-Today, over 7 billion of us inhabit the Earth... ...in a technological society of breathtaking complexity.

Now, for the first time, we can visualize the invisible bonds that link us all together.

-The world has really shrunk.

We can take in a snapshot of our entire planet in one view.

-It reveals a fascinating web of manmade networks that allow us to thrive and connect all of us.

Our interconnected planet has been thousands of years in the making.

What pivotal moments forged our global society?

What flashes of ingenuity allowed us to flourish?

Our success has triggered a vast population explosion, straining our global networks.

-This massive increase of at least 2 billion people is unprecedented.

-There's gonna be some very big challenges in the near future for how we can sustain this human population.

-To meet these challenges we'll require our humanity's long tradition of ingenuity and innovation.

-How to feed 9 billion people is obviously a headache-inducing question.

This is not an easy thing to do.

-The way we do it now cannot last forever, and so we're going to have to find some alternative solutions.

-This is the story of how our ingenuity created the modern world and how it will shape our future... as seen from space.

"Humanity From Space" is made possible Our modern world is a marvel to behold.

We've built a society that's completely dependent on technology.

Today, this technology doesn't just govern our lives... ...it allows us to see a new and fascinating global perspective of ourselves... ...revealing, for the first time, just how complex our society has become.

Our new planetary perspective shows billions of us are constantly on the move... ...by land... ...sea... ...and air... how we communicate with each other... ...and illuminates our insatiable hunger for food... water... and power.

The ability to see humanity on a global scale reveals something profound.

For the first time in our history, we are completely interdependent on each other.

-This has changed our perception of the world.

Today, we live in a global civilization, and this enhances our appreciation of the planet because we now see it all as one piece.

-And what we're seeing is just how interconnected, how everyone on planet Earth today is a part of one vast, planet-spanning network.

-It's easy to take these life-sustaining networks for granted, but each grew over thousands of years.

Forged from the simplest ideas that led to seismic shifts in human behavior.

[ Morse code beeping ] -By explaining the human ingenuity that built these networks, we can tell the story of how our modern world came to be, seen from the perspective of space.

To tell our story, we must travel back in time... ...over 12,000 years.

Long before the world we know existed.

To a time when less than 5 million humans inhabited the Earth.

The fertile crescent in the Eastern Mediterranean 10,000 B.C.

It's here the story of our modern world begins through one of the most significant innovations in human history.

For tens of thousands of years, we lived in small tribes of hunters and gatherers.

As nomads, we constantly roamed the land in search of food.

But something happened in these rich soils that completely changed the course of human behavior.

Rather than gathering seeds to eat, we planted them.

-Planting seeds is hugely significant in human history because it's a completely different way of feeding ourselves.

[ Sheep bleating ] -The new idea of farming wasn't restricted to the Middle East.

Independently, other tribes in different parts of the world began to have the same thought.

From a global perspective, it's possible to see where the roots of farming took hold.

In Mexico, the Olmecs planted maize around 9,000 years ago.

8,000 years ago, in the Peruvian Andes, the first potatoes were pulled from the ground.

The first rice was sown in the Pearl River Valley in China 7,000 years ago.

And wheat spread into Europe by 3,000 B.C.

-Humanity went through a very transformative shift.

We went from being hunters, gatherers, foragers like we'd been for most of the 200,000 years of our history to beginning to be farmers.

-For the first time, farming not only provided a reliable source of food, it provided a surplus, which had huge consequences for humanity.

-The change from hunter/gathering to farming is absolutely fundamental.

It's really what allows us, for the first time, to stay in one place.

We don't have to run around looking for our food anymore.

-Farming allowed us to gather together.

In these fledgling settlements, we strengthened another human trait... cooperation.

Working together for the greater good meant we shared new ideas and skills allowing our ingenuity to flourish.

-And those people can go off and specialize in new roles in society.

They can become expert carpenters or weavers or blacksmiths, and it's through this process, founded on agriculture, that you build complex, capable civilizations.

-With our newfound skills, we constructed our first civilizations, the ruins of which we can still see today found in regions where we first learned to farm.

Farming allowed us to build our first cities, like Jericho... Eribil... and Byblos...

...The oldest of which have been inhabited for 11,000 years.

