NARRATOR: 4.5 billion years ago,
in the high-performance race to become a planet, this
glistening blue sphere made it to the winner's circle. But the competition
was filled with chaos and violent collisions. DONALD BROWNLEE: But when
the Earth was forming, rocks and boulders came
screaming in much faster than cars crash when they
ran into walls or other cars. NARRATOR: After
tremendous perseverance, it became a special place
in the solar system, to sustain oceans,
land, and life. ROBERT BRITT: Bacteria
helped to create oxygen. We owe our heritage
to the scum of the Earth. NARRATOR: Despite modern
disasters that now plague the planet, it still remains
one of the most mystifying creations in the universe. Blastoff off aboard
Spaceship Earth. [music playing] Suppose extraterrestrials
truly exist and want a tour of planet Earth. They'd be in for the
ultimate cosmic vacation. Earth, whose name may go back
to the Greek word [greek],, meaning ground, is the
third terrestrial planet from the sun. But when arriving,
visitors will realize that it got its nickname, the
blue planet, because 3/4 of it is covered with water. And vacationers will see
that Earth is the only planet in our solar system where
humans or advanced life exists. If you can breathe our
oxygen-rich atmosphere or breathe underwater,
Earth can be explored without a protective
spacecraft and space suit. But tourists will need
to adjust their watches. It takes 365 days for Earth
to orbit around the sun, and each day is 24 hours, which
is the amount of time it takes the planet to rotate
around its axis once. Despite traveler's warnings
about deadly storms and civil wars, Earth is a
relatively safe adventure destination. [ship horn blowing] [music playing] DONALD BROWNLEE: The Earth
is a very special planet, just like a Porsche
is a very special car. Our planet was formed
in just the right place in the solar system. In fact, it's the
only place we know of in our entire solar system
where plants and animals can live under natural conditions. NARRATOR: Renowned
astronomer Donald Brownlee has spent his career
on a cosmic quest to solve the mystery
surrounding the origin of Earth. He says, in the race to become
a life-sustaining planet, Earth was in the driver's seat. But he cautions the ride was
full of danger and intrigue. DONALD BROWNLEE: The
Earth had many things that happened to it to make
it the way it is right now. And many of these
things did involve luck. NARRATOR: 4.5 billion
years ago, one corner of the universe experienced
a colossal fireworks display. A massive, but short-lived
star exploded as a supernova. The blast from this
star may have triggered the gravitational collapse of
the cloud that formed the sun. Shortly after
the sun formed, you had a lot of material
orbiting around the sun, and this was microscopic
stuff, ice particles, dust, a lot of it wasn't unlike
the lint that comes out of your dryer. And they begin to kind of stick
together in little clumps. And eventually,
some of these pieces became more like sand, little
pieces of silicate mostly, and it began to stick
together, and you begin to get little
rocks, little boulders. NARRATOR: As the boulders grew
larger, so did the collisions. As two objects impacted,
gravity held them together. [music playing] DONALD BROWNLEE:
Porche's known for speed. Planets are also
known for speed. When the Earth was forming,
particles and rocks and boulders came
screaming in much faster than these
cars crash when they ran the walls or other cars. NARRATOR: Through
multiple collisions, infant Earth was formed. But it would take many
more impacts for it to become the size it is today. [music playing] To better understand
the formation process, Pete Schultz and his former
student, Seiji Sugita, are attempting to recreate
the early impacts on Earth by using the vertical gun range
at NASA's Ames Research Center. It's a warehouse-sized room
housing a massive light gas gun, which looks more
like a ballistic missile. The vertical gun
launches projectiles at specified targets
inside a vacuum chamber. SEIJI SUGITA: The fact
that this gun can load up in a different angle makes
it really realistic in terms of comparison to what happened
on the surface of Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. So we're gonna fire it at this
tiny 1/4 inch aluminum sphere and into the chamber. And we use this because it
has about the same density as an asteroid entering the
atmosphere of the Earth. So it's going to slam in around
3 miles per second, about 10 times the speed of a bullet. It's gonna be smashed
to smithereens. NARRATOR: The vertical gun
will shoot the aluminum bead into the vacuum chamber
filled with atmospheric gases. There, it will impact a sandy
mound resembling early Earth's surface. PETER SCHULTZ: We're
in a vacuum chamber, and we'll be putting back in
