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Mérida, on the Yucatán Peninsula,

is ground zero of the biggest cataclysmthat ever occurred to our planet.

A whole asteroid hit right here.

This happened millions of yearsbefore human beings appeared,

and yet this fireball ritualfeels like a reenactment.

Certainly, the ancient Mayascould not have known.

We do not knowwhat in the future is coming at us,

eventually destroying us.

But it will look like this fireballover Siberia,

only much larger.

What simple dashboard cameras recorded

feels like science fiction.

Visitors from other worlds,

from the dark of the universe, have come.

And untold numbers are still on their way.

If something big is going to happen,

it will illuminate the skyeven in daylight.

But that may be millions of years away.

Meteorites have hit our planetall the time,

and the bigger oneshave changed entire landscapes.

But they also have lefta deep impact on cultures.

A good example is Islamic culture.

According to ancient tradition,

a stone was sent down by Godfrom heaven

as a guide for Adam and Evewhere to build an altar.

The meteorite came down

where later the holy city of Meccawas built.

We are here at the holiest siteof the Muslim world.

In its center, the Kaaba.

Embedded in its eastern corner,the Black Stone.

It was already veneratedin pre-Islamic times

for at least a millennium beforethe prophet Muhammad founded Islam.

The Black Stoneis framed entirely in silver,

and nobody is allowed to analyze it,

but it is almost certainly a meteorite.

Islam is a religionof 1.9 billion faithful.

For the pilgrims,

the Black Stoneis among the most revered of relics.

It attracts uncountable millionsof touches and kisses.

As non-Muslims, we are not allowedeven to set foot into the holy city,

and so we had to rely oncell phone footage of one of the faithful.

Back in the silent vastnessof the Australian desert.

Clive Oppenheimerof Cambridge University,

who started our voyage of this film,explains to me...

Scientists only became aware ofthis huge hole in the ground in 1947,

when it was spotted from the air.

And the crateris about a kilometer across.

And it was formedwhen a piece of iron asteroid,

the size of a battleshipand traveling at 15 kilometers per second,

plummeted into the ground.

And the crater wallsaround the floor here

are made of the ancient rocks

that were shattered by the impactand thrown about.

The meteoroid itselfwas almost completely vaporized,

and only a few fragments of it

have been foundscattered across the surrounding desert.

The pattern of ejecta

suggests that the bolidecame from that direction over there.

The temperatures are so phenomenal

that it generates a huge thermal plume

that punches up through the atmosphere,into the stratosphere,

and it's raining out molten debrisover a very wide area.

And, of course,there's colossal seismic energy

that is generated by the impact itself,

so huge earthquakes.

I mean,we're in the middle of the desert here,

but if you imagine this scenario happeningtoday in an urban environment,

this would be absolutely devastating.

To be hit by a meteoritehas barely ever happened?

There was a womanwho was struck by a meteorite

that came through her roof,through her ceiling,

and hit her while she was seatedin an armchair watching TV.

The Sylacauga meteorite.

She survived itbut had a pretty horrific bruise.

As bleak and uninviting asthe country around the crater looks,

there were always aboriginal peoplein this area.

Many of them make a living as artists.

Like those in the nearest communityof Billiluna.

They could not have witnessed the impactmore than 100,000 years ago,

but there were more recent events

that could have triggereda cultural memory.

In their paintings,the crater frequently appears as a motif,

but it goes deeper than that.

We met Katie Darkie,

one of the finest artistsof the community.

This is one ofyour very own paintings, isn't it?

Let's have a look at this one.

Now please tell uswhat we're looking at here.

It's a beautiful painting.

This is the sand hill...

and this is the grass.

And it hasn't got any karnti.No potatoes.

Long time ago, the old people said...

one man went huntingthrough the creeks, hunting for birds.

But he was walking throughthe tunnel underneath the river,

but we call it a creek.

And it came outon the other side of the crater

and then went walking backto where he came from

when he was hunting.

And in this story, the crater,how was it formed?

What's the origin?

Well, in the kartiya world,there's a meteorite fell in there.

-That's our story, the whitefellas' story.-The whitefella stories.

Some say it's a star fell in there.

But the ancestorsand the old people were telling us

it's the Rainbow Serpentwho fell in the crater.

So that's how we gotthree different stories about the crater.

But it connects in one.

We always take the kids.

Every weekend we come and camp out there.

And that's where we feel the presenceof our ancestors and our family,

that they are looking after uswhen we go down and visit the crater.

It's a very special place for us.

For our families as well.

Meteorites have fallen at random.

A significant onein the Alsace region of France.

But right here it changed human affairs.It influenced history.

In the distance, the town of Ensisheim.

In the 15th century,world history was shaped here,

because the Hapsburg Empireearned legitimacy

through a falling piece of rock.

A plaque marks a spot where it fell.

Clive brought Professor Simon Schaffer,

a colleague from Cambridge University.

He is a historian of scienceand one of the few remaining polymaths.

What happened on that day in--7th of November, 1492?

So, on this extraordinary day,

a fireball appearedin the southeast sky in that direction,

moving incredibly fastand whistling as it came.

And then it hit this fieldat about 11:30 in the morning.

There was, according to most reports,

just one person standing in the field.

A shepherd boy.

And he would have seenthe most extraordinary thing.

He would have seen a 300-pound rockhit the field

and gouge out a hole.

The 7th of November, 1492,

the moment when this stone fell,

was only a few daysafter another great landfall:

the arrival of Christopher Columbusand his crew

in their New World,in the Caribbean.

It's thanks to Columbus, ultimately,

that there is corn growing in this field.

This is the result of the eruptioninto European agriculture

of crops that up till thenhad only grown in the Americas.

Indeed, the fall of the stonewas so important

that there are some chroniclescovering the year 1492

that only mention the Ensisheim stone

and simply leave Columbus out.

It had fallen, perhaps by divine design,as they thought,

very near an extremely significant town,

Ensisheim in Alsace.

Ensisheim at that point

was the headquartersof the Austrian forces

in this part of the world.

And within two weeksof the arrival of the stone,

the Austrian military commander,

the commander in chief, Maximilian,also arrived in the town.

But, for heaven's sake,why did this stone fall here at this time?

The reason this stone fell in this fieldwas exactly for heaven's sake.

For those people,

wonderful supernatural signsin the heavens were messages.

