NEEL V. PATEL - What Eight Astronauts Saw When They Looked at Earth
There’s been no
shortage of shows this century seeking to dissect and expound on the strange
natural mysteries of Earth. David
Attenborough managed to jumpstart things with
the BBC’s Blue Planet back in the day, and then with Planet
Earth. Now, every season seems to herald a new mini-series focused on
showing exactly how wondrous and unique our third rock from the sun really is.
One Strange Rock, National Geographic Channel’s ten-episode
series produced by Darren
Aronofsky and Will Smith (who
also doubles as a narrator) is just the latest in this entry, but with a twist:
Each episode is hosted by an astronaut who has been to space, using the stories
of what they’ve seen and heard and felt while drifting weightlessly in Earth’s
orbit to regale Earthlings about the unique home we have, unlike anything we’re
likely to discover out in the rest of the universe.
“It might be the
weirdest place in the universe,” Smith says about Earth in the series’ opening
scene. Each astronaut discusses a specific theme or concept critical to our
understanding of the planet’s evolution, and how it’s helped lead to the human
species’ dominance of this world.
“It’s like I lived my
life in a little dark room and somebody flipped on a light,” astronaut Peggy
Whitson, the record holder for the most cumulative time spent in space, says at
one point. Take “Gasp,” the
premiere episode of One Strange Rock. Hosted by Canadian astronaut
Chris Hadfield, “Gasp” essentially tells the story of oxygen on Earth. The
episode demonstrates not just how the oxygen cycle moves through the smallest
microbes to the tallest reaches of the atmosphere and sustains most life
throughout the planet. Learning to “gasp” allowed us to evolve into complex
creatures, but it also comes with severe biological limitations. Breathing
oxygen is both a gift and a curse.
Hadfield drives this
point acutely home through a story of his own, recounting the time during a
spacewalk when his helmet became contaminated by some sort of anti-fog solution
and caused him to lose the ability to see for several minutes. The solution to
clear up the problem was to release his own oxygen out from his helmet into
space, and flush out the contaminant… read more:
