"Humankind is infinitely curious." "Our prying minds have plumbed the Earth and the heavens, revealing countless discoveries and propelling us into the modern age." "From the beginning, we have hungered for the unknown, for new lands and new knowledge, for the wild places unseen by human eyes." "Armed with a spirit of discovery, we have stood at the summits of the Earth, peered into the depths of the oceans, and planted our feet on another world." "Exploration has turned our ancient dreams into reality." "To know the world around us and to see and hear its wonders, for this we have risked it all." "This is the story of how our primal curiosity has driven us to the edge of the world." "How it has sparked new invention and revealed the mysteries of the universe." "How our passion for exploration led to discoveries that laid the foundations for our modern world." "This is Origins." "It's the greatest adventure story ever told, the story of humankind." "We're going back in time to explore some key moments, origin moments that changed the course of our shared history." "When it comes to the edge of the darkness, the bend in the horizon, or even the distant stars, we can't help ourselves." "'Exploration is in our nature, ' as Carl Sagan so famously put it." "We don't have a choice." "From the Mariana Trench on the deepest floor of the Pacific Ocean to the Sea of Tranquility on the surface of the Moon, there's no limit to where we can go when we set our minds to it." "Today, it's easy to take for granted that we are a global species." "We can hop on a plane and be anywhere in the world in a matter of hours." "But there was a time when the continents were unknown, every ocean was uncharted, and our place in the universe was a mystery." "We may never know why we left Africa." "Climate?" "Conflict?" "Curiosity?" "But we do know the first to leave trudged across the Ice Age southern shores of Asia and came to a vast body of water." "50,000 B.C., Indonesia." "Our ancestors walked out of Africa to settle along these shores in Southeast Asia." "What happened next almost defies logic and defines our most primal instinct as a species." "History tells us that exploration is baked into our DNA." "Wonder what's over there." "Well, let's go figure it out, you know?" "Let's go find out, and I think that is part of us." "If it weren't, we wouldn't have been so successful at populating this planet." "Well, the remarkable thing is that we didn't know we inhabited this thing called the world." "Humans are an exploratory species, and we have the ability to move into a new habitat and figure out what needs to be done to survive." "And so humans just encroached on every new habitat that they came to." "In this age, competition over resources would have been fierce between tribes." "Conflicts become inevitable... as does the search for a new home." "Imagine our ancestors in this moment." "The courage it would take to set off into the open ocean." "So that's how we discovered distant islands like Australia." "And what makes it particularly interesting wasn't just that they crossed quite a lot of open ocean, but they were doing it without any certainty that there was anything on the other side." "And that the indigenous people, the aborigines, they were doing it thousands of years before people were supposed to be undertaking those kinds of trips." "Why people would take that kind of risk is something I just cannot imagine." "The power of human curiosity is simply a wonder." "Most of us, if unleashed into the arid desert of Australia, would die within a few hours." "And so the people who walked in had to work out how to exploit the local plants and animals, how to seek shelter, how to make the instruments they could use to kill animals." "We've occupied nearly every habitat on Earth." "We're an extraordinarily successful species." "Humans are what are known as a supertramp species because we can adapt at the cultural level." "Humans, in general, they're very well-suited for this planet Earth, and when you launch them into space, there are automatically changes that start happening to your biochemistry in your body." "Space is an extremely harsh and inhospitable place, yet humans have found various inventions, a spacecraft, a spacesuit, numerous ways to be at home in space." "Exploration and technology go hand-in-hand." "They've been deeply intertwined throughout the course of human existence." "History is made by those who master the technology of their time." "One group was ahead of the curve for nearly 300 years." "The Vikings, they were a group of people who lived in Scandinavia from about 750 until 1050 A.D." "A part of their culture was this need to find out about the world around them." "They pillaged, and they raped, and they fought, and we know that they traveled far into Russia." "We know that the king of Jerusalem ordered Viking bodyguards because of their skills." "I think that reinforces the idea that the Vikings were a lot more international than the kind of image that's being portrayed and is utterly mind-blowing." "It is baffling how they were able to do this." "The ship technology of the Vikings is amazing." "And it changed the whole society." "They developed a long and stable keel." "The ship, it has a keel going all the way, and it's made