♪ ♪
WILL SMITH: Where is home?
Is it where you were born?
(alarm clock beeping)
Where you were raised?
Or where you are now?
Is it somewhere you live?
Somewhere you left?
Somewhere that shaped you?
If you really wanna know, you need to leave them all behind.
Someone who knows that it's like to really leave home is
Peggy Whitson, NASA's most experienced astronaut.
Not that you'd know it if you ever met her.
PEGGY: Well I hate talking about the records,
but I do have few.
WILL SMITH: That folks is the understatement of the year.
How about we start with most time in space for any US astronaut.
-Which is 665 days.
WILL SMITH: Think about that for a second,
that's a round trip to Mars.
(laughs).
Then there's the longest single space flight for any
woman in the world.
-Oh, that's right, yeah.
WILL SMITH: And that's just for starters.
-Ten space walks, first female Commander and I can't remember
the other, oh, I know oldest astronaut, female astronaut,
not a record I was looking for.
The press seemed to point that one out a lot.
WILL SMITH: Not bad for a farm girl from Iowa!
Eight astronauts, Chris, Nicole, Jeff, May, Jerry,
Mike, Leland and then there's Peggy.
Each one of them is different, they come from different places,
they have different stories to tell but they were all changed by one thing...
Going into space.
It's called the Overview Effect and if you could see
what they've seen, you'd feel it too.
♪ ♪
Most of us leave home every day.
We go to work without a second thought.
But just imagine if your work place overlooks the planet
then that morning commute becomes a little bit more challenging.
-We launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
It was actually the same launch pad that Yuri Gagarin launched from.
It's a fast trip to get to space.
Better than any car you've ever been in,
better than any acceleration you've ever experienced.
It feels good to be going fast.
Eight and a half minutes after leaving the launchpad
we are in orbit.
WILL SMITH: The international space station
is 250 miles above the planet.
But it is a million miles away from the place
Peggy first called home.
♪ ♪
-Growing up on a farm I think was actually a really
good experience for me, it taught me a lot of
dedication and hard work.
-She says she'd like to go to Mars.
-My parents have lived on the same farm for fifty,
almost sixty years.
My mom was incredibly supportive.
At one time I was telling my sister I wanted to be a pilot
and learn to fly and she's like, "You can't be a pilot,
you can only be a stewardess." and my mom told her,
"No, you can be anything you want to be!"
-I think there's two Peggy's, the one that comes here and
the one that goes there are different people.
WILL SMITH: An astronaut will have trained for at least
three years for a mission.
Every moment in space is scheduled with experiments to
run and tasks to complete.
But the first thing they wanna do is exactly what we do when
we go somewhere new, check out the view.
Going into space is like I live my whole life in a
semi-dark room and somebody flipped on the lights.
♪ ♪
The earth just seems to glow, it's so beautiful.
♪ ♪
CHRIS: When I first went to space,
the first thing I wanted to do was pop off my helmet,
unstrap out of my chair, float up weightless and go to the
window and see the world.
NICOLE: What we see with our eyes, what we then I think feel
through our heart says your experiencing it is,
it's beyond imagination.
LELAND: It is just so stunningly beautiful it almost
makes you, you, you wanna find new words to describe
the emotion that you're feeling because it affects you so powerfully.
MIKE: This is something that human eyes are not supposed to see.
WILL SMITH: Looking out the window may not be the
highest mission priority...
but it has a lasting impact on all astronauts.
It changes how they think about where they're from.
PEGGY: The town closest to my parents farm is Beaconsfield, Iowa.
When I was growing up it had like 32 people in it and
I think it's down to eleven'ish now so it's a pretty small town.
WILL SMITH: Beaconsfield maybe the smallest town in Iowa but
it's a place full of amazing stories,
amazing transformations.
-Growing up in Iowa there's all kinds of life around...
and when somebody says the word "butterfly" you always think
of the Monarch butterfly because it's the most
distinctive one that I saw growing up.
AUBREE: This one's a pretty good one.
-It's big!
-They feel like soft and gooey at the same time.
-I know!
-The spring and summer there are lots of caterpillars,
it's easy to find them because they're only on the milkweed.
-It's always interesting to see the caterpillars crawling
around and recognize that someday that's gonna become a butterfly.
-You like to move around a lot don't you.
WILL SMITH: We all know that caterpillars turn into butterflies...
but does it make it any less wondrous?
