Original subtitles

Welcome to the planet Earth.

A world of blue nitrogen skies,

oceans of liquid water and more kinds of living things

than you can possibly imagine.

You are the newest page in its four-billion-year-old

book of life.

We're all very young here.

New, like you, to the mysteries of the universe.

We hope someday you will add to the little we know.

I can see a future for you that is,

in many ways, longer and brighter,

and more free than any human generation has ever experienced.

I also sense danger.

That's nothing new here.

It's always been that way.

To be alive is to be in some measure of jeopardy.

Life is dangerous.

In every generation, in every time,

everywhere on Earth.

Our species, and our fellow Earthlings,

have gotten through the tough times,

when the prospects for life looked bleak.

Somehow, we manage to endure.

And now, we want to protect you,

and your 360,000 brothers and sisters also born on this day.

I have so much to tell you about our world.

Some of these stories are frightening.

But don't be afraid.

We'll find a way.

Where do I begin?

So much has happened before you got here.

Fortunately, our ancestors figured out a way to reach all

the way back in time to piece together the great story of

our planet's own childhood.

And the amazing things that have happened since.

It's called science, and it's your birthright.

It's hard to believe that all of this grandeur was once a sea of fire.

Come, I'll show you.

This time next year, you'll have your first birthday.

That means you will have completed one whole trip

around the Sun, which is what an Earth year is.

To understand the vast time scale of the cosmos,

and our little world, we've squished all of time into the

scale of a single year.

And that's where we are now.

On the Cosmic Calendar.

Every month is a little more than a billion years,

every day a little less than forty million.

A single hour on this calendar is almost two million years.

Earth was born in fire.

Fires within its seething heart.

And great balls of rock and ice that explode in fiery impact.

One was almost as big as Mars,

and when it struck Earth, it formed the Moon.

But not to worry, little one, because those fireballs were

part of the chaotic early solar system.

In the billions of years since,

the other worlds swept free the lanes of their orbits.

So our solar system is a relatively peaceful place now.

After its first half billion years,

Earth was spinning faster than it does today.

The days were shorter, merely six hours long.

The Moon was ten times closer,

and its gravitational grip on the young planet was much stronger.

The shores of the land were battered by the largest tidal

waves the world has ever known.

A thousand times greater than they are today.

The infant Earth was no place for us then.

The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia,

a toxic environment for our kind of life.

We don't know what the climate was like back then,

but scientists reason that the thick,

hazy atmosphere trapped the heat of the Earth and

made it scorching hot.

Another kind of life, tiny creatures that could shrug off

the methane and eat carbon dioxide and sunlight for breakfast,

found a way to make a living in the ocean.

And those scrappy little cyanobacteria,

as they're known, remade the whole planet.

By gobbling up the carbon dioxide,

and giving off oxygen, they turned the sky blue.

All that oxygen destroyed the methane shroud

that enveloped our planet.

And it was cool.

Not as cool as it is now, but more like a really hot

summer day year-round.

And then something wonderful happened.

The atoms of oxygen that the tiny creatures in the ocean

produced began to gather high above the world in the sky.

And a new kind of molecule was made.

Ozone.

It created an invisible canopy against those rays of

the Sun that were lethal.

Now, for the first time, life was free to leave the

oceans for the land.

And before long, life seized these new opportunities.

A wild variety of shapes and sizes evolved as adaptations

to these new habitats.

And there were ears and noses and wings.

I'd like you to meet a fellow Earthling,

a very distant relative of yours.

You've only been here a day,

but beetles have been here for 300 million years.

And the changes they've seen on this world...

Our kind has only been here for a fraction of that amount of time,

11:00 on New Year's Eve of the cosmic year.

That's when our ancestors stood up for the first time.

We call them Homo erectus for that reason.

They were no longer forced to stare at the mud beneath their feet.

Now, they could look up and see the stars,

and their hands were free to change the world.

They began to move around, to explore,

daring to risk everything to get to unknown places.

They were brave.

And their blood runs in your veins.

Some of them explored the vast continent of Africa.

Others ranged north, taking a left turn into Europe.

There is evidence that they would later evolve into the

lost people we call Neanderthals.

We have no idea what they called themselves,

but we named them after the place in Germany where

we first discovered their ancient remains.

Another even more mysterious branch of our family

took a right turn into Asia.

And they evolved into people we call the Denisovans.

But you and I,

and all our other human brothers and sisters,

were mainly descended from the people who stayed in

Africa for another million and a half years.

