Original subtitles

♪ ♪

WILL SMITH: Most people go through life trying to not get hit.

-What's up man?

WILL SMITH: All good.

-Did you see that fight?

WILL SMITH: Oh did I? I think I could've won.

(laughs).

The trick is to roll with the punches and hope that you

don't get floored by one.

-Again.

WILL SMITH: Our world was born out of violence...

and a storm that has raged since the beginning of time.

A storm with the power to destroy planets.

One mighty collision can change everything.

It's done it before and it could do it again.

Most of us live in blissful ignorance of the chaos around us.

But, 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.

NICOLE: Everyday the earth ploughs through about 40 tons

of material in space.

MAE: There is so much activity,

so much action and our planet is right in the middle of it.

JERRY: Space isn't vast and empty space but a

dynamic, cosmic storm.

NICOLE: It's a storm that could kill us,

but without it...

we wouldn't be here at all.

WILL SMITH: This is a story about the weird connections,

the near misses, the lucky breaks that created

this amazing world.

For 4.5 billion years our planet has been battered and

bruised and punched and pummeled but we're still standing.

It's actually the battle that's built us and this is

the tale of the tape.

NICOLE: Thanks guys, awesome. Alright.

WILL SMITH: Nicole Stott is an engineer, pilot and oh yeah...

-These are cool uh?

WILL SMITH: She lived for three months in space.

-You can even stick your hand in it.

Left hand.

Okay I'm coming out.

-Nicole, your right waist tether to the forward UIAD ring.

WILL SMITH: Frankly she's a bad ass.

-Now imagine them all pressurized and you're having

to work against it really hard.

Here I was, it was so unbelievable.

I'd spent almost 20 years helping build spaceships and

now here I was myself on one...

just amazing.

ASTRONAUT (over radio): Okay I am clear Nicole.

-Remember watching me do a spacewalk?

ROMAN: Yeah.

-Yeah. Was that fun? -Scary. -Yeah, why was it scary?

-Cause I thought you were gonna fall off.

NICOLE: When you're in space, 250 miles above our planet and

looking at these things you thought you knew,

you see them in a totally new way.

For example, the first time I saw a shooting star from the

space station was this very visual reminder that there's

a lot of other things travelling through the

same space, in space.

MIKE: What did I see and the first time I saw it,

it kind of startled me was,

a shooting star coming in below us.

That's a micro meteorite coming into the earth and

burning up in the atmosphere and you see this sort of

firework display thing going on.

JERRY: I was doing earth observation and I'm taking a

photo and all of a sudden I see a hole just magically

appear about that big in the solar panel, you know,

that was probably hit by a grain of sand,

something that size, coming at 17,500 miles an hour in a different orbit.

CHRIS: You get hit by rocks all the time,

you can hear them ricocheting off the hull.

You can see the scars of them in the windows of the spaceship.

NICOLE: It's a little mind boggling,

when you think about how much is really out there.

WILL SMITH: Mostly the stuff up there is pretty small,

burns up in the atmosphere, nothing to get worked up about,

but there are some pretty big rocks up there too,

ask the dinosaurs.

-We believe the asteroid that caused the extinction of the

dinosaurs started way out in the solar system.

You know, travelling that distance,

it's incredible that it found this target of earth.

♪ ♪

Bad for the dinosaurs but ultimately good for us.

WILL SMITH: We all think we know this story,

but there's something special about the place where it happened,

in the jungles of Mexico.

GUILLAUME: Here in Mexico I have the chance to dive in

what is the most magical place to free dive in the entire world.

♪ ♪

This incredible place was created with very strong

violence when the asteroid hit.

And the result of this is this calm place, this paradox.

This place which is now very quiet was, at some point,

where something dramatic happened.

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Life almost disappeared.

But at the same time, this is where our story started and

this is why we are here now.

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NICOLE: When this area was scanned,

we saw that hundreds of these flooded Mexican caverns

connected together into a vast semi-circle.

The edges of a huge crater,

110 miles across and 12 miles deep.

An asteroid that big hitting the planet anywhere is going

to be devastating, but scientists think it was

especially devastating because of where it hit.