a gas that will simulate what the Earth must have looked like. Let's go ahead and make
a bunch of craters, what the early landscape of the
Earth must have looked like, because these things are
happening all the time. There had to have
been a lot of craters. OK. The plan is to come in, hit
the center of the target, and watch the crater form. And you'll see the
destructive power of this. Even though it's
a tiny bead, it's going to do some
real serious damage. Do you believe anything
would survive-- NARRATOR: High-speed cameras
will document the impact. Schultz and Sugita
nervously watch a monitor located outside the gun range. This is the part
that kills me. It's just like this
moment before the storm. NARRATOR: From a
secure control room, an engineer flips
several switches. SEIJI SUGITA: OK, here we go. NARRATOR: Schultz and
Sugita mix science with a little superstition. Cross our fingers, cross
our legs, cross our hands. This is what drives me nuts. Oh, gorgeous. Oh my gosh. Pow. OK, let's take a look. NARRATOR: The experiment worked. PETER SCHULTZ: That
is unbelievably-- if we imagine this on
the Earth, these-- these would be clouds that
would be rolling, and the velocities would
be comparable to tornadoes. SEIJI SUGITA: Right. Or even higher. PETER SCHULTZ: Even higher. SEIJI SUGITA: Yeah. See what happen-- NARRATOR: The
video taken reveals a frightening and
realistic picture of what happened on early Earth. SEIJI SUGITA: That's
a brilliant wake. Let's go. Oh, man. Jeez. Oh, that is absolutely gorgeous. That did some serious damage. Just imagine that this
is the asteroid that slammed into the Earth. This must have been
happening just repeatedly, doing real damage
to planet Earth. And it's just a
small-scale example of what must have happened
on the early Earth. Yes. Yeah. [music playing] NARRATOR: Some of the objects
blasting into infant Earth were over 300 miles in diameter. The force of one such
high-velocity impact created tremendous heat. Earth began roasting
from the inside. Iron and nickel melted and sank
to the core, generating heat like a massive furnace. The outer rock or magma
was completely melted, producing a molten ocean. The planet was a raging
inferno floating in space. Literally hell on Earth. The most severe impactor could
have sterilized the planet. You're gonna steam atmosphere
and heat the entire surface of the Earth above
sterilization temperatures. NARRATOR: Formation
of the Earth's core, sometimes called the
Great Iron Catastrophe, occurred within the first 40
million years of our planet's existence, and it had a
profound effect on our future. Within the iron core, the
rotating ball of molten iron generated a remarkable
magnetic field. ROBERT BRITT: This
set up the conditions for a habitable planet. By getting all the iron down
to the center of the planet, you had a solid
core that eventually drove the protective
magnetic field that surrounds our planet. NARRATOR: Without
the magnetic field, Earth would be an airless
waste, devoid of life. A gusty wind of material
speeds from the sun past Earth at a million miles an hour
and could erode our atmosphere to nearly nothing in
a few million years. But Earth's magnetic field
deflects the solar wind and preserves our air. [music playing] But even with the
magnetic field, violence and chaos continued
to plague our planet. Above the Earth's iron
core, its rocky mantle was melting, forming volcanoes
that rose to the surface and burped up noxious
gases and lava. And the collisions kept coming. One impact would forever change
the course of Earth's history, and the fate of mankind. About 50 million years after
the Earth began forming, it experienced a collision
that would steer it in a new direction. An object the size
of Mars slammed right into Earth, which was already
80% of its total size. The explosive impact melted
both the planet's outer layers and fuse the two together
to form a larger Earth. Some molten debris that
didn't blend together coalesced to shape our moon. [music playing] Planetary scientist Bill Hartman
first proposed this theory after NASA's first
mission to the moon. WILLIAM HARTMANN: When the
Apollo astronauts brought back rocks from the moon and
we could actually see what the rocks were made out of. They found out that the rocks
are like lavas you can find on Earth, which tells
you that the moon material and the material
are very, very similar. [music playing] NARRATOR: Earth's intimate
relationship with its moon gave the growing planet
a competitive edge. The moon is what causes the
seasons, because some parts of the year, the North Pole
is tilted toward the sun, and later on, the South Pole
is tilted toward the sun. The moon holds that tilt steady. The various gravity
forces that are exerted tend to act in a way
that holds that steady. NARRATOR: After
the epic collision, which created our
moon, our planet was over 90% of its total mass. DONALD BROWNLEE: The
