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Downloaded from
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Official YIFY movies site:
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[shouts]
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[Herzog] Mérida, on the Yucatán Peninsula,
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is ground zero of the biggest cataclysmthat ever occurred to our planet.
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A whole asteroid hit right here.
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This happened millions of yearsbefore human beings appeared,
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and yet this fireball ritualfeels like a reenactment.
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Certainly, the ancient Mayascould not have known.
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We do not knowwhat in the future is coming at us,
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eventually destroying us.
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But it will look like this fireballover Siberia,
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only much larger.
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What simple dashboard cameras recorded
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feels like science fiction.
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Visitors from other worlds,
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from the dark of the universe, have come.
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And untold numbers are still on their way.
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If something big is going to happen,
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it will illuminate the skyeven in daylight.
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But that may be millions of years away.
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Meteorites have hit our planetall the time,
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and the bigger oneshave changed entire landscapes.
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But they also have lefta deep impact on cultures.
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A good example is Islamic culture.
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According to ancient tradition,
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a stone was sent down by Godfrom heaven
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as a guide for Adam and Evewhere to build an altar.
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The meteorite came down
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where later the holy city of Meccawas built.
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[muezzin proclaims the adhan in Arabic]
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We are here at the holiest siteof the Muslim world.
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In its center, the Kaaba.
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Embedded in its eastern corner,the Black Stone.
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It was already veneratedin pre-Islamic times
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for at least a millennium beforethe prophet Muhammad founded Islam.
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The Black Stoneis framed entirely in silver,
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and nobody is allowed to analyze it,
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but it is almost certainly a meteorite.
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Islam is a religionof 1.9 billion faithful.
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For the pilgrims,
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the Black Stoneis among the most revered of relics.
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It attracts uncountable millionsof touches and kisses.
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As non-Muslims, we are not allowedeven to set foot into the holy city,
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and so we had to rely oncell phone footage of one of the faithful.
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[clamoring]
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[speaking Arabic]
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[man speaks Arabic, laughs]
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[clamoring]
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[man kisses]
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Back in the silent vastnessof the Australian desert.
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Clive Oppenheimerof Cambridge University,
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who started our voyage of this film,explains to me...
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Scientists only became aware ofthis huge hole in the ground in 1947,
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when it was spotted from the air.
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And the crateris about a kilometer across.
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And it was formedwhen a piece of iron asteroid,
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the size of a battleshipand traveling at 15 kilometers per second,
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plummeted into the ground.
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And the crater wallsaround the floor here
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are made of the ancient rocks
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that were shattered by the impactand thrown about.
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The meteoroid itselfwas almost completely vaporized,
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and only a few fragments of it
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have been foundscattered across the surrounding desert.
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The pattern of ejecta
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suggests that the bolidecame from that direction over there.
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The temperatures are so phenomenal
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that it generates a huge thermal plume
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that punches up through the atmosphere,into the stratosphere,
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and it's raining out molten debrisover a very wide area.
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And, of course,there's colossal seismic energy
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that is generated by the impact itself,
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so huge earthquakes.
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I mean,we're in the middle of the desert here,
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but if you imagine this scenario happeningtoday in an urban environment,
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this would be absolutely devastating.
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[Herzog] To be hit by a meteoritehas barely ever happened?
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There was a woman, uh,who was struck by a meteorite
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that came through her roof,through her ceiling,
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and hit her while she was seatedin an armchair watching TV.
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The Sylacauga meteorite.
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She survived itbut had a pretty horrific bruise.
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[Herzog] As bleak and uninviting asthe country around the crater looks,
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there were always aboriginal peoplein this area.
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Many of them make a living as artists.
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Like those in the nearest communityof Billiluna.
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They could not have witnessed the impactmore than 100,000 years ago,
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but there were more recent events
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that could have triggereda cultural memory.
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In their paintings,the crater frequently appears as a motif,
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but it goes deeper than that.
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We met Katie Darkie,
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one of the finest artistsof the community.
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This is one ofyour very own paintings, isn't it?
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Let's have a look at this one.
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Now please tell uswhat we're looking at here.
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It's a beautiful painting.
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This is the sand hill...
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and this is the grass.
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And it hasn't got any karnti.No potatoes.
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Long time ago, the old people said...
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um, one man went huntingthrough the creeks, hunting for birds.
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But he was walking throughthe tunnel underneath the river,
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but we call it a creek.
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And it came outon the other side of the crater
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and then went walking backto where he came from
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when he was hunting.
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And in this story, the crater,how was it formed?
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What's the origin?
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Well, in the kartiya world,there's a meteorite fell in there.
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-That's our story, the whitefellas' story.-The whitefella stories.
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Some say it's a star fell in there.
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But the ancestorsand the old people were telling us
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it's the Rainbow Serpentwho fell in the crater.
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So that's how we gotthree different stories about the crater.
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But it connects in one.
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We always take the kids.
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Every weekend we come and camp out there.
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And that's where we feel the presenceof our ancestors and our family,
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that they are looking after uswhen we go down and visit the crater.
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It's a very special place for us.
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For our families as well.
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[Herzog] Meteorites have fallen at random.
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A significant onein the Alsace region of France.
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But right here it changed human affairs.It influenced history.
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In the distance, the town of Ensisheim.
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In the 15th century,world history was shaped here,
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because the Hapsburg Empireearned legitimacy
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through a falling piece of rock.
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A plaque marks a spot where it fell.
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Clive brought Professor Simon Schaffer,
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a colleague from Cambridge University.
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He is a historian of scienceand one of the few remaining polymaths.
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What happened on that day in, uh--7th of November, 1492?
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So, on this extraordinary day,
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a fireball appearedin the southeast sky in that direction,
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moving incredibly fastand whistling as it came.
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And then it hit this fieldat about 11:30 in the morning.
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There was, according to most reports,
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just one person standing in the field.
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A shepherd boy.
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And he would have seenthe most extraordinary thing.
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He would have seen a 300-pound rockhit the field
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and gouge out a hole.
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The 7th of November, 1492,
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the moment when this stone fell,
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was only a few daysafter another great landfall:
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the arrival of Christopher Columbusand his crew
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in their New World,in the Caribbean.
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It's thanks to Columbus, ultimately,
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that there is corn growing in this field.
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This is the result of the eruptioninto European agriculture
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of crops that up till thenhad only grown in the Americas.
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Indeed, the fall of the stonewas so important
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that there are some chroniclescovering the year 1492
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that only mention the Ensisheim stone
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and simply leave Columbus out.
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It had fallen, perhaps by divine design,as they thought,
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very near an extremely significant town,
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Ensisheim in Alsace.
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Ensisheim at that point
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was the headquartersof the Austrian forces
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in this part of the world.
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And within two weeksof the arrival of the stone,
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the Austrian military commander,
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the commander in chief, Maximilian,also arrived in the town.
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But, for heaven's sake,why did this stone fall here at this time?
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The reason this stone fell in this fieldwas exactly for heaven's sake.
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For those people,
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wonderful supernatural signsin the heavens were messages.
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This was, as it were,an e-mail sent from God
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to the subjects of Maximilian
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to tell them that his rule was legitimate,
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that he would defeat his enemies,
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and that they should obey his commands.
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Where do you get your fascination from?
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I think one of the things that I findcompletely obsessional about meteorites
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is that they carry sense,that they carry meaning.
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They arrive, so it was thought,with other kinds of falls.
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With, uh, body partsand frogs and rains of blood.
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With plagues and other catastrophes.
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Something like a meteoriteis an organism,
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an animal, almost, that speaks to us.
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And I think that'sa very powerful and eloquent idea.
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The idea that, um,meteorites have meaning,
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and the task of humanityis to interpret what that meaning is.
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[Herzog]Simon Schaffer could have continued,
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without getting boring,nonstop for the next eight hours.
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But we wanted to see the remainsof the real stone in the local museum.
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It feels unreal, inviting fantasies.
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The mayor of town wanted to greet us,
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here flanked by friends of the meteorite.
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This emblem is takenfrom a medieval woodcut.
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You find it everywhere.
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But today it means thinking backand thinking ahead in centuries.
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Did these membersof the brotherhood of the stone
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have a far-off future in mind?
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What are they thinking?
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What far-reaching plans do they have?
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What if the human race became extinct?
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What would we leavefor future astronauts of an alien galaxy
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to demonstrate that we would not leavea fallen comrade behind?
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Right next to the stone,we discovered this installation.
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[speaking French]
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[Herzog] "Hi, my name is Jean,"
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says the simulacrum,hoping the aliens speak French.
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"I am a miner.
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And this is how beautifulour world looked."
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[continues in French]
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[Herzog] "When danger for our planetbecame visible in the night sky,
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we took precautions.
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We dug tunnelsand built shelters underground.
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We think we have a chanceto survive a whole decade.
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If a big firestorm comes,
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I'm confidentthe human race can survive it.
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But I am not a prophet. I'm just a miner."
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[continues in French]
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"I wish you a good end to your visit."
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Next destination, the big sports arenain Oslo, Norway.
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It is so spaciousthat it houses an entire football field.
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But we were interested in its roof,
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and we were interested in this man,Jon Larsen,
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Norway's most famous jazz musician.
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But it is as a citizen scientist
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that he has every reasonto be on this big roof.
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[playing jazz music]
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[Oppenheimer] How did this all start?How did you find this place?
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[Larsen] I searched on, um, Google Earth
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and found the largest roofthat I could see.
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And this sports arena was probablythe largest in Oslo at that time.
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And then I realized the...
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the small object will roll down the sideand accumulate along here
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and end up close to the drain.
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And, as we can see,there is a lot of dirt here,
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but withinwe will find the cosmic dust particles.
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How did you get started?
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You've had a four-decades-long careeras a successful musician.
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Why have you ended up on rooftops?Was it to escape your fans?
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No. Uh, I've always collected rocksand been interested in geology.
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And that has been my hobby all my life.
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So ten years ago, when suddenly onthe breakfast table one morning, outdoors,
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uh, I discovered a shining black doton my table
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which hadn't been theretwo seconds earlier.
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And I picked it up with my finger,
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and because of my backgroundas an amateur mineralogist,
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I could see,"Wow, this is actually a small rock."
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And, uh, we were like,
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"Where did it come from?Is it from space perhaps? I don't know."
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But then I started to googleand found out
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that there are some, uh,strange small cosmic dust particles
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called micrometeorites.
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And then it all began.
254
00:19:57,698 --> 00:19:59,074
And you think there are some here.
255
00:19:59,157 --> 00:20:02,494
What's the equipment that you needto collect this goop?
256
00:20:03,203 --> 00:20:05,289
My main weapon is this magnet.
257
00:20:05,372 --> 00:20:08,208
And I use the magnet mainly because the...
258
00:20:08,792 --> 00:20:10,961
micrometeorites are magnetic.
259
00:20:11,044 --> 00:20:14,173
First I put the magnet itself into, uh,
260
00:20:14,256 --> 00:20:17,593
just protecting small ziplockplastic bag, like this.
261
00:20:18,635 --> 00:20:20,929
And then the hook is handy, literally...
262
00:20:21,013 --> 00:20:25,934
[Herzog] It is astounding that Jon Larsen,with such primitive equipment,
263
00:20:26,018 --> 00:20:29,646
has foundeda completely new branch of science.
264
00:20:30,022 --> 00:20:33,275
[Larsen]And now this will be the sampling area.
265
00:20:33,358 --> 00:20:35,694
I will move it down on the ground,like this.
266
00:20:37,070 --> 00:20:42,201
Heavy particles will roll downand remain at the heaviest part.
267
00:20:42,993 --> 00:20:46,830
This might be some microscopic,uh, magnetic particles.
268
00:20:47,372 --> 00:20:49,791
I'll look at it laterunder the microscope.
269
00:20:49,875 --> 00:20:53,754
What's the flux of these cosmic particlesto the Earth per day?
270
00:20:53,837 --> 00:20:55,297
Do we know the figure?
271
00:20:55,380 --> 00:20:57,799
Yeah, approximately 100 metric tons.
272
00:20:57,883 --> 00:21:04,181
Imagine two large trucks of sandpouring cosmic dust over Earth every day.
273
00:21:04,264 --> 00:21:08,101
But, uh, that equals one small particle
274
00:21:08,185 --> 00:21:11,855
-per year per square meter.-So--
275
00:21:12,314 --> 00:21:14,942
These particles are messengers,aren't they?
276
00:21:15,025 --> 00:21:17,861
This seemed to bea very particular message for you.
277
00:21:17,945 --> 00:21:19,029
Yeah, to me it is.
278
00:21:19,112 --> 00:21:22,824
And they are the oldest matter there is.
279
00:21:23,408 --> 00:21:25,202
Nothing has traveled further.
280
00:21:25,285 --> 00:21:29,331
When I pick out one micrometeoriteand feel it on my finger,
281
00:21:30,082 --> 00:21:34,127
no human beinghas ever touched anything older.
282
00:21:34,211 --> 00:21:38,465
I mean, it's really looking the eternityin the eye.
283
00:21:38,549 --> 00:21:42,302
This is the ashes of another generation,
284
00:21:42,386 --> 00:21:44,513
previous generation of dying stars.
285
00:21:45,055 --> 00:21:49,268
So it has a history that goesall the way back to the big bang.
286
00:21:52,187 --> 00:21:53,897
[Herzog] This is Jan Braly Kihle,
287
00:21:53,981 --> 00:21:59,611
a geologist who will analyze Jon's samplesunder the microscope.
288
00:21:59,695 --> 00:22:02,072
We loved his outfit as Wyatt Earp.