of one straight oak." "And this oak need hundreds of years to grow alone." "And this keel made it possible to have a huge sail, and they found out that this Viking ship, with modern crew, which are not half as good as Viking crew, they managed to cross the Atlantic" "faster than Columbus did." "Because of this, it was possible for the Vikings to open the whole world." "They learned about other people, other cultures." "And all that because of those Viking ships." "That's amazing." "From the first humans who set out by sea to the Vikings thousands of years later, the early explorers were guided by instinct, the arc of the sun across the sky, and the stars by night." "But all were useless in foreign territory, turbulent seas, and cloud-covered skies." "Then, like a break in the storm, clouds parted to offer a gift seemingly from the heavens, a new technology that set a course straight toward modern exploration." "Exploration is not just a part of our history." "It has become a part of our psyche." "Even our earliest writings tell stories of dramatic adventure." "One story has lasted for thousands of years, a recurring myth adopted by cultures around the globe." "The Hero's Journey." "It's a story of courage and bravery, an adventure to the end of the known world." "The hero changes, but the story remains the same." "It was first carved into clay 4,000 years ago as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient story of a god-king's journey to the edge of the world and back." "In Greece, the hero was reborn as Odysseus, and the hero's journey became immortalized yet again." "This eternal myth lives on even today, inspiring our most legendary films." "These tales of bravery have empowered generations of explorers and adventurers, steering us in search of unfamiliar places, revealing new truths about the world and even about ourselves." "Today, modern explorers charge into the unknown with the help of advanced navigational tools:" "GPS, satellite maps, altimeters, radios, and thermal imaging." "But for millennia, heroic voyagers had no tools to guide them." "They relied only on their knowledge of the natural world, on stories and information passed down from generation to generation... till the invention of one device." "This is the origin story of a humble instrument that changed the course of history and guided us from the dark ages of exploration into the modern world of adventure." "206 B.C. Mainland China." "A fortune-telling device shrouded in celestial mysticism points the way to the future, but it's actually pulled by unseen natural forces." "Originally, the fortune tellers of the Han Dynasty used lodestone to make what was called Heaven's Plate to make things align in a spiritual rhythm, to make them sacred, to make them blessed." "The lodestone is a naturally occurring metallic ore." "So when you touch any other metal with it, that other metal will have magnetic qualities and point towards the north." "Where the handle of the spoon pointed determined your destiny, and the new emperor, the troubled founder of the Han Dynasty, was seeking such guidance." "It took another thousand years until the Song Dynasty of China took this magnetized piece of iron spinning around to realize that that was how we could determine north from south." "To actually make what we now call the compass." "And for the first time, you are independent of the stars, which were the way the Vikings, for example, navigated, or the Polynesians." "And you could set courses in certain directions, like due west." "This was an enormously invaluable tool." "When the Chinese really began to use it seriously, they were going all over the place." "They could sail anywhere." "There's even a belief that possibly the Chinese were the first to reach America." "And when the compass itself arrived in Europe, that's when you begin to see the age of exploration." "The compass changed the world." "It's actually possible that without the compass," "Europe may have not have discovered Africa, or South America, or even North America." "The origin of modern navigation lies with the compass." "The compass is the first instrument on a boat." "This is where the instrumentalization begins." "Everything hinges on being able to go somewhere and have confidence that you're going in the right direction." "So, this is why we have GPS today." "It is one of the most important tools that we have." "We wouldn't have the ability to know exactly to the square inch where we're going without that little humble compass that every Boy Scout and Girl Guide has in their pocket." "Where you are going is just as important as how you plan to get there." "As we look forward to new frontiers, here on Earth and beyond, places where resources may be scarce or nonexistent, we need to look for new ways to carry ourselves beyond the horizon." "Ways like sailing on currents of air, drawing energy from the rays of the Sun." "Everything I do is the example I received from my grandfather and my father." "My grandfather made the first flight in the stratosphere." "Actually, he was the first man to witness with his own eyes the curvature of the Earth." "My father went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 11 kilometers down, the deepest spot in the ocean." "I thought it was normal to