This is the crew of Apollo 17...
..five hours after lift-off -
the Earth already far behind.
You're loud and clear, Bob,
and could you give us our distance from the Earth?
Roger, I'd guess about 19,000 miles,
but let me get it exact.
I guess approximate is good enough.
Harrison Schmitt is bound for the moon.
We were moving at 25,000 miles an hour.
So, things got smaller very fast.
He knows he has a unique opportunity.
The Apollo 17 landing site determined that we would see a
nearly full Earth nearly soon after launch.
Look at that!
Yeah, Madagascar, in Africa.
Hey, there's Antarctica, full of snow.
OK, you want to look?
Schmidt is the only astronaut ever to photograph the entire Earth.
His image became an icon.
The blue marble.
A human being took a picture that then everybody on the planet,
once they saw it, could identify with.
Well, there's home up there in the sky!
I tell you, if there ever was a fragile appearing piece of blue
in space, it's the Earth right now.
That's great.
45 years later, our home planet has been transformed.
Today, the International Space Station circles the Earth,
250 miles up.
A new generation of astronauts has a grandstand view.
'I was born in 1972.
'The year that the last man walked on the moon in the Apollo 17.'
In 45 years, the human population has doubled to 7.4 billion.
Astronauts and satellites have a story to tell
of startling change on planet Earth.
Food production has tripled, making strange and beautiful forms.
There's people making these perfectly shaped circles down on
Earth, to survive.
We are generating twice as much power to heat and light the world.
If it wasn't for that place down there,
I wouldn't be up here in space, looking down at it.
It's like, "Wow!"
Cities appear as if by magic.
Mysteries shimmer in the sun.
From space, it captures our attention and imagination.
We are reshaping the planet for better,
and for worse.
In the Amazon, forest gives away to fields.
In Central Asia, an inland sea runs dry.
This is our home, but is not our planet.
We don't own it.
The future owns it.
Astronauts are watching as we make our mark on Earth.
There's humans down there.
I'm human, this is a good thing.
It's the story of human progress, from a unique perspective.
It is just beautiful.
This is how we change the world.
Then look down,
to see what we have done.
RADIO IN BACKGROUND
For astronauts, the most obvious change in our planet can be seen
from any window.
As the population grows,
our cities spin a web of light across the globe.
From the first time I flew, which was 2002, to the last time,
which was 2012 - the main effect I saw on Earth was at night-time,
and it was the extent of lighting.
Any city of ten million is a mega city.
But an astronaut's camera swallows it whole.
We love taking pictures of cities to the point where you can pick out the
city when you just see the photo very quickly.
The biggest megacities are Tokyo,
Delhi, and Shanghai.
Next in line are Mumbai,
Sao Paulo,
and the Chinese capital, Beijing.
To see these glowing cities, kind of, popping out of you
at night is really pretty incredible. For me,
it opened up this whole new view of looking at places like China.
China has ten of the 20 fastest-growing megacities on Earth.
Since 1990, Chongqing has gone from four million to 40 million people.
In Shanghai, it's eight million to 24 million.
And down south, next door to Hong Kong,
there's a whole new megacity
and it's grown from the most humble beginnings.
The change that has happened there, it's incredible.
It almost doesn't seem real.
30 years ago, there was a village called Baishizhou.
There was a baby boy and his name was Jet Cui.
The boy grew up fast, but the village grew faster.
And the streets of Baishizhou became a labyrinth.
Baishizhou is a lot of things - a lot of people, a lot of stuff,
just packed, you know, into a really tiny space.
Soon, it was hard to tell where one village ended
and the next one began.
The streets were so narrow that neighbours
could shake hands across the gap.
If you get a stranger in there,
I bet he will never get out from Baishizhou.
You have to, like, turn 20 times to get there.
It's really easy to get lost.
There is no village on Earth like Baishizhou.
In less than 40 years, a megacity of 11 million has grown around it.
Its name is Shenzhen.
You can imagine all of these people bustling around that area.
But it's like the mute button is on.
It's a very surreal thing.
It gets you thinking about what all those people doing down there.
Jet Cui still hangs out with the boys from the old village.
They are the same age as the new city
and their eyes are on the future.
Electronics, my business is in electronics industry.
Because of basketball, right?
My favourite player is Michael Jordan and he said something like,
"Just do it."
But I thought it was, "Just do IT."
So, I must do IT, then.
Jet's generation is surfing the wave
of IT electronics and communications.
The city's vast market has a mind-boggling array
of hi-tech products.
Shenzhen is really, like, high efficiency.
It's pretty international as well.