289
00:22:02,614 --> 00:22:04,199
He was born in Texas.
290
00:22:05,158 --> 00:22:06,660
But there's more to him.
291
00:22:07,286 --> 00:22:09,913
He's a four-time cancer survivor,
292
00:22:09,997 --> 00:22:14,793
two times, according to him,stark naked death sentences.
293
00:22:15,711 --> 00:22:19,089
Wanting to contribute to cancer research,
294
00:22:19,173 --> 00:22:24,052
he's now involved in pioneering workwith new cancer treatments.
295
00:22:24,553 --> 00:22:25,971
[Larsen] This is the underworld.
296
00:22:26,054 --> 00:22:29,808
This is where we try to makethe photographical documentation.
297
00:22:30,601 --> 00:22:32,936
-And this is Jan Kihle, my friend.-Hi.
298
00:22:33,020 --> 00:22:34,479
We have worked together for years
299
00:22:34,563 --> 00:22:39,610
to make high-resolution color photographsof the micrometeorites
300
00:22:40,110 --> 00:22:44,948
at such a, uh, magnificationthat it's made nowhere else in the world.
301
00:22:45,866 --> 00:22:47,659
[Oppenheimer]How much magnification do you need?
302
00:22:47,743 --> 00:22:49,995
[Larsen] You can seethese particles are so small
303
00:22:50,078 --> 00:22:52,289
it's practically not possible to see them.
304
00:22:52,372 --> 00:22:57,127
We need 2,000, or better,3,000 times magnification.
305
00:22:57,544 --> 00:23:00,964
And then the original photowill be one meter in diameter.
306
00:23:01,048 --> 00:23:02,132
That's what we need.
307
00:23:02,549 --> 00:23:04,718
You know, when everyone saysthis was impossible,
308
00:23:04,801 --> 00:23:07,596
now we have madea completely new kind of science.
309
00:23:07,679 --> 00:23:12,309
And you recall the kind of feedbackwe all got from, uh, colleagues.
310
00:23:12,392 --> 00:23:14,645
-[Kihle] They were laughing hilarious...-Yes. Oh, yes.
311
00:23:14,728 --> 00:23:17,689
...when they asked us,"What you gonna do? What?
312
00:23:18,148 --> 00:23:20,192
Everybody knowsthat that's impossible.
313
00:23:20,275 --> 00:23:24,488
You know, the signal-to-noise ratio,it's beyond one to one billion.
314
00:23:24,571 --> 00:23:25,739
Make my day."
315
00:23:27,241 --> 00:23:29,868
Did it hurt you, that time?
316
00:23:29,952 --> 00:23:31,078
[Larsen] Of course not.
317
00:23:31,703 --> 00:23:33,330
This is how science works.
318
00:23:33,413 --> 00:23:37,042
It has nothing to do with feelings.It's just about curiosity.
319
00:23:37,668 --> 00:23:39,962
[Kihle] So this is from earlier today.
320
00:23:40,754 --> 00:23:43,799
[Larsen] When we see that specialtype of texture, then we know,
321
00:23:43,882 --> 00:23:48,136
"Okay, this is a micrometeoriteand not an industrial particle."
322
00:23:48,220 --> 00:23:50,264
[Oppenheimer] And it's obviouslyquite blurred at the moment.
323
00:23:50,347 --> 00:23:52,432
Can we-- Can we takea photograph of it?
324
00:23:52,516 --> 00:23:54,643
-[Larsen chuckles] No, we-- No.-[Kihle] No.
325
00:23:54,726 --> 00:23:55,811
If we just, uh--
326
00:23:55,894 --> 00:24:00,148
Our heartbeats, when we gettoo enthusiastic, will make disturbances.
327
00:24:00,232 --> 00:24:01,275
So it's not possible.
328
00:24:01,358 --> 00:24:04,069
We'll have to leave the roomwhen we actually take the photos.
329
00:24:04,778 --> 00:24:07,406
Where have these particles come fromin the first place?
330
00:24:07,489 --> 00:24:10,617
Oh, that's a good question,because we don't know the answer.
331
00:24:11,118 --> 00:24:13,203
They come, obviously, from space.
332
00:24:13,287 --> 00:24:15,706
So some of themare from the asteroid belt.
333
00:24:15,789 --> 00:24:17,916
Others may come from cometary matter.
334
00:24:18,417 --> 00:24:23,839
But, again, it might be particlesfrom other galaxies, other solar systems.
335
00:24:24,673 --> 00:24:27,759
We don't know the parent bodyof each individual grain.
336
00:24:28,343 --> 00:24:29,803
It's just amazing.
337
00:24:29,887 --> 00:24:33,724
Each Tuesday nightwhen Jon brings in new material
338
00:24:34,224 --> 00:24:35,350
we're just flabbergasted.
339
00:24:35,434 --> 00:24:37,895
It's-- It's like being a kid again.
340
00:24:37,978 --> 00:24:41,857
These particles are small and solitaryalso in space.
341
00:24:41,940 --> 00:24:46,820
Some of them have never reachedthe, uh, larger scale
342
00:24:46,904 --> 00:24:49,031
of, let's say, building--
343
00:24:49,114 --> 00:24:52,284
starting to build small planetsin the asteroid belt.
344
00:24:52,743 --> 00:24:56,788
It's actually cosmic dust.Dust is the currency of the cosmos.
345
00:24:57,289 --> 00:25:01,293
[Kihle] Here on the top, you have,for instance, this is iron-nickel alloy.
346
00:25:02,920 --> 00:25:07,633
And, uh, here you have very nicebeginning of crystallization.
347
00:25:07,716 --> 00:25:09,593
Started out with just glass.
348
00:25:10,552 --> 00:25:13,013
And now it'll start to crystallizeolivine crystals.
349
00:25:13,722 --> 00:25:18,227
And this outside isa very, very thin rim of iron sulfides.
350
00:25:18,310 --> 00:25:21,355
[Oppenheimer] This looks like almost,sort of, an icy exoplanet.
351
00:25:21,438 --> 00:25:22,898
[Kihle]Looks like packs. Yeah, yeah.
352
00:25:22,981 --> 00:25:25,651
[Oppenheimer]With the icebergs breaking up.
353
00:25:25,734 --> 00:25:28,153
[Larsen] This one, I think,is particularly interesting.
354
00:25:28,237 --> 00:25:34,117
It has a very high temperatureat atmospheric entry.
355
00:25:34,201 --> 00:25:36,453
In the front, which is up,
356
00:25:36,537 --> 00:25:40,082
that is the direction of movementin the Earth's atmosphere.
357
00:25:40,165 --> 00:25:45,337
Then when it starts to decelerate,the heavy metal core is pushed forward,
358
00:25:45,420 --> 00:25:49,049
uh, by the, um... inertia
359
00:25:49,508 --> 00:25:53,929
and ends up like a metal moundin the front of the particle.
360
00:25:54,763 --> 00:25:58,475
[Kihle] Again, the typical,with the iron-nickel in front.
361
00:25:58,559 --> 00:26:04,147
So, I mean, though we have collected now2,500 different specimens,
362
00:26:04,231 --> 00:26:05,858
none are identical.
363
00:26:06,817 --> 00:26:08,861
[Larsen] So when you start to--
364
00:26:08,944 --> 00:26:11,989
to get to know the micrometeoritesand the cosmic dust particles,
365
00:26:12,072 --> 00:26:16,702
then you will recognize them as verydifferent from the terrestrial geology.
366
00:26:16,785 --> 00:26:21,164
They have been through a processwith speed, in hypervelocity,
367
00:26:21,248 --> 00:26:23,959
50 times the speed of a rifle bullet
368
00:26:24,418 --> 00:26:26,503
and temperatures from hell.
369
00:26:26,587 --> 00:26:29,506
And then they end uplike treasures from space.
370
00:27:08,253 --> 00:27:13,509
[Herzog] The beauty and strangenessthat we just saw can become even stranger.
371
00:27:13,592 --> 00:27:15,219
This is what the pattern looks like.
372
00:27:16,094 --> 00:27:19,556
If you hold it down, I'll go up frontand, uh, to the board and...
373
00:27:19,640 --> 00:27:22,476
[Herzog] The patternthat Clive is projecting here
374
00:27:22,559 --> 00:27:26,480
is proof of somethingthat was believed to be unthinkable.
375
00:27:26,563 --> 00:27:30,108
It has to do with matterof crystalline structure
376
00:27:30,192 --> 00:27:32,945
that seemed to be utterly impossible.
377
00:27:33,028 --> 00:27:35,489
So-called quasicrystals.
378
00:27:36,281 --> 00:27:40,369
This is the man who refusedto accept the impossibility.
379
00:27:40,827 --> 00:27:46,750
He's a world-renowned cosmologist,Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.
380
00:27:46,834 --> 00:27:52,881
You ended up finding evidenceof a quasicrystal, a natural quasicrystal,
381
00:27:52,965 --> 00:27:55,259
from the universe found in a meteorite.
382
00:27:55,342 --> 00:27:57,261
But, I mean, what is a quasicrystal?
383
00:27:58,387 --> 00:28:02,891
So, a quasicrystal is a form of matterthat we thought was impossible.
384
00:28:03,392 --> 00:28:07,145
For hundreds of years, we were convincedthat we had proven that it was impossible.
385
00:28:07,646 --> 00:28:12,067
Um, but, as we now know today,not only is it possible,
386
00:28:12,150 --> 00:28:14,611
but it was made in the universe long ago,
387
00:28:14,695 --> 00:28:16,280
long before we ever imagined.
388
00:28:16,363 --> 00:28:17,990
But let's begin with something simple.
389
00:28:18,824 --> 00:28:21,660
[Herzog]Crystals follow a pattern of order,
390
00:28:21,743 --> 00:28:24,413
like the tiling of your bathroom floor.
391
00:28:24,496 --> 00:28:27,374
-[Steinhardt] Okay.-[Oppenheimer] Just simple squares.
392
00:28:27,457 --> 00:28:30,169
[Herzog] Square tiles fit seamlessly.
393
00:28:30,252 --> 00:28:33,839
But with pentagons, a fivefold symmetry,
394
00:28:33,922 --> 00:28:35,465
you are quickly in trouble.
395
00:28:35,924 --> 00:28:38,177
[Oppenheimer]Let's come out this way a little bit.
396
00:28:38,677 --> 00:28:40,095
And, uh...
397
00:28:40,512 --> 00:28:42,264
I can already seewhere the problem's gonna come from.
398
00:28:42,347 --> 00:28:44,183
[Steinhardt]Yeah, you see what's happening?
399
00:28:44,266 --> 00:28:47,436
We've opened up a gap.So now we have some choices to make.
400
00:28:47,519 --> 00:28:49,313
We're not gonna be able to fill that in.
401
00:28:49,396 --> 00:28:51,023
[Oppenheimer]I could either put it there or there,
402
00:28:51,106 --> 00:28:53,192
-but there's never gonna be a way to...-Yeah.
403
00:28:54,401 --> 00:28:55,986
[Steinhardt] Atoms hate having gaps,
404
00:28:56,069 --> 00:28:58,280
so the moment you produce gapswith real atoms,
405
00:28:58,363 --> 00:29:00,490
they're going to move aroundand get rid of them.
406
00:29:00,574 --> 00:29:04,077
Fivefold symmetry was famouslyforbidden for matter.
407
00:29:04,536 --> 00:29:09,208
[Herzog] But quasicrystals are evenmore complex and mysterious than this.
408
00:29:10,083 --> 00:29:13,545
Let's just take a lookat a quasicrystal pattern first
409
00:29:13,629 --> 00:29:16,298
to get a visual impressionof what they're like.
410
00:29:16,381 --> 00:29:20,677
So, a good example is this tilingthat you see on the table.
411
00:29:20,761 --> 00:29:25,098
Uh, if you study it, you'll see it's madeof only two pieces, those two shapes.
412
00:29:25,641 --> 00:29:26,808
[Oppenheimer] They're chickens.
413
00:29:27,684 --> 00:29:30,145
[Herzog]This looks like a puzzle for children,
414
00:29:30,229 --> 00:29:33,315
but there is ingenious mathematicsbehind it.
415
00:29:34,316 --> 00:29:38,487
[Steinhardt] This pattern was discoveredby Sir Roger Penrose in the 1970s.
416
00:29:39,446 --> 00:29:43,367
A mathematician and sometimesa cosmologist as well.
417
00:29:44,201 --> 00:29:47,579
[Herzog] It is astonishingthat a quasicrystal pattern
418
00:29:47,663 --> 00:29:51,708
can be found in a shrinein Isfahan, in Iran.
419
00:29:52,167 --> 00:29:56,964
Without any knowledge ofthe underlying mathematical principles,
420
00:29:57,047 --> 00:30:00,092
artisans more than 500 years ago
421
00:30:00,175 --> 00:30:04,596
solved the impossible geometryof fivefold symmetry.
422
00:30:05,597 --> 00:30:06,807
[Steinhardt] There we go.
423
00:30:09,226 --> 00:30:10,352
Now, I should warn you...
424
00:30:10,435 --> 00:30:12,563
[Herzog] The warning was justified.
425
00:30:13,021 --> 00:30:16,733
Yes, indeed, it gets so complicated now
426
00:30:16,817 --> 00:30:20,279
that we are not going to torture youwith details.
427
00:30:20,737 --> 00:30:22,239
Just a sample.
428
00:30:22,948 --> 00:30:27,911
So, instead of just one icosahedron,we have an icosahedron of icosahedra.
