Original subtitles

Thrown out of orbit.

Drifting into the outer reaches of space.

A world thrown into dark and cold in the face of an eternal ice

age.

Leading minds join forces.

To craft scientifically plausible scenarios of Armageddon.

And find the secrets to human salvation in the

face of ultimate disaster.

When we take a look around the solar system, it becomes very clear.

that the Earth is in a very special place.

Its orbit is perfect for sustaining all our life.

So we're going to get there on time, right? Yes, sir. We'll be out in about

minutes.

If something were to happen to take the Earth outside of this perfect zone,

everything would change.

And the first signs of such a change could take us by surprise.

There are forces in the universe that we're only beginning to comprehend.

Forces powerful enough to change mankind's course forever.

Why are they asking about our altitude?

You see right there in front of us? That's the landing strip right there.

going to land there.

Reports of multiple plane crashes around the world and several massive ships

have run aground.

The National Transportation Safety Board has still issued no official

explanation for the worldwide navigational disaster that began 48

Anonymous sources at the Department of Defense have confirmed that the GPS

networks across the globe, which affect everything from our smartphones to major

transportation hubs, have been malfunctioning all at once.

Officials are unsure what may be causing the malfunction at this time.

What if we suddenly discovered that all of our navigation systems are GPS

devices? We're wrong. We're sending it in the wrong directions, putting us in

the wrong places worldwide.

We would immediately have to ask the question of whether something has

to our own satellites.

Good day. Let's begin.

We have a lot to cover.

72 hours ago, a massive failure in the Global Positioning Satellite Network led

to a worldwide disaster in navigation.

We have discovered that this occurred because our GPS satellites are no longer

where we place them.

In fact, every satellite has been displaced.

We'd have to ask the question of whether or not something has actually happened

to the Earth itself.

This disruption is not limited to just the satellites.

Ladies and gentlemen, all measurable bodies within our solar system have to

degree been pulled out of their standard orbit.

This includes the Earth.

That Earth could be pulled out of its orbit around the sun is extremely

unlikely. But there are things in existence powerful enough to move entire

planets, things that we're only beginning to understand.

One of those things is something called dark matter.

Dark matter is this mysterious stuff that actually constitutes

85 % of the mass.

in our universe.

So in our universe is normal matter, stuff we're made of, the stuff planets

stars are made of.

But then, over many decades of research, astronomers have realized there has to

be other stuff helping hold everything together.

We know that there's this mysterious matter, this extra mass out there, but

can't quite put our finger on it. We don't know exactly what it is.

It's ghost matter.

It doesn't glow, it doesn't reflect light, but it adds to the gravitating

of objects.

And if such a clump of material passes through or near our solar system, its

gravitational force could have a profound effect.

It is our conclusion that these perturbations are being caused due to a

concentration of dark matter near our solar system.

It would pull gravitation on all of the planets and offset the planets.

from their current rather delicate orbit. In time, this instability could

grow and manifest itself as orbits that slowly expand.

So what would happen if Earth's orbit was altered, taking us out of the only

path that Earth's life has ever known?

Our very existence is made possible because we happen to live at the perfect

distance from the sun. This thin band of livable space is known as the

Goldilocks zone.

It's not too hot. It's not too cold. For all life on Earth, it's just right.

If Earth wouldn't leave the Goldilocks zone, life for humankind and everything

we know would be changed forever.

The size of the orbit was to grow.

then the winters would get much, much colder, and the global temperatures

drop significantly.

Projections show that Earth's orbit will continue to spiral away from the sun.

As it does, Earth's temperature will fall.

It will drop one degree per year.

In 20 years, it will be freezing at the equator.

96 years from now, the average global temperature could be minus 430 degrees.

As we begin to move away from the sun, out into space, our source of

light and heat would not go away all at once, but it would begin to fade. Our

biosphere would begin to change.

altering our ecosystem forever.

In the short term, we see a rearrangement of both plant and animal

Earth. A drop in average global temperatures would start this chain

going.

Where it stops, we don't know.

Six months after the dark matter incident, bizarre animal migrations are

occurring all over the globe. Birds of giraffe have begun leaving protected

reserves in South Africa, becoming targets for poachers. Thousands of birds

dropped from the sky yesterday on Edinburgh, Pennsylvania.

100 ,000 whales beached themselves along the Chilean coast.

Scientists are blaming these phenomenon on the alteration in the Earth's orbit

and the changing temperatures.

