up
like a Christmas tree,
fire warning lights,
low voltage lights,
everything flashing,
smoke lights.
Looked down the
length of the module,
and coming out of a solid
fuel oxygen canister
is a big flame,
with blow torch like intensity,
2 or 3 feet in length,
sparks flying off the end of it,
sparks flying everywhere.
I have never seen smoke spread,
like it spread on
that space station.
So within about 30
seconds, you know,
can't see the 5 fingers
in front of your face,
decided better get some
oxygen while I can,
getting a little peripheral
vision, blurring,
finally locate the mask.
Breathe in and I get nothing.
People talk about
that tunnel of death,
the next 60 seconds
or so of my life,
you know, it's frame by frame.
First thought was of my family,
never seeing them again.
My baby son and I
just yelled it out,
I said 'Goodbye John',
you know, 'I'm really sorry
I'm letting you down.'
At that point, I was kind of OK,
losing my life.
In the middle of all this
flame and smoke suddenly,
you know, something
changed inside me.
I said 'Jerry, you
gotta get through this.'
'And then I just scream out,
I'm gonna get that fire out,
gonna see my boy again.'
Jerry you have to survive.
I broke into action.
One fire extinguisher, a
second fire extinguisher,
a third fire extinguisher.
Somehow we managed to get
the fire under control.
You know it's instinct, survive.
However much we
struggle to survive,
it's not only old age,
accident or injury
that can get you.
Earth can be deadly.
It's hard to fathom,
but there have been five mass
extinctions on the planet
and 99.9 percent of all species,
that have ever lived are gone.
252 million years ago,
earth suddenly turned
toxic to life.
Way before the dinosaurs,
nearly 96 percent of
species worldwide,
rapidly became extinct.
It's known as The Great Dying.
The Great Dying is
an understatement;
it all kicked off
when a whole host
of super volcanoes erupted.
The land dried out.
And the oceans acidified.
Nearly all plant life perished,
and every forest on
the planet died.
Earth turned into the biggest
mass murder scene in history.
Everything that lives today,
owes its life to the survivors
of The Great Dying.
We're all descended from the
ones that scraped through.
Today, we're searching an area
of prehistoric flood plain,
for evidence of a creature,
that was an evolutionary
stepping stone towards mammals.
Found something.
All over this area we've
discovered ancient tunnels
that have been naturally in filled
and then cast into the rock.
It wasn't long before we started
finding bits of fossil bone
and eventually we found
complete skeletons
and those skeletons
all turned out to be
a mammal-like reptile
called Thrinaxodon.
A good way to
picture Thrinaxodon
is to think about the meerkat,
but without fur and possibly
laying eggs like reptiles
but most importantly and
similarly to the meerkat,
it lived underground digging
burrows with its large claws.
They were surviving
by living underground
to withstand the
heat of the day,
and the cold of the night.
One of the really very nice
specimens that we've found here,
are two infant Thrinaxodon
curled up together head to head.
They were sharing
their body heat
which they brought down from
the surface underground
which suggests that they were
beginning to regulate
their temperature
on their way to
becoming warm-blooded
and of course true mammals.
So you can see if it had not been
for creatures like Thrinaxodon,
surviving this Great Dying,
we humans might
never have evolved.
Our ancestors weren't the
biggest or the baddest,
they just happened to
sleep in the dirt.
Luckily that was the
safest place to be.
You never know who's
gonna beat the odds.
Throughout the history
of life on earth,
species have risen,
and they've died off
over and over again.
And now that the earth
is resplendent with life,
you can't get away
from life on earth,
you dig a mile
down into the rock
and there's still little
things living, you go to the
hottest jet in the centre of
of the ocean where
the boiling stuff
is pouring out into the world and
it's a farm of life down there.
You know the diversity
of living things
on earth ensures that
life will go on,
no matter what the
earth throws at it,
no matter which punch it takes,
no matter which species
doesn't make it,
there's another one that
finds a pathway to survival.
So, it's a good thing that
life comes in a variety pack,
but variety comes
from diversity,
and diversity comes from what
scientists call 'doing it.'
If you're a clone,
you don't have to date.
You want kids, just
copy yourself, easy.
But clones have a problem;
if every individual
is exactly the same,
one disease,
one catastrophe could
wipe them all out,
so you gotta mix it up a little.
This is MUSA,
it's an Underwater
Museum of Art.
The sculptures are becoming
home to coral species.
These animals are amazing,
they can make identical
clones of themselves,
to spread over a reef
but they also protect themselves
against changing conditions,
by having sex,
in a strange way.
Once a year,
around the time of a full moon,
the corals release
eggs and sperm
in massive numbers.
