NEEL V. PATEL - What Eight Astronauts Saw When They Looked at Earth

By Dilip -
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:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-eight-astronauts-saw-when-they-looked-at-earth?ref=home

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