This was, as it were,an e-mail sent from God

to the subjects of Maximilian

to tell them that his rule was legitimate,

that he would defeat his enemies,

and that they should obey his commands.

Where do you get your fascination from?

I think one of the things that I findcompletely obsessional about meteorites

is that they carry sense,that they carry meaning.

They arrive, so it was thought,with other kinds of falls.

With body partsand frogs and rains of blood.

With plagues and other catastrophes.

Something like a meteoriteis an organism,

an animal, almost, that speaks to us.

And I think that'sa very powerful and eloquent idea.

The idea that... meteorites have meaning,

and the task of humanityis to interpret what that meaning is.

Simon Schaffer could have continued,

without getting boring,nonstop for the next eight hours.

But we wanted to see the remainsof the real stone in the local museum.

It feels unreal, inviting fantasies.

The mayor of town wanted to greet us,

here flanked by friends of the meteorite.

This emblem is takenfrom a medieval woodcut.

You find it everywhere.

But today it means thinking backand thinking ahead in centuries.

Did these membersof the brotherhood of the stone

have a far-off future in mind?

What are they thinking?

What far-reaching plans do they have?

What if the human race became extinct?

What would we leavefor future astronauts of an alien galaxy

to demonstrate that we would not leavea fallen comrade behind?

Right next to the stone,we discovered this installation.

"Hi, my name is Jean,"

says the simulacrum,hoping the aliens speak French.

"I am a miner.

And this is how beautifulour world looked."

"When danger for our planetbecame visible in the night sky,

we took precautions.

We dug tunnelsand built shelters underground.

We think we have a chanceto survive a whole decade.

If a big firestorm comes,

I'm confidentthe human race can survive it.

But I am not a prophet. I'm just a miner."

"I wish you a good end to your visit."

Next destination, the big sports arenain Oslo, Norway.

It is so spaciousthat it houses an entire football field.

But we were interested in its roof,

and we were interested in this man,Jon Larsen,

Norway's most famous jazz musician.

But it is as a citizen scientist

that he has every reasonto be on this big roof.

How did this all start?How did you find this place?

I searched on... Google Earth

and found the largest roofthat I could see.

And this sports arena was probablythe largest in Oslo at that time.

And then I realized the...

the small object will roll down the sideand accumulate along here

and end up close to the drain.

And, as we can see,there is a lot of dirt here,

but withinwe will find the cosmic dust particles.

How did you get started?

You've had a four-decades-long careeras a successful musician.

Why have you ended up on rooftops?Was it to escape your fans?

No. I've always collected rocksand been interested in geology.

And that has been my hobby all my life.

So ten years ago, when suddenly onthe breakfast table one morning, outdoors,

I discovered a shining black doton my table

which hadn't been theretwo seconds earlier.

And I picked it up with my finger,

and because of my backgroundas an amateur mineralogist,

I could see,"Wow, this is actually a small rock."

And we were like,

"Where did it come from?Is it from space perhaps? I don't know."

But then I started to googleand found out

that there are some strangesmall cosmic dust particles

called micrometeorites.

And then it all began.

And you think there are some here.

What's the equipment that you needto collect this goop?

My main weapon is this magnet.

And I use the magnet mainly because the...

micrometeorites are magnetic.

First I put the magnet itself into

just protecting small ziplockplastic bag, like this.

And then the hook is handy, literally...

It is astounding that Jon Larsen,with such primitive equipment,

has foundeda completely new branch of science.

And now this will be the sampling area.

I will move it down on the ground,like this.

Heavy particles will roll downand remain at the heaviest part.

This might be some microscopicmagnetic particles.

I'll look at it laterunder the microscope.

What's the flux of these cosmic particlesto the Earth per day?

Do we know the figure?

Yeah, approximately 100 metric tons.

Imagine two large trucks of sandpouring cosmic dust over Earth every day.

But that equals one small particle

per year per square meter.

These particles are messengers,aren't they?

This seemed to bea very particular message for you.

Yeah, to me it is.

And they are the oldest matter there is.

Nothing has traveled further.

When I pick out one micrometeoriteand feel it on my finger,

no human beinghas ever touched anything older.

I mean, it's really looking the eternityin the eye.

This is the ashes of another generation,

previous generation of dying stars.

So it has a history that goesall the way back to the big bang.

This is Jan Braly Kihle,

a geologist who will analyze Jon's samplesunder the microscope.

We loved his outfit as Wyatt Earp.

He was born in Texas.

But there's more to him.

He's a four-time cancer survivor,

two times, according to him,stark naked death sentences.

Wanting to contribute to cancer research,

he's now involved in pioneering workwith new cancer treatments.

This is the underworld.

This is where we try to makethe photographical documentation.

-And this is Jan Kihle, my friend.-Hi.

We have worked together for years

to make high-resolution color photographsof the micrometeorites

at such a magnificationthat it's made nowhere else in the world.

How much magnification do you need?

You can see these particles are so small

it's practically not possible to see them.

We need 2,000, or better,3,000 times magnification.

And then the original photowill be one meter in diameter.

That's what we need.

You know, when everyone saysthis was impossible,

now we have madea completely new kind of science.

And you recall the kind of feedbackwe all got from colleagues.

-They were laughing hilarious...-Yes. Oh, yes.

...when they asked us,"What you gonna do? What?

Everybody knowsthat that's impossible.

You know, the signal-to-noise ratio,it's beyond one to one billion.

Make my day."

Did it hurt you, that time?

Of course not.

This is how science works.

It has nothing to do with feelings.It's just about curiosity.

So this is from earlier today.

When we see that specialtype of texture, then we know,

"Okay, this is a micrometeoriteand not an industrial particle."

And it's obviouslyquite blurred at the moment.

Can we-- Can we takea photograph of it?

-No, we-- No.-No.

If we just--

Our heartbeats, when we gettoo enthusiastic, will make disturbances.

So it's not possible.

We'll have to leave the roomwhen we actually take the photos.

Where have these particles come fromin the first place?

That's a good question,because we don't know the answer.

They come, obviously, from space.

So some of themare from the asteroid belt.

Others may come from cometary matter.

But, again, it might be particlesfrom other galaxies, other solar systems.

We don't know the parent bodyof each individual grain.

It's just amazing.

Each Tuesday nightwhen Jon brings in new material

we're just flabbergasted.

