One Strange Rock

Most people go through life trying to not get hit.

What's up man?

All good.

Did you see that fight?

Oh did I? I think I could've won.

The trick is to roll with the punches and hope that you

don't get floored by one.

Again.

Our world was born out of violence...

and a storm that has raged since the beginning of time.

A storm with the power to destroy planets.

One mighty collision can change everything.

It's done it before and it could do it again.

Most of us live in blissful ignorance of the chaos around us.

But, eight astronauts with over 1,000 days in space

between them can tell us how being "up there" helped them

to truly understand what goes on down here.

Everyday the earth ploughs through about 40 tons

of material in space.

There is so much activity,

so much action and our planet is right in the middle of it.

Space isn't vast and empty space but a

dynamic, cosmic storm.

It's a storm that could kill us,

but without it...

we wouldn't be here at all.

This is a story about the weird connections,

the near misses, the lucky breaks that created

this amazing world.

For 4.5 billion years our planet has been battered and

bruised and punched and pummeled but we're still standing.

It's actually the battle that's built us and this is

the tale of the tape.

Thanks guys, awesome. Alright.

Nicole Stott is an engineer, pilot and oh yeah...

These are cool uh?

She lived for three months in space.

You can even stick your hand in it.

Left hand.

Okay I'm coming out.

Nicole, your right waist tether to the forward UIAD ring.

Frankly she's a bad ass.

Now imagine them all pressurized and you're having

to work against it really hard.

Here I was, it was so unbelievable.

I'd spent almost 20 years helping build spaceships and

now here I was myself on one...

just amazing.

Okay I am clear Nicole.

Remember watching me do a spacewalk?

Yeah.

- Yeah. Was that fun? - Scary. -Yeah, why was it scary?

Cause I thought you were gonna fall off.

When you're in space, 250 miles above our planet and

looking at these things you thought you knew,

you see them in a totally new way.

For example, the first time I saw a shooting star from the

space station was this very visual reminder that there's

a lot of other things travelling through the

same space, in space.

What did I see and the first time I saw it,

it kind of startled me was,

a shooting star coming in below us.

That's a micro meteorite coming into the earth and

burning up in the atmosphere and you see this sort of

firework display thing going on.

I was doing earth observation and I'm taking a

photo and all of a sudden I see a hole just magically

appear about that big in the solar panel, you know,

that was probably hit by a grain of sand,

something that size, coming at 17,500 miles an hour in a different orbit.

You get hit by rocks all the time,

you can hear them ricocheting off the hull.

You can see the scars of them in the windows of the spaceship.

It's a little mind boggling,

when you think about how much is really out there.

Mostly the stuff up there is pretty small,

burns up in the atmosphere, nothing to get worked up about,

but there are some pretty big rocks up there too,

ask the dinosaurs.

We believe the asteroid that caused the extinction of the

dinosaurs started way out in the solar system.

You know, travelling that distance,

it's incredible that it found this target of earth.

Bad for the dinosaurs but ultimately good for us.

We all think we know this story,

but there's something special about the place where it happened,

in the jungles of Mexico.

Here in Mexico I have the chance to dive in

what is the most magical place to free dive in the entire world.

This incredible place was created with very strong

violence when the asteroid hit.

And the result of this is this calm place, this paradox.

This place which is now very quiet was, at some point,

where something dramatic happened.

Life almost disappeared.

But at the same time, this is where our story started and

this is why we are here now.

When this area was scanned,

we saw that hundreds of these flooded Mexican caverns

connected together into a vast semi-circle.

The edges of a huge crater,

110 miles across and 12 miles deep.

An asteroid that big hitting the planet anywhere is going

to be devastating, but scientists think it was

especially devastating because of where it hit.

A bulls eye strike on a large Sulphur reserve.

The Sulphur rock vaporized sending billions of tons of

polluting gas into the atmosphere...

blocking out the sun.

The earth froze and the dinosaurs died.

So this big old asteroid has been journeying

for billions of years through space before it gets to us and

the earth spins right.

So if the rock had arrived just a few seconds later,

it would have crashed out in the deep ocean, no bulls eye,

no fire storm, no dino extinction.

Earth's history is full of moments like this.

It's a tale of destructive good fortune that connects the

death of a planet, ten million African bats,

a clock in the sky and tiny rocks from the birth of our

solar system, some about the size of my fist.

There's a lot of rocks hitting us from space.

If they make it through our atmosphere and hit the surface

of our planet, people go in search of these in very remote

places to try to find them.

They're extremely valuable because they contain really

the story of where our earth came from.

Boom!

In Morocco we have a couple of buzzes every year of

something that's way cool, a super awesome meteorite.

If a meteorite is found in the desert and word gets out...

Especially if it's of extreme value.

Then there is like a gold rush.

We're talking about the building blocks of our planet.

Some of the most valuable meteorites are carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.

They're the oldest form of solid material in

the solar system.

All the universities want it, all the museums want it.

The Bedouins are getting amazingly good at recognizing these things.

To the untrained eye, these might just look like a

normal rock, but the really old ones contain all the raw

materials to build a planet like earth.

4.6 billion years ago where earth is today,

there was just a giant cloud of gas and dust,

all swirling around the new born sun.

This was where the cosmic storm started.

First off with tiny particles attracted by

an electrostatic force.

It's a slow process but eventually clumps grew into

solid matter.

Still only as big as a grain of sand,

but now with just enough gravity of their own to pull

other grains in.

These grains fused into rocks and as they smashed and

clumped the collisions grew in intensity.

Under immense heat and pressure,

the rocks began to build our planet.

There seems to be nothing subtle about the way

earth was built.

It would almost be like building a space station with

a sledgehammer.

All those bits smashing together,

they were everything we needed to build a living planet.

The calcium in our bones, the gold in our wedding rings,

even the iron in our ships was all here from the beginning,

except one thing was in short supply, water,

but it was on its way and coming in fast.

A lot of astronauts will tell you that from

six years old watching the moon landing that they knew from

that moment on that astronaut was a job that they

wanted to do.

For me, it wasn't that way.

My background is aeronautical engineering.

I wanted to do something with flying that allowed me to

learn about how things fly and then ultimately if you wanna

know how things fly, I can't imagine not wanting to know

how rocket ships fly.

And then one day I got this phone call to say that

I was assigned to fly a long duration flight on the

International Space Station.

Nicole didn't set out to fly on the ISS,

her job was to build the thing,

but once she got up there, she still had an eye for design.

So as an engineer you can imagine,

I couldn't help but look at the earth and wonder,

how does that work?

What's blindingly obvious when you look at earth,

is water is the key.

But earlier it didn't look like this blue planet that I

saw, it was a dry and baron rock.

For life to thrive like it has done,

the earth needed delivery of water.

We believe soon after the earth was formed,

our water came from space in a hail of violence.

It must have been brutal.

We think it lasted for about 100 million years.

Icy comets and asteroids collided with the planet in that.

To supply us with that top off of water.