As the eggs begin to float,
it feels like you're
floating on the Milky Way.
The eggs join together
with sperm cells
from other corals.
By all mating like
this at the same time,
it increases the chances
of mixing up their genes
to create more diversity
in the next
generation of corals.
That's how most of these
reef building corals
have survived in the
ever changing ocean
for 250 million years.
You take two individuals
and you mix all the DNA and you
create a different creature,
a different animal
than the original pair.
You know every
child or offspring
is different than the
parent and this ensures
survivability of that species.
I look at my own family,
I look at my children,
oh my god, they're just totally
different human beings,
and hopefully better than me.
Sex.
So you may have all
been doing it for fun
but I'm in it for the
survival of the species.
It's crucial to mix
the gene pool,
and life goes to great
lengths to do that.
Mayfly nymphs remind me
of aliens from a sci-fi film.
They live and grow in
the mud for a year,
waiting for the right
conditions to emerge.
Once the mayfly
nymphs are mature,
they have to swim to the
surface of the water.
If they don't do
this fast enough,
they will be eaten by a fish.
What happens next,
is one of the strangest
life cycles on earth.
It's like a fish turning
into a bird in just one day.
The adults can't eat,
they have no mouth parts,
they have no digestive system.
For an adult mayfly
it's all about the sex.
And they have just 24
hours to find a mate,
and then they die.
Weirdly, their mating
often coincides
with the 4th of
July celebrations.
The males in a swarm
fly up and down,
then the females fly
by these males,
and whichever male is
fast enough to catch her
is the one who gets to mate.
Once the mayflies have mated,
the males are done.
The females
find water and lay their eggs
and then they too pass on.
They only last 24 hours.
It's amazing the lengths that
life will go to, to reproduce.
Once sex came along,
it was no longer enough
to just survive,
you had to attract a mate,
and that's when life on
earth learned to dress
to impress.
Sexual reproduction
has made the earth beautiful.
It's one of the greatest
evolutionary tools
for complex life on earth.
And without sexual reproduction,
life would not have the
diversity that it needs,
that it absolutely needs to
survive on this very tough,
demanding earth.
We might like it,
we might need it,
but doing the deed,
comes with a price.
The only thing for sure in life,
you're gonna die.
Even if you don't get
hit by an asteroid or
eaten by a bear,
keeping something as
complicated as a human going,
takes a lot of upkeep.
As a physician, I'm fascinated
with the whole human
being and how it works.
Human body's incredible,
it's like 37 trillion cells.
It's more than the
stars in the galaxy.
But sitting here today I'm not
the me that I was up in space;
my cells have cycled,
hundreds of thousands of cells
a day are dropping off of me.
And so when you look at me,
this is not the hand I had
back in space.
Right now there's hundreds
of millions of cells dying
within your body.
And your body has
to replace those
and it's the way we are
able to stay alive,
as a living being.
You know most of this
destruction is inside our body,
but out on our skin we
actually can see it,
it's much more visible.
It's kind of a harmless
thing down here on earth,
but up in space, you know,
it's a different matter.
In microgravity,
everything floats.
Your dry skin is
gonna float in space.
Once a week we cleaned house.
All day Saturday.
We go around with
the vacuum cleaner,
and clean all of our dead skin,
which is collecting on
all of the surfaces
of the filters around the ship.
If you pull your sock off,
a lot of skin, dead skin,
will go flying around.
It doesn't just become
something in your sock,
but it becomes a
floating cloud of
unused dead skin,
and that's a really good day
to have taken off your sock
right next to an air intake
so that you can just
sort of turn your head
and then go get the
vacuum cleaner
and vacuum up the sole
of your own foot.
But the clock is always ticking.
Cells can only
repair so many times
before it has a failure.
Each time a cell replicates,
small errors creep in,
and along with other
wear and tear,
over time, this
damage builds up.
And when you have
enough of that failure,
when it accumulates,
it's the end of life.
That's why we die.
Making a new creature,
can be easier than
mending an old one.
That's the best way to
keep your genes going,
knowing that,
doesn't make it any
easier when the end comes.
You know, you really need
death in order to have this
complex world that we have.
It sort of is the arbitrator;
by having death
you have new life
taking its place,
and probably an improved
form of that life.
OK, Mission Alpha.
Make your way back, you have
a spot fire behind the line.
Do you hear those gunshots?
There's probably
ammo in that shed.
Stay away from there.
Every fire fighter has a respect
for fire, a fear for fire.
As you start fighting that fire,
you're right up close to it.
The sound, it's overwhelming.
You can't see very well,
your eyes are burning,
your lungs are burning.
It just doesn't
care what it burns;
vegetation, people's property.