planet formation process involved almost a
biological competition of many bodies bashing into
each other at very high speeds. [music playing] NARRATOR: When the collision
subsided nearly 3.9 billion years ago, our solar
system was left with eight planets, or nine
if you still count Pluto. Earth secured the
third orbital position from the sun, which is
now 93 million miles away. Planets don't like each other
because they're gravitationally tugging each other so that
they're equally spaced. Each planet is a certain
fraction further from the sun. NARRATOR: The
objects that didn't become planets became refugees. Asteroids made of rock
and iron found asylum in the asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter. Comets composed of
ices, dust, and rock sought shelter in
the Kuiper belt just beyond the planet Neptune. Others migrated to the Oort
cloud over a trillion miles from Earth. [music playing] DONALD BROWNLEE: These
battered Porsches are a good analog to the
early solar system, the comets and asteroids that have
survived since the early days. And like these cars, which
are kept here for their parts, we can also go to
comets and asteroids for vital parts that have been
stored since the formation of the solar system. NARRATOR: Over the course
of Earth's history, many misguided asteroids have
strayed off their orbital path and landed on our
planet as meteorites. Over the years, scientists
have analyzed these meteorites and determined their age
through radioactive dating. And since meteorites were
formed at the same time as our planets, they provide the
age of Earth, roughly 4 and 1/2 billion years old. Scientifically,
this is fantastic. It's like looking at
your family history and finding pieces of
your first relative all the way back
in Earth's history. They're still out there. NARRATOR: Asteroids
and comets may also shed light on the origins
of water on our planet. [music playing] 3.9 billion years
ago, the Earth cooled, forming a thick silicate
crust over its mantle, an iron and nickel core. Warm liquid soon covered
the planet's surface, except for a few volcanic
islands dotting the globe. DONALD BROWNLEE: One of the
Earth's lucky properties is that it happened to be
born in just the right place. It's in what's called
the habitable zone. It's the right distance from
the sun where its ocean does not boil away, not to
hot, or too far away, where ocean freezes over. NARRATOR: But where did
Earth get all this water? One view is that water
came from volcanoes, which have been around since
the early formation of Earth. Volcanoes spew out
massive amounts of steam into the atmosphere. When the Earth cooled, volcanic
steam condensed into rain, and thereby supplied
the planet with water. But where did the
steamy water emitted from volcanoes come from? MICHAEL MUMMA: Volcanoes
basically recycled material from melted rock, the mantle
of the Earth, including water. But that's not really
new water in the sense that it was there
before in the oceans, and it's coming out again
for the second time. NARRATOR: NASA senior scientist
Michael Mumma says our planet's water came from space. Comets, which are made
up of frozen gases, could have showered
Earth with water during the relentless
impacts of its infancy. MICHAEL MUMMA: The delivery
of water from an icy body depends very critically on
how large the particle is. The smaller bodies that
came in would break up high in the atmosphere. The other bodies
deliver their material to the surface of the
Earth, and they can actually vaporize that material. It becomes water on Earth. NARRATOR: Mumma is trying to
determine if cometary water is made up of the same ingredients
as our planet's water. We know that the
Earth's oceans contain a mixture of normal water, H2O,
and heavy water, HDO, which includes deuterium, a form
of hydrogen that is twice as heavy as normal hydrogen. But
comets are difficult to study. Few pass near our planet
because most orbit in the outer solar system. But in 1986, Europe's
Giotto spacecraft had a close encounter
with Comet Halley, also known as Halley's Comet,
which was 38 million miles from Earth. MICHAEL MUMMA: One of the ways
we analyze samples is to fly mass spectrometers through
cometary debris coming off the comet when it's active. And we can measure the gases
very accurately in this way. This was done for
the comet Halley. NARRATOR: Comet Halley's water
is similar to that on Earth. However, the other
comets analyzed so far have twice the amount of
HDO or heavy water that's in our oceans. MICHAEL MUMMA: We
know now by looking at other compounds in comets
that they're not all the same. So we don't know whether
Comet Halley was, in fact, representative of all comets. NARRATOR: Most comets
studied thus far have come from the
Kuiper Belt located in the outer solar
system, so they probably didn't help form planet Earth. But the Gemini North