Sure, most of us have a little blood from the other branches of the family,

but we are mostly the children of Africa.

To see how our kind spread out around the planet,

we have to go even closer to midnight.

11:55.

Or about 150,000 years ago.

It is now a minute and a half to midnight.

Until about 40,000 years ago,

our Neanderthal relatives lived very much as we did.

They had bigger brains than we do,

and were brawnier,

but they did many of the things that we think of as being human.

Most of us still carry some tiny portion of their genes inside us.

But there are no more living Neanderthals today.

Nor are there any of our other cousins,

the Denisovans.

When this happens, when a whole species vanishes...

we call it extinction.

It's the end of a road that began four billion years ago

with the origin of life.

We don't know why they died out.

We do know that they never ranged beyond the ocean

coastlines of their environment.

Maybe our hominid cousins were just a bit more contented,

less anxious and more at peace than we are.

Maybe it's a restlessness that prods us humans to

choose the unknown.

Some powerful force moved our ancestors to daring

feats of courage.

They crossed great oceans with no idea of what lay on the other side,

carrying our people to every continent on Earth.

And even to the Moon.

By the last second of the cosmic year,

there was no place on Earth that we had left untouched.

We became the first species to remake the planet since the

one-celled cyanobacteria did billions of years ago.

To change the oceans, the land and the atmosphere.

And these changes have led to a new mass extinction.

The scientific community has looked at the evidence,

and decided our age needs a new name.

The Anthropocene.

"Anthropo" from the Greek word for

"Human" and "Cene" the Greek word for "Recent."

It reflects our global impact on the environment and

the life it sustains.

There's disagreement about when it began,

and nobody knows how it will turn out.

Happy New Year, little one.

Welcome to the Anthropocene.

I see a great future for you, little one.

But a shadow hangs over it.

We're not exactly sure when the darkening began.

When did we become a force of nature, altering the skies,

the seas and the land of the planet?

When did the age of the Anthropocene begin?

Some would say that it started in places like this one,

more than 10,000 years ago.

Did our ancestors paint these images of mammoths and

saber-tooth tigers and giant sloths to somehow keep their

memory alive after slaughtering the last of them?

Human-caused extinction is nothing new.

But we can't really blame our ancestors.

How could they know that this or that kill meant

the end of an entire species?

I wonder, maybe the Anthropocene started with the

first seed that was planted in the ground,

and the agricultural revolution that followed.

Before that time, the world had twice as many trees to

convert the Earth's carbon dioxide into oxygen.

With the invention of agriculture,

our ancestors stopped wandering to settle down into

farms and cities.

This is Çatalhöyük.

It was one of the earliest cities.

This is how it looked about 9,000 years ago.

The great move indoors changed our relationship to nature.

Those hearths, those fires that warmed the small

dwellings of our ancestors...

were they the beginning?

The smoke from those small fires did little to

alter the atmosphere.

But over thousands of years,

our numbers grew exponentially,

until we were cranking out enough carbon dioxide

into the atmosphere to warm the whole world.

Did the Anthropocene begin with

the domestication of animals?

Cattle convert wild grasses into methane,

another gas that changes the climate.

It happens inside them when they're digesting their meals.

But nobody would figure this out until the

modern scientific era.

How could a few head of cattle do any harm,

let alone change Earth so radically?

Our ancestors wanted to feed their families,

and make sure that the little ones would not go hungry.

That they would live.

In China, around 4,000 years ago,

a world-changing discovery was made.

There were rocks that you could burn for fuel to drive

away the cold and the damp.

These rocks were actually the carbon remains of plants and

trees that had died hundreds of millions of years before,

and lay buried in the earth.

Was the discovery of coal the beginning of the Anthropocene?

Coal became increasingly important to power forges and

foundries and homes.

Or did the Anthropocene really get going about 1,000 years later,

when people all over Asia began to grow rice?

This ingenious technique,

which involves transplanting seedlings into flooded paddies,

is called "Puddling."

There was no way for these hardworking farmers to know

that this particular method of growing rice,

like the cattle, would someday produce tens of millions of

tons of methane per year.

The flooded soil loses oxygen, and then tiny,

invisible creatures, microbes,

digest the plant matter and produce methane.

The leaves of the rice plants release more methane into the atmosphere.

These early farmers had no way of seeing what was

happening on the scale of the very small.

Again, they were just trying to feed themselves

and each other.

There's all kinds of writing.

But this is how time writes.

If you know how to read time's alphabet,

you can reconstruct events in the great story of the planet.

