When I was little,
my grandmother gave me an old compass.
She wanted me to know where I was going.
I was always much more intrigued by where we came from.
I mean, I knew she was from Pittsburgh, but before that,
her grandmother and her grandmother's grandmother,
where did they come from?
You go back far enough and everyone, every living thing,
we all come from the same place,
a moment when a dead rock came to life.
Only a few of us have been able to see just how
extraordinary life is.
Ignition and lift-off.
Eight astronauts,
with over 1,000 days in space between them,
can tell us how being up there helped
them to truly understand what goes on down here.
I look down and I can see where we came from.
This living, breathing bubble of life in the blackness of space.
It's hard to imagine anywhere else where everything
could have fallen into place so magically.
We're so used to life that we start to think of life
as being really simple and easy to do.
It's not.
We may never know exactly how life got started,
but we do know it was a strange brew.
A dash of magical liquid...
A sprinkle of stardust...
And a crackle of energy.
Mixed together in a big bubbling cauldron to make our rock come alive.
Mae Jemison sees life differently from most of us...
And not just because she's an astronaut.
Go on my mark, three, two, one...
Okay Mae, we copy.
She's also a doctor.
She's spent her life studying life.
Houston now controlling.
Houston, Endeavour switching into roll.
Roger roll Endeavour.
At an age when I was just running around writing rhymes
in Philly, she was pondering life's biggest questions.
As a child I was fascinated by the question, who am I?
What am I?
I remember once when we were driving from Chicago to
Alabama we stopped on the side of the road and I looked up
and there was this incredibly star-studded sky.
It just made the whole universe very magical.
And 30 years later, I had a ringside seat to the stars.
When I was in space, I felt an incredible connection to the
rest of the universe.
And it's true.
We're made of the stuff of stars.
The carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen,
the elements that are the key components to our body were
actually generated inside of stars that exploded.
All of the stardust scattered across the universe,
clumping together into rocks to form planets like ours.
And the great mystery of Genesis is about how stardust came to life.
You, me, the dog, we're all made of the same dead dust
that built the planet.
It's just mixed up different.
The big mystery is, what's the mixer?
♪ ♪
Lechuguilla is probably one of the most difficult places to visit on Earth.
♪ ♪
When you're deep in Lechuguilla you're more than 1000 feet underground.
Lechuguilla cave is almost 150 miles long which makes it one
of the most complex maze caves in the world.
The trail's down here.
♪ ♪
It's a big pretty big drop-off into this room.
Got it.
♪ ♪
That's amazing. Absolutely.
♪ ♪
Most of these formations are a couple of hundred thousand years old.
We'd better not touch anything.
Yeah, let's get through without touching anything.
You'd imagine these deep dark caves to be lifeless.
There's no energy from the sun here,
but the cave walls are not as dead as they seem.
If you were to put on special glasses...
You'd see this kaleidoscope of organisms,
living in the caves.
Billions of bacteria on every surface you look at.
Lechuguilla is cut off from the surface.
But there is something above all else that is essential for life.
Water.
It takes up to 10,000 years for water to work from the
surface into the lake.
You take the water out of the equation and you have
no bacteria in the cave.
Water is required for life as we know it here on Earth.
♪ ♪
One of the important things you learn in
medicine is that bacteria are made up of just one cell.
And cells are the basic units of life.
Tiny bubbles or membranes filled with water.
Floating around this solution, we've got the ingredients of life.
Yet, it all depends on water.
And when looking at our planet from space,
I was struck by just how much water there is.
It is definitely the blue planet.
These bodies of water are massive around the Earth.
You're over the ocean, ocean, ocean,
and then you hit a continent like Africa, like, ooh, Africa, big continent.
In just a couple of minutes it's gone and
you're over the ocean again.
Looking at the Nile Delta from space,
you can see how important water is,
because all along the Nile river is this thin beautiful
green strip of life.
That H2O is magic, and so when you're looking for life,
the key is to find water.
We can last way longer without eating than we can without drinking.
Food gives us energy.
What does water give us?
Turns out that plain old H2O is the universal champ at one crucial thing.
♪ ♪
We've come here to Angel Falls to climb this huge overhang.
One of the biggest in the world.
You just feel like you're flying when you're hanging from the wall.
The sound of the waterfall is like a constant storm.
♪ ♪
Climbing Angel Falls is very dangerous.
I want to keep climbing.
You want to take the lead?
Yeah. Of course.
Where the rock has been more exposed to the water...
The Rock is crumbly.
It's very sandy, so I'm going to put one protection here.
Got to be really careful in this, you know.
And the other hand,
where there is no water at all,
you can see the rock is completely different.
It's extremely hard.
Are you going to climb?
Yeah, I will try.
When you get to see this landscape from above...
You can see how the water is a big destroyer in a way.
It dissolves the rocks.
It continues, the flow of water, for millions of years,
like these incredible islands in the sky.
