One Strange Rock

From on board the spaceship, you can see the world has a secret.

At dawn or at dusk, where the shadows are lining up just the right way,

you're at just the right place in time to see an asteroid crater.

Where a bullet from the universe left a perpetual hole in the smooth surface of our planet.

There are a billion years worth of impacts.

Huge asteroids have smashed into the world, and turned it into an enveloped fire.

Uninhabitable to almost all life on the surface.

The world will get hit again.

It's just a matter of when.

So, what should we do as a species?

Should we just, like the dinosaurs, look up and die?

The reasons the dinosaurs are extinct is they didn't have a space program.

We do.

We have the capability to perhaps escape the Earth.

Escaping Earth?

Leaving home is hard at the best of times.

Imagine how hard it would be if you were never coming back.

Not just back to your home town, but your home planet.

A one-way ticket away from everywhere, everything and everyone you know and need.

8 astronauts with over 1,000 days in space between then,

can tell us how being up there helped them to understand

why we are going to have to make a choice.

Faced with extinction of life on Earth.

Our best chance of survival is to build another colony somewhere else.

Having a base on Mars, a base on the moon or in other places,

is important to keep our civilization going.

It's really kinda up to us how long we wanna survive as a species.

Can we really cut the cord with the planet that made us?

And face the physical extremes and mental torment of space?

Theanswers are right here on earth.

In some pretty unexpected places.

Like multi-million-year-old blood.

Mutant bugs.

And humans that had left the land behind.

It is not going to be easy to get ourselves safely away from the Earth

and onto another planet.

People will die.

This maybe what saves us.

It's decision time on The Rock.

Escape or extinction?

Earth's been through some big changes.

Ice ages have come and gone...

Volcanoes have blanketed the world in ash.

And all of this could happen again.

In fact, sooner or later, it's going to.

So, if we knew a huge asteroid was bearing down...

Or a giant eruption was about to suffocate the planet...

We'd feel a lot better if we had a Plan B.

To put a human base on another planet, it will involve risk.

It pushes our technology right to the very edge of our capability.

But the benefit is for the whole species.

So today, what we're going out there to do is intercept the eclipse.

Really experience the full eclipse since it happens so rarely.

Fly and chase the moon.

You can't do it every day.

At 15 is rated almost up to mach 2.5.

So, our goal is approximately three minutes of time in the shadow.

Alright, let me break that down.

Luckily, my dad was in the Air Force, so I can do this.

These guys are going to try something they've never done before.

Something that shows how hard it is to go from 1 planet to another.

Everything in our galaxy is moving.

During an eclipse, when the moon slides across the sun...

Its shadow speeds over the air at 1700 miles per hour.

But it's easy to forget that we're moving too.

Our planet spins at 1,000 miles per hour.

To stay in the moon's shadow, the planes have to fly faster than earth spins.

33 units, mark ready, ready now.

This is definitely the ultimate intercept.

Chasing the fastest object that we could chase.

If we can do this, we can intercept anything.

Keep it tight, the eclipse is coming.

Here comes the shadow out in front of us now.

Alright stand by for.

OK.

That's pretty cool.

20 seconds.

It's almost like you're in outer space.

As a kid, you know, you always think about astronauts and travelling

to space and circling the moon.

But I never thought of how fast the moon was travelling.

30 into the eclipse.

Here comes the daylight.

And it's daytime.

If you're in an aeroplane and trying to chase that shadow,

that's really just a little hint of how hard it is to launch a rocket ship and go intercept

the moon or go all the way out to Mars where everything is moving.

And the Earth isn't just rotating.

It's moving through space at almost 70,000 miles an hour.

While Mars is moving at over 50,000 miles an hour.

It's like grabbing a gun and trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.

We've sent probes to Mars and to Jupiter and to Saturn.

But probes are machines.

Getting people there?

That's a whole other level of difficult.

So before we make that commitment and fire those engines,

we really wanna be sure we know what we're doing.

The natural human reaction to the unknown is fear.

But the greatest antidote for fear is preparation.

Part of the reason I love flight is how it makes me feel.

It pushes me a little bit closer to the limit of my capabilities.

Especially when you're flying an older plane.

Just barely give it a couple of these.