The most dramatic passage in this saga is not written in

the brightest colors, but in pale white.

This pale white line is kind of an epic poem.

It tells the saga of the death of titans,

all over the planet.

This layer of an otherwise rare metal called iridium,

signifies the end of the Cretaceous chapter some

66 million years ago.

This is when dinosaurs, and three quarters of all the

plants and animals became extinct.

There's a custom among geologists.

If you find a layer in the earth that indicates

the boundary of the first or last time that the fossils of

any species can be found,

you mark it with a "golden spike."

You drive it into the rock with a hammer.

If we are living in the Anthropocene,

the age of human- caused extinction,

what wall do we drive our golden spike into?

It's in me, little one.

When I was brand new, just like you, only a day old,

there were two great superpowers fighting

over the planet.

They were both willing to destroy everything to assert

their dominance.

On the very day I was born, both nations exploded nuclear

weapons in the atmosphere just to show how strong they were.

And those were only a few of the thousands that were

detonated over a period of decades.

The bombs gave off strontium 90,

an atom made unstable by its excess nuclear energy.

It's called a radioactive isotope.

It polluted mother's milk all over the planet.

Mothers nursing babies like you refused to live with this horror.

They joined together to protest until a treaty was signed in 1963.

I, and my whole generation,

carry an excess of another radioactive isotope

in the tissues of our bodies.

It's called carbon 14.

So if I ever lose my mind, or forget how old I am,

the echoes of those nuclear explosions on the day

of my birth would tell you my age.

Does this "golden spike" inside me signify the beginning

of the Anthropocene?

Is that when it began?

The atmospheric testing ended,

but we just kept on trashing our home.

All the while knowing that the day would come when

it would all fall down.

What good is it to know of a danger if you don't do

anything about it?

Maybe it's better not to know.

Knowing can be a curse.

That live the longest are those that never were, sts

and always will be: myths.

Apollo, the ancient god of light,

was always on the prowl for attractive humans.

One day, while strolling the bustling streets of Troy,

a rival city of the Ancient Greeks,

he spied Cassandra, the smartest and most beautiful of

the daughters of King Priam.

Apollo fell madly in love with her.

Apollo usually got his way, and he was shocked when

Cassandra rejected him.

How could he win her heart?

She lacked for nothing.

And she was happy.

But Apollo was not so easily dissuaded.

And so he made her an irresistible offer.

He would grant her the gift of prophecy,

the ability to see the future.

Cassandra was thrilled.

Knowing what would happen before anyone else would make

her all-powerful.

But then, Apollo explained to her what he expected in return.

She would have to submit to him as his lover.

This was too high a price for Cassandra.

Apollo's rage took the form of a cruel and ingenious curse.

He granted Cassandra the ability to foresee the future,

but condemned her to be ignored.

The Trojans thought she was nuts.

They contemptuously referred to her as the

"Lady of Many Sorrows."

Today she would be dismissed as a prophet of

gloom and doom.

Cassandra saw nothing but trouble when her brother, Paris,

decided to take a trip to Sparta.

She alone knew that when he got there,

he would fall in love with the King's wife,

a beauty named Helen, whom he would abduct.

This would bring ruin to Troy.

But no one paid any attention.

This was a time of peace and prosperity.

There was no clear and present danger.

The King wouldn't listen to his daughter.

No one would.

When Paris brought Helen home,

the people of Troy celebrated her arrival.

Cassandra was so desperate to prevent the coming

disaster that she attacked Helen.

Cassandra knew that the Greeks would seek revenge

against the Trojans, and that they would be victorious.

She foretold the defeat of her father's army,

and the sacking of Troy by the Greeks.

And the Greeks did come,

just as Cassandra knew they would.

But even after years of warfare, Troy still stood.

When the Greeks retreated,

boarding their ships and sailing out of the harbor,

there must have been a sigh of relief among the few

who wondered if there was

something to Cassandra's dire predictions.

But what about that enormous wooden horse?

A Trojan platoon was sent to investigate.

They found a single Greek soldier.

A man named Sinon.

The Trojans asked Sinon, "What's going on?"

He told them that a King of the Greeks had wanted to offer

him up as a human sacrifice.

So he'd stayed hidden until his brothers

departed for home.

And that colossal wooden horse?

Sinon told them that it was an offering for the goddess Athena.

How wonderful, the Trojans thought.

The horse was the ancient symbol of their city.

Why not move it inside the gates and keep it as a trophy?

Sinon laughed, and told them that the Greeks had said it was way too big

and heavy for weaklings like the Trojans to move.

