Original subtitles

Our Milky Way is just one among billions of galaxies in the universe.

In every way, an ordinary galaxy is

a hundred thousand light years ago.

There are hundreds of millions of stars here.

Almost lost inside this huge swarm.

It's one average sized star.

As stars go, it's quite unremarkable.

Nevertheless, it's the most special place in all the cosmos.

Or, but in this star, is the only place we know in all the universe to harbor life.

Our

beautiful planet is a world of water, sparkling blue in the light of our star.

Two-thirds of it is ocean.

Gossamer clouds drift above it, driven by ocean curves.

All of it is wrapped in a delicate cocoon of air that shields us.

From our star's radiation.

Three brave explorers are about to leave the safety of Earth.

They are an American, Terry Burks, a Russian, Anton Scott Lara, and an Italian.

Samantha Christopher ready.

Their mission, six months in space to study microgravity, do biomedical research.

And observe the Earth.

They're sealed inside this tiny metal cocoon.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft, traveling at 17,500 miles an hour.

Their destination, the International Space Station.

It was built in orbit by 16 countries.

It's a research lab training facility.

And observatory, all powered by the Sun.

A truly awesome example of what we can achieve when we work together.

All ready on board to welcome the new arrivals.

Russian crew members, Sasha Samakoujev, and Yelena Serova.

The arrival to the space station was tossed by the happiest home to my life, really.

And then they were Yelena's session, which welcomed us on board.

And, you know, it was just sheer happiness.

We hugged, really.

You know, I was, like, a child at that point.

I mean, it's something I had dreamed of for years.

I had started the space station.

I'd work so hard together and finally I was there.

Terry is welcomed.

I command her, but you will.

Butch describes the crazy scene.

As I watched Anton, I mean, he was thrilled and doing

flips and excited floating around getting the ceiling.

Samantha, to look on her face, just absolutely thrilling.

It was literally electric in the room.

It was, it was fabulous.

Samantha recalls her first-ever view.

From space.

But I just couldn't resist taking a peek.

And I could just see the earth majestically flowing by.

I was like a river.

And, you know, I don't know what, what happiness

is, but I was definitely happier that time.

How do you say the couple?

The couple is a magical window, unlike any other,

on the spectacle of our earth and ourselves.

Past, present, and future.

When I always found especially moving where the past is where we would fly from

the Atlantic, and then fly over Gibraltar onto the Mediterranean.

It was almost like I was doing this journey that, you know, travelers from

legends and myths and the past that dream talk were performed in the reverse way,

right, from the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar, which, you know,

once was considered the end of the known world.

More than 500 years ago, explorers rounded the stormy tip of South Africa.

As an omen for future trade, they named it the Cape of Good Hope.

At the same time, the glorious Caribbean

beckoned with the untold riches of the new world.

Aboriginal people came from Asia more than 30,000 years ago, bringing their spiritual

ties to this land, the continent we now know as Australia.

The Maori people from Polynesia traveled thousands of miles in tiny canoes across

the Pacific Ocean before they reached New Zealand.

Home to the ancient Inca civilization, the longest mountain range in the world,

the Andes.

They stretched 4,500 miles across some of the most extreme climate zones on earth,

from ice fields to deserts.

The oldest and driest desert is the Namib in Africa.

You can see our climates from space, the Great Lakes of North America,

like trapped in ice and snow, for more than a third of the year.

You can also see evidence of earth's violent past.

Asteroid impacts have left scars on its surface.

This crater in Quebec is 62 miles across.

The earth is still active, volcanoes tear through its surface.

The Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia has over 100 of them.

Now Terry Birds describes his experience.

One of the most beautiful things to see from space is thunderstorms at night,

and there are certain parts of the earth.

Central Africa especially, but also Southeast Asia.

There are just amazing amounts of thunderstorms.

You see thousands of flashes per minute.

Unbelievable amount of power when you think about a giant lightning bolt going

off near house, and how loud it is, and how it

scares you, and the dog runs under the table.

When you see it from space, there's so many of these things happening at the same time.

It's truly amazing.

You see power of funnel 25 miles in diameter of the

center of a hurricane or a typhoon, and you go, oh my.