429
00:30:28,495 --> 00:30:31,790
And we said, "Oh, maybe that's a wayof building something ever outwards
430
00:30:31,874 --> 00:30:33,375
that maintains this structure."
431
00:30:34,042 --> 00:30:35,252
But we ran into trouble.
432
00:30:35,961 --> 00:30:38,964
[Herzog]But this model here solved the problem.
433
00:30:39,047 --> 00:30:41,967
It represents a true quasicrystal.
434
00:30:42,050 --> 00:30:44,052
...and you could only just buildthis plane...
435
00:30:44,136 --> 00:30:47,848
[Herzog] Now Steinhardtwanted to find one in nature.
436
00:30:50,225 --> 00:30:53,353
You ended up doing fieldwork in Kamchatka.
437
00:30:53,437 --> 00:30:55,606
That must've been inspiredthrough the theoretical--
438
00:30:55,689 --> 00:30:57,524
Yeah. Inspired by this model.
439
00:30:57,608 --> 00:30:58,901
Because what this model says:
440
00:30:58,984 --> 00:31:02,779
"Well, actually, if the atoms have forcesthat are like these interlocks,
441
00:31:02,863 --> 00:31:05,324
they have no choicebut to form this structure."
442
00:31:05,407 --> 00:31:06,950
It immediately got me to thinking,
443
00:31:07,034 --> 00:31:11,413
"Is it possible that nature has madea quasicrystal before humans did?"
444
00:31:11,496 --> 00:31:16,627
And so that began a decades-long searchfor a natural quasicrystal.
445
00:31:17,169 --> 00:31:21,882
We eventually found a mineralogistin Florence named Luca Bindi,
446
00:31:21,965 --> 00:31:25,802
who had in his museuma tiny little sample of--
447
00:31:26,303 --> 00:31:28,889
well, a rock, a complex rock,
448
00:31:28,972 --> 00:31:32,226
which had inside ita little grain of quasicrystal.
449
00:31:32,976 --> 00:31:35,229
By studying that particular sample,
450
00:31:35,312 --> 00:31:39,274
we had some hints that what we hadin hand was a piece of a meteorite.
451
00:31:39,358 --> 00:31:44,655
But to prove the case, we had to find outwhere that rock really came from
452
00:31:44,738 --> 00:31:47,616
and see if we could gather moreof the sample to prove the case.
453
00:31:48,158 --> 00:31:51,203
[Herzog]So Paul Steinhardt and Luca Bindi
454
00:31:51,286 --> 00:31:54,915
set out on an expeditionto easternmost Russia,
455
00:31:54,998 --> 00:31:56,959
close to the Bering Strait.
456
00:31:59,878 --> 00:32:04,091
The red marker shows the siteof the meteorite fragments.
457
00:32:05,008 --> 00:32:09,763
They were found along a creeknamed Listvenitovyi,
458
00:32:10,180 --> 00:32:12,099
of which nobody has ever heard.
459
00:32:13,141 --> 00:32:18,438
The expedition included membersof the original Russian geological team
460
00:32:18,522 --> 00:32:22,317
that had found the first sampledecades ago.
461
00:32:36,874 --> 00:32:39,918
They had to negotiate uncharted terrain,
462
00:32:40,002 --> 00:32:42,921
totally novel for Paul Steinhardt,
463
00:32:43,005 --> 00:32:49,636
whose outdoor experience did not extendbeyond the lawns of Princeton University.
464
00:33:00,397 --> 00:33:03,817
Myriads of mosquitoes tormented him.
465
00:33:04,318 --> 00:33:07,696
Here we see him with a mosquito netover his face.
466
00:33:08,280 --> 00:33:10,365
His sleep was fitful.
467
00:33:10,782 --> 00:33:15,370
Bears not only appeared in his nightmares,they were really out there.
468
00:33:16,622 --> 00:33:20,584
Their hard work to find fragmentsof the meteorite paid off.
469
00:33:21,710 --> 00:33:25,172
First inspection of their findingslooked promising.
470
00:33:26,215 --> 00:33:30,344
Now Bindi and Steinhardthad reason to celebrate,
471
00:33:30,427 --> 00:33:35,307
although they could not yet knowif quasicrystals were present.
472
00:33:37,351 --> 00:33:41,647
The X-ray diffraction patternof the newly found samples
473
00:33:41,730 --> 00:33:44,900
revealed the forbidden fivefold symmetry,
474
00:33:44,983 --> 00:33:49,363
proof there were quasicrystalswithin the meteorite.
475
00:33:49,446 --> 00:33:52,199
[Oppenheimer] Could you describeyour emotion when you saw this?
476
00:33:52,950 --> 00:33:56,662
I think everything-- time seemedto stop for me at that moment.
477
00:33:56,745 --> 00:33:58,914
Uh, as...
478
00:34:00,165 --> 00:34:04,336
Just seeing this imagejust told me immediately
479
00:34:04,419 --> 00:34:07,464
that everything we had beentrying to achieve for decades
480
00:34:07,548 --> 00:34:09,424
had now been achieved.
481
00:34:09,507 --> 00:34:13,762
Plus, we had verifiedthat this quasicrystal
482
00:34:13,846 --> 00:34:17,516
not only was formed in nature,but had been formed in space.
483
00:34:19,101 --> 00:34:22,312
[Herzog] Leaving the arcane mysteriesof matter behind,
484
00:34:22,771 --> 00:34:27,525
we turn toward some more average rocksthat had come down upon us.
485
00:34:27,609 --> 00:34:30,070
...so we have some sticky mats here.
486
00:34:31,905 --> 00:34:36,534
[Herzog] Arizona State Universityhouses a large collection.
487
00:34:36,618 --> 00:34:39,663
The dirt that we have from outsidegoing into the clean vault.
488
00:34:39,746 --> 00:34:42,666
[Herzog]But wild stories were waiting for us.
489
00:34:42,748 --> 00:34:43,583
So when we go in,
490
00:34:43,667 --> 00:34:45,752
make sure you just step on thereto get the dirt off your feet.
491
00:34:45,835 --> 00:34:46,670
All right.
492
00:34:46,753 --> 00:34:49,464
[Herzog] Laurence Garvie,its curator, guided us.
493
00:34:49,547 --> 00:34:53,927
We have a positive pressure in here,just to keep sort of clean air coming in.
494
00:34:54,011 --> 00:34:55,637
-Got the dirt off? Good.-[Oppenheimer] Yep.
495
00:34:55,721 --> 00:34:59,308
And we're also on camera all the time.Smile to the camera. Wave to the camera.
496
00:34:59,933 --> 00:35:02,519
But really what's important here
497
00:35:02,603 --> 00:35:05,355
is that, when we're ina meteorite facility like this,
498
00:35:05,439 --> 00:35:08,734
is to keep the meteoritesas clean as possible.
499
00:35:08,817 --> 00:35:10,694
You know, usually we think oftrying to keep ourselves clean.
500
00:35:10,777 --> 00:35:13,822
Here, we're trying to keep the greasefrom our fingers off the samples.
501
00:35:13,906 --> 00:35:16,700
So can you please wear some gloves,and I'll put some gloves on as well.
502
00:35:16,783 --> 00:35:18,660
And we're doing this'cause I wanna show you
503
00:35:18,744 --> 00:35:23,123
one of the most spectacular meteorites,that only fell a few weeks ago,
504
00:35:23,207 --> 00:35:24,875
and actually fell on Costa Rica.
505
00:35:24,958 --> 00:35:28,962
And it's a meteoritethat's full of organic compounds.
506
00:35:29,046 --> 00:35:30,464
And, you know, that's important.
507
00:35:30,547 --> 00:35:32,257
'Cause that tells us aboutour early solar system
508
00:35:32,341 --> 00:35:35,636
and possibly the formation of lifein our solar system as well.
509
00:35:35,719 --> 00:35:39,223
Now, I actually have the samples here,in these special cabinets.
510
00:35:39,306 --> 00:35:40,849
These are nitrogen cabinets.
511
00:35:40,933 --> 00:35:43,018
Right? So we have nitrogen-- dry nitrogen.
512
00:35:43,101 --> 00:35:46,605
Here's what's important: dry nitrogenbeing fed into the cabinets.
513
00:35:46,688 --> 00:35:51,401
So when I open it you can actually hearthe nitrogen being fed into the cabinets.
514
00:35:51,485 --> 00:35:53,612
And these meteorites are now preserved.
515
00:35:53,695 --> 00:35:56,740
We don't have water going onto them.We don't have oxygen going onto them.
516
00:35:56,823 --> 00:35:59,660
So it's the best preservationthat we currently have.
517
00:35:59,743 --> 00:36:00,994
[Oppenheimer]And that's what the hissing is?
518
00:36:01,078 --> 00:36:03,288
-That's what the hissing is.-[tanks hissing]
519
00:36:03,372 --> 00:36:06,458
So, to give an example, here is...
520
00:36:08,502 --> 00:36:11,380
one of the most amazing meteorites.
521
00:36:12,089 --> 00:36:13,674
There, see what it's called?
522
00:36:14,216 --> 00:36:15,551
[together] "The Doghouse."
523
00:36:16,051 --> 00:36:17,803
[Garvie mutters] So let's just...
524
00:36:21,807 --> 00:36:23,100
So...
525
00:36:23,183 --> 00:36:24,977
have to add, do not drop this.
526
00:36:25,060 --> 00:36:27,646
-[Oppenheimer] I'll try not to. Okay.-Please don't drop it.
527
00:36:30,858 --> 00:36:35,988
[Garvie] So, this stone actually fellonly a few weeks ago in Costa Rica.
528
00:36:36,071 --> 00:36:37,781
And this one actually fellthrough a doghouse
529
00:36:37,865 --> 00:36:39,908
with the dogthat was still sleeping in it.
530
00:36:39,992 --> 00:36:43,287
-The dog was unharmed, I hope.-It missed the dog by millimeters
531
00:36:43,370 --> 00:36:46,373
and embedded itself in the groundright next to the dog.
532
00:36:46,999 --> 00:36:49,168
So what makes this one special as well,
533
00:36:49,251 --> 00:36:51,170
it's actually got some dog hairstill stuck to it.
534
00:36:51,253 --> 00:36:52,379
[Oppenheimer] No way.
535
00:36:52,462 --> 00:36:55,174
[Garvie]And what makes this one so amazing
536
00:36:55,257 --> 00:36:57,759
is the fact that, if you smell it...
537
00:36:59,094 --> 00:37:02,890
you can actually smellthe organic compounds that are in here.
538
00:37:02,973 --> 00:37:06,476
These are 4.5 billion-year-old compounds
539
00:37:06,560 --> 00:37:09,313
that were formedon an early planet--
540
00:37:09,396 --> 00:37:11,440
that planet no longer exists--
541
00:37:11,523 --> 00:37:13,275
and got trapped in this stone
542
00:37:13,358 --> 00:37:17,446
and basically just residedin the asteroid belt for 4 billion years
543
00:37:17,529 --> 00:37:19,865
before, for some reason,it left the asteroid belt
544
00:37:19,948 --> 00:37:21,325
and landed in Costa Rica
545
00:37:21,408 --> 00:37:23,952
and is now in our meteorite vault here.
546
00:37:24,036 --> 00:37:26,163
What is that smell?It's a sort of...
547
00:37:26,246 --> 00:37:28,624
We don't actually know,but we think the thing--
548
00:37:28,707 --> 00:37:31,126
it's similar to, like, mothballs.Something similar.
549
00:37:31,210 --> 00:37:33,045
Something similar to that compound.
550
00:37:33,128 --> 00:37:34,880
Like a solvent or something?
551
00:37:34,963 --> 00:37:36,632
Yeah, a little bit. A little bit.
552
00:37:36,715 --> 00:37:38,800
I'm actually gonna put this one back,unless you wanna hold it again.
553
00:37:38,884 --> 00:37:40,177
-No, I---So why-- By the way,
554
00:37:40,260 --> 00:37:42,387
the red is from the roof of the doghouse.
555
00:37:43,430 --> 00:37:46,892
And the whiteis from the floor of the doghouse.
556
00:37:46,975 --> 00:37:49,019
And did the dog instantly realize
557
00:37:49,102 --> 00:37:51,688
that it had receiveda visitor from the heavens?
558
00:37:51,772 --> 00:37:54,399
Well, it didn't, but funny enough,
559
00:37:54,483 --> 00:37:58,946
people have used dogs to lookfor meteorites because of the smell.
560
00:37:59,029 --> 00:38:01,114
They can be trained to find that smell.
561
00:38:02,074 --> 00:38:03,242
Let's put this back now.
562
00:38:09,665 --> 00:38:12,501
[Garvie] This is the Toluca ironfrom the Jiquipilco region.
563
00:38:12,584 --> 00:38:13,585
Here, try this one.
564
00:38:13,669 --> 00:38:15,629
[grunts] Don't drop it on your toe.It'll break.
565
00:38:15,712 --> 00:38:16,713
Oh, my goodness.
566
00:38:16,797 --> 00:38:18,882
So, I mean, that must weigh, what, uh,
567
00:38:18,966 --> 00:38:22,219
I don't know, 30 kilos, 40 kilos,just that one stone.
568
00:38:22,302 --> 00:38:23,595
That's just pure iron ore?
569
00:38:23,679 --> 00:38:25,556
That's just pure iron.But nickel-rich iron.
570
00:38:25,639 --> 00:38:28,225
-Here, let's not drop it. Ready. Ready.-I'll give you that.
571
00:38:29,643 --> 00:38:33,313
You know, one of the most amazingimpact phenomena never seen on TV
572
00:38:33,397 --> 00:38:35,691
is this material, tektites.