"Let them stare at it all day and be ashamed about

how feeble they are."

The Trojans were terrified that Cassandra's

attempt at arson would enrage the goddess Athena,

and bring her wrath down upon the city.

Once the invaders gave the signal,

the ships of the Greek navy that had been waiting out of

sight offshore commenced their attack on Troy.

Apollo had had his fun.

Cassandra's grim prophecies had gone unheeded,

and now it was too late for Troy.

For Cassandra, knowing was a curse.

But it can also be the greatest of blessings.

Let me tell you another story.

Once upon a time, there were no refrigerators.

♪♪

It used to be hard to keep food from spoiling in the summertime.

There was a person called the "iceman."

He would come to your house and sell you a big block of ice.

You'd keep it in something called an "icebox" to preserve

the kinds of food that spoil quickly.

But that was a drag because the ice kept melting.

It would drip all over the floor.

So somebody thought up another way to keep food cold.

It was a gas powered system that used ammonia or sulfur dioxide as a coolant.

No more lugging blocks of ice.

What could be bad about that?

The chemicals were not only poisonous,

they smelled terrible and there were leaks.

A substitute coolant was badly needed.

One that would circulate inside the refrigerator,

but would not poison anyone if the refrigerator leaked,

or pose a danger if it was sent to the junkyard.

Something that wouldn't make you sick,

wouldn't burn your eyes, or attract bugs,

or even bother the cat.

But in all of nature, no such material seemed to exist.

So chemists in the United States invented a

class of molecules.

Little collections of even tinier things called atoms,

that had never existed on Earth before.

They called them chlorofluorocarbons,

or CFCs, because they were made up of one or more carbon

atoms and some chlorine and/or fluorine atoms.

These new molecules were wildly successful,

far exceeding the expectations of their inventors.

Not only did CFCs become the chief coolant in refrigerators,

but also in air conditioners.

There were so many things you could do with CFCs.

People used them to propel great fluffy mounds of shaving cream.

And to protect your hair from wind and rain.

It was also the propellant that made fire extinguishers

and spray paint cans so much fun.

It was good for foam insulation,

industrial solvents and cleansing agents.

The most famous brand name of these chemicals was Freon,

a trademark of DuPont.

It was used for decades and no harm ever seemed to come from it.

Safe as safe could be, everyone figured.

Until, in the early 1970s, two atmospheric chemists at the

University of California, Irvine

were studying Earth's atmosphere.

Mario Molina was a Mexican immigrant,

a young laser chemist.

Sherwood Rowland was a chemical kineticist,

someone who studied the motions of molecules and gases under varying conditions.

He was from a small town in Ohio.

Molina wanted to grow as a scientist.

He was looking for a project that would take him as far

from his previous research experience as possible.

He wondered.

What happens to those Freon molecules when they

leak out of the air conditioner?

This was a time when the Apollo astronauts were still

making regularly scheduled trips to the Moon.

And NASA was contemplating weekly launches of

a space shuttle.

Would all that burning rocket fuel pose a danger to the stratosphere,

that place where Earth's atmosphere meets the blackness of space?

And this is how science works a lot of the time.

You set out to solve one problem,

and you happen on a completely different,

unexpected phenomenon.

Those wonderfully inert, "harmless" CFCs,

the magic molecules of shaving cream and hair spray,

didn't simply vanish when we were done with them.

They had an afterlife at the edge of space,

where they accumulated in the trillions.

They were silently congregating high above the Earth,

and they were up to no good.

Molina and Rowland were alarmed to discover that the

CFCs had thinned the protective layer that shielded

us from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation.

And it was getting worse all the time.

When UV light hits a CFC molecule,

it strips away the chlorine atoms.

Once that happens, the chlorine atoms start devouring

the precious ozone molecules.

It wasn't until our planet developed an ozone layer,

about two and a half billion years ago,

that it was safe for life to leave the ocean for the land.

A single chlorine atom can destroy 100,000 ozone molecules.

CFCs were in everything, and the manufacturers couldn't

imagine a world without it.

The corporate response to this danger was that the

science hadn't been settled.

People had a hard time believing that we had become

powerful enough as a species to endanger life on the planet.

They looked for non-human causes for the loss of the

ozone in the sky.

One Reagan administration official suggested that

everyone just wear more sunblock and put on a hat and sunglasses.

But the scientists pointed out that the plankton,

those tiny plants at the base of the global food chain,

and the larger plants, were unlikely to do so.

Molina and Rowland tirelessly worked to warn the world.