The typhoon, my second was amazing.

I've never seen anything like that.

I was so big, so well defined.

Then you realize that that's energy, and it is power, powerful energy.

Far above the storm, every drop of water is carefully rationed.

There's no showers in space, so there's no...

you can't just go under the water and let it run.

It's just kind of wet towels and wiping down, but you can

get pretty clean, and washing your hair is not too bad.

In principle, we want to recycle all the water, which

means that the urine gets recycled, but also your sweat.

All the humidity from the air, which is accumulated into the system via

the air conditioning system, also gets recycled into portable water.

It's not 100% efficient system, so we do

have water bags on the space station as well.

The SpaceX resupply ship, called Dragon, arrives from Florida.

It's one of the first commercial craft to bring up supplies.

It brings food and water and equipment, and without that we wouldn't be able to

live more than a few extra months on the space station.

But on Earth, we kind of don't have any supply ships.

It's almost like a mission to Mars when you're not going to get a supply ship.

You have to pack everything with you.

When we're all doing cargo ops together, I mean it is organized bedlam.

It literally is crisscrossing people flying, packages flying, going here and

there, and you have to get them in the right place.

You can't put it in the wrong spot because you'll lose it.

You won't be able to find it later because there's so much.

Literally thousands of items.

You can't remember where you put every single one of them.

That's why we have to have this database.

We lost a 14 inch torque wrench, and it was gone for five weeks.

And it just floated off, I guess, and wouldn't have been looking cranny somewhere.

It itself, and it finally reappeared one day.

I like to sleep floating, so I did not attach my sleeping bag to the walls at all.

And especially at the beginning, I would just close

my eyes and let myself float and just fall asleep.

Foot and Terrier are getting ready for a spacewalk.

There are a lot of complex systems on the outside of this station.

And sometimes they need fixing.

If you want to go outside, of course, you have to survive in outer space.

The suit allows you to do that.

So much really fills out the suit.

But it also means that when you're trying to put the suit on or taking off,

it's quite some work.

Getting out of the hatch is an entire operation in and of itself.

We have so much equipment on us.

Your backpack tends to bang into the hatch or helmet wants to bang into the hatch.

You walk around by grabbing on the things with your gloves.

Almost 300 degrees on the sun side of the space station.

You get in the shade.

It's minus 275 degrees.

You fill that inside the suit.

My fingertips in the sun light would be like a fill-um-on fire on most.

From the fatigue a little bit, but also from the

heat coming through on that sun side of the orbit.

So I have to, you know, throw my fingers at

times and put them in the shade a little bit.

Let them pull down.

You can lose where you are on station.

So you're always thinking you have a safety tether attached to station.

It's on a reel like a fishing reel.

That thing with a spring that always reels it in.

You can be upside down, twisted and inverted, and completely lose your spacial

awareness about where you are and what your attitude is.

And you can easily get tangled up in that safety tether.

If you're not cautious.

Every single movement you may, you're making an effort to think through it.

The outside of the space station is not just a sidewalk.

It's a jungle of wires and equipment.

Metal bars and trusses.

Well, if you accidentally sliced your glove or your spacesuit

on one of those sharp edges, that could create a leak.

And if that leak were big enough, you would die.

The hardest thing during a spacewalk for me is getting out of the hut.

And so the only way that we found to actually get a boat to come out of the

upper torso of the hut was for me to basically push and shake and push and

shake until it finally was able to frame itself from the suit.

How it is in space were great, but to be honest, I missed home.

Of course, we didn't want to leave Santa hanging if there's

somebody that you don't want to make mad at Santa Claus.

So we put the milk and cookies in the airlock.

We weren't sure exactly how he would get in the space station, but we assumed the

airlock would be kind of our equivalent of a chimney.

So, we thought that would be a good place to leave the milk and cookies.

My speak three language, I speak English, Russian, and Tennessee.

As you're learning Russian, they say the first ten years at the hardest.

That's a fact.

And then all of a sudden, the day arrives, boom, and it's time to go home.

The Soyuz spacecraft is ready to take butch, Sasha, and Yolena home.