A bulls eye strike on a large Sulphur reserve.

The Sulphur rock vaporized sending billions of tons of

polluting gas into the atmosphere...

blocking out the sun.

The earth froze and the dinosaurs died.

WILL SMITH: So this big old asteroid has been journeying

for billions of years through space before it gets to us and

the earth spins right.

So if the rock had arrived just a few seconds later,

it would have crashed out in the deep ocean, no bulls eye,

no fire storm, no dino extinction.

Earth's history is full of moments like this.

It's a tale of destructive good fortune that connects the

death of a planet, ten million African bats,

a clock in the sky and tiny rocks from the birth of our

solar system, some about the size of my fist.

NICOLE: There's a lot of rocks hitting us from space.

If they make it through our atmosphere and hit the surface

of our planet, people go in search of these in very remote

places to try to find them.

They're extremely valuable because they contain really

the story of where our earth came from.

-Boom!

(laughs).

(speaking in native language)

ADAM: In Morocco we have a couple of buzzes every year of

something that's way cool, a super awesome meteorite.

If a meteorite is found in the desert and word gets out...

Especially if it's of extreme value.

Then there is like a gold rush.

♪ ♪

We're talking about the building blocks of our planet.

♪ ♪

Some of the most valuable meteorites are carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.

They're the oldest form of solid material in

the solar system.

All the universities want it, all the museums want it.

The Bedouins are getting amazingly good at recognizing these things.

(speaking in native language).

NICOLE: To the untrained eye, these might just look like a

normal rock, but the really old ones contain all the raw

materials to build a planet like earth.

4.6 billion years ago where earth is today,

there was just a giant cloud of gas and dust,

all swirling around the new born sun.

♪ ♪

This was where the cosmic storm started.

First off with tiny particles attracted by

an electrostatic force.

It's a slow process but eventually clumps grew into

solid matter.

Still only as big as a grain of sand,

but now with just enough gravity of their own to pull

other grains in.

These grains fused into rocks and as they smashed and

clumped the collisions grew in intensity.

Under immense heat and pressure,

the rocks began to build our planet.

There seems to be nothing subtle about the way

earth was built.

It would almost be like building a space station with

a sledgehammer.

WILL SMITH: All those bits smashing together,

they were everything we needed to build a living planet.

The calcium in our bones, the gold in our wedding rings,

even the iron in our ships was all here from the beginning,

except one thing was in short supply, water,

but it was on its way and coming in fast.

♪ ♪

NICOLE: A lot of astronauts will tell you that from

six years old watching the moon landing that they knew from

that moment on that astronaut was a job that they

wanted to do.

For me, it wasn't that way.

My background is aeronautical engineering.

I wanted to do something with flying that allowed me to

learn about how things fly and then ultimately if you wanna

know how things fly, I can't imagine not wanting to know

how rocket ships fly.

And then one day I got this phone call to say that

I was assigned to fly a long duration flight on the

International Space Station.

WILL SMITH: Nicole didn't set out to fly on the ISS,

her job was to build the thing,

but once she got up there, she still had an eye for design.

NICOLE: So as an engineer you can imagine,

I couldn't help but look at the earth and wonder,

how does that work?

What's blindingly obvious when you look at earth,

is water is the key.

♪ ♪

But earlier it didn't look like this blue planet that I

saw, it was a dry and baron rock.

For life to thrive like it has done,

the earth needed delivery of water.

We believe soon after the earth was formed,

our water came from space in a hail of violence.

♪ ♪

It must have been brutal.

We think it lasted for about 100 million years.

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Icy comets and asteroids collided with the planet in that.

To supply us with that top off of water.

♪ ♪

But unlike Mars and Venus, who were surely bombarded by

the same storm, we kept our water.

As luck would have it, the sea that would one day grow into

earth as we know it, found its place at the perfect distance

from the sun, what we now call the Goldilocks zone.

Not too hot, not too cold.

(laughs).

WILL SMITH: The solar system is vast.

Earth could have easily wound up somewhere where every drop

of water either froze up or boiled away.

But here it's solid, gas and liquid all the time.

It only takes a tiny change like a sunrise for things to

get a little bit slippery.