573
00:38:35,774 --> 00:38:40,445
Now, here we have--There was an impact on the Earth
574
00:38:40,529 --> 00:38:44,449
that basically meltedlarge amounts of the Earth's surface.
575
00:38:44,533 --> 00:38:47,786
In this case, probably several thousandsquare kilometers of ground.
576
00:38:47,870 --> 00:38:50,455
It was almost instantaneously melted.
577
00:38:50,539 --> 00:38:52,291
And then the shock from that impact
578
00:38:52,374 --> 00:38:55,669
then sprayed this materialover about a third of the Earth.
579
00:38:55,752 --> 00:38:56,753
When did this happen?
580
00:38:56,837 --> 00:38:59,590
We think about--We've dated it about 750,000 years ago.
581
00:38:59,673 --> 00:39:01,675
So, you know, sounds like a long time ago,
582
00:39:01,758 --> 00:39:04,511
but from a geological time period,it's actually just yesterday.
583
00:39:04,595 --> 00:39:06,680
-It's a very recent phenomenon.-It's glass?
584
00:39:06,763 --> 00:39:09,266
This is just-- So, what this stuff here--If you listen...
585
00:39:09,349 --> 00:39:10,350
[clinking]
586
00:39:10,434 --> 00:39:13,562
This is just glass,but this is not extraterrestrial glass.
587
00:39:13,645 --> 00:39:18,317
This is the Earth,of which you had all this material melted,
588
00:39:18,400 --> 00:39:22,613
just turned into a melt,and then sprayed over the Earth.
589
00:39:22,696 --> 00:39:26,450
And so you find this materialin Southeast Asia, Philippines,
590
00:39:26,533 --> 00:39:29,244
through Indonesia,all the way down through Australia
591
00:39:29,328 --> 00:39:31,496
and then all the way down into Antarctica.
592
00:39:31,580 --> 00:39:34,333
And so this was a humongous event.
593
00:39:34,416 --> 00:39:37,211
Look at the shapes though.You know what these shapes are telling us?
594
00:39:37,294 --> 00:39:41,965
This is telling us that this stuff wassprayed and then solidified in the air.
595
00:39:43,133 --> 00:39:45,260
If we'd been therewhen this thing came down,
596
00:39:45,344 --> 00:39:46,887
that would've been the end of us?
597
00:39:46,970 --> 00:39:48,180
Oh, I mean, everything.
598
00:39:48,263 --> 00:39:50,974
Imagine-- And I meanseveral thousand square kilometers--
599
00:39:51,058 --> 00:39:54,937
everything underneath thatwas almost instantly turned to glass.
600
00:39:55,312 --> 00:39:57,689
So, yes. You'd be sitting therehaving your cup of tea,
601
00:39:57,773 --> 00:39:59,942
you'd be turned to glass. Everything.
602
00:40:04,863 --> 00:40:08,742
[Herzog] Each one of these stonesfrom darker worlds out there
603
00:40:08,825 --> 00:40:10,327
has its own story.
604
00:40:21,672 --> 00:40:26,635
Throughout history, meteoriteshave captivated human imagination.
605
00:40:27,427 --> 00:40:30,639
A tool as simpleas the light from a cell phone
606
00:40:30,722 --> 00:40:35,602
extols the mysterious beautyof these voyagers from afar.
607
00:41:04,381 --> 00:41:05,799
[woman]What we have here is...
608
00:41:05,883 --> 00:41:10,596
[Herzog] At the same Centerfor Meteorite Studies in Tempe, Arizona,
609
00:41:10,679 --> 00:41:13,307
we met Dr. Meenakshi Wadhwa,
610
00:41:13,390 --> 00:41:16,852
one of the foremost scientistsof meteorites.
611
00:41:16,935 --> 00:41:19,062
...40,000 different meteorites.
612
00:41:19,146 --> 00:41:23,567
-Including a piece by Barbara Hepworth.-[chuckles] Yeah. Exactly.
613
00:41:24,109 --> 00:41:25,652
Um, yeah,
614
00:41:25,736 --> 00:41:29,698
and these are an incredible resourcefor all the work that we do here.
615
00:41:29,781 --> 00:41:31,783
[Oppenheimer]What are we looking at here?
616
00:41:31,867 --> 00:41:34,953
[Wadhwa] So that round objectthat you're seeing,
617
00:41:35,037 --> 00:41:37,664
that is a tiny little--
618
00:41:37,748 --> 00:41:40,334
you can imagine itas the tiny little droplet
619
00:41:40,417 --> 00:41:43,420
that was present in the earliest historyof the solar system,
620
00:41:43,504 --> 00:41:46,381
something like 4.5 billion years ago.
621
00:41:46,465 --> 00:41:48,258
Is this before the planets have accreted?
622
00:41:48,342 --> 00:41:51,929
Yes. So this iswhen there was just gas and dust.
623
00:41:52,012 --> 00:41:54,890
Nothing else. There were no planets,there was no Earth. Nothing.
624
00:41:55,474 --> 00:41:57,059
And these are--
625
00:41:57,142 --> 00:42:00,896
These have been described asdroplets of fiery rain
626
00:42:00,979 --> 00:42:04,233
that were... just condensingout of that nebula,
627
00:42:04,316 --> 00:42:06,443
that cloud of gas and dust.
628
00:42:06,527 --> 00:42:09,530
Um, probably because ofsome sort of shock processes
629
00:42:09,613 --> 00:42:12,491
that were happening in the earliesthistory of our solar system.
630
00:42:12,574 --> 00:42:15,702
And we don't really know, actually,where those shocks were coming from,
631
00:42:15,786 --> 00:42:18,205
but we think those are the kindsof processes that were happening
632
00:42:18,288 --> 00:42:20,958
in, you know, other solar systemsthat are forming today.
633
00:42:21,583 --> 00:42:23,460
And what elements do we find in there?
634
00:42:23,544 --> 00:42:25,963
Yeah, so what you're seeing, you know,
635
00:42:26,046 --> 00:42:29,591
this kind of beautiful stained glasspattern that you're seeing?
636
00:42:29,675 --> 00:42:32,052
That's a mineral called olivine.
637
00:42:32,636 --> 00:42:36,932
And this kind of--When I rotate it in this, uh--
638
00:42:37,015 --> 00:42:40,561
As you have this sort of transmitted lightgoing through these minerals,
639
00:42:40,644 --> 00:42:43,397
you are polarize--the light is polarized,
640
00:42:43,480 --> 00:42:45,148
and so the mineral itself
641
00:42:45,232 --> 00:42:48,235
is sort of extinguishing the lightin certain directions.
642
00:42:48,318 --> 00:42:53,115
And so you're kind of seeingthis brightening and then darkening.
643
00:42:53,740 --> 00:42:56,994
It's-- It's like a beautifulstained glass window, really.
644
00:42:57,077 --> 00:43:00,247
-I think it's kinda-- Yeah.-It's gorgeous.
645
00:43:00,330 --> 00:43:02,833
[Wadhwa] Here's a slice,
646
00:43:02,916 --> 00:43:08,547
a thin slice of the very Mars samplethat I first looked at
647
00:43:08,630 --> 00:43:11,967
at the very start of my careerstudying meteorites.
648
00:43:12,050 --> 00:43:15,679
And I was just fascinated,because, you know,
649
00:43:15,762 --> 00:43:18,682
it looked so familiar, but it camefrom a completely different world.
650
00:43:19,474 --> 00:43:23,687
We know that this rock came from Marsbecause it has gases trapped in it
651
00:43:23,770 --> 00:43:27,399
that have the exact same compositionas the Martian atmosphere.
652
00:43:27,482 --> 00:43:30,277
And so when you take a pieceof this rock and you heat it up,
653
00:43:30,360 --> 00:43:34,448
you release these gases, and you canmeasure the composition of that gas,
654
00:43:34,531 --> 00:43:36,992
and it's the exact composition
655
00:43:37,534 --> 00:43:40,621
as what we measuredusing the spacecraft on Mars.
656
00:43:40,704 --> 00:43:43,081
-Incredible.-Yeah, it's incredible.
657
00:44:06,688 --> 00:44:10,108
[Oppenheimer] Was Carl Sagan right,that we're made of that stardust?
658
00:44:10,192 --> 00:44:11,860
We are all stardust, absolutely.
659
00:44:11,944 --> 00:44:16,031
I mean, every, you know,every element in our body
660
00:44:16,114 --> 00:44:20,744
was synthesized in other starsbefore it got here.
661
00:44:20,827 --> 00:44:22,704
So, yeah. We're all stardust.
662
00:44:23,872 --> 00:44:26,124
-Eventually.-A wonderful thought.
663
00:44:26,208 --> 00:44:27,042
Yeah.
664
00:44:27,125 --> 00:44:31,088
[Herzog] This was the only time throughoutthe entire shooting of this film
665
00:44:31,171 --> 00:44:33,423
where I could not resist.
666
00:44:33,507 --> 00:44:36,468
I had to intervene from behind the camera.
667
00:44:37,010 --> 00:44:40,222
I think I'm not stardust. I'm Bavarian.
668
00:44:41,098 --> 00:44:43,475
[laughing]
669
00:44:44,685 --> 00:44:47,187
[Oppenheimer] Yeah,that's made of special stuff, that is.
670
00:44:47,813 --> 00:44:49,857
Yeah. That's right.
671
00:44:58,782 --> 00:45:00,367
[Herzog] Our voyage took us
672
00:45:00,450 --> 00:45:04,496
to wherever large fireballshad plunged down to Earth.
673
00:45:05,372 --> 00:45:09,293
We wanted to knowif life had come from outer space.
674
00:45:10,252 --> 00:45:16,425
This is Ramgarh Crater in Rajasthan,in Northern India, four kilometers across.
675
00:45:17,259 --> 00:45:20,262
From spaceit immediately catches the eye,
676
00:45:20,345 --> 00:45:24,850
but down on the groundyou barely notice you are inside a crater.
677
00:45:25,392 --> 00:45:30,230
However, Hindu temples were built heresince the 10th century.
678
00:45:32,482 --> 00:45:36,403
We were curiousif organic matter in meteorites
679
00:45:36,486 --> 00:45:41,033
could have provided the ingredientsof life on our planet.
680
00:45:42,367 --> 00:45:46,788
We were seeking the expertiseof Professor Nita Sahai,
681
00:45:46,872 --> 00:45:51,001
who studies the transitionfrom chemistry to biology.
682
00:45:52,127 --> 00:45:56,173
And we're in this-- in this,uh, huge crater here,
683
00:45:56,256 --> 00:45:58,175
formed by a meteorite impact.
684
00:45:58,258 --> 00:46:00,802
And, uh, we don't knowwhether it was a carbonaceous one,
685
00:46:00,886 --> 00:46:03,722
but we know that thesecarbonaceous meteorites
686
00:46:03,805 --> 00:46:06,308
have all kindsof organic molecules in them.
687
00:46:06,391 --> 00:46:10,562
What are the key ones that might representbuilding blocks of life?
688
00:46:10,646 --> 00:46:14,441
Actually, all of the building blocksof life have been found in meteorites.
689
00:46:14,525 --> 00:46:17,069
Amino acids that make up proteins,
690
00:46:17,152 --> 00:46:20,072
uh, lipid molecules that make upcell membranes
691
00:46:20,155 --> 00:46:23,075
and, amazingly, even ribose,which is a sugar.
692
00:46:23,158 --> 00:46:25,577
I just find it astonishing, you know,
693
00:46:25,661 --> 00:46:30,332
that you can find sugars and thingsthat make proteins in a meteorite.
694
00:46:30,415 --> 00:46:31,250
[Sahai] Right.
695
00:46:31,333 --> 00:46:35,170
Are they made geologically,like minerals, or...
696
00:46:35,754 --> 00:46:39,341
They're not like minerals, in the sensethat they're organic molecules
697
00:46:39,424 --> 00:46:40,759
and minerals are inorganic,
698
00:46:40,843 --> 00:46:42,970
but they have been formed presumably
699
00:46:43,053 --> 00:46:46,974
by the interactions of organic moleculeswith mineral surfaces.
700
00:46:47,057 --> 00:46:50,727
For example, on interstellar grains,
701
00:46:50,811 --> 00:46:53,772
as well as on the surfacesof the meteorites themselves.
702
00:46:54,356 --> 00:46:56,650
And, I mean, there's still a big step
703
00:46:56,733 --> 00:47:00,445
from having these ingredientsto sparking life.
704
00:47:00,529 --> 00:47:02,406
-Right.-What-- What do we need?
705
00:47:02,489 --> 00:47:04,992
I guess we need some kind of crucibleto put this stuff in
706
00:47:05,075 --> 00:47:06,785
and-- and a heat source?
707
00:47:06,869 --> 00:47:10,205
Yeah. So, you need to getthese simple building blocks
708
00:47:10,289 --> 00:47:12,541
polymerized into longer chains,
709
00:47:12,624 --> 00:47:17,546
because the longer chains have the abilityto fold and be functional.
710
00:47:17,629 --> 00:47:19,631
What do you think of the ideaof panspermia,
711
00:47:19,715 --> 00:47:23,302
that life is dispersedaround the universe?
712
00:47:23,385 --> 00:47:26,054
That-- I mean, is it conceivablethat living organisms
713
00:47:26,138 --> 00:47:29,975
could survive the intense temperaturesand radiation of outer space?
714
00:47:30,517 --> 00:47:33,353
DNA has actually been foundto be quite robust.
715
00:47:33,437 --> 00:47:37,524
And it's possible to survive in space.
716
00:47:37,983 --> 00:47:42,696
And even an entire organism might survivein a spore-like mode.