It's like being a kid again.

These particles are small and solitaryalso in space.

Some of them have never reachedthe larger scale

of, let's say, building--

starting to build small planetsin the asteroid belt.

It's actually cosmic dust.Dust is the currency of the cosmos.

Here on the top, you have,for instance, this is iron-nickel alloy.

And here you have very nicebeginning of crystallization.

Started out with just glass.

And now it'll start to crystallizeolivine crystals.

And this outside isa very, very thin rim of iron sulfides.

This looks like almost,sort of, an icy exoplanet.

Looks like packs. Yeah, yeah.

With the icebergs breaking up.

This one, I think,is particularly interesting.

It has a very high temperatureat atmospheric entry.

In the front, which is up,

that is the direction of movementin the Earth's atmosphere.

Then when it starts to decelerate,the heavy metal core is pushed forward

by the... inertia

and ends up like a metal moundin the front of the particle.

Again, the typical,with the iron-nickel in front.

So, I mean, though we have collected now2,500 different specimens,

none are identical.

So when you start to--

to get to know the micrometeoritesand the cosmic dust particles,

then you will recognize them as verydifferent from the terrestrial geology.

They have been through a processwith speed, in hypervelocity,

50 times the speed of a rifle bullet

and temperatures from hell.

And then they end uplike treasures from space.

The beauty and strangenessthat we just saw can become even stranger.

This is what the pattern looks like.

If you hold it down, I'll go up frontto the board and...

The pattern that Clive is projecting here

is proof of somethingthat was believed to be unthinkable.

It has to do with matterof crystalline structure

that seemed to be utterly impossible.

So-called quasicrystals.

This is the man who refusedto accept the impossibility.

He's a world-renowned cosmologist,Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.

You ended up finding evidenceof a quasicrystal, a natural quasicrystal,

from the universe found in a meteorite.

But, I mean, what is a quasicrystal?

So, a quasicrystal is a form of matterthat we thought was impossible.

For hundreds of years, we were convincedthat we had proven that it was impossible.

But, as we now know today,not only is it possible,

but it was made in the universe long ago,

long before we ever imagined.

But let's begin with something simple.

Crystals follow a pattern of order,

like the tiling of your bathroom floor.

-Okay.-Just simple squares.

Square tiles fit seamlessly.

But with pentagons, a fivefold symmetry,

you are quickly in trouble.

Let's come out this way a little bit.

And...

I can already seewhere the problem's gonna come from.

Yeah, you see what's happening?

We've opened up a gap.So now we have some choices to make.

We're not gonna be able to fill that in.

I could either put it there or there,

-but there's never gonna be a way to...-Yeah.

Atoms hate having gaps,

so the moment you produce gapswith real atoms,

they're going to move aroundand get rid of them.

Fivefold symmetry was famouslyforbidden for matter.

But quasicrystals are evenmore complex and mysterious than this.

Let's just take a lookat a quasicrystal pattern first

to get a visual impressionof what they're like.

So, a good example is this tilingthat you see on the table.

If you study it, you'll see it's madeof only two pieces, those two shapes.

They're chickens.

This looks like a puzzle for children,

but there is ingenious mathematicsbehind it.

This pattern was discoveredby Sir Roger Penrose in the 1970s.

A mathematician and sometimesa cosmologist as well.

It is astonishingthat a quasicrystal pattern

can be found in a shrinein Isfahan, in Iran.

Without any knowledge ofthe underlying mathematical principles,

artisans more than 500 years ago

solved the impossible geometryof fivefold symmetry.

There we go.

Now, I should warn you...

The warning was justified.

Yes, indeed, it gets so complicated now

that we are not going to torture youwith details.

Just a sample.

So, instead of just one icosahedron,we have an icosahedron of icosahedra.

And we said, "Oh, maybe that's a wayof building something ever outwards

that maintains this structure."

But we ran into trouble.

But this model here solved the problem.

It represents a true quasicrystal.

...and you could only just buildthis plane...

Now Steinhardtwanted to find one in nature.

You ended up doing fieldwork in Kamchatka.

That must've been inspiredthrough the theoretical--

Yeah. Inspired by this model.

Because what this model says:

"Well, actually, if the atoms have forcesthat are like these interlocks,

they have no choicebut to form this structure."

It immediately got me to thinking,

"Is it possible that nature has madea quasicrystal before humans did?"

And so that began a decades-long searchfor a natural quasicrystal.

We eventually found a mineralogistin Florence named Luca Bindi

who had in his museuma tiny little sample of--

well, a rock, a complex rock,

which had inside ita little grain of quasicrystal.

By studying that particular sample,

we had some hints that what we hadin hand was a piece of a meteorite.

But to prove the case, we had to find outwhere that rock really came from

and see if we could gather moreof the sample to prove the case.

So Paul Steinhardt and Luca Bindi

set out on an expeditionto easternmost Russia,

close to the Bering Strait.

The red marker shows the siteof the meteorite fragments.

They were found along a creeknamed Listvenitovyi,

of which nobody has ever heard.

The expedition included membersof the original Russian geological team

that had found the first sampledecades ago.

They had to negotiate uncharted terrain,

totally novel for Paul Steinhardt,

whose outdoor experience did not extendbeyond the lawns of Princeton University.

Myriads of mosquitoes tormented him.

Here we see him with a mosquito netover his face.

His sleep was fitful.

Bears not only appeared in his nightmares,they were really out there.

Their hard work to find fragmentsof the meteorite paid off.

First inspection of their findingslooked promising.

Now Bindi and Steinhardthad reason to celebrate,

although they could not yet knowif quasicrystals were present.

The X-ray diffraction patternof the newly found samples

revealed the forbidden fivefold symmetry,

proof there were quasicrystalswithin the meteorite.

Could you describeyour emotion when you saw this?

I think everything-- time seemedto stop for me at that moment.

As...

Just seeing this imagejust told me immediately

that everything we had beentrying to achieve for decades

had now been achieved.

Plus, we had verifiedthat this quasicrystal

not only was formed in nature,but had been formed in space.

Leaving the arcane mysteriesof matter behind,

we turn toward some more average rocksthat had come down upon us.

...so we have some sticky mats here.

Arizona State Universityhouses a large collection.

The dirt that we have from outsidegoing into the clean vault.

