Mérida, on the Yucatán Peninsula,
is ground zero of the biggest cataclysm that ever occurred to our planet.
A whole asteroid hit right here.
This happened millions of years before human beings appeared,
and yet this fireball ritual feels like a reenactment.
Certainly, the ancient Mayas could not have known.
We do not know what in the future is coming at us,
eventually destroying us.
But it will look like this fireball over Siberia,
only much larger.
What simple dashboard cameras recorded
feels like science fiction.
Visitors from other worlds,
from the dark of the universe, have come.
And untold numbers are still on their way.
If something big is going to happen,
it will illuminate the sky even in daylight.
But that may be millions of years away.
Meteorites have hit our planet all the time,
and the bigger ones have changed entire landscapes.
But they also have left a deep impact on cultures.
A good example is Islamic culture.
According to ancient tradition,
a stone was sent down by God from heaven
as a guide for Adam and Eve where to build an altar.
The meteorite came down
where later the holy city of Mecca was built.
We are here at the holiest site of the Muslim world.
In its center, the Kaaba.
Embedded in its eastern corner, the Black Stone.
It was already venerated in pre-Islamic times
for at least a millennium before the prophet Muhammad founded Islam.
The Black Stone is framed entirely in silver,
and nobody is allowed to analyze it,
but it is almost certainly a meteorite.
Islam is a religion of 1.9 billion faithful.
For the pilgrims,
the Black Stone is among the most revered of relics.
It attracts uncountable millions of touches and kisses.
As non-Muslims, we are not allowed even to set foot into the holy city,
and so we had to rely on cell phone footage of one of the faithful.
Back in the silent vastness of the Australian desert.
Clive Oppenheimer of Cambridge University,
who started our voyage of this film, explains to me...
Scientists only became aware of this huge hole in the ground in 1947,
when it was spotted from the air.
And the crater is about a kilometer across.
And it was formed when a piece of iron asteroid,
the size of a battleship and traveling at 15 kilometers per second,
plummeted into the ground.
And the crater walls around the floor here
are made of the ancient rocks
that were shattered by the impact and thrown about.
The meteoroid itself was almost completely vaporized,
and only a few fragments of it
have been found scattered across the surrounding desert.
The pattern of ejecta
suggests that the bolide came from that direction over there.
The temperatures are so phenomenal
that it generates a huge thermal plume
that punches up through the atmosphere, into the stratosphere,
and it's raining out molten debris over a very wide area.
And, of course, there's colossal seismic energy
that is generated by the impact itself,
so huge earthquakes.
I mean, we're in the middle of the desert here,
but if you imagine this scenario happening today in an urban environment,
this would be absolutely devastating.
To be hit by a meteorite has barely ever happened?
There was a woman who was struck by a meteorite
that came through her roof, through her ceiling,
and hit her while she was seated in an armchair watching TV.
The Sylacauga meteorite.
She survived it but had a pretty horrific bruise.
As bleak and uninviting as the country around the crater looks,
there were always aboriginal people in this area.
Many of them make a living as artists.
Like those in the nearest community of Billiluna.
They could not have witnessed the impact more than 100,000 years ago,
but there were more recent events
that could have triggered a cultural memory.
In their paintings, the crater frequently appears as a motif,
but it goes deeper than that.
We met Katie Darkie,
one of the finest artists of the community.
This is one of your very own paintings, isn't it?
Let's have a look at this one.
Now please tell us what we're looking at here.
It's a beautiful painting.
This is the sand hill...
and this is the grass.
And it hasn't got any karnti.No potatoes.
Long time ago, the old people said...
one man went hunting through the creeks, hunting for birds.
But he was walking through the tunnel underneath the river,
but we call it a creek.
And it came out on the other side of the crater
and then went walking back to where he came from
when he was hunting.
And in this story, the crater, how was it formed?
What's the origin?
Well, in the kartiya world, there's a meteorite fell in there.
That's our story, the whitefellas' story.-The whitefella stories.
Some say it's a star fell in there.
But the ancestors and the old people were telling us
it's the Rainbow Serpent who fell in the crater.
So that's how we got three different stories about the crater.
But it connects in one.
We always take the kids.
Every weekend we come and camp out there.
And that's where we feel the presence of our ancestors and our family,
that they are looking after us when we go down and visit the crater.
It's a very special place for us.
For our families as well.
Meteorites have fallen at random.
A significant one in the Alsace region of France.
But right here it changed human affairs. It influenced history.
In the distance, the town of Ensisheim.
In the 15th century, world history was shaped here,
because the Hapsburg Empire earned legitimacy
through a falling piece of rock.
A plaque marks a spot where it fell.
Clive brought Professor Simon Schaffer,
a colleague from Cambridge University.
He is a historian of science and one of the few remaining polymaths.
What happened on that day in... 7th of November, 1492?
So, on this extraordinary day,
a fireball appeared in the southeast sky in that direction,
moving incredibly fast and whistling as it came.
And then it hit this field at about 11:30 in the morning.
There was, according to most reports,
just one person standing in the field.
A shepherd boy.
And he would have seen the most extraordinary thing.
He would have seen a 300-pound rock hit the field
and gouge out a hole.
The 7th of November, 1492,
the moment when this stone fell,
was only a few days after another great landfall:
the arrival of Christopher Columbus and his crew
in their New World, in the Caribbean.
It's thanks to Columbus, ultimately,
that there is corn growing in this field.
This is the result of the eruption into European agriculture
of crops that up till then had only grown in the Americas.
Indeed, the fall of the stone was so important
that there are some chronicles covering the year 1492
that only mention the Ensisheim stone
and simply leave Columbus out.
It had fallen, perhaps by divine design, as they thought,
very near an extremely significant town,
Ensisheim in Alsace.
Ensisheim at that point
was the headquarters of the Austrian forces
in this part of the world.
And within two weeks of the arrival of the stone,
the Austrian military commander,
the commander in chief, Maximilian, also arrived in the town.
But, for heaven's sake, why did this stone fall here at this time?
The reason this stone fell in this field was exactly for heaven's sake.
For those people,
wonderful supernatural signs in the heavens were messages.