Religious fundamentalism is on the rise and many people are preaching to the

dead.

As Earth spirals away from the sun

and temperatures begin to drop, many of the effects would be surprising.

As that happens, the coldest places on Earth, the poles, would begin to lose

their ability to support life.

One thing's for sure, you definitely could have some movement of that

and interactions unlike some we've seen before.

The Arctic is going to cool at a faster pace than in the lower latitudes. But

don't be mistaken, everywhere on Earth will be affected.

You might think that a drop of just a few degrees is insignificant, but we're

talking about the average temperature of the entire planet.

In the middle of the last ice age, the planet Earth was only 5 degrees Celsius

colder than it is today.

So that's a really narrow window.

A drop of 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the global temperature could mean cold snaps

of 20 to 30 degrees cooler in your hometown.

People who are unaccustomed to winter conditions, at first it's kind of

because it's so extreme and so different.

It was another week of record -breaking summertime cold throughout the

Midwestern United States.

Some, like these folks shown here in Evansville, Indiana, kept their spirits

high by having some fun outside and posting it online for others to see.

I have a cup of boiling hot water.

Check this out.

Negative 19 degrees.

Boiling water turns into mist.

And then pretty quickly thereafter, it gets old.

It's hard to go outside without putting on...

some pretty extreme clothing.

We can handle putting on warmer clothes and layering before we go outside, but

most people won't realize the dangers of a cooling planet until the cold takes

away something that we can't live without.

Our food.

Colder temperatures are going to bring later freezes as plants are trying to

germinate, so we're going to shorten the growing season, and all of that is

going to conspire to limit the amount of food grown.

Despite all of our technological advances, our food supply chain is still

fragile.

In what's become the second straight year of uncommonly cold temperatures for

Europe's farmers, resulting crop failures are affecting millions.

Britons have been warned to brace themselves for sticker shock at food

at some of the worst hit areas, or reporting prices rising by 100 % in a

of days.

In the short term, a food shortage would cause prices to skyrocket.

Anyone with enough money would buy as much food as they could and stockpile

and the poor would begin to starve.

Riots and looting could break out anywhere food is stored.

It will lead in short order to violence, and this will

in turn lead to a breakdown of government.

So there's no good or easy way out of that process.

And that will set in motion a fearsome mess.

No matter what is done, if people believe that their family and loved ones

will die or they'll be in jeopardy, they're not going to accept any way of

this. People would begin to, I hate to say it, but I think they would panic.

While we're fighting amongst ourselves, a much bigger problem is growing worse.

For six years, we've drifted away from our sun, moving further and further into

the cold of space.

The freezing at the poles is intensifying and moving down into the

areas.

Survivors are running out of time to find places warm enough to stay alive.

I think we're going to see a mass exodus of people heading for the warmest place

they can find. So the tropics and the countries around the tropics are going

be inundated with immigrants.

And that, of course, would be incredibly disruptive, tremendously threatening to

people who already live in the places that the exodus wants to move into.

Major highways in the Phoenix area are at a standstill for miles as a massive

number of Arizona residents began their exodus to warmer areas following a

national emergency announcement.

I was planning on heading over the West Coast, but I don't think I'm going to

make it now.

It's been snowing all through the night and all day. It hasn't let up at all.

The people who hang...

back and tough it out, I think you're going to end up having a much harder

existence. It's going to be a very difficult place to live.

Even in regions that are normally warm, people will be unprepared for the rapid

cold snaps headed their way.

It's now been a decade of global cooling on planet Earth, and the average

temperature has plummeted by 10 degrees.

Snow and ice are blanketing North America from northern Canada to

By now, less than half the Earth's population is still alive.

You know, some places along the equator might be happy for a while because their

temperatures are reduced a little bit.

But where the majority of the population is, is going to get a lot colder. Those

people are not going to be happy.

We have this clash between the cold air over the continent and the warm, moist

air out over the ocean. We might see it get a lot stormier.

So the Earth is going to respond in dramatic ways.

Ultimately, as we get farther and farther from the sun, we will get to the

where all of the precipitation does fall as snow.

Think about that for a second. There might never be rain showers on this

again. At a certain point, as the freezing intensifies and marches towards

equator, the only precipitation will be snow, and the only season will be

winter.

Instead of infecting places like Seattle and Chicago, they'll be more running

along Houston, Miami.

They would be faced with snows that they'd never seen before, and they'd

develop means of removing that snow.