But wild stories were waiting for us.

So when we go in,

make sure you just step on thereto get the dirt off your feet.

All right.

Laurence Garvie,its curator, guided us.

We have a positive pressure in here,just to keep sort of clean air coming in.

-Got the dirt off? Good.-Yep.

And we're also on camera all the time.Smile to the camera. Wave to the camera.

But really what's important here

is that, when we're ina meteorite facility like this,

is to keep the meteoritesas clean as possible.

You know, usually we think oftrying to keep ourselves clean.

Here, we're trying to keep the greasefrom our fingers off the samples.

So can you please wear some gloves,and I'll put some gloves on as well.

And we're doing this'cause I wanna show you

one of the most spectacular meteorites,that only fell a few weeks ago,

and actually fell on Costa Rica.

And it's a meteoritethat's full of organic compounds.

And, you know, that's important.

'Cause that tells us aboutour early solar system

and possibly the formation of lifein our solar system as well.

Now, I actually have the samples here,in these special cabinets.

These are nitrogen cabinets.

Right? So we have nitrogen-- dry nitrogen.

Here's what's important: dry nitrogenbeing fed into the cabinets.

So when I open it you can actually hearthe nitrogen being fed into the cabinets.

And these meteorites are now preserved.

We don't have water going onto them.We don't have oxygen going onto them.

So it's the best preservationthat we currently have.

And that's what the hissing is?

That's what the hissing is.

So, to give an example, here is...

one of the most amazing meteorites.

There, see what it's called?

"The Doghouse."

So let's just...

So...

have to add, do not drop this.

-I'll try not to. Okay.-Please don't drop it.

So, this stone actually fellonly a few weeks ago in Costa Rica.

And this one actually fellthrough a doghouse

with the dogthat was still sleeping in it.

-The dog was unharmed, I hope.-It missed the dog by millimeters

and embedded itself in the groundright next to the dog.

So what makes this one special as well,

it's actually got some dog hairstill stuck to it.

No way.

And what makes this one so amazing

is the fact that, if you smell it...

you can actually smellthe organic compounds that are in here.

These are 4.5 billion-year-old compounds

that were formedon an early planet--

that planet no longer exists--

and got trapped in this stone

and basically just residedin the asteroid belt for 4 billion years

before, for some reason,it left the asteroid belt

and landed in Costa Rica

and is now in our meteorite vault here.

What is that smell?It's a sort of...

We don't actually know,but we think the thing--

it's similar to, like, mothballs.Something similar.

Something similar to that compound.

Like a solvent or something?

Yeah, a little bit. A little bit.

I'm actually gonna put this one back,unless you wanna hold it again.

-No, I---By the way,

the red is from the roof of the doghouse.

And the whiteis from the floor of the doghouse.

And did the dog instantly realize

that it had receiveda visitor from the heavens?

Well, it didn't, but funny enough,

people have used dogs to lookfor meteorites because of the smell.

They can be trained to find that smell.

Let's put this back now.

This is the Toluca ironfrom the Jiquipilco region.

Here, try this one.

Don't drop it on your toe. It'll break.

Oh, my goodness.

So, I mean, that must weigh, what,

I don't know, 30 kilos, 40 kilos,just that one stone.

That's just pure iron ore?

That's just pure iron.But nickel-rich iron.

-Here, let's not drop it. Ready. Ready.-I'll give you that.

You know, one of the most amazingimpact phenomena never seen on TV

is this material, tektites.

Now, here we have--There was an impact on the Earth

that basically meltedlarge amounts of the Earth's surface.

In this case, probably several thousandsquare kilometers of ground.

It was almost instantaneously melted.

And then the shock from that impact

then sprayed this materialover about a third of the Earth.

When did this happen?

We think about--We've dated it about 750,000 years ago.

So, you know, sounds like a long time ago,

but from a geological time period,it's actually just yesterday.

-It's a very recent phenomenon.-It's glass?

This is just-- So, what this stuff here--If you listen...

This is just glass,but this is not extraterrestrial glass.

This is the Earth,of which you had all this material melted,

just turned into a melt,and then sprayed over the Earth.

And so you find this materialin Southeast Asia, Philippines,

through Indonesia,all the way down through Australia

and then all the way down into Antarctica.

And so this was a humongous event.

Look at the shapes though.You know what these shapes are telling us?

This is telling us that this stuff wassprayed and then solidified in the air.

If we'd been therewhen this thing came down,

that would've been the end of us?

I mean, everything.

Imagine-- And I meanseveral thousand square kilometers--

everything underneath thatwas almost instantly turned to glass.

So, yes. You'd be sitting therehaving your cup of tea,

you'd be turned to glass. Everything.

Each one of these stonesfrom darker worlds out there

has its own story.

Throughout history, meteoriteshave captivated human imagination.

A tool as simpleas the light from a cell phone

extols the mysterious beautyof these voyagers from afar.

What we have here is...

At the same Center for Meteorite Studiesin Tempe, Arizona,

we met Dr. Meenakshi Wadhwa,

one of the foremost scientistsof meteorites.

...40,000 different meteorites.

-Including a piece by Barbara Hepworth.-Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah, and these are an incredible resourcefor all of the work that we do here.

What are we looking at here?

So that round object that you're seeing,

that is a tiny little--

you can imagine itas the tiny little droplet

that was present in the earliest historyof the solar system,

something like 4.5 billion years ago.

Is this before the planets have accreted?

Yes. So this iswhen there was just gas and dust.

Nothing else. There were no planets,there was no Earth. Nothing.

And these are--

These have been described asdroplets of fiery rain

that were... just condensingout of that nebula,

that cloud of gas and dust.

Probably because ofsome sort of shock processes

that were happening in the earliesthistory of our solar system.

And we don't really know, actually,where those shocks were coming from,

but we think those are the kindsof processes that were happening

in, you know, other solar systemsthat are forming today.

And what elements do we find in there?

Yeah, so what you're seeing, you know,

this kind of beautiful stained glasspattern that you're seeing?

That's a mineral called olivine.

And this kind of--When I rotate it in this--

As you have this sort of transmitted lightgoing through these minerals,

you are polarize--the light is polarized,

and so the mineral itself

is sort of extinguishing the lightin certain directions.

And so you're kind of seeingthis brightening and then darkening.

It's like a beautifulstained glass window, really.