717
00:47:42,779 --> 00:47:46,450
Uh, 'cause people have actuallydug deep into the Earth
718
00:47:46,533 --> 00:47:50,120
and even a couple of kilometers down
719
00:47:50,204 --> 00:47:54,791
they find bacteria that have been livingthere presumably for millions of years.
720
00:47:54,875 --> 00:47:59,505
Uh, and they survive in this state of,kind of, suspended animation.
721
00:47:59,588 --> 00:48:02,841
Do you have any idea why the priestsbuilt their temples here?
722
00:48:02,925 --> 00:48:05,302
I mean, and this one'sdedicated to Shiva, you know?
723
00:48:05,385 --> 00:48:09,765
I mean, it seems too good to be true,on the floor of a meteorite-impact crater.
724
00:48:09,848 --> 00:48:14,394
It's kind of interesting that this templeis dedicated to Shiva and Parvati.
725
00:48:14,478 --> 00:48:19,900
And it's a tantric temple,which represents creation.
726
00:48:19,983 --> 00:48:22,110
And Shiva is also the god of destruction.
727
00:48:22,569 --> 00:48:25,072
So, in Hindu mythology,there is this idea
728
00:48:25,155 --> 00:48:28,784
of cycles of creationand destruction of the universe.
729
00:48:28,867 --> 00:48:32,704
And, appropriately,it's in a meteor-impact crater site,
730
00:48:32,788 --> 00:48:36,124
where the impact can wipe out life,
731
00:48:36,208 --> 00:48:38,794
but then also deliverthese organic molecules
732
00:48:38,877 --> 00:48:41,129
that could have seeded lifein the first place.
733
00:48:45,592 --> 00:48:50,180
[Herzog] This was confirmedin a similar way by a resident sadhu.
734
00:48:51,014 --> 00:48:56,645
If humanity and all life becomes extinctby war or a meteorite,
735
00:48:56,728 --> 00:49:01,108
life will regenerate at this place,at this crater lake.
736
00:49:10,450 --> 00:49:14,663
We had to go wherethe most colossal fireball came down.
737
00:49:15,622 --> 00:49:19,084
It was at a placewith an unpronounceable name,
738
00:49:19,168 --> 00:49:22,880
at the coastof the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
739
00:49:24,882 --> 00:49:30,804
This is the very place where our planetsuffered an unimaginable apocalypse.
740
00:49:31,597 --> 00:49:34,850
What came down from space right here
741
00:49:34,933 --> 00:49:40,105
had the force of hundreds of millions--possibly thousands of millions--
742
00:49:40,189 --> 00:49:43,066
of atomic bombs Hiroshima's size.
743
00:49:44,610 --> 00:49:47,571
Nothing out here is reminiscent of it.
744
00:49:48,113 --> 00:49:51,992
Only leaden boredomweighs upon everything.
745
00:49:54,203 --> 00:50:00,292
Chicxulub is a beach resortso godforsaken you want to cry.
746
00:50:00,375 --> 00:50:04,046
["A Pesar De Todo" by Ana Gabriel playing]
747
00:50:48,507 --> 00:50:51,510
[music continues]
748
00:51:12,489 --> 00:51:15,826
[Herzog] The dogs here,like all dogs on this planet,
749
00:51:15,909 --> 00:51:19,121
are just too dim-witted to understand
750
00:51:19,204 --> 00:51:22,708
that three-quarters of all specieswere extinguished
751
00:51:22,791 --> 00:51:25,627
by the event that took place right here.
752
00:51:31,550 --> 00:51:35,304
The dinosaurs have only survivedin a local museum.
753
00:51:38,265 --> 00:51:42,477
Their eyes were made by humans.They recognize nothing.
754
00:51:44,062 --> 00:51:46,690
Only their footprints are authentic,
755
00:51:46,773 --> 00:51:50,527
but they showthey were ambling along, not fleeing.
756
00:51:51,612 --> 00:51:54,781
They were obliviousto the sudden death of everything.
757
00:52:13,550 --> 00:52:15,928
This godforsaken spot is at the center
758
00:52:16,011 --> 00:52:19,681
of one of the greatest geologicalcataclysms in Earth history.
759
00:52:20,182 --> 00:52:24,436
It irreversibly changed the course of lifeon the planet.
760
00:52:24,520 --> 00:52:26,605
Some 66 million years ago,
761
00:52:26,688 --> 00:52:29,066
an asteroid, perhaps 10 kilometers across,
762
00:52:29,149 --> 00:52:34,029
came hurtling to the Earthat speeds of 20 kilometers a second.
763
00:52:34,905 --> 00:52:37,574
The force of the impactwas so phenomenal
764
00:52:37,658 --> 00:52:41,495
that it excavated a hole30 kilometers deep.
765
00:52:42,246 --> 00:52:44,373
The crater that formed
766
00:52:44,456 --> 00:52:49,670
stretches out 100 kilometers out to seaand 100 kilometers inland,
767
00:52:50,212 --> 00:52:54,508
and the temperaturesgenerated in the crust from the impact
768
00:52:54,591 --> 00:52:59,805
melted and vaporized the crustand the bolide itself.
769
00:53:00,597 --> 00:53:03,308
There were earthquakes of magnitude 11.
770
00:53:03,392 --> 00:53:07,938
That's a hundred times greaterthan any historical earthquake.
771
00:53:08,021 --> 00:53:10,691
Mega-tsunami, 100-meter-high waves,
772
00:53:10,774 --> 00:53:14,152
ravaged the shorelines of distant oceans,
773
00:53:14,236 --> 00:53:19,658
and a vast pall of dustand molten droplets and gases
774
00:53:19,741 --> 00:53:21,285
soared into the atmosphere,
775
00:53:21,368 --> 00:53:25,998
some of the material even reachingescape velocity and exiting into space.
776
00:53:26,665 --> 00:53:31,044
Those molten droplets rained outover an area of 3,000 kilometers,
777
00:53:31,128 --> 00:53:34,214
igniting firestorms on the land.
778
00:53:34,298 --> 00:53:36,717
[Herzog] I love how movies depict it.
779
00:53:36,800 --> 00:53:40,012
[narrator]800 kilometers from the impact site,
780
00:53:40,095 --> 00:53:41,805
the light is so intense
781
00:53:41,889 --> 00:53:45,142
it causes the flesh of the Alamosaurusto appear transparent...
782
00:53:45,225 --> 00:53:46,935
[dinosaurs roaring]
783
00:53:47,811 --> 00:53:50,981
...and burns images of their shadowsonto the ground.
784
00:53:54,568 --> 00:53:57,154
The scorching light sears their eyeballs.
785
00:53:57,237 --> 00:53:59,740
They now can't seewhat's headed their way.
786
00:54:00,741 --> 00:54:02,117
But they can feel it.
787
00:54:02,576 --> 00:54:03,744
[roars]
788
00:54:04,703 --> 00:54:06,622
Now, mammals, they made it through,
789
00:54:06,705 --> 00:54:10,125
and they took advantageof the new ecological opportunities.
790
00:54:11,376 --> 00:54:14,796
We probably wouldn't be here ourselves,Homo sapiens as a species,
791
00:54:14,880 --> 00:54:17,382
were it not for this colossal impact.
792
00:54:18,967 --> 00:54:23,889
[Herzog] Nobody knew there isan impact crater until the 1970s.
793
00:54:24,431 --> 00:54:30,896
Gravity anomalies and borehole datarevealed its structure and immense size.
794
00:54:31,563 --> 00:54:33,941
The only surface manifestation
795
00:54:34,024 --> 00:54:38,654
is an enigmatic ring of water holescalled cenotes.
796
00:54:39,363 --> 00:54:42,449
They are a geological echo of the impact.
797
00:54:43,617 --> 00:54:47,454
Since there are no rivers and lakesin the Yucatán Peninsula,
798
00:54:47,955 --> 00:54:51,208
these water holes attractedthe ancient Mayas.
799
00:54:52,543 --> 00:54:55,170
Without the presence of cenotes,
800
00:54:55,254 --> 00:54:59,842
this cultural center of Chichén Itzáwould never have been built.
801
00:55:02,010 --> 00:55:05,639
They developed a high culturewith a writing system,
802
00:55:05,722 --> 00:55:10,686
astronomy and monumental architectureof pyramids and temples.
803
00:55:20,404 --> 00:55:24,783
They even built an observatorybefore there were telescopes.
804
00:55:25,284 --> 00:55:28,287
They tracked the positionof celestial bodies.
805
00:55:29,746 --> 00:55:35,419
Their calendar was much more precisethan anything at this historical time.
806
00:55:37,588 --> 00:55:42,176
The Mayas had a deep fascinationof death and the afterlife.
807
00:55:43,093 --> 00:55:48,140
In their belief, there werenine underworlds and 13 heavens.
808
00:55:53,854 --> 00:55:56,648
Wanting to see some of the underworld,
809
00:55:56,732 --> 00:56:00,110
we descended to the bottomof a nearby cenote.
810
00:56:06,033 --> 00:56:11,038
Fátima Tec Pool,a cave expert and archaeologist,
811
00:56:11,121 --> 00:56:14,374
took us to one of the abodesof the rain god.
812
00:56:17,503 --> 00:56:21,089
[Oppenheimer] This cenotewas virtually unknown until very recently.
813
00:56:21,173 --> 00:56:24,801
Tell me, Fátima, what is the relationshipbetween the cenote,
814
00:56:24,885 --> 00:56:28,472
the cave here, and the ritualand belief of the Maya?
815
00:56:29,556 --> 00:56:32,309
[in Spanish] This place is interestingbecause you can see
816
00:56:32,392 --> 00:56:36,021
how the concepts of waterand caves combine.
817
00:56:36,605 --> 00:56:39,024
And how the Mayans usedthese spaces for rituals.
818
00:56:39,566 --> 00:56:45,656
Inside, you can see walls which suggestthe Mayans used to make pilgrimages here
819
00:56:45,739 --> 00:56:47,783
to pass through these sacred walls.
820
00:56:47,866 --> 00:56:50,077
-Can we go in?-Of course, let's go.
821
00:56:58,585 --> 00:57:01,004
As the caves are seen asentrances to the underworld,
822
00:57:01,588 --> 00:57:06,510
we can see here how they made use ofthe natural form of the cave,
823
00:57:06,593 --> 00:57:09,596
to make ritual depositsof human remains,
824
00:57:09,680 --> 00:57:13,809
possibly an ancestor of a Mayan family.
825
00:57:13,892 --> 00:57:17,396
-[Oppenheimer] What era are they from?-Possibly the Preclassic.
826
00:57:19,648 --> 00:57:22,734
We can also see this portal.
827
00:57:22,818 --> 00:57:24,987
This takes us further into the underworld.
828
00:57:26,113 --> 00:57:29,283
There's something else interesting...
829
00:57:35,205 --> 00:57:37,040
A human finger bone.
830
00:57:38,083 --> 00:57:42,087
Deposited here in part of the wall.
831
00:57:42,171 --> 00:57:47,050
Look closely and you can see ashes,possibly a kind of mortuary treatment,
832
00:57:47,676 --> 00:57:50,679
before being placed in the wall.
833
00:57:50,762 --> 00:57:53,682
[in English] Is it safe for human beingsto enter the underworld,
834
00:57:53,765 --> 00:57:55,058
the abode of the gods?
835
00:57:55,142 --> 00:57:56,894
[in Spanish] Yes, of course!
836
00:58:14,203 --> 00:58:18,040
[Herzog] We timed our visitwith the Mexican Day of the Dead.
837
00:58:18,790 --> 00:58:21,502
For the Mayans, death was an obsession.
838
00:58:22,461 --> 00:58:26,507
There are endless friezeswith nothing but skulls.
839
00:58:39,853 --> 00:58:42,481
Mérida, the central cemetery.
840
00:58:43,023 --> 00:58:46,652
All this within the perimeterof the Chicxulub crater.
841
00:58:49,404 --> 00:58:52,950
The dead leave their gravesand join the living.
842
00:58:54,368 --> 00:58:57,496
[haunting music playing]
843
00:59:39,580 --> 00:59:42,457
[music continues]
844
01:01:23,934 --> 01:01:25,811
[Herzog] We are here in the serene park
845
01:01:25,894 --> 01:01:29,731
of the pope's summer residenceof Castel Gandolfo.
846
01:01:30,148 --> 01:01:33,861
However,serious science is being done here.
847
01:01:35,112 --> 01:01:41,368
There's an astronomical observatoryfamous for its photographic celestial map.
848
01:01:42,786 --> 01:01:48,292
Right next to the residence, Lake Albano,a formidable volcanic crater.
849
01:01:51,128 --> 01:01:56,550
The director of the observatoryis a Jesuit, Brother Guy Consolmagno.
850
01:01:57,759 --> 01:02:00,971
He's one of the foremost scholarsin meteoritics.
851
01:02:01,972 --> 01:02:05,267
Brother Guy, at the heartof the Vatican Observatory
852
01:02:05,350 --> 01:02:07,352
is this wonderful meteorite collection.
853
01:02:07,436 --> 01:02:09,188
Quite a historical collection.
854
01:02:09,271 --> 01:02:10,439
I certainly think so.
855
01:02:10,522 --> 01:02:13,567
This is the stuff I've been working onfor, now, nearly 30 years.
856
01:02:13,650 --> 01:02:15,569
Is this why you came here initially?
857
01:02:15,652 --> 01:02:17,613
I didn't choose to come here.
858
01:02:17,696 --> 01:02:20,282
I did this under a vow of obedience.