This was, as it were, an e-mail sent from God
to the subjects of Maximilian
to tell them that his rule was legitimate,
that he would defeat his enemies,
and that they should obey his commands.
Where do you get your fascination from?
I think one of the things that I find completely obsessional about meteorites
is that they carry sense, that they carry meaning.
They arrive, so it was thought, with other kinds of falls.
With body part sand frogs and rains of blood.
With plagues and other catastrophes.
Something like a meteorite is an organism,
an animal, almost, that speaks to us.
And I think that's a very powerful and eloquent idea.
The idea that... meteorites have meaning,
and the task of humanity is to interpret what that meaning is.
Simon Schaffer could have continued,
without getting boring, nonstop for the next eight hours.
But we wanted to see the remains of the real stone in the local museum.
It feels unreal, inviting fantasies.
The mayor of town wanted to greet us,
here flanked by friends of the meteorite.
This emblem is taken from a medieval woodcut.
You find it everywhere.
But today it means thinking back and thinking ahead in centuries.
Did these members of the brotherhood of the stone
have a far-off future in mind?
What are they thinking?
What far-reaching plans do they have?
What if the human race became extinct?
What would we leave for future astronauts of an alien galaxy
to demonstrate that we would not leave a fallen comrade behind?
Right next to the stone, we discovered this installation.
"Hi, my name is Jean,"
says the simulacrum, hoping the aliens speak French.
"I am a miner.
And this is how beautiful our world looked."
"When danger for our planet became visible in the night sky,
we took precautions.
We dug tunnels and built shelters underground.
We think we have a chance to survive a whole decade.
If a big firestorm comes,
I'm confident the human race can survive it.
But I am not a prophet. I'm just a miner."
"I wish you a good end to your visit."
Next destination, the big sports arena in Oslo, Norway.
It is so spacious that it houses an entire football field.
But we were interested in its roof,
and we were interested in this man, Jon Larsen,
Norway's most famous jazz musician.
But it is as a citizen scientist
that he has every reason to be on this big roof.
How did this all start? How did you find this place?
I searched on... Google Earth
and found the largest roof that I could see.
And this sports arena was probably the largest in Oslo at that time.
And then I realized the...
the small object will roll down the side and accumulate along here
and end up close to the drain.
And, as we can see, there is a lot of dirt here,
but within we will find the cosmic dust particles.
How did you get started?
You've had a four-decades-long career as a successful musician.
Why have you ended up on rooftops? Was it to escape your fans?
No. I've always collected rocks and been interested in geology.
And that has been my hobby all my life.
So ten years ago, when suddenly on the breakfast table one morning, outdoors,
I discovered a shining black dot on my table
which hadn't been there two seconds earlier.
And I picked it up with my finger,
and because of my background as an amateur mineralogist,
I could see,"Wow, this is actually a small rock."
And we were like,
"Where did it come from? Is it from space perhaps? I don't know."
But then I started to Google and found out
that there are some strange small cosmic dust particles
called micrometeorites.
And then it all began.
And you think there are some here.
What's the equipment that you need to collect this goop?
My main weapon is this magnet.
And I use the magnet mainly because the...
micrometeorites are magnetic.
First I put the magnet itself into
just protecting small ziplock plastic bag, like this.
And then the hook is handy, literally...
It is astounding that Jon Larsen, with such primitive equipment,
has founded a completely new branch of science.
And now this will be the sampling area.
I will move it down on the ground, like this.
Heavy particles will roll down and remain at the heaviest part.
This might be some microscopic magnetic particles.
I'll look at it later under the microscope.
What's the flux of these cosmic particles to the Earth per day?
Do we know the figure?
Yeah, approximately 100 metric tons.
Imagine two large trucks of sand pouring cosmic dust over Earth every day.
But that equals one small particle
per year per square meter.
These particles are messengers, aren't they?
This seemed to be a very particular message for you.
Yeah, to me it is.
And they are the oldest matter there is.
Nothing has traveled further.
When I pick out one micrometeorite and feel it on my finger,
no human being has ever touched anything older.
I mean, it's really looking the eternity in the eye.
This is the ashes of another generation,
previous generation of dying stars.
So it has a history that goes all the way back to the big bang.
This is Jan Braly Kihle,
a geologist who will analyze Jon's samples under the microscope.
We loved his outfit as Wyatt Earp.
He was born in Texas.
But there's more to him.
He's a four-time cancer survivor,
two times, according to him, stark naked death sentences.
Wanting to contribute to cancer research,
he's now involved in pioneering work with new cancer treatments.
This is the underworld.
This is where we try to make the photographical documentation.
And this is Jan Kihle, my friend.-Hi.
We have worked together for years
to make high-resolution color photographs of the micrometeorites
at such a magnification that it's made nowhere else in the world.
How much magnification do you need?
You can see these particles are so small
it's practically not possible to see them.
We need 2,000, or better, 3,000 times magnification.
And then the original photo will be one meter in diameter.
That's what we need.
You know, when everyone says this was impossible,
now we have made a completely new kind of science.
And you recall the kind of feedback we all got from colleagues.
They were laughing hilarious...-Yes. Oh, yes.
...when they asked us,"What you gonna do? What?
Everybody knows that that's impossible.
You know, the signal-to-noise ratio, it's beyond one to one billion.
Make my day."
Did it hurt you, that time?
Of course not.
This is how science works.
It has nothing to do with feelings. It's just about curiosity.
So this is from earlier today.
When we see that special type of texture, then we know,
"Okay, this is a micrometeorite and not an industrial particle."
And it's obviously quite blurred at the moment.
Can we... Can we take a photograph of it?
No, we... No.-No.
If we just...
Our heartbeats, when we get too enthusiastic, will make disturbances.
So it's not possible.
We'll have to leave the room when we actually take the photos.
Where have these particles come from in the first place?
That's a good question, because we don't know the answer.
They come, obviously, from space.
So some of them are from the asteroid belt.
Others may come from cometary matter.
But, again, it might be particles from other galaxies, other solar systems.
We don't know the parent body of each individual grain.
It's just amazing.