explore." "And for a long time, exploration was about discovering new geographical territories." "And I believe that now exploration has a role to play if we want to make a better world." "And 13 years ago, we had this idea to fly around the world without the dependence of fossil energy." "They told us it was impossible." "So, that was the starting point." "Solar Impulse is a feat of exploration." "It's a scientific adventure." "The goal was to demonstrate how you can use solar energy to fly around the world." "It was not possible to take an existing airplane and to glue some solar cells." "It would never work, so we had to rethink this airplane completely from scratch." "The conclusion was to be an airplane the size of a 747 with the weight of a car... the only airplane today which can fly almost forever." "And these technologies can be used everywhere, not just in our airplane." "And this moment of rapture, where you let behind what you know and enter into the unknown... it's the leap of faith." "In 2016, Solar Impulse became the first aircraft in aviation history to circumnavigate the globe with no fuel." "If you want exploration, very often, you need to get out of the system because the system is paralyzed by common assumptions." "It's not the people selling candles who invented the light bulb." "We had succeeded to use solar energy to fly around the world." "It's interesting to see the difference between conquering and exploring." "When you want to conquer, it's to have more." "When you want to explore, it's to know more." "The future will be very different, so you need an explorer's mind if you want to succeed in the future." "The potential to harness solar energy will be essential for human exploration beyond Earth." "Here on our planet, there are still many corners left unexplored by humans because for most of our existence, the conditions were too dangerous and our technology too primitive to take the risk." "For centuries, we knew more about the surface of the moon than the oceans that surround us." "But when we began to turn our attention to the ocean's depths, what we saw completely changed our conception of the Earth itself." "What happens when you take the ancient world's most legendary trade route and sever it?" "You send a parade of empires across oceans and launch the age of discovery." "When the Silk Road was blocked in the 15th century," "Europeans took to the seas instead." "Henry the Navigator launched the first wave, sending Portuguese explorers into the uncharted Atlantic." "Columbus, Magellan, Cook all followed in their footsteps, circling the globe in the name of science, trade, and conquest." "The payoff was immense." "It turned European empires into global powers and brought them untold riches." "Their discoveries and atrocities reshaped the world." "But history almost took a different path." "The first rulers of the sea were not the Europeans, but the Chinese." "Before Columbus or Magellan, China had Zheng He." "In 1405, he launched a massive fleet with ships dwarfing anything being built in Europe." "It was manned by thousands of workers, scientists, merchants, and soldiers." "His seven expeditions vastly expanded the reach of the Chinese empire." "But the glory was short-lived." "New emperors abandoned his fleet and China slid into isolationism, clearing the way for centuries of European domination." "As China stumbled, the Europeans conquered continents, revealing a profound truth:" "History is written by the explorers." "For tens of thousands of years, we have explored the seas." "Simple rafts took our ancestors to Australia on the open ocean." "They set out without a clue about what they'd find when they got there." "Ever since, we have used water to carry us to new lands and explore terrain untouched by humanity." "But we had no way to look deep below the surface." "Complex physics kept us in the shallows until the 20th century." "Armed with new technology, a whole new, almost alien world opened up for us to explore." "A domain almost as dangerous as space, the final frontier of exploration here on Earth." "1952, a turbulent Atlantic Ocean." "New developments in underwater and sonar technologies allow us to explore and map the ocean floor with unprecedented accuracy." "Exploration is a really dangerous process, and in fact, many explorers die in the course of what they're doing." "So, there's always been a kind of heroism and glory and excitement and maleness about being an explorer." "Add that to the sample collection, would you?" "So, what you got?" "We got a ton of data this time." "Pity the poor soul who's got to make sense of this baby." "When you look at the Earth and you look at it from a distance, it looks like, kind of, like a jigsaw puzzle, right?" "I mean, you got these different landmasses, these continents, which kind of fit together, and there was evidence that suggested that they came from a super continent, but nobody really understood how they might have drifted apart." "But when you looked at that jigsaw puzzle, you realize that the clues to explain why they were where they were, well, it'd be buried under these massive bodies of water." "Geologist Marie Tharp worked tirelessly with dedicated precision, analyzing mountains of sonar data to make the first complete map of the ocean