Huge asteroids have smashed into the earth, 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. Astronaut Chris Hadfield believes the only chance for human survival is to escape from Earth and build a space colony, but there are real barriers.
The Blue Marble is an image of Earth taken on 1972, from a distance of about 18,000 miles from the planet's surface. It was taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the Moon. Before it was photographed from space, our perspective of Earth was fragmented and disconnected. Recent discoveries have revealed a dynamic and rapidly changing planet, above the crust and below.
When mankind eventually leaves the cradle of Earth and ventures forth into the uncharted territories of the cosmos, where, and what form, will our new homes take?
What might happen if the first manned mission to Mars crashes hundreds of miles from the rocket that would take them back home? Could they survive the crash, and travel across the brutal Martian surface to their home ship? We'll show what the astronauts would have to do to survive dust storms and space radiation, while extracting vital resources like water from the Martian soil itself. It's a dramatic vision of the very near future, where survival can depend on pre-industrial technology and human ingenuity.
Sunset over the plains of Kenya's Maasai Mara, one of Africa's most protected wild spaces. And home to the fastest land animal on Earth, the cheetah. These agile cats have always been thought of as daylight hunters. They target prey from more than a kilometre away and chase it down at over 100 kilometres an hour. In one of these plains, two cheetah brothers attempt a high-speed night hunt with a gang of powerful hyenas on their trail.
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft has just completed one of the most intricate procedures in space exploration. The first mission to deliver rovers onto an asteroid has now descended to its surface for a sample, before returning back to Earth in 2020.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield believes the only chance for human survival is to escape from Earth and build a space colony, but there are real barriers.