Each Tuesday night when Jon brings in new material
we're just flabbergasted.
It's like being a kid again.
These particles are small and solitary also in space.
Some of them have never reached the larger scale
of, let's say, building...
starting to build small planets in the asteroid belt.
It's actually cosmic dust. Dust is the currency of the cosmos.
Here on the top, you have, for instance, this is iron-nickel alloy.
And here you have very nice beginning of crystallization.
Started out with just glass.
And now it'll start to crystallize olivine crystals.
And this outside is a very, very thin rim of iron sulfides.
This looks like almost, sort of, an icy exoplanet.
Looks like packs. Yeah, yeah.
With the icebergs breaking up.
This one, I think, is particularly interesting.
It has a very high temperature at atmospheric entry.
In the front, which is up,
that is the direction of movement in the Earth's atmosphere.
Then when it starts to decelerate, the heavy metal core is pushed forward
by the... inertia
and ends up like a metal mound in the front of the particle.
Again, the typical, with the iron-nickel in front.
So, I mean, though we have collected now 2,500 different specimens,
none are identical.
So when you start to...
to get to know the micrometeorite sand the cosmic dust particles,
then you will recognize them as very different from the terrestrial geology.
They have been through a process with speed, in hypervelocity,
50 times the speed of a rifle bullet
and temperatures from hell.
And then they end up like treasures from space.
The beauty and strangeness that we just saw can become even stranger.
This is what the pattern looks like.
If you hold it down, I'll go up front to the board and...
The pattern that Clive is projecting here
is proof of something that was believed to be unthinkable.
It has to do with matter of crystalline structure
that seemed to be utterly impossible.
So-called quasicrystals.
This is the man who refused to accept the impossibility.
He's a world-renowned cosmologist, Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.
You ended up finding evidence of a quasicrystal, a natural quasicrystal,
from the universe found in a meteorite.
But, I mean, what is a quasicrystal?
So, a quasicrystal is a form of matter that we thought was impossible.
For hundreds of years, we were convinced that
we had proven that it was impossible.
But, as we now know today, not only is it possible,
but it was made in the universe long ago,
long before we ever imagined.
But let's begin with something simple.
Crystals follow a pattern of order,
like the tiling of your bathroom floor.
Okay.-Just simple squares.
Square tiles fit seamlessly.
But with pentagons, a fivefold symmetry,
you are quickly in trouble.
Let's come out this way a little bit.
And...
I can already see where the problem's gonna come from.
Yeah, you see what's happening?
We've opened up a gap. So now we have some choices to make.
We're not gonna be able to fill that in.
I could either put it there or there,
but there's never gonna be a way to...-Yeah.
Atoms hate having gaps,
so the moment you produce gaps with real atoms,
they're going to move around and get rid of them.
Fivefold symmetry was famously forbidden for matter.
But quasicrystals are even more complex and mysterious than this.
Let's just take a look at a quasicrystal pattern first
to get a visual impression of what they're like.
So, a good example is this tiling that you see on the table.
If you study it, you'll see it's made of only two pieces, those two shapes.
They're chickens.
This looks like a puzzle for children,
but there is ingenious mathematics behind it.
This pattern was discovered by Sir Roger Penrose in the 1970s.
A mathematician and sometimes a cosmologist as well.
It is astonishing that a quasicrystal pattern
can be found in a shrine in Isfahan, in Iran.
Without any knowledge of the underlying mathematical principles,
artisans more than 500 years ago
solved the impossible geometry of fivefold symmetry.
There we go.
Now, I should warn you...
The warning was justified.
Yes, indeed, it gets so complicated now
that we are not going to torture you with details.
Just a sample.
So, instead of just one icosahedron, we have an icosahedron of icosahedra.
And we said, "Oh, maybe that's a way of building something ever outwards
that maintains this structure."
But we ran into trouble.
But this model here solved the problem.
It represents a true quasicrystal.
...and you could only just build this plane...
Now Steinhardt wanted to find one in nature.
You ended up doing fieldwork in Kamchatka.
That must've been inspired through the theoretical...
Yeah. Inspired by this model.
Because what this model says:
"Well, actually, if the atoms have forces that are like these interlocks,
they have no choice but to form this structure."
It immediately got me to thinking,
"Is it possible that nature has made a quasicrystal before humans did?"
And so that began a decades-long search for a natural quasicrystal.
We eventually found a mineralogist in Florence named Luca Bindi
who had in his museum a tiny little sample of...
well, a rock, a complex rock,
which had inside it a little grain of quasicrystal.
By studying that particular sample,
we had some hints that what we had in hand was a piece of a meteorite.
But to prove the case, we had to find out where that rock really came from
and see if we could gather more of the sample to prove the case.
So Paul Steinhardt and Luca Bindi
set out on an expedition to easternmost Russia,
close to the Bering Strait.
The red marker shows the site of the meteorite fragments.
They were found along a creek named Listvenitovyi,
of which nobody has ever heard.
The expedition included members of the original Russian geological team
that had found the first sample decades ago.
They had to negotiate uncharted terrain,
totally novel for Paul Steinhardt,
whose outdoor experience did not extend beyond
the lawns of Princeton University.
Myriads of mosquitoes tormented him.
Here we see him with a mosquito net over his face.
His sleep was fitful.
Bears not only appeared in his nightmares, they were really out there.
Their hard work to find fragments of the meteorite paid off.
First inspection of their findings looked promising.
Now Bindi and Steinhardt had reason to celebrate,
although they could not yet know if quasicrystals were present.
The X-ray diffraction pattern of the newly found samples
revealed the forbidden fivefold symmetry,
proof there were quasicrystals within the meteorite.
Could you describe your emotion when you saw this?
I think everything... time seemed to stop for me at that moment.
As...
Just seeing this image just told me immediately
that everything we had been trying to achieve for decades
had now been achieved.
Plus, we had verified that this quasicrystal
not only was formed in nature, but had been formed in space.
Leaving the arcane mysteries of matter behind,
we turn toward some more average rocks that had come down upon us.
...so we have some sticky mats here.
Arizona State University houses a large collection.