What's the use of having developed a science

well enough to make predictions if,

in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait

for them to come true?

Rowland and Cassandra would've had a lot

to talk about.

But then something amazing happened.

There was a global outcry.

People all over the world got involved.

In the 1960s, the women of the world demanded an end to

atmospheric nuclear testing because they didn't want to

nurse their babies with poisoned milk.

Then, in the '80s, consumers demanded that the corporations

stop manufacturing CFCs.

And you know what, little one?

The governments listened.

CFCs were banned in 197 countries.

That's just about as many countries as there are on this planet.

And that's why this is one danger you can cross

off your worry list.

The ozone layer has been getting thicker ever since.

But what would've happened if Rowland and Molina

hadn't been curious about the stratosphere,

or if their warnings had been ignored as Cassandra's were?

By the time of your 40th birthday,

the ozone would have been all but gone from

the entire planet.

You would never have been able to take your own little ones

out to bask in the sunshine.

The food crops would have completely failed.

The herbivores, those who live off them,

would have died out.

The carnivores would subsist on their corpses for a while,

but ultimately they, too, would be doomed.

If we continue to safeguard the ozone layer,

it will be completely mended by your 50th birthday.

I may not get to see it,

but I have imagined what it might be like.

One last story, little one.

It's about another person who had the power to

foresee the future.

His story remains unknown outside the scientific community.

But even Apollo would've envied his power of prophecy.

He foretold an epic tale of things to come with

astonishing accuracy.

And every one of us, including you, are in his debt.

He was born in a rural part of Japan named Ehime,

which means "Lovely Princess."

A place of unspoiled natural beauty.

But he spent much of his childhood buried beneath the

surface of the earth.

The cruelest war the world had ever seen had forced the boy

and the people of his small town to hide in an underground

bomb shelter.

At first, Syukuro Manabe,

or "Suki," wanted to be a doctor, like his father and grandfather.

He discovered physics and became enchanted by it,

but didn't think he could do the math.

His grades were poor, until he began to concentrate

on the questions that interested him most.

Why is the atmosphere and climate of Earth the way that it is?

He wondered why Earth maintained the same average

global temperature year after year.

What was keeping the planetary thermostat set at that

particular temperature?

Was it possible to take all the variables of the planet's climate

its atmospheric pressure,

cloud cover, humidity, surface conditions,

ocean and wind currents;

and create a climate model for the planet?

One that had the power of prophecy?

Now remember, this was before climatologists in Japan

had any access to computers.

He did these brain-numbing calculations by hand.

In 1958, he was invited to immigrate to the United States

by the US Weather Service.

Five years later, Manabe was given access to

one of the first "super computers."

When the great volume of data about Earth's climate

crashed the entire system, he was mortified.

It took him another four years to assemble the evidence

for a bold and tragic prediction.

There are broken branches on the four-billion-year-old

tree of life.

And this is their monument.

Each hallway memorializes the mass extinctions that

were so widespread that life itself came close to dying.

The first five catastrophes happened a long time

before we got here.

But the sixth is now, and it has our name on it.

Sometimes prophecy comes as a cry from the heart of a Trojan princess,

but it can also be the

dry-as-dust title of a scientific paper.

Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution

of Relative Humidity.

Doesn't sound like,

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling!"

But that's what it said.

Maybe this is where we should place our golden spike.

Manabe and his colleague, Richard Wetherald,

predicted how the temperature of the planet would change as

a function of the increased greenhouse gases humans pumped

into the atmosphere.

The scientists foresaw precisely how the looming

catastrophe would unfold.

They saw far.

Into our own time, and beyond.

Some people still claim the science is unsettled,

but if that's so, how was it possible for Manabe and

Wetherald to correctly predict the rise in Earth's

temperature across more than 50 years?

And if it wasn't caused by us,

where was all that carbon dioxide coming from?

The larger community of climate scientists predicted

heightened flooding of coastal cities, check.

The mass death of coral reefs by ocean warming, check.

The increase in intensity of catastrophic storms, check.

Lethal heat waves,

droughts and runaway wildfires of unprecedented magnitude, check.

The scientists warned us.

What about your future, your life, little one?

Your first day of kindergarten was postponed until the

thermometer dropped below the lethal temperature level.

When the wildfires came,

your family was forced to flee with nothing from your childhood home.

Water was the champagne at your wedding.

This doesn't have to be.

It's not too late.

There's another hallway, another future, we can still have.

I promise to get you there. We'll find a way.

Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.