These are the roots of our modern world.

-The simple act of planting a seed transformed the way we are as a species.

It made it possible to congregate in settlements which eventually became cities, which eventually became the heart of ideas and technology and art, and the global, connected society that we have today.

-The Roman, Greek, Mayan, and Mongolian Empires were all governed from cities.

Cities that became the first great hubs of human innovation, all of which were built on the foundations of farming.

But what's surprising is few grew to have populations greater than a million people.

To create today's mega cities would take another huge shift in human behavior.

A shift triggered by another seemingly insignificant event.

These are our modern cities from space.

From up here, it's possible to see how numerous and vast they have become.

Many are home to over 20 million people.

Some have merged to form giant metropolises, huge, urban networks that stretch hundreds of miles, where more than 50 million of us have gathered.

-You see major metropolises all the way up across the Appalachians, down the entire eastern seaboard, up into the granite and the ice of Canada, and you can see all that in one view.

-In the 90 minutes it takes for us to orbit the Earth, we can see the impact of humanity all around us.

We could see that humanity has spread all over the globe.

-Today, we take our cities for granted, but modern society as we know it couldn't exist without them.

Over 500 worldwide now contain more than 1 million people.

What's surprising is their incredible growth started just 250 years ago.

-For most of human history, cities were the exception.

You know, there were a handful of large ones and very few in general.

Most of humanity lived on the land, and that situation lasted for thousands of years.

-So, what triggered the phenomenal growth of our cities?

Great Britain, 1765.

While most of us work in the fields... this man, Scottish engineer James Watt, sees a way of improving a recent invention -- the steam engine.

Until now, steam engines were primitive and had limited uses.

But with just a few crucial tweaks, Watt designs a steam engine that's far more efficient, one that burns 70% less coal.

Watt's ingenuity unleashes steam's astonishing potential with unimaginable consequences.

-We've had three incredible leaps forward in our human history.

The first was the discovery of how to control fire, the second was how to farm, and the third massive difference was made when we learned how to harness steam to produce power.

[ Steam hissing ] -Engineers embrace Watt's engine, ushering in a new wave of human innovation almost overnight.

Suddenly, a single steam-powered water pump in a coal mine could replace a team of 500 horses, and now we could manufacture not just with our hands, but with machines.

-And so for the first time, human society was freed from constraints of just using muscle power, and now you could use machinery.

-Steam power had a profound effect on our lives.

In hundreds of factories, new machines brought about mass production on a scale unheard of... ...triggering a huge shift in the labor force.

-No longer do we find work in the countryside as farmers.

Suddenly, work and opportunity is located in the city, in the factories that are transforming society.

-Before 1800, few people ever left the village where they were born.

Transporting them to the cities to fill the factories required another revolution... ...One that was also driven by steam.

[ Train whistle blows ] -The railways can bring in food, they can bring in coal, they can bring in people.

Cities just -- they just roll out.

-And this in itself became a transformative episode in human behavior, in human history.

It opened up the world to us.

-The amazing thing that happens is that cities can grow as big as they like because the railways can bring the food in, they can bring the coal in, it can bring the people in.

You know, so these things just go "Pbht!"

I mean, you know, you get a great metropolitan splat, basically.

-Nowhere is more affected than Manchester in England.

Thanks to James Watt, this sleepy market town soon succumbs to steam power.

With the coming of the railways, tens of thousands of people flock in from the countryside seeking work in its new factories.

In just 50 years, Manchester's population soars from 20,000 to 160,000 people... as it becomes the world's first industrialized city.

-The industrial revolution is absolutely huge.

Basically, the discovery of steam makes it possible for us to produce things, and it's a complete game changer.

-The industrial revolution draws people together as never before.

For the first time in human history, the population of cities around the world expands massively, running into millions in just a few decades.

It's another giant leap forward in building today's modern world.

-We see it in India, we see it in China, we see it in Tokyo.

Suddenly, you have factory cities like Detroit springing up from a quarter million people to a million people in a single decade.

-And it's just extraordinary.

The whole thing turns on its head.

Cities explode.

-The industrial revolution triggers one of the greatest mass migrations the modern world has ever witnessed, ushering in the urban age.