floor." "Kind of customary to knock." "Kind of got my hands full." "Heezen." "Back with the goodies." "All for you." "Put it... put it somewhere." "In those days, there were hardly any women in the sciences, but Marie Tharp was a woman who always had this passion for geology and geography, and she was given this big break during the Second World War," "when they suddenly needed women to start doing that kind of work." "She wasn't allowed to do the physical stuff, because of the sexism of the time, so she used the one thing that they couldn't take away from her and that was her intellect." "Heezen, get in here." "There's a rift." "That so?" "Listen to me." "A rift caused by earthquake activity, forcing the earth apart." "It's too crazy." "It's too theoretical." "It's... too female." "Heezen." "Yeah?" "Get out, would you?" "Tharp was dismissed by even her closest colleagues." "And when her results were published, one of the world's most renowned oceanographers," "Jacques Cousteau, sought to challenge her incredible findings with definitive visual evidence." "Hello." "It's him." "Hello?" "My dear Madame Tharp." "It appears that your rift does in fact exist." "So, you were wrong?" "Yes." "My apologies." "Well, apology accepted." "Thank you." "Well, what did he say?" "That I was right." "Not bad for a girl?" "Marie Tharp was able to chart the ocean's floor discovering the 10,000-mile Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is actually the Earth's biggest physical structure." "And this completely changed the way geologists understood the makeup of the world." "That the sea floor is spreading, and that there is continental drift." "And that magma comes up and creates earthquakes, and volcanoes, and how it's a living organism almost." "It's always changing and shifting and moving." "Marie Tharp initiated such a large-scale mapping program of the ocean floor." "The research that she started is still ongoing today." "There's a new project called GEBCO, which is an attempt..." "It's gonna cost $3 billion..." "To map the ocean floor properly by combining data from oil companies, the companies that lay cables, academics who do oceanographic surveys, and they're gonna do some scans of their own." "Even then, it's gonna take until 2030, but we should then finally have a really good map of the ocean floor." "Only 5% of the ocean to date has been explored." "And yet, in that 5%, we've unlocked some of the most incredible aspects of life on planet Earth." "And the discoveries that have been made in that small slice of the larger ocean have just changed our understanding of where life even comes from." "Now, imagine what's gonna be in the next 95%." "From Marie Tharp and her quiet, rigorous work, we learned that the Earth is a dynamic, volatile planet." "It was an origin moment that forever reshaped our understanding of planet Earth." "One of the largest shifts in our knowledge came when we turned our eyes and technology to the heavens and redefined our place in the universe." "Every time we journey out into the unknown, we find something new, not just about the world, but about ourselves." "Today, virtually every modern technology at our fingertips has roots in space exploration." "But long before we strapped ourselves into capsules on top of massive rockets and blasted out into the great beyond, there was one moment, one origin moment of exploration that completely changed our place in the universe." "1609, Padua." "One man, Galileo Galilei, puts two simple pieces of glass together and looks out into the night sky and transforms the world." "When you think about the role of exploration, it's gone through so many different incarnations in the history of humanity." "Our greatest explorers today, you could say, are the scientists, and that relates to someone like Galileo." "And where he went was courageous because at that point the church forbade humankind to go there." "In Galileo's time, we thought that we were the center of the universe, we were the center of the solar system, and everything went around us." "But, there was this new hypothesis by Nicolaus Copernicus that said," "'No, Earth was not the center of the universe.'" "The planets, including the Earth, actually revolve around the sun." "Unfortunately, there was no evidence at the time to support this hypothesis." "With a few improvements," "Galileo next turned his telescope to Jupiter, and what he found was nothing short of heretical." "When discoveries like these run against divine truth, they become dangerous." "While Galileo was put under house arrest for the remainder of his years, the truths he uncovered could not be contained and would reach scientists for centuries to come." "On the face of it, a telescope is, you know, a wooden tube with some lenses in it, but it had these incredible geopolitical effects." "One of the things that Galileo figures out is that Jupiter has moons." "That means that not everything is going around the Earth, that means the Catholic church is wrong." "That, obviously, is a big deal, causes lots of problems for Galileo." "It's because of Galileo's refusal to bow down to the demands of the church and retract what he knew to be true that we can be sure today that facts govern our lives, not beliefs, not superstitions." "And this was the beginning