859
01:02:20,365 --> 01:02:23,202
I had been a scientistand then entered the Jesuits
860
01:02:23,285 --> 01:02:26,955
and thought I was gonna be teachingat a school like maybe Georgetown.
861
01:02:27,039 --> 01:02:30,751
But under obediencethey ordered me to come to Rome
862
01:02:30,834 --> 01:02:34,087
and eat that terrible foodand look at this miserable scenery.
863
01:02:34,171 --> 01:02:37,424
And, oh, yes, there's a collectionof a thousand meteorites.
864
01:02:37,508 --> 01:02:39,968
They didn't knowthat the meteorites were here.
865
01:02:40,052 --> 01:02:43,138
They didn't know that my expertisewas meteorites.
866
01:02:43,222 --> 01:02:46,099
It was one of those,uh, divine coincidences.
867
01:02:46,183 --> 01:02:48,644
It's phenomenal that we've got meteorites,
868
01:02:48,727 --> 01:02:53,023
that we've got pieces of outer spacethat have visited us here on Earth,
869
01:02:53,106 --> 01:02:55,400
and that we can tellthat they're not from the Earth,
870
01:02:55,484 --> 01:02:58,403
that they're made, chemically,of completely different materials,
871
01:02:58,487 --> 01:03:01,073
that they were formed4.5 billion years ago.
872
01:03:01,156 --> 01:03:04,243
That we have the abilityto understand these things
873
01:03:04,326 --> 01:03:05,994
is itself a miracle.
874
01:03:06,703 --> 01:03:11,166
And you would find it perfectly reasonablethat life is elsewhere in the universe,
875
01:03:11,250 --> 01:03:14,253
life on Earthmay have originated elsewhere?
876
01:03:14,336 --> 01:03:17,381
It's possible. I don't know.I don't have the data.
877
01:03:17,464 --> 01:03:19,675
You know, people will sometimes ask me,
878
01:03:19,758 --> 01:03:22,219
do I believe that there's life elsewherein the universe?
879
01:03:22,302 --> 01:03:24,429
And I think that's the right wayto ask it.
880
01:03:24,513 --> 01:03:27,850
It's a matter of belief.I don't have the data.
881
01:03:28,559 --> 01:03:30,644
But if you were to come to me,as a scientist,
882
01:03:30,727 --> 01:03:32,771
saying you wanted resourcesto look for life,
883
01:03:32,855 --> 01:03:35,148
and you had a great project,I'd say, "Go for it."
884
01:03:35,232 --> 01:03:37,150
On the other hand, if you were sayingyou wanted to study
885
01:03:37,234 --> 01:03:39,820
little green mencoming out of a flying saucer,
886
01:03:39,903 --> 01:03:42,322
then I'm not so sureI'd go along with that.
887
01:03:42,406 --> 01:03:47,035
But if the green men arrived on Earth,would you consider baptizing them?
888
01:03:47,452 --> 01:03:48,745
Only if they ask.
889
01:03:50,831 --> 01:03:54,835
[Herzog] Brother Guy invited usto see the historical telescope.
890
01:03:54,918 --> 01:03:57,588
...that were commissionedto photograph the entire sky
891
01:03:57,671 --> 01:03:59,298
and make a photographic atlas.
892
01:03:59,798 --> 01:04:02,801
Why, throughout so much of historyand around the world,
893
01:04:02,885 --> 01:04:06,597
have people thought of heavenas up there?
894
01:04:07,973 --> 01:04:09,641
I don't know, but it's certainly true.
895
01:04:09,725 --> 01:04:11,518
I mean, there are so many languages
896
01:04:11,602 --> 01:04:14,605
where the word for "sky" and the wordfor "heaven" are the same word.
897
01:04:15,939 --> 01:04:17,149
All I can think of--
898
01:04:17,232 --> 01:04:20,611
and maybe, you know, a professionalwould come up with a better answer--
899
01:04:20,694 --> 01:04:24,364
all I can think of is looking at the stars
900
01:04:24,448 --> 01:04:29,745
give you that sense of out-of-yourselfthat you need
901
01:04:29,828 --> 01:04:32,623
to be able to be readyto encounter a god.
902
01:04:33,790 --> 01:04:35,918
[Oppenheimer]When you see a shooting star today,
903
01:04:36,001 --> 01:04:40,088
is it an interesting scientific factfor you, or do you gasp in wonder?
904
01:04:40,172 --> 01:04:42,299
Yes. It is both.
905
01:04:43,634 --> 01:04:48,055
And frankly, I think it's because I knowthe science that I'm even more in awe.
906
01:04:48,805 --> 01:04:51,558
It's one thing to say,"Oh, that's a pretty bit of light."
907
01:04:51,642 --> 01:04:52,935
It's another thing to say,
908
01:04:53,018 --> 01:04:55,562
"I know what elementsare creating that light.
909
01:04:55,646 --> 01:04:57,773
I know why it's that color.
910
01:04:57,856 --> 01:05:00,817
I know what I can learn from this.
911
01:05:00,901 --> 01:05:03,612
I hope some camera captured it,so that I can measure
912
01:05:03,695 --> 01:05:06,073
not only, 'Boy, was that pretty,'
913
01:05:06,156 --> 01:05:10,285
but also, 'This is telling me somethingabout dust from a comet.'
914
01:05:10,369 --> 01:05:15,040
A cloud of dust left behind a cometthat the Earth is barreling into,
915
01:05:15,123 --> 01:05:17,709
and, like snowflakeshitting your windscreen,
916
01:05:17,793 --> 01:05:21,880
it's shots of lighthitting our atmosphere."
917
01:05:22,840 --> 01:05:27,344
All of that adds to the joy.It doesn't take away from it.
918
01:05:27,427 --> 01:05:31,223
This brings to mind the dynamicof different orders of knowledge,
919
01:05:31,306 --> 01:05:35,352
the rational and the poetic,the imaginative and the intellectual.
920
01:05:35,435 --> 01:05:39,523
And it seems to me that you marshalthe same thought processes
921
01:05:39,606 --> 01:05:43,902
to cope with mattersthat are so vast, the cosmos,
922
01:05:43,986 --> 01:05:46,530
and yet mattersthat are so intimate, the soul.
923
01:05:47,406 --> 01:05:50,742
You can't do the one without the other.
924
01:05:51,159 --> 01:05:52,911
You can't do science--
925
01:05:52,995 --> 01:05:55,080
You don't want to do science
926
01:05:55,163 --> 01:06:00,002
if you don't have that sense of awe,that sense of wonder.
927
01:06:00,752 --> 01:06:04,506
You can't believe in a creator god
928
01:06:04,590 --> 01:06:07,301
without experiencing creation.
929
01:06:07,759 --> 01:06:09,970
Otherwise what's the point of believing?
930
01:06:11,138 --> 01:06:14,516
And I know that you described in the '70s,as a graduate student,
931
01:06:14,600 --> 01:06:16,268
-seeing Comet West.-Mm-hmm.
932
01:06:16,351 --> 01:06:20,647
And you said, "Was it impressive?No, it was frightening."
933
01:06:20,731 --> 01:06:23,442
It shook you to the core, you said.Why?
934
01:06:24,651 --> 01:06:26,695
In the sky was a comet
935
01:06:26,778 --> 01:06:30,282
that looked like every photographof a comet you'd ever seen.
936
01:06:30,365 --> 01:06:33,619
The kind of thing that you thoughtonly existed in photographs.
937
01:06:33,702 --> 01:06:35,245
And it didn't belong there.
938
01:06:35,329 --> 01:06:37,289
And it was big. And it was scary.
939
01:06:37,372 --> 01:06:40,042
And it wasn't there yesterdayand, "What's going on?"
940
01:06:41,001 --> 01:06:44,755
And then you understood why ancient peoplewould look at comets
941
01:06:44,838 --> 01:06:50,135
as a portent of somethingreally, really scary and different.
942
01:06:50,802 --> 01:06:55,349
How might the church reactif the NASA telescopes detect
943
01:06:55,432 --> 01:06:59,311
a really threatening near-Earth objecthurtling towards us?
944
01:06:59,937 --> 01:07:03,815
I'll be honest. We'll pray. [chuckles]What else can you do?
945
01:07:04,316 --> 01:07:05,526
[rumbling]
946
01:07:08,111 --> 01:07:10,781
[Herzog]I want to show an excerpt of a movie
947
01:07:10,864 --> 01:07:13,742
where physical and existential fear
948
01:07:13,825 --> 01:07:16,912
are just the shudder audiences go for.
949
01:07:17,371 --> 01:07:19,164
This is beautifully done.
950
01:07:54,116 --> 01:07:56,785
Apart from Brother Guy's prayers,
951
01:07:56,869 --> 01:07:59,913
there are practical measuresalready in place.
952
01:08:00,497 --> 01:08:02,916
We are here at Pan-STARRS,
953
01:08:03,000 --> 01:08:07,963
the Panoramic Survey Telescopeand Rapid Response System,
954
01:08:08,046 --> 01:08:11,633
located at the Hawaiian island of Maui.
955
01:08:11,717 --> 01:08:13,844
Okay, brake is released.
956
01:08:14,595 --> 01:08:17,639
Everybody stand clear.I'm gonna bring it down.
957
01:08:17,723 --> 01:08:21,602
[Herzog] Here, one of the telescopesduring maintenance.
958
01:08:44,582 --> 01:08:46,417
[man] Um, we'll go for that, I guess, huh?
959
01:08:46,502 --> 01:08:48,962
-[woman] Yeah. I'll try.-Yeah. Okay.
960
01:08:52,424 --> 01:08:56,136
[Herzog] Dr. Joanna Bulger is entrusted,in a way,
961
01:08:56,220 --> 01:08:58,596
with the safekeeping of humanity.
962
01:09:01,850 --> 01:09:04,895
And so is her colleague, Dr. Mark Willman.
963
01:09:05,812 --> 01:09:10,567
Just looking at their faces gave usa good amount of confidence.
964
01:09:14,071 --> 01:09:17,448
They allowed usto intrude on their night watch.
965
01:09:17,533 --> 01:09:19,868
-Good evening.-[Willman] Ah, Clive, hey.
966
01:09:19,952 --> 01:09:22,371
-I found you. The night watch.-[Bulger] How's it going?
967
01:09:22,453 --> 01:09:24,997
-Come on. Have a seat.-[Willman] Have a seat.
968
01:09:25,082 --> 01:09:27,209
[Oppenheimer]Um, helping to protect us
969
01:09:27,292 --> 01:09:30,546
from space rocksthat might have hostile intent.
970
01:09:30,629 --> 01:09:32,840
We were just observing,but we had to close up
971
01:09:32,923 --> 01:09:34,800
because the humidity shot up.
972
01:09:34,883 --> 01:09:37,051
So we're up to 90% now,
973
01:09:37,135 --> 01:09:39,680
and we have to close at 85to protect the mirror.
974
01:09:39,763 --> 01:09:42,057
We don't want moisture on the mirror.
975
01:09:42,140 --> 01:09:45,560
And how do you communicatewith the controllers up at the telescope?
976
01:09:45,644 --> 01:09:49,398
Oh, well, uh... [chuckles]we are the controllers.
977
01:09:49,481 --> 01:09:52,317
There's nobody at the summit.It's all remote observing now.
978
01:09:52,401 --> 01:09:54,945
That's old school,where you had to drive up at the summit.
979
01:09:55,028 --> 01:09:56,488
It's 10,000 feet,
980
01:09:56,572 --> 01:09:59,157
so it's much more comfortabledown here at 2,000 feet.
981
01:10:00,659 --> 01:10:01,952
[Oppenheimer] And so what have we got?
982
01:10:02,035 --> 01:10:04,371
I mean, this screen,I guess, is the night sky.
983
01:10:04,454 --> 01:10:06,039
Yep, this is a map of the sky.
984
01:10:06,123 --> 01:10:08,166
You can see there's the zenith.
985
01:10:08,250 --> 01:10:10,752
That's just straight overhead.And here's the telescope.
986
01:10:11,378 --> 01:10:15,007
Um, and this was the targetwe were gonna observe.
987
01:10:15,090 --> 01:10:16,842
We take about 60 images,
988
01:10:16,925 --> 01:10:21,805
and we get four imagesof the same spot in the sky.
989
01:10:21,889 --> 01:10:24,808
And so we have a tiny movie,a four-image movie then.
990
01:10:24,892 --> 01:10:27,019
And then we can pick outmoving targets that way.
991
01:10:27,102 --> 01:10:29,146
[Oppenheimer] And you've gotthe largest cameras on Earth.
992
01:10:29,229 --> 01:10:30,480
-Is that right?-We do. Um...
993
01:10:30,564 --> 01:10:31,982
[Oppenheimer]I've got a 12-megapixel camera.
994
01:10:32,065 --> 01:10:34,151
-Twelve megapixels.-What's your camera?
995
01:10:34,234 --> 01:10:37,321
Um, ours is over a billion pixels,
996
01:10:37,404 --> 01:10:40,282
so it's-- it's much larger
997
01:10:40,365 --> 01:10:44,328
than a-- a consumer camera like that.
998
01:10:46,496 --> 01:10:48,957
What is going on with this image here?
999
01:10:49,041 --> 01:10:51,043
-Is this the pixel array itself?-[Bulger] Yeah, exactly.
1000
01:10:51,126 --> 01:10:53,337
So this is actually the raw imagethat we take.
1001
01:10:53,420 --> 01:10:56,215
Um, so this is a 45-second exposure.
1002
01:10:56,298 --> 01:11:01,053
And you can see the sizeof the camera itself.