-If we come to something like 1800, there's still only 3% of the global population living in cities.

Then we get steam power, we get railways, the industrial revolution, and [whistles] completely hockey stick curve.

-And what started 200 years ago continues today.

-There's 1.2 million people moving into cities every week globally at the moment.

This is extraordinary.

-This human shift has led to a unique moment in the history of humanity.

-In the year 2006, something hugely significant happened in the human story.

Basically, this year is the first in history when more people are living in cities than in the countryside.

-The industrial revolution led us to become a truly urban society.

But keeping the modern world running would require another spark of ingenuity.

Something that would lead to the greatest engineering network on the planet.

Something we connect with across continents without which the modern world wouldn't function.

October 28th, 2011, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

-3...2... Main engine start.

1...zero.

And liftoff of the Delta II.

-NASA launches the Suomi satellite.

It's designed to study the world's weather.

But with an electronic eye hundreds of times more sensitive that previous satellites, it reveals something remarkable.

The interconnectivity of our electrified world.

This is the black marble... a cloudless composite of the entire world made up of thousands of images collected from Suomi over 312 orbits.

It reveals almost every light we've switched on from office blocks to houses to individual street lights.

-When I look at the NASA black marble images, my mind boggles.

It is an amazing illustration of the impact that electricity and our power grids have had on the human species.

-Here, the Nile River shines as a ribbon of light that fans out at the river's delta just above the city of Cairo.

These are the lights of hundreds of fishing trawlers.

Unwittingly, they pick out an invisible manmade boundary as they patrol their territorial waters.

We can even see who's embraced the modern world.

South Korea blazes with light while North Korea remains almost entirely dark.

All these lights have one thing in common -- They require electricity.

-It's hard to overstate just how important electricity is to our lives today.

From when we wake up in the morning to getting to work to doing our work to going to bed at night.

Almost everything we do involves electricity in one way or the other.

-There's no doubt electrification marks a seismic shift in founding our modern world, but the events that sparked it can be traced back in time to surprisingly humble beginnings.

December 31st, 1879, Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his improved version of the electric light bulb.

Before Edison, light bulbs were unreliable, expensive, and failed quickly.

His breakthrough comes when he makes a filament out of bamboo and carbon.

It's a small change, but the consequences are huge.

-Edison didn't invent the light bulb, but what he did do was tweak and play around with the designs that existed at the time.

And looking back, these might seem like insignificant changes, but they got the design to work, and that's the important thing.

-Edison's bulb shines brighter and longer than any before -- lasting for over 1,000 hours.

He patents his design and declares, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

But a bulb is useless without a source of power.

-It's only half of the solution, because at the end of the day, you need to get the electricity from where it's generated in your power station to where you need to use it, to your homes and factories.

And for that, you need another kind of invention.

-Thomas Edison perfected the light bulb as we know it, but what's not as well known, but certainly even more significant is that Edison was also the originator of the electrical grid.

-With a talented group of electrical engineers, among them, Nikola Tesla, Edison built a small network of electrified cables supplying power to just 59 customers in southern Manhattan.

Stretching just a few blocks, this is the world's first electric grid.

And in a little over 100 years, it has grown exponentially.

In North America, hundreds of power stations feed electricity into almost half a million miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

These, in turn, connect thousands of cities, linking over 300 million people to the North American grid with enough copper cable to stretch to the moon and back.

-The electrical grid is a mind-boggling machine.

It is easily the largest and most sophisticated machine ever built by people.

It's hard to even quantify how massive this device is.

-Seen from a global perspective, the importance of the grid becomes clear.

29,000 miles of cable carry electricity throughout Australia.

In India, it's double that.

Russia's grid has 73,000 miles of cable.

In Europe, over 185,000 miles of cable connects 23 different countries.

Globally, the electrical grid supplies power to over 5.5 billion of us, 80% of humanity.

From the ingenuity of a handful of pioneering electricians, we've constructed a modern wonder of the world.

-The electrical grid is one of the best and most amazing examples of how humanity is connected all around the world.

-And now the interconnectivity of the grid allows us to see the electrical consumption of countries and regions across the world.

Canada consumes just 2% of the world's electricity.

America uses 10 times as much.

The combined countries of Europe use another 16.5%.