♪ ♪
Water has special properties.
You know the same water we drink can dissolve almost anything.
It will even dissolve rock over time.
So that means lots of different molecules can be
mixed together in it.
And interact with one another, making something new.
And that's what makes Earth so special.
With all the liquid water we have,
our planet's like some type of giant chemistry lab.
Water takes dust from the stars,
breaks it down and shakes it up.
But life isn't going to bubble up just because you stirred up
some muddy stardust.
If you want to brew the soup of life,
you need to kick it up a notch.
If you want to make stardust into life...
There's a bit more to it than, just add water.
A recipe is more than a list of ingredients.
It also tells you how to put them all together.
Imagine a big pot of all these ingredients,
you throw them in, but if you throw in the celery,
tomatoes and the pepper, you're not gonna get a
spaghetti sauce, unless you add some heat.
♪ ♪
I usually start my day with a hit of caffeine,
but Lee Koon Yau, his job gives him all the jolt he needs.
♪ ♪
Lee is up top to check the lightning conductor.
He's testing it to make sure it conducts electricity right down to the ground.
You and I may only see lightning a few times a year,
but the Earth is constantly crackling with energy.
To see it, you have to go way higher than a skyscraper.
Viewed from space, the Earth is dynamic.
It's full of energy.
I remember seeing these big flashes of light that sort of come through the clouds.
You know, the lightning just propagates literally for
thousands of miles across the surface of the Earth.
It looks like its nervous system spreading
across the planet.
They're spectacular.
They almost seem to be communicating to each other.
There are over 100 lightning strikes per second.
That's eight million a day.
And at the start of our planet, billions of years ago,
there was even more energy on display.
That's what life needed to get started.
Energy.
The first experiment to reveal this really captivated
me as a child.
I grew up in Chicago and two scientists from my hometown
Urey and Miller, took the components that were believed
to be Earth's primitive lifeless atmosphere.
Then they subjected it to electrical charges.
They were able to generate organic molecules.
The basic building blocks of life.
The thought that energy could make lifeless stuff
come alive was just about as exciting as life could get for me.
I mean, wow.
Now we have a lot more knowledge about early Earth.
Billions of years ago, there were many more sources of
energy than just lightning.
Meteors rained down.
There were volcanic eruptions.
Super-tides churned these seas.
The Earth was a much more energy-rich, violent place.
Very lively, right?
Lots of things are happening.
But out of this lifeless system,
and over a long period of time, we actually got life.
And one of the best contenders for where life started is a
place we might believe nothing could ever survive at all.
Deep on the floor of the oceans,
something very mysterious happens.
Cracks in the Earth's crust open up down there.
And heated water and gases spew out.
Hydrothermal vents.
Chemicals, energy, water.
All in one place.
Some are even cooking up organic molecules today,
life's building blocks.
And that's why many scientists believe it's someplace like
this where life first started.
So the origin of all of us, all the way back,
was fired out of a chimney at the bottom of the ocean.
But it would have been nothing more than hot mud if there
wasn't one very special element in that stardust.
Space offers an incredible platform to study
life as it evolved here on Earth.
It's fascinating to think that for us to be here now,
the right combination of stardust,
energy and water had to come together.
And not just any bit of stardust...
When you look at life in its most basic form,
you find that there's one element that acts like a
backbone and holds it all together.
And you only get to see how important it is for
life when you encounter death.
For the Hindus of Bali,
death is a part of the cycle of life.
Not the end.
♪ ♪
It's up to all the members of the family to
make sure the spirits of the dead get to the right place.
They burn the bodies to return the elements of the
universe back to their source.
The goal?
To convert the body into ash.
When you burn something that was once alive,
and drive off all the water, what emerges in the flame is
the essential bit of stardust that makes life possible.
That charred black stuff, carbon.
Everything is our body has carbon in it.
From our bones to our muscle to our neuro-receptors.
It might be hard to understand what makes carbon so great for life,
but it turns out that carbon is the ultimate building block.
It can connect with other elements in almost infinite
ways to generate all the different molecules needed to
create a living cell.
Carbon is like the coolest Lego brick you can imagine.
My kids loved playing with this stuff,
but if carbon was one of those blocks,
it'd be the one that they'd all fight over,
because you can snap it together just about
any way you like.
Take something with a lot of carbon in it.
Spider silk.
♪ ♪
Now spider silk is finer than hair, stronger than steel,
stretchy as elastic and sticky as gum.
All of those qualities just depend on how you snap
together that carbon.
Carbon's versatility enables a construction of a
miraculous molecule inside nearly every living cell.
DNA.
Our DNA is one of the most complex molecules in the entire universe.
Billions of carbon atoms combined to help hold it together,
and this beautifully tangled formation is like an organic super-computer.
It contains the instruction manual for life.
And every facet and every detail that makes you, you.
And it's not just us humans.
DNA is at the heart of almost every living cell that ever existed.
