All language subtitles for one.strange.rock.s01e05.survival.480p.webrip.x264.rmteam

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 ofEarth 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.

8 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 endeavor

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 enate 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.

1 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 5 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

infilled 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 2 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 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 2 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 1 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 firefighter 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, 4 or 5 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 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