And China accounts for almost a quarter of the world's total.

Every day, our electricity consumption could light half a trillion 100-watt light bulbs.

Electricity is the lifeblood of our modern world, and the grid we've built to transport it is its veins.

Its availability has sparked almost all of our modern inventions, from fridges and TVs to telephones and computers, to our electrified skylines.

It's only when the supply is cut that we fully appreciate its importance.

-Suddenly, life freezes.

Can't go on the Internet.

None of the lights work.

You can't do anything, and suddenly, you realize for those moments, when electricity is not there, just how ubiquitous it is in terms of how we function in the contemporary world.

-Without electricity, our modern world would be left in the dark.

To keep it powered, we've drawn on our ingenuity to provide us with two resources that our society has become completely dependent on.

The Cordero Rojo Mine in Powder River Basin, Wyoming, USA.

This is one of the largest mines in America -- a vast hole in the ground over a mile wide.

Here, some of the largest machines ever built scoop thousands of tons of earth a day... digging for coal.

Coal is critical in the story of the modern world.

250 years ago, it fueled the steam engines that triggered the industrial revolution.

Changing human behavior and laying the foundation of our urban society.

Today, it influences our lives in another vital way.

-I think it surprises a lot of people to learn that the bulk of electricity produced all around the world comes from coal.

-Powder River Basin is the largest coal-mining region in North America.

This revealing time lapse from space shows the extent of coal exploration here over the last 20 years.

Starting from nothing, we've excavated an area the size of Miami.

This massive complex of mines supplies less than half of America's electricity needs.

Our dependence on coal has led to a complex network of supply and demand.

Indonesia is the world's greatest coal exporter.

It sells 30 million tons to Japan every year.

Coal from Australia has fueled China's industrial boom.

And much of Europe, the world's largest economy, buys coal from Russia.

When it comes to producing electricity, coal is king today.

But coal alone doesn't meet our electricity demands.

Globally, we use enough electricity every day to power the average American home for over 5 million years.

To meet the demand, we've constructed a vast network of power plants.

Over 2,300 coal power plants generate 41% of our electricity.

439 nuclear power stations supply another 10%.

While natural gas feed almost 3,000 plants, generating a fifth of the electricity we consume.

But these energy sources pale in significance when compared to a commodity that permeates nearly every component of our world... ...oil.

Titusville, Pennsylvania, August 27th, 1859.

Until now, oil could only be collected where it seeped to the surface, but this man, Edwin Drake, thinks differently.

He's hired by the Seneca Oil Company to find a way to extract underground oil deposits.

Drake reasoned, he could tap oil's potential by drilling for it in the same way he'd seen miners drill for salt.

-And he almost immediately started to encounter problems.

It didn't go well at first.

What essentially happened, the further down they got, they began to hit water, and this well began filling up with water, and it collapsed.

So, it was a complete disaster.

-He's practically laughed out of town.

Drake's Folly will never work.

-People began calling him Crazy Drake 'cause they literally thought he was crazy.

No one had done this before successfully.

-Drake doesn't give up.

He uses iron pipes to shore up the sides of his well.

-And guess what?

It worked.

He was able to drill down to about 70 feet, and lo and behold, oil was coming up out of that well, and then people didn't think he was so crazy anymore.

-Drake's ingenuity proves another powerful example of how a small innovation can radically change the scale of human endeavor.

Drilling meant we could extract oil and exploit it like never before.

In just 10 years, North America's oil production leaps from 2,000 barrels to over 5 million a year.

Setting us on a path to today's modern, oil-dependent world.

-This moment, when Drake successfully drilled his well and oil came up, was a fundamental seismic shift in human history.

-Today, our quest for oil takes us around the globe.

With drilling as far-flung as Alaska and Southern Australia.

And from the frozen wastes of Siberia to the deserts of Saudi Arabia.

Globally, our 350,000 rigs extract almost 4 million barrels of the black stuff every hour.

Around 67,000 barrels a minute.

In just 150 years, we've extracted almost a trillion barrels of oil from the Earth.

Without oil, our modern world would be grounded.

It's what keeps our planes... cars... and ships constantly circling the globe.

But oil does so much more than keep us on the move.