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WILL SMITH: Solid, liquid, gas.

Earth's water, it's a shape shifter,

constantly changing forms and as it moves from snow to sea,

from stream to steam it helps make the weather that

keeps this planet a paradise for life.

LELAND: From space you can see clouds at the tops of the

Amazon Basin but you can also see them evaporating on the

oceans and so these systems are all interconnected.

CHRIS: That natural, seemingly inevitable process

of turning the oceans into rain,

it's the very essence of life itself on earth.

MAE: Without it they'd be no rivers, no ground water,

no plants, no animals.

The continents would be dead.

JERRY: It actually surprised me how dynamic the planet is,

clouds whirling, lightning storms propagating over the surface,

the ocean currents visible and you realize this

thing is not a dead rock down there, this thing is alive.

NICOLE: So we can thank our lucky stars I suppose that the

seed that started earth was in the right place for water to

exist in its three states.

WILL SMITH: Our planet was born out of cosmic dust then

watered by a storm from above,

but all those blows were nothing compared to one that literally

ripped the earth apart.

You see earth had a twin.

A twin that threatened our existence.

WILL SMITH: The earth is the result of many,

many collisions but the most violent collision of all was

unknown to humankind, unknown that is,

until we went to the moon.

NICOLE: I have really vivid memories of our

first moon landing.

Sitting in front of the black and white TV,

for some reason I remember having a grilled cheese sandwich, who knows?

We thought, how could there possibly be anything in common

between the earth and all its beautiful earthly colors and

the grey of the moon.

ASTRONAUT (over radio): Oh that looks beautiful from here Neil.

-This cratered surface.

ASTRONAUT (over radio) It's different but it's very pretty out here.

-What we found surprised us, moon rock and earth rock had

striking similarities.

ASTRONAUT (over radio): We'd like you to press on.

Yeah right.

-Suggesting that both the earth and the moon had somehow

originated from the same place.

ARMSTRONG (over radio): It's one small step for man...

WILL SMITH: Well there's only a handful of ways that could

have happened and none of 'em are pretty.

NICOLE: The prominent theory is that there was something

else in the Goldilocks zone.

Another planet called Theia and it was on an

intersecting orbit with earth.

In space when two things are in an intersecting orbit,

with enough time, it's inevitable that those

two things will collide.

Both planets became molten on impact.

We have debris thrown out into space.

When this cloud of debris eventually cools,

it condenses into a new cosmic partnership.

Planet earth and a uniquely large moon.

WILL SMITH: Our moon was ripped right out of us,

because of that,

it's big and close and has a lot of pull,

pulls the sea in, pulls the sea out, tides, simple right?

But things get harder when that same sea is

covered by ice.

Which is something that grandads know and modern kids

could stand to learn.

♪ ♪

(singing in native language)

WILL SMITH: Lukasi knows when the moon is full,

the tide is strongest and he'll have a few more minutes

under the ice, the best chance to grab their catch.

NICOLE: We shouldn't underestimate how influential

the moon is in all of our lives.

Those regular tides also help give us another kind of

rhythm, one you might assume had been with us all along.

The collision that ended up forming the moon sent the

earth just spinning.

A day back then was just five hours long.

It was the drag of the tides that eventually slowed the

earth down to where a day became 24 hours,

like we know now.

♪ ♪

The 24-hour day; waking up, having breakfast,

working eight hours.

Making dinner, day in, day out.

These cycles, they're embedded in our DNA.

WILL SMITH: The violent whack that gave us our moon,

our tides and our 24-hour day,

it gave us one more thing too;

summer in Philadelphia.

♪ ♪

NICOLE: When I think of the space station,

I think of this, like, beautiful masterpiece in space,

just hanging there.

The ultimate engineering challenge was,

how do ya make your spaceship as much like earth as possible?

Crossing the hatch from the space shuttle into the space

station the first time.

I remember thinking, wow, it's not the neatest

place I've ever seen.

There was wires and cables and computers and equipment all

strung along these walls.

The way we live there is, we've essentially mimicked

what we have naturally occurring on our planet.

We have to generate the oxygen to breathe.