The dirt that we have from outside going into the clean vault.
But wild stories were waiting for us.
So when we go in,
make sure you just step on thereto get the dirt off your feet.
All right.
Laurence Garvie, its curator, guided us.
We have a positive pressure in here, just to keep sort of clean air coming in.
Got the dirt off? Good.-Yep.
And we're also on camera all the time. Smile to the camera. Wave to the camera.
But really what's important here
is that, when we're in a meteorite facility like this,
is to keep the meteorites as clean as possible.
You know, usually we think of trying to keep ourselves clean.
Here, we're trying to keep the grease from our fingers off the samples.
So can you please wear some gloves, and I'll put some gloves on as well.
And we're doing this 'cause I wanna show you
one of the most spectacular meteorites, that only fell a few weeks ago,
and actually fell on Costa Rica.
And it's a meteorite that's full of organic compounds.
And, you know, that's important.
'Cause that tells us about our early solar system
and possibly the formation of life in our solar system as well.
Now, I actually have the samples here, in these special cabinets.
These are nitrogen cabinets.
Right? So we have nitrogen... dry nitrogen.
Here's what's important: dry nitrogen being fed into the cabinets.
So when I open it you can actually hear the nitrogen being fed into the cabinets.
And these meteorites are now preserved.
We don't have water going onto them. We don't have oxygen going onto them.
So it's the best preservation that we currently have.
And that's what the hissing is?
That's what the hissing is.
So, to give an example, here is...
one of the most amazing meteorites.
There, see what it's called?
"The Doghouse."
So let's just...
So...
have to add, do not drop this.
-I'll try not to. Okay.-Please don't drop it.
So, this stone actually fell only a few weeks ago in Costa Rica.
And this one actually fell through a doghouse
with the dog that was still sleeping in it.
The dog was unharmed, I hope.-It missed the dog by millimeters
and embedded itself in the ground right next to the dog.
So what makes this one special as well,
it's actually got some dog hair still stuck to it.
No way.
And what makes this one so amazing
is the fact that, if you smell it...
you can actually smell the organic compounds that are in here.
These are 4.5 billion-year-old compounds
that were formed on an early planet...
that planet no longer exists...
and got trapped in this stone
and basically just resided in the asteroid belt for 4 billion years
before, for some reason, it left the asteroid belt
and landed in Costa Rica
and is now in our meteorite vault here.
What is that smell? It's a sort of...
We don't actually know, but we think the thing...
it's similar to, like, mothballs. Something similar.
Something similar to that compound.
Like a solvent or something?
Yeah, a little bit. A little bit.
I'm actually gonna put this one back, unless you wanna hold it again.
No, I... By the way,
the red is from the roof of the doghouse.
And the white is from the floor of the doghouse.
And did the dog instantly realize
that it had received a visitor from the heavens?
Well, it didn't, but funny enough,
people have used dogs to look for meteorites because of the smell.
They can be trained to find that smell.
Let's put this back now.
This is the Toluca iron from the Jiquipilco region.
Here, try this one.
Don't drop it on your toe. It'll break.
Oh, my goodness.
So, I mean, that must weigh, what,
I don't know, 30 kilos, 40 kilos, just that one stone.
That's just pure iron ore?
That's just pure iron. But nickel-rich iron.
-Here, let's not drop it. Ready. Ready.-I'll give you that.
You know, one of the most amazing impact phenomena never seen on TV
is this material, tektites.
Now, here we have... There was an impact on the Earth
that basically melted large amounts of the Earth's surface.
In this case, probably several thousand square kilometers of ground.
It was almost instantaneously melted.
And then the shock from that impact
then sprayed this material over about a third of the Earth.
When did this happen?
We think about... We've dated it about 750,000 years ago.
So, you know, sounds like a long time ago,
but from a geological time period, it's actually just yesterday.
It's a very recent phenomenon.-It's glass?
This is just... So, what this stuff here... If you listen...
This is just glass, but this is not extraterrestrial glass.
This is the Earth, of which you had all this material melted,
just turned into a melt, and then sprayed over the Earth.
And so you find this material in Southeast Asia, Philippines,
through Indonesia, all the way down through Australia
and then all the way down into Antarctica.
And so this was a humongous event.
Look at the shapes though. You know what these shapes are telling us?
This is telling us that this stuff was sprayed and then solidified in the air.
If we'd been there when this thing came down,
that would've been the end of us?
I mean, everything.
Imagine... And I mean several thousand square kilometers...
everything underneath that was almost instantly turned to glass.
So, yes. You'd be sitting there having your cup of tea,
you'd be turned to glass. Everything.
Each one of these stones from darker worlds out there
has its own story.
Throughout history, meteorites have captivated human imagination.
A tool as simple as the light from a cell phone
extols the mysterious beauty of these voyagers from afar.
What we have here is...
At the same Center for Meteorite Studies in Tempe, Arizona,
we met Dr. Meenakshi Wadhwa,
one of the foremost scientists of meteorites.
...40,000 different meteorites.
Including a piece by Barbara Hepworth.-Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah, and these are an incredible
resource for all of the work that we do here.
What are we looking at here?
So that round object that you're seeing,
that is a tiny little...
you can imagine it as the tiny little droplet
that was present in the earliest history of the solar system,
something like 4.5 billion years ago.
Is this before the planets have accreted?
Yes. So this is when there was just gas and dust.
Nothing else. There were no planets, there was no Earth. Nothing.
And these are...
These have been described as droplets of fiery rain
that were... just condensing out of that nebula,
that cloud of gas and dust.
Probably because of some sort of shock processes
that were happening in the earliest history of our solar system.
And we don't really know, actually, where those shocks were coming from,
but we think those are the kinds of processes that were happening
in, you know, other solar systems that are forming today.
And what elements do we find in there?
Yeah, so what you're seeing, you know,
this kind of beautiful stained glass pattern that you're seeing?
That's a mineral called olivine.
And this kind of... When I rotate it in this...
As you have this sort of transmitted light going through these minerals,
you are polarize... the light is polarized,
and so the mineral itself
is sort of extinguishing the light in certain directions.