Shenzhen had a DNA of...
of starting up something.
There's a lot of giant enterprise started from here.
Shenzhen's home to the world's biggest drone company.
And it's estimated to make one quarter of all smartphones
sold on Earth.
Electronics make the city a blaze of colour.
When you look at the city at night, you can see the colour has changed.
There are now many different colours.
Western cities glow orange from sodium streetlights.
Asian cities have a green tinge of mercury.
But Shenzhen is a colour shifting chameleon.
You can see bright colours of pinks and blues and these are coming from
the LED billboards and other LED lighting
that's coming out in cities.
You just feel like you're looking at a place that's alive.
Jet Cui's generation has moved on from the village.
They work in hi-tech business parks and live in high-rise condos.
The reason I moved here is I'm 30 now, so I'm looking for
a space better maybe for my future family.
These are the children of the megacity age,
but they haven't forgotten their roots.
Baishizhou is special for us, because we grew up there.
We have been through a lot together,
we spent a lot of time together and we know each other.
We are brothers to each other.
Shenzhen is a sign of things to come.
By 2056, there will be ten billion people on Earth.
We'll need more megacities, more power,
more food, more everything.
Our planet will have to provide it.
In the last 45 years, the human population has doubled.
As we multiply, the Earth glitters with the light of new cities.
But astronauts also see the price we pay for progress.
To see how fragile our atmosphere is
makes you very aware that we have to be responsible
about how we do things on planet Earth.
We are changing the planet
in ways that other species of animals haven't done before us.
Satellites see huge long-term changes.
Central Asia's Aral Sea has shrunk dramatically since the '60s.
Since 1980...
..Alaska's Columbia Glacier has halved in volume.
In South America, Bolivia's Lake Poopo
has dried up almost completely.
All three have been put down to man-made causes.
We do not want to foul our nest to the point
where we can no longer live in the places we want to.
The view from space gives us a vital way to understand changes on Earth.
INCOMPREHENSIBLE SPEECH Go ahead, Luca.
Astronauts see things the rest of us can only dream of.
I do have this very complete memory of my first spacewalk.
OVER RADIO: Luca, ready for motion?
OVER RADIO: Ready for motion, go ahead.
'While we were over the Atlantic Ocean,'
the sun came out.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
A sunrise while you're outside on a space walk
with nothing to do but just observe and let it all sink in.
The blue of the ocean, that super deep blue, came up all at once.
And then, it transformed into the terracotta colour of Africa
and it extends and it turns into green,
and you're looking at the Forest of Africa.
And then, the majesty of Mount Kilimanjaro,
climbing over everything else that was covered in clouds.
Just the eye of the volcano coming out,
and it looked like an eye, even the shape of the clouds around it,
and I took a picture of it,
and it looked almost like staring at a dinosaur, a living thing.
It just takes your breath away.
It literally takes your breath away.
Mount Kilimanjaro is the great icon of the African continent.
From Tanzanian forest,
the dormant volcano climbs 19,000 feet to a frozen peak.
Ultramarathon runner Simon Mtuy
has lived his entire life in the foothills.
He's climbed to the top nearly 500 times.
You're feeling every twist of the stones that you're stepping on.
You're more aware of your sound.
You're more aware of your breathing,
so you're on this zone, zooming.
In 2006, Simon ran to the top and back unaided
in 9 hours, 21 minutes -
a record that still stands.
But the glaciers at the summit,
the celebrated snows of Kilimanjaro,
are shrinking.
Some of them used to be very huge, maybe 20 metres high.
I've seen it at five metre, can I tell the difference?
Of course I can tell the difference.
From space, the loss of ice is obvious.
Since 1976, more than half has disappeared.
The problem has been blamed on global warming.
Kilimanjaro's foothills are in prolonged drought.
When I remember my childhood,
there were so many places I couldn't go because there was a huge river.
Now, you can almost cover the whole entire mountain
without getting your shoes wet.
In fact, Kilimanjaro's problem may be more local than global.
And the evidence comes from space.
The mountain stands on an island of trees.
When you look at Kilimanjaro from space,
you see it is surrounded by what looks like desert.
It's brown, and then it changes going up the side,
and it becomes green.
And then, it changes again back to brown
when you get above the timber line.
These rectangles mean the forest is being destroyed...
by us.
People need fields for crops and wood for fuel and materials.
But trees pump water back into the atmosphere.
So when we cut down the trees,
we turn off the taps that water the glaciers.
In the last 70 years,
Kilimanjaro has lost one third of its forest.
We can't just take and take and take.
This selfishness of taking, taking, taking.