1003
01:11:01,136 --> 01:11:02,971
Um, so it-- We're--
1004
01:11:03,055 --> 01:11:05,724
We get a three-degree field of view,
1005
01:11:05,807 --> 01:11:08,352
which is roughly seven square degreeson the sky.
1006
01:11:08,936 --> 01:11:11,355
And the camera itselfis stitched together
1007
01:11:11,438 --> 01:11:16,026
of an eight-by-eight arrayof addressable CCDs.
1008
01:11:16,527 --> 01:11:19,404
So if you actually--We can click on one of these images.
1009
01:11:19,488 --> 01:11:21,198
-This one over here.-Oh, what's that?
1010
01:11:21,281 --> 01:11:23,325
-Is that a meteor there?-[Bulger] Here?
1011
01:11:23,408 --> 01:11:27,287
[Bulger] Uh, no. These are two satellitesthat we've caught in our field of view.
1012
01:11:27,704 --> 01:11:31,291
[Willman] It is a satisfying job,because, um...
1013
01:11:32,417 --> 01:11:36,004
well, we don't wanna go the wayof the dinosaurs, and, um...
1014
01:11:36,088 --> 01:11:38,173
so it's worthwhile looking outfor these things.
1015
01:11:38,257 --> 01:11:43,345
Although the odds are slim that a big oneis gonna hit us anytime soon.
1016
01:11:44,096 --> 01:11:47,140
But sooner or laterthere will be a big one,
1017
01:11:47,224 --> 01:11:49,309
so we're watching for it.
1018
01:11:50,769 --> 01:11:53,272
I do feel I can sleepmore soundly at night
1019
01:11:53,355 --> 01:11:56,650
knowing that there is always someone herein the night shift,
1020
01:11:56,733 --> 01:12:00,153
you know, looking for inbound bolides.That's wonderful.
1021
01:12:00,237 --> 01:12:02,322
365 days a year, yeah.[laughs] Every night.
1022
01:12:02,406 --> 01:12:04,658
Thank you. Thank you very muchfor protecting us.
1023
01:12:05,284 --> 01:12:07,369
-You're welcome. It's our privilege.-Yeah.
1024
01:12:07,953 --> 01:12:13,000
[Herzog] The photos of the night skyare analyzed by Dr. Rob Weryk,
1025
01:12:13,083 --> 01:12:16,211
a planetary defense researcherfrom Canada.
1026
01:12:17,462 --> 01:12:20,299
I can't believe this is the first timeyou've actually been to the telescopes.
1027
01:12:20,382 --> 01:12:23,677
Yeah, well, normally I focus on the dataanalysis, reviewing the candidates.
1028
01:12:23,760 --> 01:12:25,679
So it's nice to have a chanceto come see the telescope.
1029
01:12:25,762 --> 01:12:29,057
Is it like seeing a sort of, you know,brother that you've never met before?
1030
01:12:29,141 --> 01:12:30,517
That's true. That's true. Yeah.
1031
01:12:30,601 --> 01:12:33,979
They actually ended up opening at the endof the night for an hour and a half.
1032
01:12:34,062 --> 01:12:36,398
We actually were ableto review the data this morning.
1033
01:12:36,481 --> 01:12:38,901
And so I foundsix new candidate objects.
1034
01:12:38,984 --> 01:12:40,277
"We" is "you."You found them.
1035
01:12:40,360 --> 01:12:42,070
Yes. I mean, it's reallya team effort overall,
1036
01:12:42,154 --> 01:12:43,822
but I'm the one that reviews it, so...
1037
01:12:43,906 --> 01:12:46,283
What's the most exciting objectthat you've found?
1038
01:12:46,366 --> 01:12:49,369
So, the most exciting object we foundbecame known as 'Oumuamua.
1039
01:12:49,453 --> 01:12:51,330
It's actually the firstinterstellar comet.
1040
01:12:51,413 --> 01:12:53,707
It's a comet that camefrom outside our solar system.
1041
01:12:53,790 --> 01:12:56,335
It's the first time we ever sawan object like this. Yeah.
1042
01:12:56,418 --> 01:12:57,586
'Oumuamua?
1043
01:12:57,669 --> 01:12:59,880
'Oumuamua.So, it's actually a Hawaiian word.
1044
01:12:59,963 --> 01:13:01,965
It means "first messenger from afar." Yes.
1045
01:13:02,049 --> 01:13:03,050
[Oppenheimer] Okay.
1046
01:13:03,759 --> 01:13:05,844
So it's actually a two-step process.
1047
01:13:05,928 --> 01:13:09,306
The computer software isn't perfect,and it still requires manual review,
1048
01:13:09,389 --> 01:13:10,849
and that's where I come in.
1049
01:13:10,933 --> 01:13:14,478
So my main responsibility is to reviewall the nightly detections.
1050
01:13:14,561 --> 01:13:16,313
And things that are real,
1051
01:13:16,396 --> 01:13:20,400
they would show up as eithera series of dots or trailed objects.
1052
01:13:20,484 --> 01:13:22,653
[Oppenheimer]Are you the first person who's seen this?
1053
01:13:22,736 --> 01:13:25,322
Yes. So while the observerscollect the data,
1054
01:13:25,405 --> 01:13:28,492
I'm actually the first personon the planet to review and see this,
1055
01:13:28,575 --> 01:13:30,452
and my submitting it would sound the alarm
1056
01:13:30,536 --> 01:13:32,871
if there was an objectthat was a hazard to the Earth.
1057
01:13:34,498 --> 01:13:37,543
[Herzog] The alarmwould instantly call the attention
1058
01:13:37,626 --> 01:13:41,255
of NASA's Planetary DefenseCoordination Office.
1059
01:13:42,089 --> 01:13:45,175
Only a few people know that it exists.
1060
01:13:45,884 --> 01:13:50,264
Responsible here is Dr. Kelly Fast,an astronomer.
1061
01:13:50,347 --> 01:13:52,516
[Oppenheimer]I've heard you describe asteroids
1062
01:13:52,599 --> 01:13:54,101
as the vermin of the solar system.
1063
01:13:54,184 --> 01:13:56,395
-Why do you call them that?-[laughing]
1064
01:13:56,478 --> 01:14:01,316
Well, certainly astronomers who arelooking at things besides asteroids,
1065
01:14:01,400 --> 01:14:03,652
uh, they might be looking at their target,
1066
01:14:03,735 --> 01:14:08,031
and asteroids are going to photobombwhatever they're looking at.
1067
01:14:08,115 --> 01:14:11,118
So I guess from a point of view,if you're looking at something else,
1068
01:14:11,201 --> 01:14:13,412
then they are the verminof the solar system.
1069
01:14:13,495 --> 01:14:15,873
Uh, from our point of view at NASA,
1070
01:14:15,956 --> 01:14:20,586
they're fantastic for science,for spacecraft targets.
1071
01:14:20,669 --> 01:14:22,421
But we also want to keep an eye on them,
1072
01:14:22,504 --> 01:14:27,009
because it's never good when two thingsoccupy the same space at the same time.
1073
01:14:27,092 --> 01:14:30,804
So we want to know if any of themare going to intersect Earth's orbit
1074
01:14:30,888 --> 01:14:33,307
at a time when Earth is going to be there.
1075
01:14:33,390 --> 01:14:35,976
There's dust hitting Earth's atmosphereall the time.
1076
01:14:36,059 --> 01:14:37,936
We see shooting stars,
1077
01:14:38,020 --> 01:14:39,980
that's just dust burning upin the atmosphere.
1078
01:14:40,063 --> 01:14:43,025
But it's when things are larger,
1079
01:14:43,108 --> 01:14:45,903
when you get up tothe size of asteroids--
1080
01:14:45,986 --> 01:14:49,865
Earth's atmosphere is fantasticfor burning things up,
1081
01:14:49,948 --> 01:14:52,159
but eventually things get too bigfor that to happen.
1082
01:14:52,242 --> 01:14:55,454
Chelyabinsk, 20 meters.There was devastation.
1083
01:14:56,246 --> 01:14:58,707
Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.
1084
01:14:58,790 --> 01:15:02,294
That was probably a 40-meter asteroid.
1085
01:15:04,379 --> 01:15:08,342
[Herzog] Eighty million treeswere flattened by the blast.
1086
01:15:08,425 --> 01:15:13,096
But not a single grain of the asteroidhas ever been discovered.
1087
01:15:16,225 --> 01:15:19,937
And defense? What can we doif there's a big sucker coming in at us?
1088
01:15:20,020 --> 01:15:21,980
What can we do about it?
1089
01:15:22,064 --> 01:15:24,691
Well, yeah, the best defenseis preparation.
1090
01:15:24,775 --> 01:15:26,652
And so finding them first--
1091
01:15:26,735 --> 01:15:29,363
You don't know how to mount a defenseuntil you find them.
1092
01:15:29,446 --> 01:15:31,490
So that is the first order of business.
1093
01:15:31,573 --> 01:15:34,076
And that is going onwith ground-based surveys.
1094
01:15:34,535 --> 01:15:36,203
If you think of it as:
1095
01:15:36,286 --> 01:15:37,120
You've got the Sun,
1096
01:15:37,204 --> 01:15:39,957
you've got the Earth and the other planetsgoing around the Sun,
1097
01:15:40,040 --> 01:15:41,208
like being on a racetrack.
1098
01:15:41,291 --> 01:15:44,169
And then you've got all the asteroidsgoing around the Sun on the racetrack.
1099
01:15:44,253 --> 01:15:47,005
And so there are many timeswhen they might come close together.
1100
01:15:47,089 --> 01:15:49,925
In fact, we have that often,where there's a "close approach,"
1101
01:15:50,008 --> 01:15:53,011
where an asteroidcomes close to Earth, which--
1102
01:15:53,095 --> 01:15:56,390
Close might mean, you know,many lunar distances away.
1103
01:15:56,849 --> 01:15:58,517
But let's say this is really large.
1104
01:15:58,600 --> 01:16:02,062
It's a very large asteroid,and you don't have a lot of time.
1105
01:16:02,688 --> 01:16:06,233
There are the moviesthat show blowing them up.
1106
01:16:06,316 --> 01:16:09,361
You don't necessarily have to do that.You still need a good push.
1107
01:16:09,444 --> 01:16:12,823
And you could usea nuclear explosive device
1108
01:16:12,906 --> 01:16:14,283
that is used in some of these movies.
1109
01:16:14,366 --> 01:16:18,245
But the idea is you would detonate itnext to the asteroid,
1110
01:16:18,328 --> 01:16:23,375
and the energy from that detonationwould irradiate the surface,
1111
01:16:23,458 --> 01:16:26,211
and the material that blows offthe surface of the asteroid
1112
01:16:26,295 --> 01:16:28,297
would give it that pushin the other direction.
1113
01:16:30,340 --> 01:16:32,885
[Herzog]A softer, unaggressive approach
1114
01:16:32,968 --> 01:16:38,307
was actually performed bya Japanese probe on Asteroid Ryugu.
1115
01:16:39,391 --> 01:16:41,602
How small the asteroid is
1116
01:16:41,685 --> 01:16:46,815
we can tell from the size of the shadowthe probe casts on its surface.
1117
01:16:49,651 --> 01:16:53,906
Gravity is so minimalthat the softest of landings
1118
01:16:53,989 --> 01:16:58,702
already threw great quantitiesof debris away from it, into space.
1119
01:17:00,621 --> 01:17:03,749
Right herewe see how meteorites originate.
1120
01:17:05,042 --> 01:17:08,962
The probe itself is alreadyon its way back to Earth,
1121
01:17:09,046 --> 01:17:12,799
bringing a single gramscooped from the asteroid.
1122
01:17:13,842 --> 01:17:18,138
But for bigger specimens,Antarctica is paradise.
1123
01:17:18,222 --> 01:17:20,807
[helicopter propeller whirring]
1124
01:17:21,767 --> 01:17:25,062
It is not that more rocks fall herethan elsewhere.
1125
01:17:25,812 --> 01:17:31,401
They are visible on the vast glaciersthat cover almost the entire continent
1126
01:17:31,485 --> 01:17:34,571
that is larger than the United States.
1127
01:17:35,989 --> 01:17:41,078
We were invited to join the huntby South Korean scientists.
1128
01:17:41,745 --> 01:17:45,249
Their station, named Jang Bogo,
1129
01:17:45,332 --> 01:17:49,837
at the coast of East Antarctica,houses about 50 people.
1130
01:17:53,048 --> 01:17:57,052
The austral summer seasonlasts nearly five months,
1131
01:17:57,469 --> 01:18:00,013
during which the Sun never goes down.
1132
01:18:03,183 --> 01:18:06,895
Inside, it is more spaciousthan we anticipated.
1133
01:18:08,522 --> 01:18:13,610
Only a few miles away,six men of Scott's last expedition
1134
01:18:13,694 --> 01:18:19,825
endured a whole winter huddlingin a snow cave just nine feet across.
1135
01:18:20,659 --> 01:18:23,620
They were starving and freezingin squalor,
1136
01:18:23,704 --> 01:18:28,417
surviving on seal meatand a ration of one biscuit a day.
1137
01:18:29,418 --> 01:18:31,837
From diaries of Scott's men,
1138
01:18:31,920 --> 01:18:37,634
we know they dreamt of banquets thatwere ripped away from their ready forks.
1139
01:18:37,718 --> 01:18:42,014
Only one man managed in his dreamto actually eat,
1140
01:18:42,097 --> 01:18:45,767
and he was rightfully hatedby his comrades for this.
1141
01:18:50,147 --> 01:18:53,317
But we were not herefor lobster and kimchi.