Telescope in Hawaii recently discovered comets
in an unlikely place, the asteroid belt located
between Mars and Jupiter. These warmer, ice-bearing
bodies may have the same water as Earth, because
they were all formed in the inner solar system,
which is closer to the sun. What's more,
startling new evidence suggests that these
unusual comets may not only have delivered water
to Earth, they also may have seeded our planet with
the building blocks of life. The origin of life,
it remains one of the most puzzling and
controversial questions about our planet Earth. One thing is certain,
3.9 billion years ago, humans would have lasted
for only a brief moment. The Earth's atmosphere consisted
of carbon dioxide, water vapor, a little nitrogen,
but no oxygen. Yet, could primitive life have
endured in such an environment? We have no firm evidence
that there was life 4.3 billion years ago, but we
think now that the conditions were possible. NARRATOR: The oldest
fossils on Earth only date back 3.7 to
3.9 billion years ago. Some believe that these remains
once evolved in ancient ponds or lakes. There, atmospheric
chemicals and energy formed a primordial
soup of amino acids, the essential elements of life. But could the building
blocks of life have come from somewhere else? Perhaps from an
extraterrestrial object? DONALD BROWNLEE: Meteorites
contain organic materials, including amino acids. They formed somehow in
the early solar system. So there is this delivery of
organic material from space. NARRATOR: But if asteroids and
comets gave the building blocks of life a space
shuttle ride to Earth, how did they survive the
high-velocity impact? [music playing] Back at NASA's Ames
Research Facility, Pete Schultz and Seiji
Sugita are conducting another cutting-edge experiment
using the vertical gun range. They hope to one day confirm
that meteorites and comets could have delivered life's
essential ingredients to Earth. PETER SCHULTZ: One of the
things we are trying to look at, what is the survival of some
of these building blocks? Can they be delivered to the
Earth that would help seed a planet so the conditions
for life could begin to exist? SEIJI SUGITA: Comets
and asteroids probably brought essential ingredients
for origin of life to the surface of Earth. The impact probably made the
surface environment much more favorable for life. NARRATOR: Their experiments
show that meteors delivered primitive carbon
compounds to early Earth. Some of these compounds may have
produced the building blocks necessary for life. But more research is needed. Yeah, So this is-- it's coming
through the atmosphere, burning up as it goes. SEIJI SUGITA: OK. NARRATOR: Still, many scientists
agree the first lifeforms were single-celled organisms
that lived in the oceans. And today, biologists are
digging up the descendants of our earliest known
ancestors in some of the most uninhabitable places on Earth. KENNETH NEALSON: If you
have a big Cadillac today as modern life, ancient life
was more like a bicycle. There are no remains of
these organisms other than their chemistry. And I think it's
important to keep in mind that for the first two billion
years of this planet's living history, it was all microbial. NARRATOR: Professor Ken Nealson
is a bona fide microbe hunter. He scours the planet for the
tiniest forms of primitive life that still exist today. KENNETH NEALSON: The earliest
Earth was full of hydrogen, was full of hydrogen sulfide,
had a lot of methane, some carbon dioxide. It was a place full of energy. The microbes exploited virtually
every niche on this planet for energy. NARRATOR: Some have dubbed these
early life forms extremophiles or thermophiles,
organisms that can live in extreme environments. Let's say there was a massive
meteorite that hit the Earth and the temperature of the
Earth went up 40 degrees. Well, that would be just
perfect for these extremophiles. One of the things we
know, for instance, is that the, quote, "oldest
organisms," the ones that are nearest to the
last common ancestor are all thermophilic organisms. And you could say, well,
that proves that life evolved at high temperature. NARRATOR: Descendants of
these hot-blooded organisms can be found today, and they
can live at temperatures of 230 degrees Fahrenheit. KENNETH NEALSON: If you want
some so-called thermophiles, then you go to Yellowstone, and
you see these bubbling lakes and cauldrons of smelly water. And for years, people
assumed they were sterile, but they're full of life. And they-- all these organisms
adapting to that extreme. NARRATOR: Modern
day extremophiles may prove that life could
have survived and adapted under the extreme
conditions on Earth during its turbulent infancy. But how could
single-celled microbes transform into complex life? [music playing] Approximately three billion
years ago, primitive life soaked up energy from the sun. Underwater microbes