of the scientific method." "One of the things that Galileo brought to science is he interpreted his results using the language of mathematics." "In doing that, he made science accessible to all, regardless of their gender, their nationality, their religious beliefs." "Galileo was certainly the first space explorer." "He made up the first road map to exploring our solar system." "But now, with the Hubble telescope and the James Webb telescope, which are in space, we can see so much more." "For every scientific revelation, for every discovery we make about the universe, the more we realize how little we know." "We have come a long way, but deep fundamental questions remain unanswered." "Perhaps none bigger than is life unique to Earth or is it spread throughout the universe?" "We've now learned that almost all of the stars in our galaxy have at least one planet and most likely, a planetary system." "So, when you consider the fact that there are a couple hundred billion stars in our galaxy, that's likely over a trillion planets." "For those of us interested in the search for life, the stakes just got more likely." "So, what a great opportunity this would be if we could develop the technologies that will help us determine if life actually exists on some of these faraway planets." "Two of the biggest questions in science are, 'What is the universe made of?" "' and 'Are we alone in the universe?" "'" "And down here in Boulby, both of those science questions are being answered." "We're down here in Boulby Mine, a kilometer underground in salt that's 250 million years old." "Deep underground is where probably most of life on Earth is." "Perhaps about half of all the mass of life on our planet is microbes underground." "If you look in the walls of the mine or up in the roof, you'll see these strange black shapes, these lines in the salt." "They're sort of hexagonal shapes and polygonal shapes." "Now, what's really interesting about these features is we also see them on Mars." "On the surface of Mars, we find salt deposits in impact craters." "So, craters where water has collected, evaporated away, and then you've got these salt crusts in the craters." "The question is, do those also contain evidence of ancient life?" "So, by coming down to a mine like this, deep underground, and looking at these strange features in the salt formed quarter of a billion years ago, we can get ideas as to how we might explore Mars" "and look for life and understand the past environment of that planet." "In looking for this life underground, we're testing instruments that will one day be sent to other planets with robotic and human explorers to prepare for the long-term settlement of space." "There's absolutely a spiritual aspect to exploration." "In fact, I believe that's why people, at the heart of it, actually explore." "It's not for the scientific knowledge." "We like that, but what we're actually looking for is bigger answers." "That is the blessing and the curse of consciousness, and we are a fascinating species in that we want answers, we thirst for them." "We just need them." "And it's to explain existence." "It's to explain who we are." "We have traversed every continent of our planet." "We are now beginning to explore its depths." "When we turn our wanderlust beyond our solar system, to the stars, when we finally leave our planet as a species, what will compel us to leave the place we've called home for hundreds of millions of years?" "Will it be for the same reasons we left Africa?" "Will it be inevitable?" "Will it be essential for our survival?" "What will we discover that we haven't even thought to ask?" "One thing is certain:" "Wherever we go and whatever we discover will completely redefine who we are." "We will become not just global explorers, but galactic explorers, ceaselessly going forward, driven by the burning human need to know." "Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked, why did he want to climb it?" "He said because it is there." "Well, space is there." "And we're going to climb it." "And the moon and the planets are there." "And new hopes for knowledge and peace are there." "Our thirst for exploration has transformed our species from nomads into astronauts, spurring new innovations, opening up the globe, and clearing the path to new and distant worlds." "We explore, not just to reach new lands, but for the journey itself." "It is in the adventure that we discover who we really are." "Our discoveries about the world are rivaled only by what has been revealed about the human condition." "We are a race of explorers." "We risk our lives in the pursuit of new frontiers, new experiences, and new knowledge." "The spirit of discovery is built into our biology, our culture, and our mythology." "No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come." "Wherever adventure takes us in the future, whatever challenges we face, we know that the spirit of discovery will always guide us." "Our journey has only just begun." "We set sail on this new sea, because there is new knowledge to be gained." "Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." "Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept." "The vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered still far outstrip our collective comprehension."