Planetary

Thirty seconds and counting.

Astronauts report it feels good.

T-minus 25 seconds.

Twenty seconds and counting.

T-minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal.

Twelve, eleven,

ten, nine,

ignition sequence start,

six, five,

four, three, two, one, zero.

All engines running.

Lift-off.

We have a lift-off.

Thirty-two minutes past the hour.

Lift-off on Apollo 11.

The first moment that I realised I wanted to be an astronaut

was the day where, I, as a young boy,

along with millions and millions of people around the globe,

watched those first footsteps on the moon.

One giant leap for mankind.

I realised that humanity had just become a different species.

We were no longer a species confined to our planet.

That's what I wanted to do.

I wanted to be part of that exploration.

I wanted to be part of that group of people that stepped off the planet

Ron Garan ISS ASTRONAUT

and was able to look back upon ourselves.

WELCOME ASTRONAUTS

As a child, I assumed that I would go into space.

We were trying to get to the moon,

the whole Apollo programme,

and it seemed like we had this momentum moving forward.

Mae Jemison SHUTTLE ASTRONAUT

And I assumed I would be a part of it.

The first time I went into space, it was 2008.

I flew on Space Shuttle Discovery.

It was really an incredible day, it was almost surrealistic.

I remember leaving the crew quarters and boarding the Astrovan,

and waving to everybody as we stepped out.

And we get out to the launch pad, and it was really a spectacular sight.

When you watch a space-shuttle launch on TV,

it looks like you see all this white smoke,

and then eventually this space shuttle

just slowly, gradually rises out of the smoke and heads up.

But what it felt like

is it felt like we were on the end of a slingshot.

And when those solid rocket boosters fire, you realise you are going somewhere.

That somebody just let go that slingshot and off you go.

Shuttle has cleared the tower.

That was a really amazing experience.

On that first day, that first day in space,

the most spectacular moment was when you look out the window for the first time.

When you are able to unstrap out of your seat,

your tasks are over, and you get to really take a look at our planet.

It's just absolutely breathtaking to see that.

It is just an incredible view.

I looked down at this planet, at our Earth,

and you see this thin, shimmering layer of blue light

that's our atmosphere that sustains us.

It almost seems like it iridesces from within.

What's really amazing and beautiful

is watching this line slowly pass across the Earth below us.

Something that you can't see from the Earth.

And watching all the evidence of human activity all of a sudden come alive

as we pass into the dark side of the orbit.

We flew so close to dancing curtains of auroras

that we felt like we could reach out and touch them.

There's so many just absolutely breathtaking things.

The really wonderful thing

that happened to me when I was in space

was this feeling of belonging to the entire universe.

I actually didn't think, "Here's this Earth and that's the only thing I belong to."

I actually imagined myself in a star system 10,000 light-years away,

and I felt I also belong there.

You know, we're as much a part of this universe

as any speck of star dust, you know, any asteroid.

We're a part of this universe.

On the third spacewalk that we did,

I was strapped to the end of the space station's robotic arm

and was flown through a big manoeuvre across the top of the space station and back.

So, at the top of this arc,

I was looking down at the space station

against the backdrop of the undescribably beautiful Earth 250 miles below,

and it took my breath away.

I was filled with awe.

If we can do this, if nations can join together and do this amazing thing in space,

imagine what we can do to overcome the challenges facing our planet.

But the other side of that is

we have this incredibly beautiful, peaceful, fragile planet from space,

but you can't help but think about the unfortunate realities of life on our planet

for a significant portion of those inhabitants.

The real issue is how do we operate here on this planet?

There's a story that comes from India that says,

that once upon a time

humans had the godhead in themselves

but we behaved so badly that the gods decided to take it away from us.

And so they were trying to figure out where to hide it so that humans wouldn't find it.

One said, "Let's put it at the bottom of the ocean.

"They'll never find it there."

And everybody said, you know,

"No, one day humans will get to the bottom of the ocean and they'll find it there."

Another said, "Let's put it in the skies and the heavens."

And they said, "No, humans will fly that far one day and they'll find it."

And then Brahma said, "I know where to hide it.

"Let's put it inside of humans themselves,

"because they'll never think to look for it there."