And so you're kind of seeing this brightening and then darkening.
It's like a beautiful stained glass window, really.
I think it's kinda... Yeah.-It's gorgeous.
Here's a slice,
a thin slice of the very Mars sample that I first looked at
at the very start of my career studying meteorites.
And I was just fascinated, because, you know,
it looked so familiar, but it came from a completely different world.
We know that this rock came from Mars because it has gases trapped in it
that have the exact same composition as the Martian atmosphere.
And so when you take a piece of this rock and you heat it up,
you release these gases, and you can measure the composition of that gas,
and it's the exact composition
as what we measured using the spacecraft on Mars.
Incredible.-Yeah, it's incredible.
Was Carl Sagan right, that we're made of that stardust?
We are all stardust, absolutely.
I mean, every, you know, every element in our body
was synthesized in other stars before it got here.
So, yeah. We're all stardust.
Eventually.-A wonderful thought.
Yeah.
This was the only time throughout the entire shooting of this film
where I could not resist.
I had to intervene from behind the camera.
I think I'm not stardust. I'm Bavarian.
Yeah, that's made of special stuff, that is.
Yeah. That's right.
Our voyage took us
to wherever large fireballs had plunged down to Earth.
We wanted to know if life had come from outer space.
This is Ramgarh Crater in Rajasthan, in Northern India, four kilometers across.
From space it immediately catches the eye,
but down on the ground you barely notice you are inside a crater.
However, Hindu temples were built here since the 10th century.
We were curious if organic matter in meteorites
could have provided the ingredients of life on our planet.
We were seeking the expertise of Professor Nita Sahai,
who studies the transition from chemistry to biology.
And we're in this... in this huge crater here,
formed by a meteorite impact.
And we don't know whether it was a carbonaceous one,
but we know that these carbonaceous meteorites
have all kinds of organic molecules in them.
What are the key ones that might represent building blocks of life?
Actually, all of the building blocks of life have been found in meteorites.
Amino acids that make up proteins,
lipid molecules that make up cell membranes
and, amazingly, even ribose, which is a sugar.
I just find it astonishing, you know,
that you can find sugars and things that make proteins in a meteorite.
Right.
Are they made geologically, like minerals, or...
They're not like minerals, in the sense that they're organic molecules
and minerals are inorganic,
but they have been formed presumably
by the interactions of organic molecules with mineral surfaces.
For example, on interstellar grains,
as well as on the surfaces of the meteorites themselves.
And, I mean, there's still a big step
from having these ingredients to sparking life.
Right.-What do we need?
I guess we need some kind of crucible to put this stuff in
and a heat source?
Yeah. So, you need to get these simple building blocks
polymerized into longer chains,
because the longer chains have the ability to fold and be functional.
What do you think of the idea of panspermia,
that life is dispersed around the universe?
I mean, is it conceivable that living organisms
could survive the intense temperatures and radiation of outer space?
DNA has actually been found to be quite robust.
And it's possible to survive in space.
And even an entire organism might survive in a spore-like mode.
'Cause people have actually dug deep into the Earth
and even a couple of kilometers down
they find bacteria that have been
living there presumably for millions of years.
And they survive in this state of, kind of, suspended animation.
Do you have any idea why the priests built their temples here?
I mean, and this one's dedicated to Shiva, you know?
I mean, it seems too good to be true, on the floor of a meteorite-impact crater.
It's kind of interesting that this temple is dedicated to Shiva and Parvati.
And it's a tantric temple, which represents creation.
And Shiva is also the god of destruction.
So, in Hindu mythology, there is this idea
of cycles of creation and destruction of the universe.
And, appropriately, it's in a meteor-impact crater site,
where the impact can wipe out life,
but then also deliver these organic molecules
that could have seeded life in the first place.
This was confirmed in a similar way by a resident sadhu.
If humanity and all life becomes extinct by war or a meteorite,
life will regenerate at this place, at this crater lake.
We had to go where the most colossal fireball came down.
It was at a place with an unpronounceable name,
at the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
This is the very place where our planet suffered an unimaginable apocalypse.
What came down from space right here
had the force of hundreds of millions... possibly thousands of millions...
of atomic bombs Hiroshima's size.
Nothing out here is reminiscent of it.
Only leaden boredom weighs upon everything.
Chicxulub is a beach resort so godforsaken you want to cry.
The dogs here, like all dogs on this planet,
are just too dim-witted to understand
that three-quarters of all species were extinguished
by the event that took place right here.
The dinosaurs have only survived in a local museum.
Their eyes were made by humans. They recognize nothing.
Only their footprints are authentic,
but they show they were ambling along, not fleeing.
They were oblivious to the sudden death of everything.
This godforsaken spot is at the center
of one of the greatest geological cataclysms in Earth history.
It irreversibly changed the course of life on the planet.
Some 66 million years ago,
an asteroid, perhaps 10 kilometers across,
came hurtling to the Earth at speeds of 20 kilometers a second.
The force of the impact was so phenomenal
that it excavated a hole 30 kilometers deep.
The crater that formed...
stretches out 100 kilometers out to sea and 100 kilometers inland,
and the temperatures generated in the crust from the impact
melted and vaporized the crust and the bolide itself.
There were earthquakes of magnitude 11.
That's a hundred times greater than any historical earthquake.
Mega-tsunami, 100-meter-high waves,
ravaged the shorelines of distant oceans,
and a vast pall of dust and molten droplets and gases
soared into the atmosphere,
some of the material even reaching escape velocity and exiting into space.
Those molten droplets rained out over an area of 3,000 kilometers,
igniting firestorms on the land.
I love how movies depict it.
800 kilometers from the impact site,
the light is so intense
it causes the flesh of the Alamosaurus to appear transparent...
and burns images of their shadows onto the ground.
The scorching light sears their eyeballs.
They now can't see what's headed their way.
But they can feel it.
Now, mammals, they made it through,
and they took advantage of the new ecological opportunities.
We probably wouldn't be here ourselves, Homo sapiens as a species,
were it not for this colossal impact.
Nobody knew there is an impact crater until the 1970s.
Gravity anomalies and borehole data revealed its structure and immense size.