It's extremely unforgiving.
Fires do kill,
but you have to realise
there is a sense of health
that does come from
fires, after the fact.
It burns dead trees,
and death away on the ground,
and then it allows
new things to grow.
It is a part of nature
and what it does.
Death is a necessary
part of the cycle of life.
Mother Nature
kills to regrow life.
It's death that provides
the window of opportunity,
for new forms of life to occur.
Death-life, death-life,
death-life
and it helps to
perpetuate things
and improve things
on the planet.
Nature takes us all in the end,
but she doesn't do
it to be cruel,
getting rid of the old,
makes way for the new.
On planet earth, death
is not the end,
this is not a wasteful world,
the dead feed the living.
We all know it's a one way trip,
when salmon go to spawn.
No one knows that more
than the Kamchatkans.
Every year to mark the
return of the fish,
they hold a dance to
celebrate the connection
between life, sex and death.
It's an endurance event.
Like the salmon,
they bop till they drop.
The bears and the
fishermen get a bounty,
but they're not the only
ones who feast on the dead.
You know, earth is really just
waiting for you to drop dead
so that it can recycle you
and use all your parts in
some other form of life.
Salmon are packed
with an element
that is essential for
life and that's nitrogen.
Salmon die,
and then the trees use the
nitrogen as a type of fertiliser,
the animal body decomposing
being used by plants.
The trees pick up the nitrogen,
and they flourish.
Those elements are now
part of the ecosystem,
and they help out other
parts of the ecosystem.
Without the salmon, you
don't have the forest.
Everything benefits from
this banquet of nitrogen.
Living things on earth,
they are interdependent on each
other and they are interwoven.
I think as an astronaut
looking down at earth,
you understand that this
world is interconnected,
you know, you realise this is
one heck of a system down there
and you're just in awe of it.
We used to think
the world was flat.
We like to think about
things in straight lines;
birth, life, death, period.
But that's not
really how it works,
you need to take that line
and bend it into a circle;
birth, life, death,
birth, life, death,
so what does that mean for us?
Dad passed away before I
was launched into space,
but I'll tell you, I was up
on that Mir Space Station,
and I could just sense
my dad's presence there.
And almost out of the
corner of my eye,
it's almost like I'm seeing him.
And I was almost afraid to look
'cause I thought if I look,
he won't be there
but by not looking,
just feeling his presence,
he's sort of telling
me, you know,
he's proud, he's glad I made it.
It was sort of a
psychological support for me
up there and I had his presence
there probably, you know,
four or five times near my time
in space when I needed it,
it was something I
could draw upon.
My father's time on this
earth has come to an end,
but I find comfort in knowing
that he still lives on
because on our strange rock,
nothing is ever truly gone.
He is forever a part of one
beautiful pattern of life.
You're just a speck in this
long timeline of life on earth.
We don't really think
of the string of events
that had to take place
for us to exist today.
From the survivors of
those mass extinctions,
to the cycles of death that
keep the planet so alive today,
a million migrating salmon,
a billion mating
mayflies in the sky,
mixing the genes and
and all those combination
and permutations.
Yet all those different
things had to weave together,
all those chance meetings
had to take place.
Grandparents coming over
from the Old Country,
that all had to happen.
In my father's life, he had
to survive World War II,
you know his best friend
Jerry did not survive,
that's why I'm Jerry,
you know, named after
my dad's best friend.
If you look in a history book,
there's nothing
special about my dad,
he's not gonna be in there
but he influenced my life
and he was somebody
who always told me
you can be anything
you set your mind to
and 'if you work hard
and you study hard',
'for example, Jerry, you'll
be an astronaut someday'
and when you think of all those
things that had to happen
to create the human being called
Jerry Linenger at that moment,
who then becomes an astronaut,
floating above the planet
going 17,500 miles an hour,
a life dream.
It's incredible.
You know I had to meet my wife,
we overlapped at a
job by one day,
you know, would John, Jeff,
Henry and Grace exist
without that chance
meeting, without
us getting together
at the right time,
at the right place
on a beautiful,
you know, summer night?
I kind of feel that
I've done my job now;
my family has grown at this
point and I'm proud of them
and if I move onto, you
know, another life,
I'm kind of OK with
that at this point.
And I feel I'm gonna
keep going on and on
through my kids.
So I hope down the line,
getting emotional here, down
the line, you know, my sons
and my daughter draw upon something
that their dad did for them,
you know, how I influenced them.
We're all against all odds,
we are all against
all odds, you know,
our very existence on earth
against all odds and so, you
know, take advantage of it.
Make the most of it.
Next time,
do we need to escape
this one strange rock,
and what would happen if we did