And of course, you're looking forward, you're coming home, you're wife,

your family's been away from for eight months.

But of course, the people that you're leaving behind today, you spent six months

with them, and it's a very mellow column filling because the hat shuts,

and they're going.

And you realize that part of your life is over, and you're not going to have this

same fellowship with those people ever again.

And it's a sad thing.

In space without gravity pulling you down, you grow, and I grew almost two inches.

Unfortunately, the minute I got back to Earth, I lost those.

In zero G, without the loading of gravity, your

bones and muscles will weaken very quickly.

To stay in shape, it's extremely important for the crews to exercise a lot.

And we have two and a half hours of exercise

scheduled every day, and that includes cardio.

And this marvelous machine, which is called A-RIT.

And you can do things like squats, and deadlifts, and shoulder presses.

So this is a great example of no three being busy.

I'm working on the bathroom, and there's a lot of

plumbing and valves and systems that I was changing.

I'll also have some exercise in there.

It's a busy place, but it's important to keep this equipment working.

All right, Smith, I'm going to put the final lip in here.

I kept joking that he wouldn't be qualified for his flight unless he came

with me to my hairdresser to learn how to cut my hair.

All the things we do is astronauts.

This scares me the most.

For the crews that live on the station, one of the

most important things of all is being able to see.

From day to day, what we down here on the ground can't see so clearly.

What is happening to our Earth, and how we are changing it.

We began with a home of lush green forests, animals, and plants.

With more and more of us to feed, we began clearing the land for farms.

But when you cut down the trees, there are other losses too.

Great forests once covered much of the island of Madagascar.

You can see how many of them are gone.

Without tree roots to anchor it, the red soil loses

downhill, clogging the rivers, and banishing into the sea.

Unique animals, like the lemurs, are losing their homes.

The great rainforest in Brazil continues to disappear.

It's home to nearly half the species found on Earth.

In just four decades, almost half a million square miles have been cut down and burned.

From space, you can see huge smoke plumes stretching

across the rainforest for hundreds of miles.

Thousands of species up in smoke forever lost.

As the forest burned, carbon dioxide and other

greenhouse gases spew into our atmosphere.

We've always taken our fresh air for granted, but we know now that the fossil

fuels be burned also released clouds of pollution into the air we breathe.

They fill the atmosphere with gases that cause the climate to change.

As a result, the Earth's temperature is rising.

In California, it's affecting our most precious resource on Earth.

Water.

Seeing California is beautiful from space.

It actually looks like a giant ice cream scooper went right down the middle part of

the state and scooped out the central valley.

But it's very brown, and you can really tell there's a drought going on,

and that they could probably use a lot of rain.

In efforts to save parched crops, we used ground water so much of it in the

last 75 years that parts of the valley have sunk 30 feet.

The life of ranchers and farmers depend on water

rights and who can take what water out of whichever.

Even cities like San Diego, Los Angeles and

Phoenix depend completely on their access to water.

The Colorado River Basin supplies water to 40 million of us in seven states.

The reservoirs that make this system work are losing water at alarming rates.

They need huge amounts of runoff from snow to feed

them, and the runoff has dwindled in recent years.

California's reservoirs could soon be dry.

I had never seen the Himalayas at all, and the immense size was just...

it was mind -boggling.

They just went on for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

In the shadow of Mount Everest, several of the Earth's great rivers begin

their journey across the Indian subcontinent.

They provide water to drink, irrigation for crops, a place for worship.

But now, the rising temperatures are causing glaciers and snow high on the

plateau to melt.

The water supply of over 500 million people is now threatened.

By the time the rivers reach the Ganges Delta, they've become

pipelines for all kinds of pollution, pouring into the sea.

But problems like this can be solved, and when we work at it, sometimes we succeed.

When I was a kid in the 70s, the Chesapeake Bay was a mess.

The fish and crabs were disappearing, and there was a big restriction.

You couldn't fish or rock fish and other types of fish.

It's been cleaned up, and in a few decades time it's a beautiful place now.

It's thriving.

That's a great success story of conservation.

It's a giant universe out there, but there's nowhere like earth.

It's a beautiful planet.