When it snows, it doesn't melt.

And it piles up and piles up and piles up, and the bottom of that snowfall

into ice.

The weight of those ice sheets and gravitational forces will spread that

down into the main city.

You're going to start to see glaciers forming around you.

Hundreds of terrified residents were barricaded into their homes today in

Jackson, Mississippi as massive sheets of ice surrounded entire neighborhoods.

Much of this population could be at high risk for even death, staying in their

home for that long with no heat.

Volunteer rescue teams are working with the National Guard into the night to

find those still missing.

This drift is over 20 feet high.

You see he's right at the top.

of the edge of the roof.

As more and more of the planet is encased with ice permanently, the

impact is going to be catastrophic.

The roads will be impassable.

The power would be terminated.

If the people did not have a way to get in from the cold, starvation will kill.

And the cold will kill.

They would perish.

With nowhere to run from the cold, people would begin to suffer from the

physical effects of the freezing temperatures.

At 40 below, our skin freezes almost instantly, so it can't be exposed.

It's hard to go outside, and you have to cover pretty much every...

square inch of exposed skin to avoid getting frostbitten.

Frostbite is when the actual cells in your skin start to freeze, the water in

those cells. If it goes deep enough and you actually kill the cells in the skin

that make new skin cells, then you end up with frostbite.

You tend to get frostbitten first in your fingers and your nose and your ears

they're exposed because your body does shut down the circulation to the

extremities first.

You can live without arms, but you can't live without your vital organs.

A drop of only 4 degrees Fahrenheit in core body temperature can cause

uncontrollable shivering, confusion, and weakness.

As your organs begin to cool, death can strike long before your body actually

freezes.

As the Earth begins to cool, it can actually be an accelerating process.

And this is because frozen water reflects more sunlight than liquid

As the ice caps expand, the Earth becomes more and more reflective, and so

actually absorbs even less sunlight.

As glacier -like ice sheets move beyond 30 degrees latitude, covering places

like Houston, New Orleans, and Cairo,

we would reach a tipping point.

And it's a runaway process.

Sometimes it's called a snowball earth effect.

With that tipping point, things could move at a faster pace and make it more

difficult for the human race to keep up with it.

We're heading off into territory that we cannot return from.

I think at that point we should be very worried.

Ultimately, as we get farther and farther from the sun, we will get to the

where everything on the surface is freezing.

Ice is enveloping the planet.

We're running out of time. But what options do we have?

The surface is becoming too cold for even the strongest to survive.

about places where people have somehow been generating energy or heat. I'm

getting conflicting reports on where these locations are, but I'll keep you

posted as soon as I hear more.

Stay warm.

Survivor Radio signing off.

It comes down to having a sufficiency of energy.

It really does. If you haven't got energy, you've got nothing. If you've

energy, then you've got a chance.

If we're losing the sun's power, what do we do? Well, we know we have fossil

fuels, but those are finite. We know we have nuclear power, but that's tricky.

It's a problem we haven't faced before.

Many things we rarely think about are powered by our sun.

Photosynthesis, light so we can feed, heat to keep us from freezing. All of

now has to be generated another way.

So we're going to have to start thinking seriously about really producing a lot

more energy.

than we've ever produced before.

If we're clever enough, we can tap into geothermal energy sources.

The Earth itself is an energy source.

Geothermal energy, the heat of the planet, has been with us forever, and

not going away anytime soon.

The center of the Earth is about 9 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

There's a lot of heat there that we could use to power our needs on the

but we have to get it from there to the surface.

One of the things you can do in this scenario is you drill down a ways, and

you get deep enough, you can get a lot of heat out of it.

And you can, in fact, boil water away.

And you can use that steam to drive a turbine to create energy and

It's going to give you the heat to power energy, light, and grow the crops you

need to survive.

So if we know the energy we desperately need exists underground, where is the

best place to access it in order to save the maximum number of lives?

Any place where you see a lot of volcanic action is where you would want

to find that heat.

The place you would most want to look would be around the Ring of Fire, which

essentially encircles the Pacific Basin.

There are some major geothermal mining systems that generate electricity for

Southern California.

It's a relatively untapped but very abundant source of energy.

The dream scenario would be to find a hotspot with large infrastructure near a

city that can house a large number of survivors.

And we're in luck. It exists.

The largest geothermal development in the world is the geysers, which lies

72 miles north of San Francisco in California.