The only surface manifestation
is an enigmatic ring of water holes called cenotes.
They are a geological echo of the impact.
Since there are no rivers and lakes in the Yucatán Peninsula,
these water holes attracted the ancient Mayas.
Without the presence of cenotes,
this cultural center of Chichén Itzáwould never have been built.
They developed a high culture with a writing system,
astronomy and monumental architecture of pyramids and temples.
They even built an observatory before there were telescopes.
They tracked the position of celestial bodies.
Their calendar was much more precise than anything at this historical time.
The Mayas had a deep fascination of death and the afterlife.
In their belief, there were nine underworlds and 13 heavens.
Wanting to see some of the underworld,
we descended to the bottom of a nearby cenote.
Fátima Tec Pool, a cave expert and archaeologist,
took us to one of the abodes of the rain god.
This cenote was virtually unknown until very recently.
Tell me, Fátima, what is the relationship between the cenote,
the cave here, and the ritual and belief of the Maya?
This place is interesting because you can see
how the concepts of water and caves combine.
And how the Mayans used these spaces for rituals.
Inside, you can see walls which suggest the Mayans used to make pilgrimages here
to pass through these sacred walls.
Can we go in?-Of course, let's go.
As the caves are seen as entrances to the underworld,
we can see here how they made use of the natural form of the cave,
to make ritual deposits of human remains,
possibly an ancestor of a Mayan family.
What era are they from?-Possibly the Preclassic.
We can also see this portal.
This takes us further into the underworld.
There's something else interesting...
A human finger bone.
Deposited here in part of the wall.
Look closely and you can see ashes, possibly a kind of mortuary treatment,
before being placed in the wall.
Is it safe for human beings to enter the underworld,
the abode of the gods?
Yes, of course!
We timed our visit with the Mexican Day of the Dead.
For the Mayans, death was an obsession.
There are endless friezes with nothing but skulls.
Mérida, the central cemetery.
All this within the perimeter of the Chicxulub crater.
The dead leave their graves and join the living.
We are here in the serene park
of the pope's summer residence of Castel Gandolfo.
However, serious science is being done here.
There's an astronomical observatory famous for its photographic celestial map.
Right next to the residence, Lake Albano, a formidable volcanic crater.
The director of the observatory is a Jesuit, Brother Guy Consolmagno.
He's one of the foremost scholars in meteoritics.
Brother Guy, at the heart of the Vatican Observatory
is this wonderful meteorite collection.
Quite a historical collection.
I certainly think so.
This is the stuff I've been working on for, now, nearly 30 years.
Is this why you came here initially?
I didn't choose to come here.
I did this under a vow of obedience.
I had been a scientist and then entered the Jesuits
and thought I was gonna be teaching at a school like maybe Georgetown.
But under obedience they ordered me to come to Rome
and eat that terrible food and look at this miserable scenery.
And, oh, yes, there's a collection of a thousand meteorites.
They didn't know that the meteorites were here.
They didn't know that my expertise was meteorites.
It was one of those divine coincidences.
It's phenomenal that we've got meteorites,
that we've got pieces of outer space that have visited us here on Earth,
and that we can tell that they're not from the Earth,
that they're made, chemically, of completely different materials,
that they were formed 4.5 billion years ago.
That we have the ability to understand these things
is itself a miracle.
And you would find it perfectly reasonable that
life is elsewhere in the universe,
life on Earth may have originated elsewhere?
It's possible. I don't know. I don't have the data.
You know, people will sometimes ask me,
do I believe that there's life elsewhere in the universe?
And I think that's the right way to ask it.
It's a matter of belief. I don't have the data.
But if you were to come to me, as a scientist,
saying you wanted resources to look for life,
and you had a great project, I'd say, "Go for it."
On the other hand, if you were saying you wanted to study
little green men coming out of a flying saucer,
then I'm not so sure I'd go along with that.
But if the green men arrived on Earth, would you consider baptizing them?
Only if they ask.
Brother Guy invited us to see the historical telescope.
...that were commissioned to photograph the entire sky
and make a photographic atlas.
Why, throughout so much of history and around the world,
have people thought of heaven as up there?
I don't know, but it's certainly true.
I mean, there are so many languages
where the word for "sky" and the word for "heaven" are the same word.
All I can think of...
and maybe, you know, a professional would come up with a better answer...
all I can think of is looking at the stars
give you that sense of out-of-yourself that you need
to be able to be ready to encounter a god.
When you see a shooting star today,
is it an interesting scientific fact for you, or do you gasp in wonder?
Yes. It is both.
And frankly, I think it's because I know the science that I'm even more in awe.
It's one thing to say,"That's a pretty bit of light."
It's another thing to say,
"I know what elements are creating that light.
I know why it's that color.
I know what I can learn from this.
I hope some camera captured it, so that I can measure
not only, 'Boy, was that pretty, '
but also, 'This is telling me something about dust from a comet.'
A cloud of dust left behind a comet that the Earth is barreling into,
and, like snowflakes hitting your windscreen,
it's shots of light hitting our atmosphere."
All of that adds to the joy. It doesn't take away from it.
This brings to mind the dynamic of different orders of knowledge,
the rational and the poetic, the imaginative and the intellectual.
And it seems to me that you marshal the same thought processes
to cope with matters that are so vast, the cosmos,
and yet matters that are so intimate, the soul.
You can't do the one without the other.
You can't do science...
You don't want to do science
if you don't have that sense of awe, that sense of wonder.
You can't believe in a creator god
without experiencing creation.
Otherwise what's the point of believing?
And I know that you described in the '70s, as a graduate student,
seeing Comet West.
And you said, "Was it impressive? No, it was frightening."
It shook you to the core, you said. Why?
In the sky was a comet
that looked like every photograph of a comet you'd ever seen.
The kind of thing that you thought only existed in photographs.
And it didn't belong there.
And it was big. And it was scary.
And it wasn't there yesterday and, "What's going on?"
And then you understood why ancient people would look at comets
as a portent of something really, really scary and different.
How might the church react if the NASA telescopes detect
a really threatening near-Earth object hurtling towards us?