It's as extraordinary as a farm girl from Iowa
transforming into an astronaut.
♪ ♪
The Monarch butterfly's caterpillar is nature's shape shifter supreme.
-When the caterpillar is inside the chrysalis it dissolves and it
turns into goo...
And then the good turns into a butterfly.
♪ ♪
WILL SMITH: Caterpillars don't know much of the world beyond a milkweed plant
but once a butterfly it's cleared for takeoff.
And from up high it gains a new perspective on the world.
♪ ♪
Astronauts change when they leave earth.
They undergo a metamorphosis.
Home is no longer a town, it's something much bigger.
NICOLE: I think the opportunity to kind of live in
space has allowed me to look at things a
little bit differently.
It really opens up a new perspective.
MIKE: I don't think about the city I live in or where I'm from,
I think about home and home is our whole planet or whole earth,
it's one home for all of us.
-As I've grown up and gone to college and gone to graduate
school home has expanded from Iowa to Texas to the
United States and since being in space home is
actually planet Earth!
♪ ♪
-Look!
-Here she comes!
WILL SMITH: There she is.
-17,500 miles an hour, fast moving star.
-That's your daughter up there, isn't it?
There's lot of stars out there tonight but she's the only one that's moving.
Bye Peggy, hurry home.
WILL SMITH: Astronauts don't spend all their free time at
the window looking at earth, after all they're explorers so
it's only natural for them to turn the other way
towards the far reaches of space.
They set their sights on what's out there.
Thing is, that big window on the ISS only points one way,
down to earth.
To see the cosmos you have to step outside!
WILL SMITH: You'd think when you're in space you'd have
lots of it, you've probably got more room in your back
yard than the astronauts have on the ISS.
It is cramped up there.
You don't really experience space until you walk in it!
PEGGY: Going for a walk it's not a trivial process,
it takes a lot of work and preparation.
But, everyone wants to do it because oh my gosh the view is phenomenal!
WILL SMITH: On a spacewalk it's just you!
Floating!
No up, no down.
Turn one way a 250 mile drop back to earth,
the other an endless expanse of unblinking stars.
The main thing astronauts remember though is not the
stars but the black.
Looking into that void makes astronauts ask the same question,
"Is there anybody out there?"
MAE: To say that there's no life elsewhere in the universe
is a real stretch.
JERRY: You know mathematics doesn't lie,
probability doesn't lie and when you look at these numbers
surely there has to be some other life out there.
-There's got to be other life out there, there has to be.
It's just a matter of whether we can find it or not.
WILL SMITH: To find out if we have neighbors you need a
telescope and I'm talking big, really big!
♪ ♪
WILL SMITH: This dish is a giant ear,
listening to radio waves coming from deep space.
WILL SMITH: There are literally billions of strange
rocks out there but so far not a whisper from any of them.
Nada!
WILL SMITH: So where is everybody?
Well...
it's about 250 miles from earth to the
international space station,
250,000 miles to the moon.
Long way right?
Baby steps!
Saturn, 700 million miles.
Edge of the solar system, over nine trillion.
Our nearest start, four and a quarter light years.
Aboard our fastest spacecraft it will take
17,000 years to get there and that's just our next-door neighbor!
Travelling beyond, through our galaxy to the edge of the
Milky Way we're talking 25,000 light years!
And our galaxy is just one of trillions!
So life elsewhere might just be a very,
very long way away...
And there's another thing,
any aliens out there might not be able to say "hello"
because they might not have a mouth or even a brain.
WILL SMITH: These jellyfish have found a way to capture
energy from sunlight.
WILL SMITH: If life exists elsewhere it will need energy,
probably from a sun and water just like on earth.
But like these jellyfish most creatures on our planet are
not intelligent, they never ask to phone home!
JERRY: There's probably life out there in the universe but
to find intelligent life, those odds go way, way, way down.
JEFF: We don't know for sure that we're alone but
psychologically, spiritually, culturally we
definitely are alone.
NICOLE: As far as we know we're the only ones like us.
WILL SMITH: Space is almost entirely nothing.
Adrift in that empty void it's easy to feel completely
and utterly alone.
That's when earth starts to look really good.
WILL SMITH: Down here we see infinite blue skies and
life all around us.
For astronauts it's different.
Everywhere they look is barren,
life exists in just a single, solitary oasis.
The more they look at it, the more they appreciate the earth.
They begin to understand the shear interconnectedness of
the natural world.