-I think it's kinda-- Yeah.-It's gorgeous.

Here's a slice,

a thin slice of the very Mars samplethat I first looked at

at the very start of my careerstudying meteorites.

And I was just fascinated,because, you know,

it looked so familiar, but it camefrom a completely different world.

We know that this rock came from Marsbecause it has gases trapped in it

that have the exact same compositionas the Martian atmosphere.

And so when you take a pieceof this rock and you heat it up,

you release these gases, and you canmeasure the composition of that gas,

and it's the exact composition

as what we measuredusing the spacecraft on Mars.

-Incredible.-Yeah, it's incredible.

Was Carl Sagan right,that we're made of that stardust?

We are all stardust, absolutely.

I mean, every, you know,every element in our body

was synthesized in other starsbefore it got here.

So, yeah. We're all stardust.

-Eventually.-A wonderful thought.

Yeah.

This was the only time throughoutthe entire shooting of this film

where I could not resist.

I had to intervene from behind the camera.

I think I'm not stardust. I'm Bavarian.

Yeah, that's made ofspecial stuff, that is.

Yeah. That's right.

Our voyage took us

to wherever large fireballshad plunged down to Earth.

We wanted to knowif life had come from outer space.

This is Ramgarh Crater in Rajasthan,in Northern India, four kilometers across.

From spaceit immediately catches the eye,

but down on the groundyou barely notice you are inside a crater.

However, Hindu temples were built heresince the 10th century.

We were curiousif organic matter in meteorites

could have provided the ingredientsof life on our planet.

We were seeking the expertiseof Professor Nita Sahai,

who studies the transitionfrom chemistry to biology.

And we're in this--in this huge crater here,

formed by a meteorite impact.

And we don't knowwhether it was a carbonaceous one,

but we know thatthese carbonaceous meteorites

have all kindsof organic molecules in them.

What are the key ones that might representbuilding blocks of life?

Actually, all of the building blocksof life have been found in meteorites.

Amino acids that make up proteins,

lipid molecules that make upcell membranes

and, amazingly, even ribose,which is a sugar.

I just find it astonishing, you know,

that you can find sugars and thingsthat make proteins in a meteorite.

Right.

Are they made geologically,like minerals, or...

They're not like minerals, in the sensethat they're organic molecules

and minerals are inorganic,

but they have been formed presumably

by the interactions of organic moleculeswith mineral surfaces.

For example, on interstellar grains,

as well as on the surfacesof the meteorites themselves.

And, I mean, there's still a big step

from having these ingredientsto sparking life.

-Right.-What do we need?

I guess we need some kind of crucibleto put this stuff in

and a heat source?

Yeah. So, you need to getthese simple building blocks

polymerized into longer chains,

because the longer chains have the abilityto fold and be functional.

What do you think of the ideaof panspermia,

that life is dispersedaround the universe?

I mean, is it conceivablethat living organisms

could survive the intense temperaturesand radiation of outer space?

DNA has actually been foundto be quite robust.

And it's possible to survive in space.

And even an entire organism might survivein a spore-like mode.

'Cause people have actuallydug deep into the Earth

and even a couple of kilometers down

they find bacteria that have been livingthere presumably for millions of years.

And they survive in this state of,kind of, suspended animation.

Do you have any idea why the priestsbuilt their temples here?

I mean, and this one'sdedicated to Shiva, you know?

I mean, it seems too good to be true,on the floor of a meteorite-impact crater.

It's kind of interesting that this templeis dedicated to Shiva and Parvati.

And it's a tantric temple,which represents creation.

And Shiva is also the god of destruction.

So, in Hindu mythology,there is this idea

of cycles of creationand destruction of the universe.

And, appropriately,it's in a meteor-impact crater site,

where the impact can wipe out life,

but then also deliverthese organic molecules

that could have seeded lifein the first place.

This was confirmed in a similar wayby a resident sadhu.

If humanity and all life becomes extinctby war or a meteorite,

life will regenerate at this place,at this crater lake.

We had to go wherethe most colossal fireball came down.

It was at a placewith an unpronounceable name,

at the coastof the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

This is the very place where our planetsuffered an unimaginable apocalypse.

What came down from space right here

had the force of hundreds of millions--possibly thousands of millions--

of atomic bombs Hiroshima's size.

Nothing out here is reminiscent of it.

Only leaden boredomweighs upon everything.

Chicxulub is a beach resortso godforsaken you want to cry.

The dogs here,like all dogs on this planet,

are just too dim-witted to understand

that three-quarters of all specieswere extinguished

by the event that took place right here.

The dinosaurs have only survivedin a local museum.

Their eyes were made by humans.They recognize nothing.

Only their footprints are authentic,

but they showthey were ambling along, not fleeing.

They were obliviousto the sudden death of everything.

This godforsaken spot is at the center

of one of the greatest geologicalcataclysms in Earth history.

It irreversibly changed the course of lifeon the planet.

Some 66 million years ago,

an asteroid, perhaps 10 kilometers across,

came hurtling to the Earthat speeds of 20 kilometers a second.

The force of the impactwas so phenomenal

that it excavated a hole30 kilometers deep.

The crater that formed...

stretches out 100 kilometers out to seaand 100 kilometers inland,

and the temperaturesgenerated in the crust from the impact

melted and vaporized the crustand the bolide itself.

There were earthquakes of magnitude 11.

That's a hundred times greaterthan any historical earthquake.

Mega-tsunami, 100-meter-high waves,

ravaged the shorelines of distant oceans,

and a vast pall of dustand molten droplets and gases

soared into the atmosphere,

some of the material even reachingescape velocity and exiting into space.

Those molten droplets rained outover an area of 3,000 kilometers,

igniting firestorms on the land.

I love how movies depict it.

800 kilometers from the impact site,

the light is so intense

it causes the flesh of the Alamosaurusto appear transparent...

and burns images of their shadowsonto the ground.

The scorching light sears their eyeballs.

They now can't seewhat's headed their way.

But they can feel it.

Now, mammals, they made it through,

and they took advantageof the new ecological opportunities.

We probably wouldn't be here ourselves,Homo sapiens as a species,

were it not for this colossal impact.

Nobody knew there is an impact crateruntil the 1970s.

Gravity anomalies and borehole datarevealed its structure and immense size.