You want to be able to tap the most available energy. And if it's near

areas such as San Francisco, then that's what you go for. We know we can use

that geothermal heat for all sorts of things once we tap it.

But we'd still have to find a way to keep that heat in and insulate ourselves

from the cold.

Certainly one option would be to build a geodesic dome.

We've built domes like this on a smaller scale in the Arctic. These geodesic

domes are built in the Arctic to keep people safe from the frigid temperatures

and extreme winds.

And if a geodesic dome has the right geometric configuration, then that's the

way to go.

But there needs to be some creative engineering to best secure that heat and

ward off the cold from outside.

Now think bigger. If you want to protect a large area, an effective way to do it

might be to create a large, massive geodesic dome.

One. large enough to fit over an entire city.

The buildings inside could be heated with geothermal energy, which would keep

everyone warm and safe.

The dome would have to be made from a cutting -edge material designed to

withstand extreme cold.

There are ideas for how you might put carbon nanotubes or other things

impregnated in some of these materials to make them stronger and more robust at

low temperatures.

We'll need these materials because up on the surface the world is going to be a

much different place than we've ever known

As

we

get further and further out the Sun begins to look like a dim ball of white

light in the sky

It's been 35 years since the Earth began moving away from the sun. Over 98 % of

the world's population has either starved or frozen to death.

Those people who are not in the geodesic dome, but have somehow managed to

protect themselves from the cold up to now, won't be safe for very long.

One thing that is almost certain to happen is that the assemblage of

and infrastructure will increasingly start to fail.

The reason for that is that we build largely with a very small number of

of material, generally concrete, glass, and steel.

We know the properties of these materials, but we design and use them

fairly narrow temperature range.

Steel, which seems really strong in our everyday application, when you get to be

100 degrees below zero, can actually be very fragile and very brittle.

Water will infiltrate the pores of concrete and buildings will fall down.

Bridges will fail.

Standing in temperatures this cold would be like soaking these structures in

liquid nitrogen.

Eventually, the slightest tap can make them shatter like glass.

and another one right here in Africa.

There could be others.

Coordinates will be on loop at the end of this message.

I'm headed under myself.

Stay alive.

Survivor Radio, signing off.

By now, Earth has cooled by over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and its

to an icy rock is well underway.

The planet barely resembles the place that survivors remember from their

days. But some have found a way to hold off the cold inside geodomes using heat

from inside the Earth.

While domed cities will save many lives, they won't be the answer for everyone.

There are only a handful of cities near active geothermal areas.

Not everyone will get a spot inside.

So what options are there for the rest of mankind?

We're not entirely out of luck.

With or without a dome, we still have our energy source at the Earth's core

places where that energy is close to the surface.

The surface is too dangerous to stay on for any real amount of time. So the most

important thing for Earth's remaining human beings is to get underground.

Now you go down into mines that go a mile or more underground and it gets

warmer.

You go near geothermal vents and such and it can be considerably warmer. So

there are some places to take cover.

The Earth is a great insulator. It is a great thermal insulator because it stays

at a fairly constant temperature under the ground.

So given enough energy, given the right sort of equipment, we can engineer the

spaces.

But tunneling holes deep underground is a very delicate business.

We're not just talking about a single mine. We're talking about building

underground cityscapes. As we dig deeper into Earth to access more energy, we're

going to have a whole new set of problems on our hands.

While our planet's surface continues its deep freeze, people might find safe

haven underground by building networks of tunnels.

Engineers will have to move very quickly to accommodate the growing numbers of

survivors who want to move in.

But the deeper we go, the greater the risk.

How far below grade are we? We've been getting 300 feet a day, but we've had to

cut production a little bit. We're real close to a methane pocket.

We've altered the alignment slightly so we can get around it. It's killing our

production.

Workers digging those tunnels would be under immense pressure to move quickly,

and this would increase the probability of accidents occurring.

We can't go very long like this. We've got to go, man.

And when you're deep below the surface, one false step could have serious

consequences.

We've got a problem in tunnel 112.

The deeper down we dig, the greater the risk. The supporting structures of your

shelter have to hold up all that weight above you.

And if they can't hold that weight, you get buried alive.

Some accidents will inevitably happen.

But if we're safe and smart about it, we could build underground cities around

the world.

I think all that is possible. It just takes a lot of imagination, willpower,

a total commitment.

and technology that I'm not sure exists today.

But there's a problem we'd have to solve first.

How can we grow food with no sunlight?