formed a green pigment called chlorophyll. This enabled them to
trap sunlight and produce a chemical reaction, which
converts carbon dioxide and water into food. This process, called
photosynthesis, led the way for bacteria to multiply
into one of Earth's earliest structures,
cyanobacteria, formerly called blue-green algae. Cyanobacteria injected
vast amounts of free oxygen into the water and air and
sparked the oxygen revolution. KENNETH NEALSON: All of a
sudden, life divided into two groups, one that ran
away from the oxygen and hid in the anaerobic
part of the world, and the other that
started using the oxygen as a great energetic advantage,
and then could evolve, I think, to be much bigger, and
perhaps, to evolve much faster. One thing is for sure, when the
cyanobacteria got this ability, they out-competed
everybody else. [music playing] NARRATOR: Thanks to
cyanobacteria, life was able to quickly diversify
and become more complex. Without it, molecular
oxygen wouldn't exist. Therefore, plants,
animals, and humans would have never developed. ROBERT BRITT: So if we didn't
have the cyanobacteria, we wouldn't be around. We owe our heritage to
the scum of the Earth. KENNETH NEALSON: All of us
came from the same place. We have so many things
in common with bacteria. There's just no doubt about it. [music playing] NARRATOR: The Mojave Desert
near Death Valley in Southern California appears void of life. But below the surface
of this dried lake, mankind's ancestors thrive. Planet Earth's
earliest life forms may have adapted and persevered
under extreme conditions. [music playing] Today, in the parched
and barren Mojave Desert in Southern California,
geobiologist Ken Nealson is searching for
the secrets to life. He's discovered that modern
microbial organisms also thrive in some inhospitable places. KENNETH NEALSON: What
you see when you glance at this environment are a bunch
of what appear to be tunnels or mounds here, and these are
made from the gases produced by the microbes living
in this mud flat area. If we were to take water and
rehydrate this piece of dirt and put this under
the microscope, it would be rife with abundant
microbes swimming everywhere. And this is the life cycle in
the salt flat, all of which we'd call extremophiles, and
which eke out an existence in a mud flat like this. [music playing] NARRATOR: Microbes
reigned supreme for much of Earth's history. They revolutionized the planet
and paved the way for a myriad of sophisticated species. But it was land that
gave life a new home. It's believed the
emergence of landmass began roughly four
billion years ago. Plate tectonics created
heat and pressure that produced rock lighter
than the ocean floor. It ultimately floated
and accumulated, creating continents that
would change in size and shape over time. The presence of vast
continents would enable Earth to sustain its
most distinctive component, complex life. [music playing] After two billion years of
planetary and biological evolution, the first
plants and animals emerged from water onto land. But it would take hundreds
of millions of years before humans evolved. And once man claimed
dominance over the planet, Earth would never be the same. Planet Earth now holds the
best real estate for mankind in our solar system. Seven diverse continents
and countless islands are home to six billion people. [music playing] Yet, remarkably, most
of Earth's existence thus far has been
without humans. The planet's history has been
compared to a 24-hour clock, with the presence of
man being the last two seconds of the day. [music playing] DONALD BROWNLEE: We're
driving around the track now at a relatively
modest speed, and this car handles
very smoothly, a very controlled ride. This reminds me
of life on Earth. Life on Earth has had
its ups and downs, but compared to evolution
on other planets, the Earth has had a relatively
smooth ride for billions of years. That's why life has
flourished here. [music playing] NARRATOR: But with mankind
now navigating its future, spaceship Earth may return
to its tumultuous beginnings. ROBERT BRITT: Humans, through
trial and error of evolution, are suited to live on
this particular planet. Now, that's true right now. We don't know if that will
be true in the future. NARRATOR: Earthlings created
what once would seem almost unimaginable, technology. Mechanical vehicles,
gadgets, and gizmos have simplified and
bettered our lives. Many of these
conveniences are run on or made using fossil
fuels, which are harvested from the Earth's crust. [music playing] But over the last 100
years, our innovations have gotten us into
planetary trouble. DONALD BROWNLEE: Humans
are having a major effect on planet Earth with global
warming and population explosion. So we're having a very large
effect on the environment. NARRATOR: The natural
