All language subtitles for One.Strange.Rock.S01E01.Gasp.1080p.D1

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 spacewalk, 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 favorite 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 hellhole 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
photosynthesize...

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 color.

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 colors 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.

Ee, two, one.

Lift off, lift off.

Though I've flow 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 colors 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 colors become
a little more brittle,

like maybe a certain
type of painter's way

of using only the
primary colors.

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 makeup 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%.

Everything'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.

Captioned by Cotter
Captioning Services.