If you have good energy supplies and enough space underground, you might just

able to engineer conditions in which you can grow food under artificial

daylight.

As long as I have an ability to

generate the same spectrum of light as the sun, then I can grow the same crops.

Thankfully, in this scenario, we will have access to water.

As long as we can mine ice from the oceans and from the glaciers that form

land. The ice is so fresh that you can actually melt it and

drink it.

As seawater freezes, the salt actually gets rejected into the water beneath.

When they go up on an Arctic expedition, for example, they chop out a chunk of

old sea ice and melt it, and it's fresh enough to drink.

So underground cities could succeed. We have energy, shelter, food, water,

everything we need to survive.

And the small remaining population could thrive, which is good.

Because the surface is transforming into a bizarre landscape.

It's starting to look like the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

As the planet continues to move away from the sun, the surface begins to take

strangely alien features.

If the Earth's orbit were to expand beyond...

the orbit that is shared by Neptune today.

At this point, our atmosphere would begin to rain out and collapse away.

Oxygen and nitrogen make up 99 % of our atmosphere.

As the global temperature reaches below a negative 290 degrees Fahrenheit, these

gases will condense to liquid and fall to Earth in the last precipitation the

planet will ever see.

When the last oxygen and nitrogen flakes land, That will be it. Our atmosphere

will be gone.

Eventually becoming a giant solid mass of all of what was once our atmosphere.

At this point, we'd have to seal off our underground home to prevent our

breathable air from escaping.

But that's only a temporary solution because we'd soon use up all that

What we'll need to do is to find a long -term air supply.

If gases like nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide have frozen as solids on

the surface of our planet, we still need them as raw materials. We might be able

to go to the surface, harvest this frozen atmosphere, bring it back with

then thaw it out to make use of the gaseous compounds it contains.

The main problem here is that our atmosphere doesn't just provide us with

breathable air.

It's also our defense mechanism.

And without it, the Earth is left exposed.

When we have objects that fall down on Earth, like an asteroid

or a meteor, the atmosphere flows that debris, and it burns it up before most

it can reach the ground.

If we were to lose our atmosphere, then we lose our shield from all these

things, all these rocks that could come in from space.

With this protection mechanism gone, even small meteorites could do a huge

amount of damage.

off into the depths of space, Earth has become a very different place since the

cold settled in, and the loss of our atmosphere is devastating.

One of the things that would vanish with the atmosphere would be the protection

that the atmosphere fords us from space debris.

All the meteorites, the chunks of ice from comet's tails, would in fact impact

the Earth. The Earth would look very pockmarked.

perhaps like the moon, would further be a dangerous plague.

Without the atmosphere to protect them, the G -domes on the surface will become

vulnerable.

Eventually, those living above ground will feel the full wrath of the cold.

Ultimately, without an atmosphere to protect life on the surface of the

anything trying to survive there is at risk.

Despite our best efforts, we really can't expect to survive on the surface.

But remember, inside the Earth, we'll still have heat and energy for billions

years. And where there's energy, there can be life, including any human

civilization that's thriving underground.

What would the future hold for humans?

We've moved underground.

We're living off geothermal energy. And we're living off our incredible ability

to innovate.

As long as we can maintain an atmosphere underground and provide our survivors

with oxygen, mankind has a chance to live on. For people who have lived above

ground, they're not going to be seeing the sun anymore.

They're not going to feel the wind on their faces.

They're not going to be able to look up at the stars at night, not be able to

see the moon.

All these things that we take for granted make us feel comfortable as

beings.

But if they survive and they have children, and this goes on for

someone who is born in this underground environment, for them, that will be all

that they ever knew.

They won't miss what they didn't know in the first place.

One of the things that's most beautiful about the way life survives on Earth is

that it is incredibly adaptable.

It finds the tiniest bit of energy and thrives in some of the most inhospitable

environments.

So the odds are, since our planet is full of life, and we have a hard time

finding any place that doesn't have any life on it, that life would continue on.

I think to a lot of people this would sound like science fiction, but that

back to both the optimism and my thought that the ingenuity of humanity

being able to bring it back to where we want it to be. I think that without a

doubt in my mind, given enough time, we can do it.

It's possible that the pressure of trying to survive in this extreme and

environment, would actually help us come up with new ways to exist in the

universe.

Conceivably, even new ways to retake our planet.

Perhaps we could find a way to engineer our whole world into something not the

same as it was, but new.

A new world that we could then claim again as ours.