You have to focus, you have to constantly thing about what are the things that are gonna try

and kill me.

Try and predict what the dangers are going to be.

And then try and get ready for those.

Pull her out.

Yeah.

Here we go.

Permanently leaving the earth.

Turning our tail to the planet and firing the engines to go somewhere else,

that is still right on the edge of impossible.

But in 1902, flying was impossible.

But after the Wright Brothers, it was something we knew how to do.

Summer of '69, impossible to walk on the moon.

And then 12 people put their grey, dusty footprints into the surface of the moon.

So I think we'll go from a space station to the moon and eventually onto Mars.

Because it's a necessary thing for the survival of our species.

They call it a Goldilocks planet.

A world that's not too hot and not too cold.

Just like Earth.

Until we find it, we're looking at the next best thing.

Life on Mars.

But even if we have the technology to leave our home, do we have the biology?

Nothing good lasts forever.

Earth is no different.

If we want to outlast our home, we need to franchise.

Set up an outlet on another planet.

When we leave earth, we leave behind more than a rock.

Earth is a living planet.

An interconnected web of life.

We are part of it and it is part of us.

So when we go, what comes and what stays.

One of the final stages of preparation for my third space flight

to fly a Russian spaceship, was wiping my entire body with rubbing alcohol.

To try and get rid of as many bacteria as possible.

You don't want the spaceship to become unhealthy for the people living there.

But bacteria have been colonizing the planet for billions of years.

And they're pretty good at getting everywhere.

To spot them we have to use something else that's survived for a long time.

Horseshoe crabs were alive 200 Million years before the dinosaurs.

And yet, they've turned out to be surprisingly useful in space.

Their immune system is primitive but effective.

So we make use of their incredible blue blood.

When cells in their blood come into contact with bacteria, they instantly release enzymes.

And these enzymes can be used to detect bacteria at less than one part per trillion.

That's like detecting one grain of sugar in an Olympic size swimming pool.

So we can use a tiny spec of horseshoe crab blood to spot contamination.

It's easy to think of the bacteria on my body as some foreign matter that I would like

to get rid of.

But if you look at us under a microscope, we're crawling with life.

There are more bacterial cells in our body than there are human cells.

An entire universe inside me.

The more we study the human microbiome, all of the little microbes that live within us,

and especially when we start thinking about leaving earth, the more we realize,

the bacteria aren't stowaways, they're crew.

And we're going to have to bring some of them with us, when we go to another planet.

How far are they, ahead, do you think?

I would say absolute minimum of two, probably at least three miles.

We are searching for the world's biggest creature.

The blue whale.

Most species on the planet are totally dependant on their microbiomes to survive.

It's amazing how similar whales and humans are.

Even though we walk on the land and they swim in the abyss,

the same biological mechanisms are in play here.

The reality is, it's very difficult to collect data on whales.

Imagine if an elephant disappeared under the Serengeti and came up five miles away.

Whale's right over here at ten o'clock.

Every time a whale exhales, it's throwing up this biological treasure trove.

Starting engines, clear.

So how can you collect biological data in a non-invasive manner?

The answer is, snot bot.

30 plus feet, you're just going off for visual?

Yeah, you're in good shape.

And I see the whale now. OK.

You're right to 16 feet, 16.

14.

Alright. She's dived. No words, lovely dive.

Might not have liked that head on approach, but there's no way to know.

As excited as we are with this tool, you've gotta be at the right place at the right time.

OK, so the whale's been doing 9-minute dives.

Let's launch the drone at 8 minutes and then we're ready when it comes up.

Hopefully we'll get the second blow.

Looking good, right on track. That's 14 feet.

They're exchanging a lung full of air, probably bigger than a VW

in one or two seconds.

It's incredible.

- Staying with it. - What's my height?

You're at 14.

Whale's looking really calm.

Moving very slowly.

Bingo.

Good job team, good job.

Alright, you guys ready for landing, bring her in.

And this is gonna be a snotty dish.

We know bacteria in the stomach of whales is necessary for digestion,

but we're starting to see that the microbiome in the lungs plays a key role

in fighting infection. Just like it does in humans.

There's a world of bacteria outside us and a world of bacteria inside us.