1142
01:18:53,817 --> 01:18:57,988
We were itching to flyto the Polar Plateau in the interior.
1143
01:18:58,822 --> 01:19:02,910
We knew there wasan overland expedition of trucks
1144
01:19:02,993 --> 01:19:05,954
that had left our station three weeks ago
1145
01:19:06,038 --> 01:19:10,626
and was nearing the meteoritehunting grounds on the blue ice.
1146
01:19:20,928 --> 01:19:25,766
But first the helicopter has to climb upsome 2,000 meters.
1147
01:19:26,266 --> 01:19:30,729
From the station at the coastto the ice plateau of the continent,
1148
01:19:30,812 --> 01:19:34,691
we are flying over glacier icecascading down.
1149
01:19:35,400 --> 01:19:37,569
Imagine crossing this on foot.
1150
01:19:38,237 --> 01:19:41,281
Each of these wildly tossed boulders
1151
01:19:41,365 --> 01:19:43,992
is larger than an apartment building,
1152
01:19:44,076 --> 01:19:47,621
and the mass is constantly flowingtowards the sea.
1153
01:19:51,416 --> 01:19:53,794
Finally we reach the Plateau.
1154
01:19:54,628 --> 01:19:59,842
Only a few mountains remain,sticking out of the ice like islands.
1155
01:20:01,677 --> 01:20:06,390
It felt like entering into a worldthat was not our planet.
1156
01:20:11,645 --> 01:20:14,523
From here begins the immense loneliness
1157
01:20:14,606 --> 01:20:20,737
of a vast continent covered by icetwo to four kilometers thick.
1158
01:20:26,285 --> 01:20:30,539
Through GPS data,we knew the position of the caravan.
1159
01:20:31,999 --> 01:20:33,959
They were expecting us.
1160
01:20:52,978 --> 01:20:56,315
We were so looking forwardto meet Jong Ik Lee,
1161
01:20:56,398 --> 01:20:58,692
the leader of this expedition.
1162
01:20:59,526 --> 01:21:03,280
He was the one who invited usto Antarctica,
1163
01:21:03,363 --> 01:21:06,325
and it felt like meeting an old friend.
1164
01:21:07,576 --> 01:21:09,328
-I didn't think you'd make it.-Yes, yes.
1165
01:21:09,411 --> 01:21:11,330
I didn't know that we would make it.
1166
01:21:11,413 --> 01:21:13,290
My dream...
1167
01:21:13,373 --> 01:21:17,878
[Herzog] We had seen footage he shotclose to here a few years earlier.
1168
01:21:18,962 --> 01:21:21,548
He had found a large meteorite,
1169
01:21:21,632 --> 01:21:26,220
and we fell in love with him,seeing his ecstasy of discovery.
1170
01:21:27,012 --> 01:21:29,681
This is science at its best.
1171
01:21:30,349 --> 01:21:33,810
-[shouts]-[men shouting]
1172
01:21:37,898 --> 01:21:40,651
[laughing]
1173
01:21:44,196 --> 01:21:46,698
[shouting in Korean]
1174
01:21:53,539 --> 01:21:55,749
[shouting]
1175
01:21:59,044 --> 01:22:00,170
[speaking Korean]
1176
01:22:00,838 --> 01:22:02,464
[grunts, laughs]
1177
01:22:02,548 --> 01:22:04,800
[men speaking Korean]
1178
01:22:10,180 --> 01:22:13,308
[Jong Ik in English] Okay, down. Down.
1179
01:22:14,518 --> 01:22:16,144
[grunts]
1180
01:22:17,187 --> 01:22:19,231
[speaking Korean]
1181
01:22:21,024 --> 01:22:25,445
[Herzog] Something else I like aboutthis highly charged emotional moment,
1182
01:22:25,529 --> 01:22:30,075
something the stupid doctrineof film schools would never allow.
1183
01:22:31,702 --> 01:22:34,454
Watch the background. A figure enters.
1184
01:22:34,538 --> 01:22:38,458
No recognizable motivation,wrong timing,
1185
01:22:38,542 --> 01:22:40,544
rear end approaching.
1186
01:22:42,379 --> 01:22:43,755
[sniffles]
1187
01:22:45,424 --> 01:22:47,467
[sobs, sniffles]
1188
01:22:49,761 --> 01:22:52,222
[speaking Korean]
1189
01:22:54,349 --> 01:22:58,395
-[cameraman chuckles]-[sobbing, speaking Korean]
1190
01:22:59,062 --> 01:23:00,856
[Herzog] Back to the present.
1191
01:23:01,690 --> 01:23:06,195
Along with us, Jong Ik's wife,Mi Jung, had arrived,
1192
01:23:06,278 --> 01:23:09,448
herself a renowned polar geologist.
1193
01:23:09,531 --> 01:23:13,327
-[Jong Ik chuckles] Aw.-[Oppenheimer] Aw.
1194
01:23:13,410 --> 01:23:14,912
[Mi Jung speaking Korean]
1195
01:23:21,251 --> 01:23:24,004
[Oppenheimer in English]Husband and wife reunited. [laughs]
1196
01:23:24,588 --> 01:23:29,009
[Herzog] Minutes after our arrivalwe found our first meteorite.
1197
01:23:30,260 --> 01:23:34,097
The sheer, blank ice,not covered with snow,
1198
01:23:34,181 --> 01:23:36,767
is the ideal terrain to spot them.
1199
01:23:37,684 --> 01:23:42,940
The gigantic mass of ice is moving slowly,like a conveyor belt
1200
01:23:43,023 --> 01:23:48,612
and exposes stones that may have fallenhundreds of thousands of years ago.
1201
01:23:49,488 --> 01:23:50,822
[men, indistinct]
1202
01:23:51,782 --> 01:23:55,369
Most of the meteoritesare carried all the way to the ocean.
1203
01:23:55,911 --> 01:24:02,000
But where the glacier is deflected upwardsby a mountain range deep down there,
1204
01:24:02,084 --> 01:24:06,255
the ice evaporates,leaving its cargo at the surface.
1205
01:24:08,090 --> 01:24:11,593
Every stone out here is a meteorite.
1206
01:24:55,345 --> 01:24:58,473
Watch the man on the right.He found something.
1207
01:25:12,154 --> 01:25:14,948
The lucky one turned out to be Clive.
1208
01:25:15,574 --> 01:25:18,619
It may look staged, but it was really him.
1209
01:25:23,415 --> 01:25:29,296
[Jong Ik, indistinct] Oh, this is it!This is your sample!
1210
01:25:29,379 --> 01:25:31,548
-Congratulations.-[Oppenheimer chuckles]
1211
01:25:31,632 --> 01:25:34,218
This is big. Biggest today.
1212
01:25:34,301 --> 01:25:38,013
-I found one over there. A little one.-Uh-huh?
1213
01:25:38,096 --> 01:25:39,431
And then when I was...
1214
01:25:39,515 --> 01:25:41,141
[Herzog] It also turned out
1215
01:25:41,225 --> 01:25:45,020
this was the largest meteoriteof the entire season,
1216
01:25:45,103 --> 01:25:50,442
and the first assessment suggestedit was an extremely rare specimen.
1217
01:25:53,028 --> 01:25:56,031
[no audible dialogue]
1218
01:26:03,872 --> 01:26:08,252
We resumed our search,but one thought crept up on us.
1219
01:26:09,086 --> 01:26:13,048
It would be a full five monthsuntil night would fall,
1220
01:26:13,799 --> 01:26:19,471
and we could walk on for the next5,000 kilometers without meeting a soul.
1221
01:26:42,786 --> 01:26:47,666
This is the ultimate experience of spacefor those on foot.
1222
01:26:49,168 --> 01:26:55,174
But we knew of a place where not our feetbut our souls start to travel,
1223
01:26:55,924 --> 01:27:00,137
a place where we transcendour human existence.
1224
01:27:05,267 --> 01:27:09,605
Our last journey took usto one of the remotest islands
1225
01:27:09,688 --> 01:27:12,774
of the archipelago in the Torres Strait.
1226
01:27:13,859 --> 01:27:18,238
These islands are locatedbetween Australia and New Guinea.
1227
01:27:20,032 --> 01:27:25,412
This tiny island called Merhas a population of about 400.
1228
01:27:26,747 --> 01:27:30,959
We had heard of tribal beliefsabout shooting stars
1229
01:27:31,043 --> 01:27:35,506
that carry the souls of the deceasedto a new life somewhere else.
1230
01:27:38,175 --> 01:27:41,553
Doug Passi, one of the tribal elders,
1231
01:27:41,637 --> 01:27:47,142
knew stories about soulsdeparting by meteor to the netherworld.
1232
01:27:49,436 --> 01:27:55,400
One of my family members was sent bythe ghosts on a maier.
1233
01:27:55,484 --> 01:27:58,237
-[Oppenheimer] "Maier" is a meteor?-Falling star, yeah.
1234
01:27:58,320 --> 01:28:03,075
And she was actuallyon that maier itself,
1235
01:28:03,158 --> 01:28:04,284
burned with fire.
1236
01:28:06,245 --> 01:28:07,913
Mm. That's what I heard.
1237
01:28:08,872 --> 01:28:11,458
And they said that's a true story.
1238
01:28:12,167 --> 01:28:16,380
And that lady-- old lady--named Gizou Simbolo.
1239
01:28:16,463 --> 01:28:18,090
[Oppenheimer]Was she alive, or was it her spirit?
1240
01:28:18,173 --> 01:28:19,925
She was alive. She was alive, yeah.
1241
01:28:20,551 --> 01:28:23,345
And when them family is ready to die...
1242
01:28:24,721 --> 01:28:27,307
the maier can tell us a story saying,
1243
01:28:27,391 --> 01:28:31,645
"Oh, someone will go lostin a few days." Or--
1244
01:28:32,396 --> 01:28:34,022
Or-- Or...
1245
01:28:34,857 --> 01:28:38,026
"Here he goes somewhere else."
1246
01:28:39,444 --> 01:28:44,199
The star-- the falling star. Maier.Sometime red. Sometime light blue.
1247
01:28:46,159 --> 01:28:47,995
[Oppenheimer]It seems here that death is--
1248
01:28:48,078 --> 01:28:51,957
It's not so much an event.It's the beginning of a journey.
1249
01:28:53,208 --> 01:28:57,129
Beginning of the new journeyon the new life. Yes.
1250
01:28:59,756 --> 01:29:00,757
Mm.
1251
01:29:02,342 --> 01:29:04,052
They can come in different forms.
1252
01:29:04,761 --> 01:29:09,099
Form of a bird. Form of a dog.Form of a person.
1253
01:29:11,143 --> 01:29:14,313
Or a shadow that you can seemove on the wall.
1254
01:29:14,980 --> 01:29:16,857
Or maybe a floating wood.
1255
01:29:17,941 --> 01:29:20,360
Floating wood on the ocean.
1256
01:29:27,826 --> 01:29:29,995
[Herzog] Because we came with a camera,
1257
01:29:30,078 --> 01:29:33,749
the islanders revivedan almost forgotten dance
1258
01:29:33,832 --> 01:29:36,877
that was not performed herefor half a century.
1259
01:29:37,628 --> 01:29:40,631
[speaking Meriam]
1260
01:29:44,092 --> 01:29:49,556
Alo Tapim, an elder, instructed young menin the choreography.
1261
01:29:50,432 --> 01:29:53,560
[speaking Meriam]
1262
01:30:05,656 --> 01:30:09,243
[singing softly in Meriam]
1263
01:30:22,381 --> 01:30:24,800
[singing continues]
1264
01:30:32,182 --> 01:30:35,394
-[drum music]-[singing in Meriam]
1265
01:30:48,240 --> 01:30:54,288
The dance is about maier,as you've indicated.
1266
01:30:55,747 --> 01:30:59,918
Maier is that star, comet.
1267
01:31:00,794 --> 01:31:02,713
And it's a special star.
1268
01:31:06,967 --> 01:31:11,221
Only on special times that this starappears to the Meriam people.
1269
01:31:11,305 --> 01:31:14,099
The Meriam observe this star
1270
01:31:14,766 --> 01:31:18,937
when a loved onedeparts this life to the next.
1271
01:31:20,647 --> 01:31:23,734
The transition is done through this star.
1272
01:31:26,195 --> 01:31:31,408
The dancers carrying nair. Torches.
1273
01:31:32,618 --> 01:31:34,578
We call it nair.
1274
01:31:35,412 --> 01:31:36,538
They carry them.
1275
01:31:38,248 --> 01:31:43,420
And-- And they indicate when that star--
1276
01:31:43,504 --> 01:31:48,425
falling star lets go its embers.
1277
01:31:50,010 --> 01:31:52,721
It's indicated by the fire sticksthey carry.
1278
01:31:54,181 --> 01:31:57,142
And when two fire sticks, they clap...
1279
01:31:58,769 --> 01:32:00,771
they, uh, hit together,
1280
01:32:01,605 --> 01:32:04,942
clap together,the two fire sticks, the embers...
1281
01:32:06,902 --> 01:32:10,989
And this is captured. Um...
1282
01:32:12,824 --> 01:32:17,621
That tells-- describes that star.
1283
01:32:19,831 --> 01:32:21,750
Yes. And this is our story.
1284
01:32:50,863 --> 01:32:53,407
[drum music playing]
1285
01:32:59,538 --> 01:33:03,500
[singing in Meriam]
1286
01:33:34,948 --> 01:33:38,368
[music, singing continue]
1287
01:34:28,669 --> 01:34:33,131
[music, singing fade]