The only surface manifestation

is an enigmatic ring of water holescalled cenotes.

They are a geological echo of the impact.

Since there are no rivers and lakesin the Yucatán Peninsula,

these water holes attractedthe ancient Mayas.

Without the presence of cenotes,

this cultural center of Chichén Itzáwould never have been built.

They developed a high culturewith a writing system,

astronomy and monumental architectureof pyramids and temples.

They even built an observatorybefore there were telescopes.

They tracked the positionof celestial bodies.

Their calendar was much more precisethan anything at this historical time.

The Mayas had a deep fascinationof death and the afterlife.

In their belief, there werenine underworlds and 13 heavens.

Wanting to see some of the underworld,

we descended to the bottomof a nearby cenote.

Fátima Tec Pool,a cave expert and archaeologist,

took us to one of the abodesof the rain god.

This cenote was virtually unknownuntil very recently.

Tell me, Fátima, what is the relationshipbetween the cenote,

the cave here, and the ritualand belief of the Maya?

This place is interestingbecause you can see

how the concepts of waterand caves combine.

And how the Mayans usedthese spaces for rituals.

Inside, you can see walls which suggestthe Mayans used to make pilgrimages here

to pass through these sacred walls.

-Can we go in?-Of course, let's go.

As the caves are seen asentrances to the underworld,

we can see here how they made use ofthe natural form of the cave,

to make ritual depositsof human remains,

possibly an ancestor of a Mayan family.

-What era are they from?-Possibly the Preclassic.

We can also see this portal.

This takes us further into the underworld.

There's something else interesting...

A human finger bone.

Deposited here in part of the wall.

Look closely and you can see ashes,possibly a kind of mortuary treatment,

before being placed in the wall.

Is it safe for human beingsto enter the underworld,

the abode of the gods?

Yes, of course!

We timed our visitwith the Mexican Day of the Dead.

For the Mayans, death was an obsession.

There are endless friezeswith nothing but skulls.

Mérida, the central cemetery.

All this within the perimeterof the Chicxulub crater.

The dead leave their gravesand join the living.

We are here in the serene park

of the pope's summer residenceof Castel Gandolfo.

However,serious science is being done here.

There's an astronomical observatoryfamous for its photographic celestial map.

Right next to the residence, Lake Albano,a formidable volcanic crater.

The director of the observatoryis a Jesuit, Brother Guy Consolmagno.

He's one of the foremost scholarsin meteoritics.

Brother Guy, at the heartof the Vatican Observatory

is this wonderful meteorite collection.

Quite a historical collection.

I certainly think so.

This is the stuff I've been working onfor, now, nearly 30 years.

Is this why you came here initially?

I didn't choose to come here.

I did this under a vow of obedience.

I had been a scientistand then entered the Jesuits

and thought I was gonna be teachingat a school like maybe Georgetown.

But under obediencethey ordered me to come to Rome

and eat that terrible foodand look at this miserable scenery.

And, oh, yes, there's a collectionof a thousand meteorites.

They didn't knowthat the meteorites were here.

They didn't know that my expertisewas meteorites.

It was one of those divine coincidences.

It's phenomenal that we've got meteorites,

that we've got pieces of outer spacethat have visited us here on Earth,

and that we can tellthat they're not from the Earth,

that they're made, chemically,of completely different materials,

that they were formed4.5 billion years ago.

That we have the abilityto understand these things

is itself a miracle.

And you would find it perfectly reasonablethat life is elsewhere in the universe,

life on Earthmay have originated elsewhere?

It's possible. I don't know.I don't have the data.

You know, people will sometimes ask me,

do I believe that there's life elsewherein the universe?

And I think that's the right wayto ask it.

It's a matter of belief.I don't have the data.

But if you were to come to me,as a scientist,

saying you wanted resourcesto look for life,

and you had a great project,I'd say, "Go for it."

On the other hand, if you were sayingyou wanted to study

little green mencoming out of a flying saucer,

then I'm not so sureI'd go along with that.

But if the green men arrived on Earth,would you consider baptizing them?

Only if they ask.

Brother Guy invited usto see the historical telescope.

...that were commissionedto photograph the entire sky

and make a photographic atlas.

Why, throughout so much of historyand around the world,

have people thought of heavenas up there?

I don't know, but it's certainly true.

I mean, there are so many languages

where the word for "sky" and the wordfor "heaven" are the same word.

All I can think of--

and maybe, you know, a professionalwould come up with a better answer--

all I can think of is looking at the stars

give you that sense of out-of-yourselfthat you need

to be able to be readyto encounter a god.

When you see a shooting star today,

is it an interesting scientific factfor you, or do you gasp in wonder?

Yes. It is both.

And frankly, I think it's because I knowthe science that I'm even more in awe.

It's one thing to say,"That's a pretty bit of light."

It's another thing to say,

"I know what elementsare creating that light.

I know why it's that color.

I know what I can learn from this.

I hope some camera captured it,so that I can measure

not only, 'Boy, was that pretty,'

but also, 'This is telling me somethingabout dust from a comet.'

A cloud of dust left behind a cometthat the Earth is barreling into,

and, like snowflakeshitting your windscreen,

it's shots of lighthitting our atmosphere."

All of that adds to the joy.It doesn't take away from it.

This brings to mind the dynamicof different orders of knowledge,

the rational and the poetic,the imaginative and the intellectual.

And it seems to me that you marshalthe same thought processes

to cope with mattersthat are so vast, the cosmos,

and yet mattersthat are so intimate, the soul.

You can't do the one without the other.

You can't do science--

You don't want to do science

if you don't have that sense of awe,that sense of wonder.

You can't believe in a creator god

without experiencing creation.

Otherwise what's the point of believing?

And I know that you described in the '70s,as a graduate student,

seeing Comet West.

And you said, "Was it impressive?No, it was frightening."

It shook you to the core, you said.Why?

In the sky was a comet

that looked like every photographof a comet you'd ever seen.

The kind of thing that you thoughtonly existed in photographs.

And it didn't belong there.

And it was big. And it was scary.

And it wasn't there yesterdayand, "What's going on?"

And then you understood why ancient peoplewould look at comets

as a portent of somethingreally, really scary and different.

How might the church reactif the NASA telescopes detect

a really threatening near-Earth objecthurtling towards us?

I'll be honest. We'll pray.What else can you do?