greenhouse effect is the absorption of infrared
radiation by our atmosphere, which warms our planet. Without greenhouse gases,
the Earth's surface would be up to 86 degrees
Fahrenheit cooler. But in the last
20 years, there's been an increase in
greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide produced
by burning fossil fuels. The increased heating is
affecting agriculture, sea level, and weather. In the past, carbon
dioxide levels have spiked due
to natural causes, such as volcanic out-gassing. However, today's rises seem to
be happening much more rapidly. To visibly witness
the drastic changes, one needs to travel to
the barely habitable zones on planet Earth. There, mankind's future
is literally melting away. The Earth's North
and South Poles are known as the
cryospheres, regions blanketed with snow and ice. They help regulate climate
temperature and water levels around the globe. NASA senior scientist
Waleed Abdalati investigates the frozen
parts of our world. WALEED ABDALATI: The feeling
of being on the ice is amazing. Its pristine. In places, probably, my boots
have been the first to touch the ground there. It's very humbling. You know, you stand there, and
it's so vast and impressive. NARRATOR: But in
the last century, scientists like Dr. Abdalati
have personally witnessed Earth's ice shrinking. The reason? Ice and snow are white. They reflect sunlight
and cool the planet. By contrast, the open
oceans absorb sunlight, which heats the globe. However, as ice melts, it
creates more open water, which sucks in more sunlight, and
increasingly warms the planet and melts more ice. It's unstable, we say, because
even the slightest change tends to amplify itself. And it's essentially
a runaway effect. NARRATOR: Earth's polar
icecaps are in peril. Continually melting of
these precious landscapes may one day produce
catastrophes across the planet, [music playing] At the South Pole, the
continent of Antarctica holds 70% of the
world's fresh water. Ice shelves surrounding
the continent hold back ice like the Hoover Dam,
but they are weakening. After 12,000 years of solidity,
the Larsen B Ice Shelf collapsed in just five weeks. At the North Pole, some
predict that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free during the
summer in the next 40 to 60 years. WALEED ABDALATI: What's
causing the warm temperatures? Certainly, there's an element
of natural variability, but there is also a
human contribution. We know that humans are
contributing to the warmer environment, and that was
subsequently contributing to diminished ice cover. NARRATOR: In Greenland,
the Jakobshavn Glacier, one of the fastest flowing
glaciers in the world, is now moving like
a runaway train. WALEED ABDALATI: So it's now
going about five feet an hour, which believe me, for
a glacier is very fast. The worst case scenario would
be that all of these glaciers start to speed up and just
deliver huge amounts of ice to the sea. That would be a 3-foot
increase worldwide. And 3 feet in coastal regions
is plenty to displace millions and millions of people. [music playing] NARRATOR: Although humans
may be able to stabilize manmade pollutants,
it might take decades. At the same time, there are
natural processes at work that might determine mankind's fate. DONALD BROWNLEE:
The planet's going through its own evolution. What we do to the
planet affects us. It doesn't affect the planet. So we may muck up the
atmosphere for a few thousand years of global
warming and so forth, but this is actually
just a blip. It's an important blip to
us, but it's not necessarily a blip in terms of
planetary evolution. [music playing] NARRATOR: Don Brownlee
and colleague Peter Ward have measured our
planet's vital signs, and its prognosis is bleak. Earth as a place for animal and
human life is nearing old age. Why? Our sun is getting
brighter and hotter. DONALD BROWNLEE: The problem
down the line for advanced life on Earth is that as the
sun gets slightly brighter, the expectation is that
carbon dioxide will be almost completely
removed from the atmosphere. There will be an end to the
age of plants and animals. [music playing] NARRATOR: Humans could die
out 500 million years from now due to the brightening
of the sun. But in the grand
scheme of things, man may have had a good run. Before reaching
extinction, perhaps humans will have lived longer than any
other complex species because of their ability to
adapt to changing environmental conditions. DONALD BROWNLEE: From
a human standpoint, the Earth will remain a
Porsche plant probably for another half a billion
to a billion years, which is a truly
awesome timescale from a human standpoint. [music playing] NARRATOR: As spaceship
Earth maneuvers through uncharted
waters, humankind can reflect on the planet's
awesome achievements and steadfast survival
in the tough neighborhood called the universe. [music playing]