And you couldn't build it without carbon.
Now hang on a sec, something doesn't add up, alright.
I'm no scientist but growing up,
I made a lot of instant noodles and I'll tell you one
thing, if you take your flavor packet and throw it into a
swimming pool, you are not going to get a nice bowl of ramen.
So how are you supposed to make DNA in the middle of an endless ocean?
Take a pinch of star, splash of water,
turn up the heat and bam.
Happy Birthday Life.
Not quite.
There's still something missing from our recipe.
The pot you cook it all up in.
Everything alive needs to be held together and protected.
That's true if you're a strand of DNA...
Or an astronaut.
The space station is like a cell in a way.
It's like a bubble of life.
You really have this sense of being enclosed,
you know, just a few inches in front of my eyes
is the vacuum of space, and if I were out there,
I'd be gone in 10 seconds.
Inside we have all the ingredients and the
systems to keep us alive.
It's the same for living cells.
Just at a microscopic level.
Water is a critical solvent for life.
But if there's too much water...
The solution might be dilute,
and the molecules of life never bump into one another.
So you need something to contain them.
Think of a bubble that we blow.
That surrounds this pocket of air.
And it keeps the air contained.
There's something similar encasing all living cells.
Membranes.
The holy grail for me is to find out how the first membranes formed.
It could have formed in a hot spring,
in an ice pool underneath an ice sheet.
It's a huge mystery.
I've come to Iceland because it's a fantastic natural laboratory.
This is Liane, coming in.
I'm heading north, I'm at 460 meters altitude and I'm heading to direction 71.
It's snowing outside.
I'll be there in an hour. Over.
♪ ♪
Today in Iceland you see volcanoes underneath icecaps.
You also see hot springs.
Bubbling pools where life could have started as well.
Even in the hottest environments,
if you take a sample and you analyze its DNA,
there is life there.
In the early Earth you can envisage these bubbling mud pools,
where water dissolves the rocks and makes clay.
As the gas comes out, it forms a membrane which then bursts.
So think of that membrane not bursting and actually
preserving at a very, very small scale...
And then if you mix organic molecules inside,
you all of a sudden have an organic molecule inside a
membrane to form a cell.
♪ ♪
Without membranes we would be on a planet covered
by a dilute ocean of the building blocks of life.
But with membranes,
finally there was a way to keep all those building blocks together.
I believe there were many opportunities for life to arise.
We may have had other types of lifeforms that came and went,
but didn't take, right?
They didn't hit and stick.
But one of them made it.
It's called LUCA, which stands for the
Last Universal Common Ancestor,
for all life here on Earth.
LUCA could protect itself with a membrane and reproduce itself.
Everything came together in just the right way to create
the first living cell, with DNA at its heart.
Fast forward billions of years...
And we find that all life today uses the same basic chemistry.
And this points to one thing, it all originated in that first primitive cell.
Alright, now my grandma,
you know, she was kind of small.
But LUCA, the great, great, great times a gazillion
grandmother of us all, she was tinier than a dot.
As far as we know, that cell was the single and
only origin of all life.
Well, at least on Earth.
If you check out pretty much anywhere in the
universe, you're going to find the same ingredients
to cook up life.
They're not exotic, they're staples.
Now sure, mixing them up just right is hard,
but the universe is vast.
So does that mean there's a big piping hot serving
of life somewhere else out there?
That's what one group of explorers is trying to find out.
Hunting for strange lifeforms, not off-planet,
but right here, in parts unknown.
There's an alien world right beneath our feet.
♪ ♪
As you drop into this blackness,
you have no sense that you're still on this planet anymore.
It can be completely disorienting.
You're spun around, and which way is up,
which way is forward, which way is backwards.
These underwater caves are one of the least understood parts
of our planet because of the dangers of going down into them.
My desire to understand how life began on Earth also
reaches out to the stars, because the ingredients for
life probably exist in many places.
In our solar system, in our galaxy and in the universe,
stardust...
Water... And energy.
Out there we're finding water on different moons that surround
some of the planets in our solar system.
The icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn have oceans of liquid water
underneath the ice.
Enceladus is a water-world,
but with a hot rocky center and plumes of water spraying
out into the universe.
So maybe there's primitive life on a moon of Saturn right now.
I always wondered, will we find life on other planets?
Will we find life outside of our solar system?
And as we look beyond the Earth and explore other rocks,
I believe that it's likely we will find simple life.
It'll look different, it will be different, but our rock,
our planet is important to us.
It's special and it's unique because it's our home.
It's where we evolved.
Think of that fragile moment, billions of years ago,
where you and I and all of us began.
A tiny moat of life suspended in a ripple of water.
The promise of everything that is alive or ever
lived in our world.
It's the moment nothing turned to something.
That stardust sparkled to life.
The moment one rock in a remote corner of the universe became
most wonderfully strange.
Genesis is the bright side of life.
Next time, life's dark shadow...
Death.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.