We have air that we can breathe.

We have water that we can drink.

Food is there for us.

We have this life support system that's

perfectly designed to support billions of humans.

It's pretty amazing to see how much effort we had to

put into designing and building the space station.

But what if our surface water disappeared altogether?

This actually happened on our neighboring planet Mars.

Mars doesn't have a magnetic field.

Without any protection, its atmosphere was ripped away from the planet by the solar

wind.

If you could stand on Mars today, you would find a landscape of lifeless desolation.

Very cold and very dry.

But on earth, things are going in a very different direction.

I sense snow are melting at rates we've never seen before.

In Greenland, time lapse cameras captured a 23

square mile chunk of the Yacabsoven Glacier.

Breaking off.

The Greenland ice sheet is melting.

If the whole ice sheet were to melt, sea levels could rise 20 feet.

As the level rises, low-lying coastal areas will submerge.

The city of New Orleans could be gone.

But we can change this if we step up to limit greenhouse gases reproducing.

As human beings, we need to start to consider some more and more as crew members.

Not passengers, you know, nobody gets free ride.

Do you have a responsibility to take care of your fellow crewmates?

Just like we do on the space station.

It's more difficult to do it when you're talking about billions of people.

But that's really the mindset that we have to work towards.

A new crew has arrived at the station.

Two Russians, Gennady Padulka, and Mihayil, Corienko, and an American Scott Kelly.

The mission for both Scott and Mihayil is to spend a full year here, so researchers

can study how they're affected by long -term space travel.

Scott is soon providing data for his study.

One of the more recent discoveries in terms of the effects of weightlessness on

human physiology is the effect that he has on our eyes.

Several crew members, long-duration crew members in the past, have reported the

worsening of their eyesight while they were up in space.

I think the space is present machine.

It was developed in Italy, and we actually, for the

first time, could enjoy a good espresso in space.

So, welcome change.

I'm actually going to try and drink it out of this zero-G cup.

Let's see what happens.

Very much an experiment.

But, it'd be a last nicer if I get to drink my espresso from an actual cup

instead of from a punch.

See.

Wow, that was good.

That was really good.

Six months have passed, and it's time for Terry,

Samantha, and Anton to say their goodbyes.

It's a bittersweet departure.

Three new crew members have moved in.

They've said about a special project, which will be very

important when people take longer journeys to other planets.

The best results are produced in this pink light.

Without soil, the crew is attempting to grow their own crops.

Childlingrin, an American medical doctor, inspects the progress.

Veggie was an amazing experiment, not only because we got

to grow this plant in space, but we also got to eat it.

Chels' crew mate, Kimi Ayui, is from Japan.

Well, I know that I enjoyed the lettuce.

I think Kimi is not a big fan of vegetables.

His father is actually a lettuce farmer.

And so, I think he's had a lot of lettuce.

Happily, fresh food is about to arrive.

This time, on the Japanese HTV resupply ship.

Childlingrin is completely delicious.

It's like a golden treasure, markai.

Who will show you how x3?

We have to share your belief, Phurya.

We have to share your belief.

We are approaching England and its great capital London.

Across the English Channel to the right is France and the glorious city of Paris.

Europe lies beyond.

During the daytime it's kind of hard to tell that people are on earth.

You don't see that much evidence of humanity.

But at night the same view tells a different story.

It's easy to see how populated our planet really is.

And how many of us have gathered in towns and cities.

Now you can spot famous cities like Amsterdam, Brussels.

The capital of Russia, Moscow.

The vibrant cities of Japan, Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo.

Beloved Rome and Naples.

Italy at Midas is very moving because it's incredibly bright.

It's a dancing populated country for some so you can really see all the cities.

And you have this very distinct shape that you can very definitely see at Midas well.

Of this boat reaching into this darkness of Mediterranean.

This is just overwhelmingly beautiful.

The undulating ribbon of light is the Nile River

illuminated by people drawn from the desert to its water.

Cairo gleams like a jewel in the Delta's crown to the

left, Israel and the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

I think one of the most amazing sites I saw with my eye was coming across the

Southern United States Florida into the Caribbean

Sea through the Bahamas at night with a full moon.