Our ingenuity has found ways of using it that even Edwin Drake could never have seen.

-Nearly everything that we use, every product we engage with every day is related to oil in some way.

-The versatility of oil is everywhere.

Walk down any street in any town, and it surrounds you.

From the tarmac under your feet to the paint on walls... ...to the goods in store windows, and the plastic in cars.

-It's synthetic fibers in our clothes.

-The very chair I'm sitting in.

-The pesticides, the insecticides we use to grow the food that we eat.

-The toothbrush I use to brush my teeth.

-Televisions or mobile phones.

-The camera that you're using to film me right now.

Everything that you can think of is tied to oil in one way or another.

It's really amazing.

-So, in a sense, we are utterly dependent to this black stuff.

-Oil's influence over us is so huge, a tiny shift in its value impacts every part of our lives.

From our ability to travel to the price of a loaf of bread or a quart of milk.

[ Register beeping ] And oil underpins one of the oldest human traits that govern us today... ...global trade.

Our modern world is built around a series of vast, interconnected global networks.

Millions of miles of roads and rail... thousands of aircraft spanning the globe... and ships that plow the oceans.

Through them flows everything our civilization makes.

These are our modern trade routes -- An indispensable network that connects us.

-Everything that we consume, everything that we use, all come from many different places now, and that's very different to any time before.

-If there's one thing that makes the world go 'round today, it's this international global trade.

-Trade with each other is one of the oldest and most basic of human connections.

The modern world is entirely defined by it.

We can see how by going back to the origins of the international trading network in China.

The Chinese were pioneers of trade.

Over hundreds of years, the Han Dynasty created a network of paths over 6,000 miles long... ...collectively called the Silk Routes.

Stretching across continents, the Silk Routes are widely recognized as the first intercontinental trade network.

-And the significance was profound because it brought the East and the West into contact with each other for the very first time.

The Silk Routes provided Rome, Egypt, the Middle East, and China with a regular, reliable means of trading.

Becoming the arteries through which exotic goods such as spices... coffee... silk... and gold were exchanged, raising the standard of living for those who bought and sold.

-Before the introduction of silk into the Roman empire, they had scratchy and crumply linen and wool, and to them, silk was a revelation.

They went gaga over it.

-But trading over land was often arduous and dangerous.

By the mid 1400's, war between the Byzantine and Ottoman Dynasties meant the Silk Routes became impassable.

But trade between East and West was too lucrative to lose.

So an alternative route to the Far East was needed.

Southern Spain, 3rd of August, 1492.

Christopher Columbus departs on the first of his four ground-breaking voyages.

His quest to reach the East Indies is legendary, but the real legacy of Columbus would have far-greater consequences for establishing our global society.

Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic, thinking he'd find a passage to the Far East.

Of course, what lay ahead was a completely different continent... ...America.

This serendipitous find sparked the golden age of discovery.

The flotilla of ships that sailed the globe over the next 150 years would charge routes to new lands in the Northern and Southern hemisphere.

And although they were often depicted in history as heroic missions of exploration, the sailors who risked life and limb on these voyages were driven by something more lucrative -- the desire to trade.

-Columbus, Dias, and Da Gama, and Magellan weren't looking for gold, and they weren't looking for souls to save.

They were looking for nutmeg and mace and cloves and cinnamon.

-The age of discovery allowed us to realize in Europe that there are places on the other side of the world that had untold riches.

-A pound of nutmeg was the Armani suit and the Gucci shoe and the BMW of its era.

-Over the next 400 years, the effect of these voyages rippled around the world.

Businesses like Britain's East India Company revolved around the prosperity international trade offered.

Bolstering not just ports such as London, Paris, and Amsterdam, trading in tea, coffee, and spices, but entire countries like India, Burma, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Although not without periods of hardship and upheaval, these shipping routes brought great wealth to the lands they linked... ...laying the foundations of today's global trade networks.

-The age of discovery brought Europeans into contact with luxury goods that they had never seen before, and they gradually developed an increasing taste for these.

-By the 19th century, no proper English household was without its Darjeeling tea and bone china set.

But luxuries like these were reserved for the rich.

The start of today's modern mass market would have to wait for another several hundred years.

Port Newark Elizabeth, New jersey, April 26, 1956.