I'll be honest. We'll pray. What else can you do?
I want to show an excerpt of a movie
where physical and existential fear
are just the shudder audiences go for.
This is beautifully done.
Apart from Brother Guy's prayers,
there are practical measures already in place.
We are here at Pan-STARRS,
the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System,
located at the Hawaiian island of Maui.
Okay, brake is released.
Everybody stand clear. I'm gonna bring it down.
Here, one of the telescopes during maintenance.
We'll go for that, I guess.
Yeah. I'll try.-Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Joanna Bulger is entrusted, in a way,
with the safekeeping of humanity.
And so is her colleague, Dr. Mark Willman.
Just looking at their faces gave us a good amount of confidence.
They allowed us to intrude on their night watch.
Good evening.-Clive, hey.
I found you. The night watch.-How's it going?
Come on. Have a seat.-Have a seat.
Helping to protect us from space rocks that might have hostile intent.
We were just observing, but we had to close up
because the humidity shot up.
So we're up to 90% now,
and we have to close at 85 to protect the mirror.
We don't want moisture on the mirror.
And how do you communicate with the controllers up at the telescope?
Well... we are the controllers.
There's nobody at the summit. It's all remote observing now.
That's old school, where you had to drive up at the summit.
It's 10,000 feet,
so it's much more comfortable down here at 2,000 feet.
And so what have we got?
I mean, this screen, I guess, is the night sky.
Yep, this is a map of the sky.
You can see there's the zenith.
That's just straight overhead. And here's the telescope.
And this was the target we were gonna observe.
We take about 60 images,
and we get four images of the same spot in the sky.
And so we have a tiny movie, a four-image movie then.
And then we can pick out moving targets that way.
And you've got the largest cameras on Earth.
Is that right?-We do.
I've got a 12-megapixel camera.
Twelve megapixels.-What's your camera?
Ours is over a billion pixels,
so it's... it's much larger
than a... a consumer camera like that.
What is going on with this image here?
Is this the pixel array itself?-Yeah, exactly.
So this is actually the raw image that we take.
So this is a 45-second exposure.
And you can see the size of the camera itself.
So it... We're... We get a three-degree field of view,
which is roughly seven square degrees on the sky.
And the camera itself is stitched together
of an eight-by-eight array of addressable CCDs.
So if you actually... We can click on one of these images.
This one over here.-What's that?
Is that a meteor there?-Here?
No. These are two satellites that we've caught in our field of view.
It is a satisfying job, because...
well, we don't wanna go the way of the dinosaurs, and...
so it's worthwhile looking out for these things.
Although the odds are slim that a big one is gonna hit us anytime soon.
But sooner or later there will be a big one,
so we're watching for it.
I do feel I can sleep more soundly at night
knowing that there is always someone herein the night shift,
you know, looking for inbound bolides. That's wonderful.
365 days a year, yeah. Every night.
Thank you. Thank you very much for protecting us.
You're welcome. It's our privilege.-Yeah.
The photos of the night sky are analyzed by Dr. Rob Weryk,
a planetary defense researcher from Canada.
I can't believe this is the first time you've actually been to the telescopes.
Yeah, well, normally I focus on the data analysis, reviewing the candidates.
So it's nice to have a chance to come see the telescope.
Is it like seeing a sort of, you know, brother that you've never met before?
That's true. That's true. Yeah.
They actually ended up opening at the endow the night for an hour and a half.
We actually were able to review the data this morning.
And so I found six new candidate objects.
"We" is "you."You found them.
Yes. I mean, it's really a team effort overall,
but I'm the one that reviews it, so...
What's the most exciting object that you've found?
So, the most exciting object we found became known as 'Oumuamua.
It's actually the first interstellar comet.
It's a comet that came from outside our solar system.
It's the first time we ever saw an object like this. Yeah.
'Oumuamua?
'Oumuamua. So, it's actually a Hawaiian word.
It means "first messenger from afar." Yes.
Okay.
So it's actually a two-step process.
The computer software isn't perfect, and it still requires manual review,
and that's where I come in.
So my main responsibility is to review all the nightly detections.
And things that are real,
they would show up as either a series of dots or trailed objects.
Are you the first person who's seen this?
Yes. So while the observers collect the data,
I'm actually the first person on the planet to review and see this,
and my submitting it would sound the alarm
if there was an object that was a hazard to the Earth.
The alarm would instantly call the attention
of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
Only a few people know that it exists.
Responsible here is Dr. Kelly Fast, an astronomer.
I've heard you describe asteroids
as the vermin of the solar system.
Why do you call them that?
Well, certainly astronomers who are looking at things besides asteroids...
they might be looking at their target,
and asteroids are going to photobomb whatever they're looking at.
So I guess from a point of view, if you're looking at something else,
then they are the vermin of the solar system.
From our point of view at NASA,
they're fantastic for science, for spacecraft targets.
But we also want to keep an eye on them,
because it's never good when two
things occupy the same space at the same time.
So we want to know if any of them are going to intersect Earth's orbit
at a time when Earth is going to be there.
There's dust hitting Earth's atmosphere all the time.
We see shooting stars,
that's just dust burning up in the atmosphere.
But it's when things are larger,
when you get up to the size of asteroids...
Earth's atmosphere is fantastic for burning things up,
but eventually things get too big for that to happen.
Chelyabinsk, 20 meters. There was devastation.
Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.
That was probably a 40-meter asteroid.
Eighty million trees were flattened by the blast.
But not a single grain of the asteroid has ever been discovered.
And defense? What can we do if there's a big sucker coming in at us?
What can we do about it?
Well, yeah, the best defense is preparation.
And so finding them first...
You don't know how to mount a defense until you find them.
So that is the first order of business.
And that is going on with ground-based surveys.
If you think of it as:
You've got the Sun,
you've got the Earth and the other planets going around the Sun,
like being on a racetrack.
And then you've got all the asteroids going around the Sun on the racetrack.
And so there are many times when they might come close together.
In fact, we have that often, where there's a "close approach,"
where an asteroid comes close to Earth, which...
Close might mean, you know, many lunar distances away.