In this satellite image, red dots highlight individual fires.
They make a blanket of smoke the breadth of Africa.
It's just man destroying pristine forest
to make space for cultivation.
You cannot help but being saddened by the sight of these huge fires.
At some point, we must say,
"It's enough. The world needs to heal."
In South America,
the rainforest puts more water into the atmosphere
than the Amazon puts into the ocean.
But these patterns are made by logging.
In just 40 years,
one fifth of the trees has gone.
On Kilimanjaro, one man is showing the world the way ahead.
A man of faith and biological science.
His name is Bishop Frederick Shoo, but they call him the Tree Bishop.
THEY SING
When I plant trees, I feel great.
I feel happy.
I really feel like I'm contributing something to the protection of life.
The bishop's diocese is 360,000 strong,
and these many hands can move mountains.
It's about the future of our planet.
It's about the future of our children.
By the bishop's estimate, they've planted 3 million trees.
We have seen some streams coming back.
It is very, very important.
It is an ongoing project.
I do believe there's a future.
I've climbed the mountain.
I've climbed the highest peak of Africa.
Kilimanjaro, a mountain of ours, a mountain of greatness,
the mountain of everything, of the waters, the forest and everything.
We have to be smart about how we change our environment,
so that we can continue to thrive.
Over time, we take those lessons into account,
as we figure out how we'll farm in new places,
or how we'll generate our power and our energy to live here on Earth.
In 2014, astronauts photographed these mystery flashes
in the American wilderness.
These things catch your eye.
I mean, it makes you...
It makes you look at it.
You almost innately know that that is not a natural thing.
This is an energy source for the future.
And it comes from outer space.
There are 7.4 billion people on planet Earth.
1.2 billion have no access to electricity.
But astronauts see us finding new ways to light the world.
Lighting at night-time
is a signature to the expansion of human beings on
the surface of Earth.
Before lighting,
you could barely read a book at night-time by candlelight.
It effectively extends our lifetime.
There's one city that will take all the light it can get.
I like to refer to Las Vegas,
tongue-in-cheek, as the beacon of humanity
and I don't know if it's the brightest city on Earth,
but it is really, really bright.
They built this city on electric power.
Las Vegas, Nevada is legendary for its casinos, hotels
and no-holds-barred entertainment.
The space beam from the Luxor Hotel
has 42-billion candlepower.
An unmissable signal from the heart of the Mojave Desert.
Las Vegas is so striking from space because it's surrounded by darkness,
but in the wild American West,
there's still plenty of places for darkness to hideout.
The lights of Vegas were switched on by a wonder of engineering.
The Hoover Dam created Lake Mead...
..and a vast new source of hydroelectric power.
In the '80s, Sin City boomed.
Satellites watched it grow by 15% a year.
But the population was draining the lake.
Today, there are rings around the bathtub
and the dam alone can't produce enough power.
In the rest of North America, fossil fuel is king.
But crude oil extraction is stripping Canadian forests.
In Wyoming, coal mines are eating away the landscape.
And burning these fuels drives global warming
to evermore dangerous levels.
As human beings, that's part of how we live here.
We need new ways of balancing that with the planet that we live on.
Nevada is blazing a new trail in its quest for electricity.
In these vast empty spaces,
the energy they need can grow...
..and grow.
It looks like the first base on Mars.
Welcome to Nevada Solar One.
Half a square mile of pristine power.
There is a free energy source that is pouring down on us
every single day
and once we've collected it, we can put it on the grid.
Tim Kanjorski is a transmissions expert in the Nevada power industry.
It's hard for people, for humans, to live here in the desert,
because the desert environment is not hospitable to our kind of life.
So to make it habitable, we have to get our power, electricity,
to where we're at.
My job is to make sure that when we flip a light switch,
a light comes on.
Focused by mirrors, sunlight turns water to steam,
to drive Solar One's turbines.
It is using our heads to provide power to thousands of homes without
having to burn a single drop of fossil fuel.
The downside is
that it would take eight Solar Ones
But the Mojave Desert has plenty of sun and plenty of room.
Its solar power plants are visible from space.
When you pull the camera out and you look a little bit closer and you see that -
"Wow! Down there on Earth, we are working very hard to shift
"the way we are generating our electricity,
"so that we can continue to survive here."
Solar power is lighting the world.
From Spain...
..to Morocco...
..to South Africa.
For Tim Kanjorski, plants like these
are the Hoover Dams of the 21st century.
It's humbling. It's as if I'm standing on the backs of giants.
The space beam still burns brightly.
And Tim has come to see a special Vegas appearance.