This man, Malcolm McLean, is about to introduce an innovation that will revolutionize trade.

Before McLean, loading and offloading shipping cargo is slow and expensive.

Grain was craned into the hold, and hundreds of porters packed goods into every available space.

McLean's bright idea was to standardize the process using shipping containers.

-It's just a box, but what the shipping container does for you is it gives you a unit of trade, something which is uniform in size anywhere in the world, and you can have the space on the ships and the cranes, and you're transporting trucks all adapted to something the same size.

-The one-size-fits-all container slashes the costs of loading in an instant from around $6 to just 16 cents a ton.

-And it's that incredible increase in efficiency which really drives down the cost of shipping with container, and it makes international trade so much cheaper.

-Cheap shipments meant people around the world could afford more.

Today, it's grown into a $4 trillion network... ...With thousands of ships carrying over 120 million containers every year.

From space, global positioning satellites track the movement of this immense fleet... ...revealing today's international shipping network.

A global network delivering cargo to and from over 4,500 container ports.

Much of that cargo passes through here, the Panama Canal.

Each year, over 14,000 ships sail this shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, making it the most congested shipping lane in the world.

Announcer: We now return t t To appreciate how the humble shipping container has changed your life, just walk into your nearest supermarket.

You can buy oranges and bananas from the USA and Ecuador... ...fish from China... ...beef from Argentina... ...almonds from Morocco.

Such a diversity of products would be unimaginable without modern shipping.

-You don't give a second thought to the fact that you're looking at goods from Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, Africa, South America.

-Trading routes have brought the world to our doorstep.

A global network supporting almost every aspect of our modern way of life.

It connects us all.

-The ability to buy goods from around the world, the shrinking of the world in terms of its marketplaces, has brought us a degree of interconnectedness that makes the world everyone's country.

-But in the modern world, it's not just goods that are constantly on the move.

Now it's populations that move around the world quickly.

We can cross countries, continents, and cultural boundaries in a single day.

Yet 150 years ago, many believed traveling faster than a galloping horse would suffocate you.

So, what triggered today's global travel?

New York, one of the largest cities on the planet.

Today, over 800 different languages are spoken here at any time.

Built by generations of migrants, the Big Apple is the most linguistically diverse city on Earth.

Globally, over 200 million of us head for a new life abroad every year.

But the number of us who travel each day is considerably greater.

At any one moment, a staggering one-fifth of humanity, around 1.5 billion of us, is on the move.

Navigating a complex global network made up of roads... and railways... shipping lanes, and flight paths, transportation has opened up the world, enabling us to go almost anywhere at any time.

But just 100 years ago, virtually none of this infrastructure was in place.

-It took thousands of years for our ancestors to move across the land bridge into North America, for example.

And it took thousands of years beyond that for a single person to circumnavigate the globe.

And today, we do it all the time, every day.

-Our ability to travel the globe stems from a long line of innovations, each allowing us to travel further and faster.

For thousands of years, we moved by foot, allowing us to travel between villages.

By boat, we could head upriver and reach the next town.

By the 1800's, horse-drawn stage coaches carried us to the nearest city.

But the real revolution in travel comes with innovations using coal and oil.

The steam train speeds at 30 miles an hour, making continental travel possible.

Then finally comes an invention that opens up the continent to everyone.

October 1st, 1908, Detroit, Michigan.

Industrialist Henry Ford designs an assembly line mass producing his car, the Ford Model T. It slashes manufacturing costs, making the car cheap enough for the average American to buy.

Over the next 20 years, 15 million roll off the factory floor, beginning a radical gear change in human behavior.

-And the car is really the technology that binds us together and marks us as a modern civilization.

Because the car fulfilled the dream that we'd had for centuries, which was point-to-point travel in individual form.

-The mass production of cars drives a new network -- our roads.

America's first highway stretched 600 miles from the Potomac to the Ohio River.

100 years later, and North America had built the world's largest road network -- 4.5 million miles worth.

Globally, over 35 million miles of roads links cities, countries, and even continents together.

Today, you can drive 11,000 miles nonstop from John O' Groats, Scotland, to Cape Town in South Africa.