We have to look inside of ourselves to figure this out.

PLANETARY

One of the truly extraordinary events of the 20th century

was space travel.

David Loy PHILOSOPHER

And by that I don't simply mean

the fact that we went to the moon and came back,

but that this gave us a totally different perspective on the Earth.

A totally different understanding about who we are.

The history of human life on the planet, in one sense,

is a history of wandering,

a history of leaving home.

Sean Kelly PHILOSOPHER

Humans spread out of Africa to eventually inhabit every continent of the planet.

So in that sense, humans became planetary 40,000 years ago.

But they didn't know that they existed on the planet.

With the Apollo mission, we had a kind of visceral experience

where individuals were able to see the whole planet from space.

And through our technology, the rest of us could see it.

I think the first time we got that picture of the Earth

we were seeing our home in a much bigger context.

It was no longer, you know, the house we lived in or the village or the country.

Suddenly we were seeing this is home in the much larger context.

It became a symbol for many, many things.

The environmental movement, the whole global thinking that's happening.

In the past, we could have individual community, national destinies.

The one thing that it did for me was it just brought home the fact

Peter Russell PHYSICIST AND AUTHOR

we are one species on a single planet with a common destiny.

To identify ourselves as part of the human species?

That's really the identity shift, right, of ourselves as a single species on this planet.

You realised that there was a subset of the teeming life on that planet

Janine Benyus BIOLOGIST AND AUTHOR

called humans,

and that you were far enough away to not see our differences. Right?

You could almost see us as one people, as one population.

I spent half of 2011 on board the International Space Station,

and during that time I got into a routine

where I would almost say goodnight to the Earth.

I would go to the cupola,

which is the windowed observatory on the bottom of the space station,

and I would just gaze at the Earth.

One of the really interesting things about a long-duration spaceflight

is you get to watch the Earth transform

over the weeks and the months that you're up there.

You get to watch the ice break up, the seasons change.

And from that perspective, the perspective over time,

you really get the sense that we have this living, breathing organism

hanging in the blackness of space that's riding through the universe.

Very early on the astronauts looked at the whole of Earth,

and this feeling came that it was one single living system.

I think that was part of the shift that happened.

And it's interesting that came at the same time

as Jim Lovelock was thinking about his Gaia hypothesis.

The idea that all the different creatures, the oceans, atmosphere, soil,

were sort of working together,

which throughout the history of life on Earth

had kept the optimum conditions for evolution to continue.

When he looked at the Earth, he saw this was exactly what was happening.

And so he put forward the idea that the whole planet is like one single living system.

If you imagine the famous Earthrise picture,

these first images of the Earth that the Apollo missions were taking from space,

you normally think of it as an astronaut in a spaceship,

looking from outside of Earth at the Earth.

More fundamentally, however, these images are the Earth looking at itself through us.

In other words,

the first images from space are a critical moment

in the emerging awakening of the Earth.

So, we look at those first images that came back from space.

It's important for us to understand that those are as out of date now

as my high school yearbook picture is.

Bill McKibben ENVIRONMENTALIST

I mean, you look at the summer Arctic and there's 40% less ice on it.

You look at those vast oceans, and they're 30% more acid than they were 40 years ago.

It's hard for us to take in both the kind of beauty and majesty,

and to understand the vulnerability and the fragility of those systems.

Clearly, the basic, most fundamental, physical problem that we face

is this exploding fountain of carbon into the atmosphere, warming the planet.

And that comes from the fact that fossil fuel

radically transformed our set of possibilities, beginning 300 years ago.

We are at the point where we know that humans have impacted the planet.

That was something that we didn't think about, you know, 200-300 years ago.

We weren't having that kind of impact.

We know we can affect the world.

We are traversing a terrain

which we, as a species and as a planet overall, have not seen before.

We are facing an ecological crisis

Lawrence Ellis COMPLEX SYSTEMS THEORIST

that has the capacity to tremendously alter life on earth.

We don't know what will happen if major parts of the web of life disappear.

Every species that exists on the planet has been coaxed into existence

over the 4.4 billion-year history of the Earth.

So, literally, it's taken the entire history of cosmic evolution to bring forth

Drew Dellinger ECOLOGICAL ACTMST AND POET