We have to generate the electricity to power all of

our systems.

We have to figure out a way to clean the air,

so we can continue to breathe.

Because we're human beings and can only live comfortably

really within a certain temperature range,

the whole space station, all of the systems are working

really hard to maintain that environment for us.

And then you look down at earth and you realize that's

exactly what nature is doing, just on a mind-blowing scale.

And we've got that cosmic collision that made our moon

to thank for it.

Wow.

That collision between earth and Theia was so violent

that it actually knocked earth off its axis.

There you go.

So let's just pretend, this is our sun and this is

our earth and our earth is titled, due to that collision,

titled 23 and a half degrees.

For six months of the year the northern hemisphere is

favoring the sun and for six months of the year,

the southern hemisphere is favoring the sun.

The shift in the sun's energy from north to south throughout

the year is constantly trying to move the hot areas to the

cold areas and the cold areas to the hot areas.

This tilt of the earth results in our seasons.

CHRIS: The seasons constantly change in shape and contour

the land underneath.

The world is constantly adjusting itself.

LELAND: From the vantage point of space you can see the

ever-changing planet through the seasons from snowcapped

mountains to desert plains.

JERRY: I really never thought of this until just very

recently you know, I'm seeing all the seasons at once,

so I'm seeing the winter in the northern hemisphere and

it's summer in the southern hemisphere.

WILL SMITH: If we had no tilt, nearly half the planet could

be frozen all year round.

Nicole would be fine in Florida nearer the equator but

growing up in Philly, there'd be a glacier in my backyard.

♪ ♪

NICOLE: Because of our tilt, there really are few places on

this planet where life can't thrive.

♪ ♪

Life on our planet has synchronized with our seasons.

Raising its young in the spring and readying

them for winter.

♪ ♪

WILL SMITH: Four and a half billion years ago we started

with a smash that created a tilt that made our seasons,

that gave us the rhythms of existence.

But more than that, it gave us the diversity of

life we see around us.

WILL SMITH: Hard to imagine but for most of the year,

not a single one of these bats lives here.

All ten million arrive from across Africa,

chasing the rains, to gorge on ripening fruits.

WILL SMITH: These bats are essentially a flying forest

delivery system.

The tilt of the earth means cold moves to hot and hot to cold,

means winter gives way to spring just as summer

yields to fall.

It means bats fly across a continent seeding

forests as they go.

The world is connected in 1,000 ways and all because of one massive whack.

So is the danger all the in past or is the

calm before another storm?

♪ ♪

WILL SMITH: This planet is only here because we've

weathered just enough body blows to build our world.

So far it's been a perfect storm that's made our perfect home,

one that feels stable, safe, reliable.

It isn't.

NICOLE: Imagine yourself on a boat.

Out in the middle of the ocean.

In the middle of a storm.

A big storm.

It's very real to you.

It might even be a little bit scary.

But if you had the opportunity to just zoom in on one of

these tiny little droplets and see that inside that little

droplet are these tiny little micro-organisms that are just

oblivious to this storm going on around them.

And if we look at our earth, if we look at where we live,

this planet that's out in space,

we in some ways go about our daily lives oblivious to all

the action that's going on around us, in space,

in the solar system, in the universe.

This cosmic storm that actually has a violent nature to it,

is the reason why we're here.

The reason why we're able to live so comfortably

on this planet.

Before flying in space I tried really hard to learn

from the people who had flown before me,

to get some idea of what the experience meant to them.

These astronauts had seen the whole earth from space.

While they described it as a really incredibly beautiful place,

there were also some that said,

they felt a sense of insignificance.

From the very first time I looked out the window,

I felt like this is significant.

The significance of it to me is how something so

overwhelmingly beautiful could have come from chaos,

violence and collisions.

It's just amazing to think about this fine line, this,

this balance between being here surviving,

thriving and not.

WILL SMITH: The storm has not been our enemy.

We aren't here in spite of it.

We're here because of it.

And when the storm blows over,

it's anything but blue skies and rainbows.

Next time...

Here comes the sun.

It is the fuel of life, but it is not our friend.

The sun is a planet killer.

Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.