The earth begins to reveal patterns, connections,
seasons, systems and cycles.
PEGGY: It really is enlightening to me how complex
even a little butterfly is.
-The Monarch butterflies are special because they travel really long ways.
WILL SMITH: The Monarch's don't like winter in Iowa, they migrate South.
♪ ♪
AUBREY: The butterflies they go all the way to Mexico.
Like, I don't know where to go if I were to go to Mexico,
like how do they get there?
It's like a mystery!
WILL SMITH: After more than 2,000 miles they've almost reached their
winter home and there's a welcome party waiting
to greet them.
WILL SMITH: Okay, so this may just be co-incidental
but the arrival of the Monarchs has come at the
same time as the Day of Dead for so long it's
become part of the culture.
WILL SMITH: It's not just butterflies from Iowa that travel here,
they're joined by immigrants from across
the mid-west and as far north as Canada,
all heading for refuge in the forests of central Mexico.
WILL SMITH: It's one of the greatest homecomings on earth!
Even though every Monarch here has another home far away,
each one started life on a milkweed some place like
Beaconsfield, Iowa.
It's hard to know where these Monarchs belong, Iowa, Mexico,
on the wing or all of those?
These butterflies show that the earth has no borders.
Everything is interconnected.
It turns out what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas!
It's linked to the rest of the planet.
And on a world where everything is connected,
the smallest actions can have global consequences.
Take the plastic bottles we throw away.
Well, they might just end up on someone else's doorstep.
This Hermit crab is looking for a new home.
House hunting is a especially hard when someone's
trashed your neighborhood.
Millions of tons of plastic end up in our oceans each year.
But one guy's trash is another guy's treasure!
♪ ♪
Hermit crabs have been found living in garbage across the planet,
after all a plastic house can last a long time.
But not every creature can adapt like the Hermit crab.
As we change our planet most life on earth struggles to keep up.
CHRIS: Right now there's seven and a half billion of us
turning the lights on and flushing the toilet and
driving our cars and turning up the heat in our
house and none of that comes for free.
JEFF: When you look at the earth from space and you
realize the finiteness of our planet,
the thinness of our atmosphere,
it's obvious that the earth, like any environmental system
has a limited carrying capacity.
PEGGY: The greatest threat to our planet,
I think we are probably the potential greatest threat to our planet.
WILL SMITH: But there's hope for us all,
because there's something else that's changed too,
something that could help save our precious home!
-Alright, we're gonna roll.
WILL SMITH: Christmas 1968,
an astronaut took this photograph.
It went viral when that wasn't such an easy thing to do
because it was the first time we'd ever seen a color
portrait of our planet.
-Because little planet Earth photobombing the moon.
WILL SMITH: It was a pretty deal,
it showed us how beautiful our world is,
turns out photos don't do it justice.
PEGGY: When we look out the window and we see the
beautiful oceans, beautiful land masses,
the thin layer of atmosphere that protects the Earth,
it just really gives you a sense of how special this
place is where we live.
CHRIS: It's an interesting coincidence that at this time in history,
when our population has gotten so big that we're starting to
make global changes to the planet it's also the time that
we've invented space flight which allows us to see the
whole world as one place.
NICOLE: Seeing earth from space made me think of myself
and everybody else that I share the planet with as Earthlings.
♪ ♪
WILL SMITH: All over the world people love to party and in
India every Spring people celebrate Mother Earth's new
life in colors.
CHRIS: One of the biggest changes I noticed within
myself as a result of flying in space was that the
difference between us and them disappeared.
-Somehow going around the world in 92 minutes,
not just once but over and over and over again,
turned the entire world into one shared place.
CHRIS: I think it's a perspective that's seeps into astronauts.
I think it's a perspective that's,
that's kind of good for everybody.
LELAND: I truly believe that if more people could have the
opportunity to see the planet from space,
looking at the rich colors, looking at the fact that there
are no borders separating us we could see that we are truly
all connected as human beings.
WILL SMITH: Ever been on a trip and seen something new?
Something incredibly beautiful or something that changed the
way you think about things.
Now imagine that trip was to space.
You've seen something only a very few people have ever seen.
Astronauts need to tell someone, anyone, everyone!
Soon they're ready to go back down but it's actually bittersweet.
I mean they're going back to the place that made them but
leaving the place that shaped them.
-Last day in space.
After 665 total days over three different expeditions.
