One Strange Rock

Where is home?

Is it where you were born?

Where you were raised?

Or where you are now?

Is it somewhere you live?

Somewhere you left?

Somewhere that shaped you?

If you really wanna know, you need to leave them all behind.

Someone who knows that it's like to really leave home is

Peggy Whitson, NASA's most experienced astronaut.

Not that you'd know it if you ever met her.

Well I hate talking about the records,

but I do have few.

That folks is the understatement of the year.

How about we start with most time in space for any US astronaut.

Which is 665 days.

Think about that for a second,

that's a round trip to Mars.

Then there's the longest single space flight for any

woman in the world.

Oh, that's right, yeah.

And that's just for starters.

- Ten space walks, first female Commander and I can't remember

the other, oh, I know oldest astronaut, female astronaut,

not a record I was looking for.

The press seemed to point that one out a lot.

Not bad for a farm girl from Iowa!

Eight astronauts, Chris, Nicole, Jeff, May, Jerry,

Mike, Leland and then there's Peggy.

Each one of them is different, they come from different places,

they have different stories to tell but they were all changed by one thing...

Going into space.

It's called the Overview Effect and if you could see

what they've seen, you'd feel it too.

Most of us leave home every day.

We go to work without a second thought.

But just imagine if your work place overlooks the planet

then that morning commute becomes a little bit more challenging.

- We launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

It was actually the same launch pad that Yuri Gagarin launched from.

It's a fast trip to get to space.

Better than any car you've ever been in,

better than any acceleration you've ever experienced.

It feels good to be going fast.

Eight and a half minutes after leaving the launchpad

we are in orbit.

The international space station

is 250 miles above the planet.

But it is a million miles away from the place

Peggy first called home.

- Growing up on a farm I think was actually a really

good experience for me, it taught me a lot of

dedication and hard work.

- She says she'd like to go to Mars.

- My parents have lived on the same farm for fifty,

almost sixty years.

My mom was incredibly supportive.

At one time I was telling my sister I wanted to be a pilot

and learn to fly and she's like, "You can't be a pilot,

you can only be a stewardess." and my mom told her,

"No, you can be anything you want to be!"

- I think there's two Peggy's, the one that comes here and

the one that goes there are different people.

An astronaut will have trained for at least

three years for a mission.

Every moment in space is scheduled with experiments to

run and tasks to complete.

But the first thing they wanna do is exactly what we do when

we go somewhere new, check out the view.

Going into space is like I live my whole life in a

semi-dark room and somebody flipped on the lights.

The earth just seems to glow, it's so beautiful.

When I first went to space,

the first thing I wanted to do was pop off my helmet,

unstrap out of my chair, float up weightless and go to the

window and see the world.

What we see with our eyes, what we then I think feel

through our heart says your experiencing it is,

it's beyond imagination.

It is just so stunningly beautiful it almost

makes you, you, you wanna find new words to describe

the emotion that you're feeling because it affects you so powerfully.

This is something that human eyes are not supposed to see.

Looking out the window may not be the

highest mission priority...

but it has a lasting impact on all astronauts.

It changes how they think about where they're from.

The town closest to my parents farm is Beaconsfield, Iowa.

When I was growing up it had like 32 people in it and

I think it's down to eleven'ish now so it's a pretty small town.

Beaconsfield maybe the smallest town in Iowa but

it's a place full of amazing stories,

amazing transformations.

- Growing up in Iowa there's all kinds of life around...

and when somebody says the word "butterfly" you always think

of the Monarch butterfly because it's the most

distinctive one that I saw growing up.

This one's a pretty good one.

It's big!

- They feel like soft and gooey at the same time.

I know!

- The spring and summer there are lots of caterpillars,

it's easy to find them because they're only on the milkweed.

- It's always interesting to see the caterpillars crawling

around and recognize that someday that's gonna become a butterfly.

- You like to move around a lot don't you.

We all know that caterpillars turn into butterflies...

but does it make it any less wondrous?

It's as extraordinary as a farm girl from Iowa

transforming into an astronaut.

The Monarch butterfly's caterpillar is nature's shape shifter supreme.

- When the caterpillar is inside the chrysalis it dissolves and it

turns into goo...

And then the good turns into a butterfly.

Caterpillars don't know much of the world beyond a milkweed plant

but once a butterfly it's cleared for takeoff.

And from up high it gains a new perspective on the world.

Astronauts change when they leave earth.

They undergo a metamorphosis.

Home is no longer a town, it's something much bigger.

I think the opportunity to kind of live in

space has allowed me to look at things a

little bit differently.

It really opens up a new perspective.

I don't think about the city I live in or where I'm from,

I think about home and home is our whole planet or whole earth,

it's one home for all of us.

- As I've grown up and gone to college and gone to graduate

school home has expanded from Iowa to Texas to the

United States and since being in space home is

actually planet Earth!

Look!

Here she comes!

There she is.

- 17,500 miles an hour, fast moving star.

- That's your daughter up there, isn't it?

There's lot of stars out there tonight but she's the only one that's moving.

Bye Peggy, hurry home.

Astronauts don't spend all their free time at

the window looking at earth, after all they're explorers so

it's only natural for them to turn the other way

towards the far reaches of space.

They set their sights on what's out there.

Thing is, that big window on the ISS only points one way,

down to earth.

To see the cosmos you have to step outside!

You'd think when you're in space you'd have

lots of it, you've probably got more room in your back

yard than the astronauts have on the ISS.

It is cramped up there.

You don't really experience space until you walk in it!

Going for a walk it's not a trivial process,

it takes a lot of work and preparation.

But, everyone wants to do it because oh my gosh the view is phenomenal!

On a spacewalk it's just you!

Floating!

No up, no down.

Turn one way a 250 mile drop back to earth,

the other an endless expanse of unblinking stars.

The main thing astronauts remember though is not the

stars but the black.

Looking into that void makes astronauts ask the same question,

"Is there anybody out there?"

To say that there's no life elsewhere in the universe

is a real stretch.

You know mathematics doesn't lie,

probability doesn't lie and when you look at these numbers

surely there has to be some other life out there.

- There's got to be other life out there, there has to be.

It's just a matter of whether we can find it or not.

To find out if we have neighbors you need a

telescope and I'm talking big, really big!

This dish is a giant ear,

listening to radio waves coming from deep space.

There are literally billions of strange

rocks out there but so far not a whisper from any of them.

Nada!

So where is everybody?

Well...

it's about 250 miles from earth to the

international space station,

250,000 miles to the moon.

Long way right?

Baby steps!

Saturn, 700 million miles.

Edge of the solar system, over nine trillion.

Our nearest start, four and a quarter light years.

Aboard our fastest spacecraft it will take

17,000 years to get there and that's just our next-door neighbor!

Travelling beyond, through our galaxy to the edge of the

Milky Way we're talking 25,000 light years!

And our galaxy is just one of trillions!

So life elsewhere might just be a very,

very long way away...

And there's another thing,

any aliens out there might not be able to say "hello"

because they might not have a mouth or even a brain.

These jellyfish have found a way to capture

energy from sunlight.

If life exists elsewhere it will need energy,