But let's say this is really large.
It's a very large asteroid, and you don't have a lot of time.
There are the movies that show blowing them up.
You don't necessarily have to do that. You still need a good push.
And you could use a nuclear explosive device
that is used in some of these movies.
But the idea is you would detonate it next to the asteroid,
and the energy from that detonation would irradiate the surface,
and the material that blows off the surface of the asteroid
would give it that push in the other direction.
A softer, unaggressive approach
was actually performed by a Japanese probe on Asteroid Ryugu.
How small the asteroid is
we can tell from the size of the shadow the probe casts on its surface.
Gravity is so minimal that the softest of landings
already threw great quantities of debris away from it, into space.
Right here we see how meteorites originate.
The probe itself is already on its way back to Earth,
bringing a single gram scooped from the asteroid.
But for bigger specimens, Antarctica is paradise.
It is not that more rocks fall here than elsewhere.
They are visible on the vast glaciers that cover almost the entire continent
that is larger than the United States.
We were invited to join the hunt by South Korean scientists.
Their station, named Jang Bogo,
at the coast of East Antarctica, houses about 50 people.
The austral summer season lasts nearly five months,
during which the Sun never goes down.
Inside, it is more spacious than we anticipated.
Only a few miles away, six men of Scott's last expedition
endured a whole winter huddling in a snow cave just nine feet across.
They were starving and freezing in squalor,
surviving on seal meat and a ration of one biscuit a day.
From diaries of Scott's men,
we know they dreamt of banquets that were ripped away from their ready forks.
Only one man managed in his dream to actually eat,
and he was rightfully hated by his comrades for this.
But we were not here for lobster and kimchi.
We were itching to fly to the Polar Plateau in the interior.
We knew there was an overland expedition of trucks
that had left our station three weeks ago
and was nearing the meteorite hunting grounds on the blue ice.
But first the helicopter has to climb up some 2,000 meters.
From the station at the coast to the ice plateau of the continent,
we are flying over glacier ice cascading down.
Imagine crossing this on foot.
Each of these wildly tossed boulders
is larger than an apartment building,
and the mass is constantly flowing towards the sea.
Finally we reach the Plateau.
Only a few mountains remain, sticking out of the ice like islands.
It felt like entering into a world that was not our planet.
From here begins the immense loneliness
of a vast continent covered by ice two to four kilometers thick.
Through GPS data, we knew the position of the caravan.
They were expecting us.
We were so looking forward to meet Jong Ik Lee,
the leader of this expedition.
He was the one who invited us to Antarctica,
and it felt like meeting an old friend.
I didn't think you'd make it.-Yes, yes.
I didn't know that we would make it.
My dream...
We had seen footage he shot close to here a few years earlier.
He had found a large meteorite,
and we fell in love with him, seeing his ecstasy of discovery.
This is science at its best.
Okay, down.
Something else I like about this highly charged emotional moment,
something the stupid doctrine of film schools would never allow.
Watch the background. A figure enters.
No recognizable motivation, wrong timing,
rear end approaching.
Back to the present.
Along with us, Jong Ik's wife, Mi Jung, had arrived,
herself a renowned polar geologist.
Husband and wife reunited.
Minutes after our arrival we found our first meteorite.
The sheer, blank ice, not covered with snow,
is the ideal terrain to spot them.
The gigantic mass of ice is moving slowly, like a conveyor belt
and exposes stones that may have fallen hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Most of the meteorites are carried all the way to the ocean.
But where the glacier is deflected upwards by a mountain range deep down there,
the ice evaporates, leaving its cargo at the surface.
Every stone out here is a meteorite.
Watch the man on the right. He found something.
The lucky one turned out to be Clive.
It may look staged, but it was really him.
This is it! This is your sample!
Congratulations.
This is big. Biggest today.
I found one over there. A little one.
And then when I was...
It also turned out
this was the largest meteorite of the entire season,
and the first assessment suggested it was an extremely rare specimen.
We resumed our search, but one thought crept up on us.
It would be a full five months until night would fall,
and we could walk on for the next 5,000 kilometers without meeting a soul.
This is the ultimate experience of space for those on foot.
But we knew of a place where not our feet but our souls start to travel,
a place where we transcend our human existence.
Our last journey took us to one of the remotest islands
of the archipelago in the Torres Strait.
These islands are located between Australia and New Guinea.
This tiny island called Merhas a population of about 400.
We had heard of tribal beliefs about shooting stars
that carry the souls of the deceased to a new life somewhere else.
Doug Passi, one of the tribal elders,
knew stories about souls departing by meteor to the netherworld.
One of my family members was sent by the ghosts on a maier.
"Maier" is a meteor?-Falling star, yeah.
And she was actually on that maier itself,
burned with fire.
That's what I heard.
And they said that's a true story.
And that lady... old lady... named Gizou Simbolo.
Was she alive, or was it her spirit?
She was alive. She was alive, yeah.
And when them family is ready to die...
the maier can tell us a story saying,
"Someone will go lost in a few days." Or...
Or... Or...
"Here he goes somewhere else."
The star... the falling star. Maier.Sometime red. Sometime light blue.
It seems here that death is...
It's not so much an event. It's the beginning of a journey.
Beginning of the new journey on the new life. Yes.
They can come in different forms.
Form of a bird. Form of a dog. Form of a person.
Or a shadow that you can see move on the wall.
Or maybe a floating wood.
Floating wood on the ocean.
Because we came with a camera,
the islanders revived an almost forgotten dance
that was not performed here for half a century.
Alo Tapim, an elder, instructed young men in the choreography.
The dance is about maier, as you've indicated.
Maier is that star, comet.
And it's a special star.
Only on special times that this star appears to the Meriam people.
The Meriam observe this star
when a loved one departs this life to the next.
The transition is done through this star.
The dancers carrying Nair. Torches.
We call it Nair.
They carry them.
And they indicate when that star...
falling star lets go its embers.
It's indicated by the fire sticks they carry.
And when two fire sticks, they clap...
they hit together,
clap together, the two fire sticks, the embers...
And this is captured.
That tells... describes that star.
Yes. And this is our story.