I want to show an excerpt of a movie

where physical and existential fear

are just the shudder audiences go for.

This is beautifully done.

Apart from Brother Guy's prayers,

there are practical measuresalready in place.

We are here at Pan-STARRS,

the Panoramic Survey Telescopeand Rapid Response System,

located at the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Okay, brake is released.

Everybody stand clear.I'm gonna bring it down.

Here, one of the telescopesduring maintenance.

We'll go for that, I guess.

-Yeah. I'll try.-Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Joanna Bulger is entrusted,in a way,

with the safekeeping of humanity.

And so is her colleague, Dr. Mark Willman.

Just looking at their faces gave usa good amount of confidence.

They allowed usto intrude on their night watch.

-Good evening.-Clive, hey.

-I found you. The night watch.-How's it going?

-Come on. Have a seat.-Have a seat.

Helping to protect us from space rocksthat might have hostile intent.

We were just observing,but we had to close up

because the humidity shot up.

So we're up to 90% now,

and we have to close at 85to protect the mirror.

We don't want moisture on the mirror.

And how do you communicatewith the controllers up at the telescope?

Well... we are the controllers.

There's nobody at the summit.It's all remote observing now.

That's old school,where you had to drive up at the summit.

It's 10,000 feet,

so it's much more comfortabledown here at 2,000 feet.

And so what have we got?

I mean, this screen,I guess, is the night sky.

Yep, this is a map of the sky.

You can see there's the zenith.

That's just straight overhead.And here's the telescope.

And this was the targetwe were gonna observe.

We take about 60 images,

and we get four imagesof the same spot in the sky.

And so we have a tiny movie,a four-image movie then.

And then we can pick outmoving targets that way.

And you've gotthe largest cameras on Earth.

-Is that right?-We do.

I've got a 12-megapixel camera.

-Twelve megapixels.-What's your camera?

Ours is over a billion pixels,

so it's-- it's much larger

than a-- a consumer camera like that.

What is going on with this image here?

-Is this the pixel array itself?-Yeah, exactly.

So this is actually the raw imagethat we take.

So this is a 45-second exposure.

And you can see the sizeof the camera itself.

So it-- We're--We get a three-degree field of view,

which is roughly seven square degreeson the sky.

And the camera itselfis stitched together

of an eight-by-eight arrayof addressable CCDs.

So if you actually--We can click on one of these images.

-This one over here.-What's that?

-Is that a meteor there?-Here?

No. These are two satellitesthat we've caught in our field of view.

It is a satisfying job, because...

well, we don't wanna go the wayof the dinosaurs, and...

so it's worthwhile looking outfor these things.

Although the odds are slim that a big oneis gonna hit us anytime soon.

But sooner or laterthere will be a big one,

so we're watching for it.

I do feel I can sleepmore soundly at night

knowing that there is always someone herein the night shift,

you know, looking for inbound bolides.That's wonderful.

365 days a year, yeah. Every night.

Thank you. Thank you very muchfor protecting us.

-You're welcome. It's our privilege.-Yeah.

The photos of the night skyare analyzed by Dr. Rob Weryk,

a planetary defense researcherfrom Canada.

I can't believe this is the first timeyou've actually been to the telescopes.

Yeah, well, normally I focus on the dataanalysis, reviewing the candidates.

So it's nice to have a chanceto come see the telescope.

Is it like seeing a sort of, you know,brother that you've never met before?

That's true. That's true. Yeah.

They actually ended up opening at the endof the night for an hour and a half.

We actually were ableto review the data this morning.

And so I foundsix new candidate objects.

"We" is "you."You found them.

Yes. I mean, it's reallya team effort overall,

but I'm the one that reviews it, so...

What's the most exciting objectthat you've found?

So, the most exciting object we foundbecame known as 'Oumuamua.

It's actually the firstinterstellar comet.

It's a comet that camefrom outside our solar system.

It's the first time we ever sawan object like this. Yeah.

'Oumuamua?

'Oumuamua.So, it's actually a Hawaiian word.

It means "first messenger from afar." Yes.

Okay.

So it's actually a two-step process.

The computer software isn't perfect,and it still requires manual review,

and that's where I come in.

So my main responsibility is to reviewall the nightly detections.

And things that are real,

they would show up as eithera series of dots or trailed objects.

Are you the first person who's seen this?

Yes. So while the observerscollect the data,

I'm actually the first personon the planet to review and see this,

and my submitting it would sound the alarm

if there was an objectthat was a hazard to the Earth.

The alarmwould instantly call the attention

of NASA's Planetary DefenseCoordination Office.

Only a few people know that it exists.

Responsible here is Dr. Kelly Fast,an astronomer.

I've heard you describe asteroids

as the vermin of the solar system.

Why do you call them that?

Well, certainly astronomers who arelooking at things besides asteroids...

they might be looking at their target,

and asteroids are going to photobombwhatever they're looking at.

So I guess from a point of view,if you're looking at something else,

then they are the verminof the solar system.

From our point of view at NASA,

they're fantastic for science,for spacecraft targets.

But we also want to keep an eye on them,

because it's never good when two thingsoccupy the same space at the same time.

So we want to know if any of themare going to intersect Earth's orbit

at a time when Earth is going to be there.

There's dust hitting Earth's atmosphereall the time.

We see shooting stars,

that's just dust burning upin the atmosphere.

But it's when things are larger,

when you get up tothe size of asteroids--

Earth's atmosphere is fantasticfor burning things up,

but eventually things get too bigfor that to happen.

Chelyabinsk, 20 meters.There was devastation.

Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.

That was probably a 40-meter asteroid.

Eighty million treeswere flattened by the blast.

But not a single grain of the asteroidhas ever been discovered.

And defense? What can we doif there's a big sucker coming in at us?

What can we do about it?

Well, yeah, the best defenseis preparation.

And so finding them first--

You don't know how to mount a defenseuntil you find them.

So that is the first order of business.

And that is going onwith ground-based surveys.

If you think of it as:

You've got the Sun,

you've got the Earth and the other planetsgoing around the Sun,

like being on a racetrack.

And then you've got all the asteroidsgoing around the Sun on the racetrack.

And so there are many timeswhen they might come close together.

In fact, we have that often,where there's a "close approach,"

where an asteroidcomes close to Earth, which--

Close might mean, you know,many lunar distances away.