Quite amazing to think that I'd lived up there,
just under two years of my life, pretty amazing.
It was hard to leave because I knew I wouldn't be coming back.
Jeepers!
But I was so excited about going back home and,
and being back on earth having you know,
wind and smelling the air and just being on earth.
WILL SMITH: But coming home is not easy.
Mother Earth doesn't exactly welcome you back with open arms!
♪ ♪
-We land in Kazakhstan, there's not many people around
so there's no risk of us damaging or hurting anybody during a re-entry.
WOMAN (over radio): We have maneuver, copy.
CHRIS: The earth's atmosphere is a protective shield around
our planet, it keeps our radiation.
It keeps our rocks and meteorites but it also keeps
out astronauts, suddenly we're on the other side of that
protective body and we are essentially an invader.
PEGGY: During re-entry the window seat is...
It's interesting.
CHRIS: Flying the Russian (inaudible) is a little bit
like flying a meteorite home.
LELAND: You can look out and see the orange and purple
flames of 3,000 degrees, they are this far from you.
That's pretty frickin' scary.
CHRIS: You're going 17,000 miles an hour,
eight kilometers a second and somehow you have to get rid of
all of that speed, you have to apply the brakes.
WILL SMITH: Re-entry is about the most dangerous thing an astronaut will ever do.
(inaudible rado chatter)
CHRIS: It's an extremely complex and dangerous process to return home.
You have to control your spaceship so you can end up at
the landing point where everybody's waiting for you.
WILL SMITH: The search and rescue team doesn't know
exactly where Peggy will fall back to earth but one things
for certain, gravity will eventually bring her home.
PEGGY: The Russian's never design their vehicle to land
on the water so it's always been a land landing for them
and it works, it's abrupt but it works.
Once we get inside the atmosphere,
about five miles above the planet a parachute will open.
Okay, we're good now.
♪ ♪
(thud)
Most people compare it to a car crash,
I would compare it to maybe two car crashes.
When we hit the ground and you feel everything settle that
was when I knew we were home again.
-Peggie, welcome back.
PEGGY: It's incredibly hard to describe how heavy
everything feels in those first few minutes.
-Just moving your arm this much is like,
it has to be a huge conscious effort to move your arm at all
so you're like, "Wow, space was good!"
Gravity sucks!
WILL SMITH: Peggy hasn't just looked at space or visited it,
she's lived there, so is her home back in Iowa?
Or the whole earth?
Or is it up on the ISS?
Truth is, like the Monarch it's all of them!
-I'm not sure whether I feel more like an Earthling or a space woman.
I think being a space woman's a lot more fun.
LELAND: When I got home from space,
after getting out of my suit, then to have a meal without
the food floating away from you and being able to pet your
dog and talk to your parents face to face it made me feel
so much more connected to the planet.
JERRY: You know after that space experience being back on the planet
I think what really sky rocketed me is just gratitude.
You know how good we have it on the earth.
NICOLE: I couldn't wait to feel what a breeze would be
like again you, you know what the smell of grass was gonna
you know smell like again.
CHRIS: It's the smell of earth, the smell of home,
the smells of the natural world.
It's over powering, it's kind of overwhelming.
MAE: Just because you physically leave the surface
of the earth does not mean you leave the earth,
because the earth is part of you.
MIKE: I think we're pretty special, yeah,
we might be small in comparison to the rest of that
universe but I dare anybody from any other planet to come
up with a place as nice as ours,
I think we definitely have the nicest home on the block!
JEFF: This is our home, the earth it's, it's the only place we've got, it,
it is one strange rock because it's ours and we are here and
we don't know if any other place in the universe, yet,
that can support life.
We're very lucky to have it as our home.
MIKE: There's no place like home!
CHRIS: There is no place like home!
PEGGY: There's definitely no place like home!
WILL SMITH: For thousands of years maybe tens of thousands
we've looked up and asked questions.
Now for the first time in history we have the
opportunity to look down, the questions are different and so
are the answers.
We can now literally see how fortunate we are to call this place home,
it's complex, calibrated, inter-connected...
fine-tuned but fragile.
Perspective is everything.
From down here earth is simply our home.
From up there, it is one strange rock.
♪ ♪
-I miss space!
-What did you say?
-You can ask me when I'm 95 do I wanna go back.
-I love it!
-The answer would absolutely be yes!
-I wanna go back!
Don't tell my wife!
(laughs).
Don't put that on television!
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.