And you could literally see the colors, the aqua colors in the Bahamas area.

All the way down into through Cuba and then Dominican Republic Haiti on into

Puerto Rico and in Virgin Islands beyond that.

Oh, my goodness.

Fish and boats really stand out at night, especially

in Asia and the Anaman Sea and near Thailand.

There's a bunch of green fishing boats.

During the day, you can't tell there's people in the ocean down there.

But in nighttime, there's lots of folks fishing.

You can see that.

I can see where I was born.

Murfersboro looks like a little diamond below Nashville.

North of that, Louisville.

Of course, Indianapolis just just beyond there.

Pitsboro.

And then looking to the left, you can see that.

the Great Lakes and of course the cities of Green Bay, Chicago.

You can see Cleveland evident, Buffalo.

And then further up the East Coast, coming to Richmond, Washington,

Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York.

Long Island sticks out just absolutely gorgeous.

Boston, Cape Cod, very visible, just absolutely beautiful.

And then of course the cities across the border, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal,

Quebec City.

Astronauts often remark that you don't see any national borders from space.

But there are exceptions.

The strand of orange light dividing the view

is the border separating Pakistan from India.

West that there weren't issues, but there are.

We have different ideals and different mindsets.

And it causes us to have the border.

That is same.

The most noticeable border at night is between North and South Korea.

Seoul, South Korea is one of the brightest most vibrant cities on the planet.

The whole South Korean country is lit up.

And then there's this line of the border in this complete darkness.

of North Korea with a few little white lights where Pyongyang is.

But there's a similar number of people on both sides of the border.

And you can really see the difference between how people live.

By moonlight, the Gulf of Mexico and the great

cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.

The landscape around them is a blaze with thousands of oil and gas flares.

To meet our ever increasing energy needs for the future, we'll

have to develop new energy sources on a far larger scale.

And one of them is our own sun.

As the space station crosses its face, from 250 miles

below, you can see the solar panels that provide its power.

Here on Earth, we must go beyond capturing the sun's rays and learn how to create

energy the way the sun does by nuclear fusion.

The challenge is to build a fusion reactor that

will provide enough power for all our needs.

If you can figure out how to reproduce this, you can

create immense amounts of power and leave no pollution.

Our sun also bombards us with lethal radiation.

Without protection, most living creatures cannot survive it.

But our Earth has a magnetic field which deflects the harmful particles away from us.

The aurora shows that shield in action.

The magnetic field protecting us.

We have our forests and oceans, animals and people.

It's why ours is a planet of life.

What struck me looking at Earth on space is the fact that you can really perceive

it visually as a spacecraft.

I've heard before about space to Earth, but when you

are up there, you really cannot escape that notion.

It's totally obvious that it is a celestial body that is carrying all of us,

all of humanity, all of life on Earth, on this journey through space.

And just like the space station is a human -made outpost out there that allows us to

survive in this hostile environment of space, our Earth is the same for all of

us.

I can imagine, of course, a future image of human

beings who are able to travel to other star systems.

So I really hope that at some point there will be a breakthrough in science and

technology that will allow us to travel faster and light and actually explore

different star systems.

Don't you wonder sometimes, are there planets around other stars?

Could they have life?

Though we can't yet travel to the stars ourselves, our telescopes can.

Astronomers have already discovered several thousand planets.

We are searching around stars for the perfect conditions, not too hot,

not too cold, for liquid water to exist.

We call this the Goldilocks Zone.

We can detect a planet as it crosses in front of a star, blocking its light.

This is one system we found.

Kepler-186.

It's 500 light years from Earth and it

contains a remarkable five Earth-sized planets.

Most important of all, the outermost planet, Kepler-186F, is just the right

distance from its star for water and life to exist.

Could this be another Earth?

It's

about two things.

It's about this great adventure of exploring and that it's about

understanding how a world works and expanding

the possibilities of what we human beings can do.

And we can do great things together.

If we all do our power for our children and great-grandchildren,

our Earth will always be a beautiful planet.

The sun is rising.

It doesn't matter who you are, the sun still sets the same.

This is how you break it.