But let's say this is really large.

It's a very large asteroid,and you don't have a lot of time.

There are the moviesthat show blowing them up.

You don't necessarily have to do that.You still need a good push.

And you could usea nuclear explosive device

that is used in some of these movies.

But the idea is you would detonate itnext to the asteroid,

and the energy from that detonationwould irradiate the surface,

and the material that blows offthe surface of the asteroid

would give it that pushin the other direction.

A softer, unaggressive approach

was actually performed bya Japanese probe on Asteroid Ryugu.

How small the asteroid is

we can tell from the size of the shadowthe probe casts on its surface.

Gravity is so minimalthat the softest of landings

already threw great quantitiesof debris away from it, into space.

Right herewe see how meteorites originate.

The probe itself is alreadyon its way back to Earth,

bringing a single gramscooped from the asteroid.

But for bigger specimens,Antarctica is paradise.

It is not that more rocks fall herethan elsewhere.

They are visible on the vast glaciersthat cover almost the entire continent

that is larger than the United States.

We were invited to join the huntby South Korean scientists.

Their station, named Jang Bogo,

at the coast of East Antarctica,houses about 50 people.

The austral summer seasonlasts nearly five months,

during which the Sun never goes down.

Inside, it is more spaciousthan we anticipated.

Only a few miles away,six men of Scott's last expedition

endured a whole winter huddlingin a snow cave just nine feet across.

They were starving and freezingin squalor,

surviving on seal meatand a ration of one biscuit a day.

From diaries of Scott's men,

we know they dreamt of banquets thatwere ripped away from their ready forks.

Only one man managed in his dreamto actually eat,

and he was rightfully hatedby his comrades for this.

But we were not herefor lobster and kimchi.

We were itching to flyto the Polar Plateau in the interior.

We knew there wasan overland expedition of trucks

that had left our station three weeks ago

and was nearing the meteoritehunting grounds on the blue ice.

But first the helicopter has to climb upsome 2,000 meters.

From the station at the coastto the ice plateau of the continent,

we are flying over glacier icecascading down.

Imagine crossing this on foot.

Each of these wildly tossed boulders

is larger than an apartment building,

and the mass is constantly flowingtowards the sea.

Finally we reach the Plateau.

Only a few mountains remain,sticking out of the ice like islands.

It felt like entering into a worldthat was not our planet.

From here begins the immense loneliness

of a vast continent covered by icetwo to four kilometers thick.

Through GPS data,we knew the position of the caravan.

They were expecting us.

We were so looking forwardto meet Jong Ik Lee,

the leader of this expedition.

He was the one who invited usto Antarctica,

and it felt like meeting an old friend.

-I didn't think you'd make it.-Yes, yes.

I didn't know that we would make it.

My dream...

We had seen footage he shotclose to here a few years earlier.

He had found a large meteorite,

and we fell in love with him,seeing his ecstasy of discovery.

This is science at its best.

Okay, down.

Something else I like aboutthis highly charged emotional moment,

something the stupid doctrineof film schools would never allow.

Watch the background. A figure enters.

No recognizable motivation,wrong timing,

rear end approaching.

Back to the present.

Along with us, Jong Ik's wife,Mi Jung, had arrived,

herself a renowned polar geologist.

Husband and wife reunited.

Minutes after our arrivalwe found our first meteorite.

The sheer, blank ice,not covered with snow,

is the ideal terrain to spot them.

The gigantic mass of ice is moving slowly,like a conveyor belt

and exposes stones that may have fallenhundreds of thousands of years ago.

Most of the meteoritesare carried all the way to the ocean.

But where the glacier is deflected upwardsby a mountain range deep down there,

the ice evaporates,leaving its cargo at the surface.

Every stone out here is a meteorite.

Watch the man on the right.He found something.

The lucky one turned out to be Clive.

It may look staged, but it was really him.

This is it! This is your sample!

Congratulations.

This is big. Biggest today.

I found one over there. A little one.

And then when I was...

It also turned out

this was the largest meteoriteof the entire season,

and the first assessment suggestedit was an extremely rare specimen.

We resumed our search,but one thought crept up on us.

It would be a full five monthsuntil night would fall,

and we could walk on for the next5,000 kilometers without meeting a soul.

This is the ultimate experience of spacefor those on foot.

But we knew of a place where not our feetbut our souls start to travel,

a place where we transcendour human existence.

Our last journey took usto one of the remotest islands

of the archipelago in the Torres Strait.

These islands are locatedbetween Australia and New Guinea.

This tiny island called Merhas a population of about 400.

We had heard of tribal beliefsabout shooting stars

that carry the souls of the deceasedto a new life somewhere else.

Doug Passi, one of the tribal elders,

knew stories about soulsdeparting by meteor to the netherworld.

One of my family members was sent bythe ghosts on a maier.

-"Maier" is a meteor?-Falling star, yeah.

And she was actuallyon that maier itself,

burned with fire.

That's what I heard.

And they said that's a true story.

And that lady-- old lady--named Gizou Simbolo.

Was she alive, or was it her spirit?

She was alive. She was alive, yeah.

And when them family is ready to die...

the maier can tell us a story saying,

"Someone will go lostin a few days." Or--

Or-- Or...

"Here he goes somewhere else."

The star-- the falling star. Maier.Sometime red. Sometime light blue.

It seems here that death is--

It's not so much an event.It's the beginning of a journey.

Beginning of the new journeyon the new life. Yes.

They can come in different forms.

Form of a bird. Form of a dog.Form of a person.

Or a shadow that you can seemove on the wall.

Or maybe a floating wood.

Floating wood on the ocean.

Because we came with a camera,

the islanders revivedan almost forgotten dance

that was not performed herefor half a century.

Alo Tapim, an elder, instructed young menin the choreography.

The dance is about maier,as you've indicated.

Maier is that star, comet.

And it's a special star.

Only on special times that this starappears to the Meriam people.

The Meriam observe this star

when a loved onedeparts this life to the next.

The transition is done through this star.

The dancers carrying nair. Torches.

We call it nair.

They carry them.

And they indicate when that star--

falling star lets go its embers.

It's indicated by the fire sticksthey carry.

And when two fire sticks, they clap...

they hit together,

clap together,the two fire sticks, the embers...

And this is captured.

That tells-- describes that star.

Yes. And this is our story.