He's also an amateur astronomer.
Do you see that?
It's the International Space Station,
moving at five miles a second.
I see you.
The dark side of the Earth...
..is never dark.
We are making it our own.
From space, it's beautiful.
It's almost as if you have a direct visual proof that
yes, I come from that planet and my people, my species is down there,
and we are all together.
It felt like there was this neural net of communication,
as if people and what we do... Our thoughts crossing this big brain.
We are more connected than we think we are.
There's a very human thing to looking out the window at Earth
and I think that's why we put humans in space.
In daylight, it's man-made shapes that catch the eye.
You start to focus in on the details.
Sometimes, you would be struck by things that you hadn't appreciated
were even there.
On the coast of Mexico, strange blue rectangles come and go.
They're prawn farms, to meet global supermarket demand.
In the southern hemisphere, a vast Australian irrigation project,
so that cotton fields can bloom in the wilderness.
There is the ingenuity of man that's working to make order out of disorder.
The Arabian desert has a striking mystery.
Alien shapes marching across the sands.
They look like pixels from a video game,
you know - Space Invaders.
Everybody wants to get pictures of them
because it's like a piece of art.
These circles of colour seem to come out of nowhere.
This is Jordan, one of the driest countries on Earth.
Wadi Rum is a desert outpost of sandstone and granite.
15 years ago, Sijal Majali came here to attempt the impossible.
It's called desert.
I mean, look around you.
It's all dry. Dry sand.
It rains once or twice a year in this part of the country.
Sijal managers Rum Farm...
..a masterpiece of geometry for efficient use of precious water.
It's really hard land to cultivate.
Lots of evaporation.
So we have to think of the best techniques for irrigating.
Sijal has liquid gold in the cellar.
Beneath the desert, there's an aquifer,
60 trillion gallons of water in natural storage.
It's so interesting to look at the choice of geometric design,
to make it work.
Because the water transportation,
the irrigation system, requires them to do that.
Pivoting at the wells,
the irrigation arms sweep out perfect circles.
If there's a slice of rocky ground, they just avoid it.
Sometimes you have a circular pattern
and it's only three quarters of the circle,
so they almost look like PAC-MAN has invaded Earth
and there'll be another circular pattern right next to it
and it looks like they're eating each other in the classic game.
It just reminds me that human beings are down there and they're raising food.
Sijal grows potatoes,
onions and other staple crops, but these are the green shoots of early spring.
Sijal has anxious weeks ahead.
In agriculture,
God is your partner.
We might get frost in the coming two or three weeks.
If we get frost, we really lose a lot of our production.
From year to year, the satellite looks on,
as Sijal's fortunes wax and wane.
In a good year, this one farm feeds a fifth of Jordan's people.
It makes me proud that Jordanians are eating our potatoes.
And we're keeping even the prices down,
because they're not importing potatoes,
which is much more expensive and the quality is much better over here.
The aquifer provides drinking water for Jordan
and Saudi Arabia.
Agriculture in both countries depends on it.
But it is not renewable.
One estimate says the wells will run dry within 50 years.
I hope this project stays the way it is,
because it's feeding too many mouths at the moment.
And many people depend on our produce.
This is agriculture at its most extreme.
Sijal is growing vegetables in a moonscape.
You cannot deny that this is the expansion of human beings.
That's human beings making food so that you can live.
The fact that astronauts can see
this particular farm from space is really amazing.
I wish I were a little bit younger.
I would have gone up to space and took a view.
We are used to think of deserts as empty places or dead places.
When humans get their way,
they can become completely different.
Deserts are living.
If we can make a living desert,
we can make a living anywhere.
Looking at Earth from space gives us this opportunity to see that as human beings,
we adapt and we find our home.
We are moving into the barren reaches of every landmass on Earth.
But astronauts see danger.
And it comes from the ocean.
But 40% of us still live within 60 miles of the ocean.
As a human species, we've emerged from the water,
which is a source of food and a source of commerce and travel.
So wherever there's a coastline, you will find habitation.
Satellites see cities growing on every shore.
Pearl City, Kuwait is an earthly work of art.
South Korea's Songdo was built from scratch in just ten years.
In its second century, Brisbane, Australia is still growing.
In Mexico, Playa del Carmen is a tropical boom town.
And there's one place even astronauts can't resist.
Well I grew up in Florida
so I wanted to see Florida from space,
and it has a very unique shape to it.
It just stands right out.
You can see these, just translucent blues and turquoises of the water
around the whole state.
You want to go there.
I mean, it just invites you to be there.
Living on a beach is like a dream.
This is Matanzas on Florida's Atlantic Coast.
In 1990,
Joni and Jerry came down from New York
to start a new restaurant, and a new life.
There were barely any houses.
There were a few old beach houses on the ocean front,
and that was about it.
The first few years there, we couldn't afford a house
and we actually raised our three kids in the restaurant.
As the neighbourhood took off, so did the business.
The area has just boomed.
It's just been a huge growth spurt.
My staff knew nearly every customer by name.
As somebody walked in, the chorus would start in, "Hello, George!"
or "Hello, Dave", so it was always like that.
Life on the beach was good.
But in Florida, the ocean can take it all away.
This time, the bull's-eye was on the roof, I guess.
In October 2016,
International Space Station cameras watched events unfold.
You see this big white structure that almost looks like its own ship
moving, you know, moving across the planet.
From space, it looks, like, billowy and white.
It looks beautiful.
It almost looks peaceful.
We begin with breaking news.
Hurricane Matthew bearing down on Florida and sending ripples of fear
all along the southeast coast.
Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.
It's almost eerie because you don't hear any noise,
because you're far away and you're isolated.
The hurricane drove a wall of water over the coast.
It's so quiet from up there, it almost seems more ominous.
On the day after,
Jerry and Joni came back to Matanzas.
We had this water surge, with a five foot wave
blowing out the whole north side of our building.
We drove a mile south and we saw half the deck down the road,
about a mile from here.
The water threw a walk-in refrigerator across the car park.
Everything in the restaurant was destroyed.
Chairs and tables that were in the dining room that just got
washed through.
It's shocking,
when it's been such a vibrant place for so long.
To come in here and say your whole life's work,
"Oh, my God, it's all, it's gone."
Hurricanes are powered by heat from the ocean.
And global warming is a reality.
But scientists don't know whether hurricanes are getting worse
because, until now,
there's been no consistent way to measure their strength.
Here on the Florida coast, someone is rising to the challenge.
George Diller works at the most expensive beachfront property
on Earth.
This is Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral,
where astronauts set sail from planet Earth.
'Firing chain is armed.'
You may not recognise George...
'We are go for main engine start.'
..but you've probably heard his voice.
'Five, four, three, two, one,
'and lift-off of the space shuttle Discovery!'
'Lift-off of space shuttle...'
'The final lift-off of Atlantis.
'On the shoulders of this space shuttle,
'America will continue the dream.'
It certainly beats working for a living.
It's a lot of fun.
Nasa is playing a leading role in coastal defence
because they've found a way to measure hurricane strength
by looking inside them from space.
Just six weeks after Hurricane Matthew,
the CYGNSS mission is a game changer.
'T minus 12, T minus 10,
'Peg is go for launch.'
The satellite is launched from mid-air on a Pegasus rocket.
'And drop.
'Pegasus is away.
'Ignition of the Pegasus rocket with CYGNSS,
'helping hurricane forecasters understand and predict
'the intensity of hurricanes.'
CYGNSS is eight satellites in one,
throwing a ring of protection around the Earth.
They measure the height of ocean waves,
the crucial indicator of hurricane wind speed.
As global warming continues,
CYGNSS will warn us if hurricanes get more powerful
and more dangerous.
All this massive amount of data gives us an idea of how much we are
affecting the nature of our planet.
The more we see, the more we want to pay attention to it
because we're not sure all the changes are for good.
So, looking down on the Earth from space
is just as important as being able to look out.
Hurricanes are a stark reminder
that Nature is more powerful than any of us.
You can't live in fear.
If you're living in fear,
you're always looking over your shoulder.
It's not the right way to live.
In 1972, Harrison Schmitt went to the moon,
but discovered the Earth.
Astronauts have been watching us reshape the planet ever since.
We still have to realise that civilisation,
if we want civilisation, requires resources.
And you have to balance that with the wellbeing of a planet.
I think astronauts that are in orbit around the Earth are going to learn
more and more about the Earth itself,
and the resources that we might use here.
The better we do that, the better off we're going to be.
There's a life-or-death challenge ahead.
13 years from now, there will be another billion people on Earth.
Humanity must find ever more food, power and shelter,
without destroying the planet.
The quest continues.
The Earth is very fragile, seen from space,
and that fragility needs to be understood by everybody.
It's the only place that we have.
That is what we should be thinking about every day
as we make our mark on Earth.
We are thriving here.
We also have to take care of this place.
Home is the word.
'I just want to say good night, sleep tight.'
Bob, that's the most beautiful crescent Earth I've ever seen.
It's a nice place to come home to, guys.
Subtitles by Ericsson