String out all our roads, and they'd wrap around the equator well over 1,000 times... allowing us to drive over a billion vehicles worldwide.

One for every seven of us.

We've embraced the car like no other invention.

Today, billions of us head out on the highway every day.

-The car represents freedom, the ability to remake one's life, the ability to find a new job, the ability to live still depends on the car.

-This personal freedom has transformed how and where we live, and in doing so, we've transformed our world.

-Now suddenly metropolitan regions span for miles, and we're able to live at scales that were completely unheard of even generations before.

And that sets a final stage for transportation that takes us beyond the city to a global scale.

-Surprisingly, the innovation that triggered humanity's largest spanning network predates Ford's car by five years.

Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, December 17th, 1903.

On this bleak, windswept beach, the Wright brothers test a machine called The Flyer.

It's airborne for just 12 seconds, flying 120 feet.

This seemingly insignificant event begins a new revolution -- the age of powered flight.

Further propelling our journey towards today's global society.

-From that first flight, which travels only a couple hundred feet, the world shrinks.

We now have global networks that allow us to travel from one side of the planet to the other in a single day.

-Using GPS and radar data, we can reveal every single plane crisscrossing the globe each day.

Around half a million of us are in the air at any one time.

Each year, almost 40 million flights carry 3 billion of us to far-flung destinations.

Supporting this moving matrix is a network of over 40,000 airports.

Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International is the busiest airport on the Earth, serving 95 million passengers in a year to 225 different destinations.

Today, aviation paints an incredible picture of modern human movement.

-With the invention of the airplane and international flights, it's not only shrunk the world, but it's also connected the whole of humanity, the whole planet into a single, interconnected city.

-Today, viewing our modern methods of transportation, an astonishing picture emerges.

We can reach over 90% of the planet in just 48 hours... ...startling proof we are more connected than at any other time in human history.

-It has changed our perception of the world.

We can now see ourselves as members of a single society, as members of a single race.

-Travel in the modern world binds us in ways unimaginable a century ago.

But in the last 20 years, we've developed a transformative network that connects humanity in a very different way... ...an invisible system that allows us to communicate with the world without the need to leave our homes.

Today, billions of us carry around miniature computers.

50 years ago, calculators with the equivalent processing power would have filled your living room.

Now advances in technology have shrunk them to fit in our hands.

Networked together, our smartphones have completely changed the way society works with incredible consequences.

At the touch of a button, we can share our lives with anyone almost anywhere in the world.

-We see everyone going around texting all the time, snapping all the time, sending e-mails on their mobile phones.

-Tracking how we keep in touch in our modern world gives us a startling new view of human communication.

Every day, we send 182 billion e-mails and 500 million tweets.

We Instagram 70 million photos, and we like over 3 billion Facebook posts.

We can spread a thought or idea in an instant.

Going viral, a single post can reach billions of people.

Today's communication network is remarkable, but its roots stem to the smallest of innovations.

Mainz, Germany, 1450.

For centuries, books and scriptures were printed with these -- wooden letters.

Each letter is meticulously carved, and every page individually printed.

Until blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg had a very simple idea.

He makes his printing-press letters from lead.

Metal letters can be cast rather than carved, speeding up printing enormously.

-Before 1450, to print a book, it would take maybe two weeks, maybe a month.

Now, with Gutenberg's very flexible and very fast invention, you could print a book in an hour.

-The consequence of Gutenberg's lead letters is stark.

It makes printing 100 times cheaper.

-What the availability of cheap books and pamphlets did was it made people want to learn to read and write.

-Reading and writing is no longer restricted to the rich.

Over the next 500 years, the printing press becomes the method of mass communication... ...rolling out billions of books and newspapers.

-The printing press wasn't just a technological innovation, it was socially transformative.

It allows people to exchange their ideas far more widely than they ever would have been able to before.

-Books and newspapers remain the fastest way to communicate for over 200 years, but they could only travel as fast as they could be carried...

...In the case of America, taking over a week to travel from East Coast to West.

Until the early 1800s sees the arrival of an invention that speeds up communication exponentially... ...the electric telegraph.

[ Morse code beeping ] With the innovation of electricity, messages can be carried not at the pace of a horse, but along cables close to the speed of light.

-At a stroke, what the telegraph does is to shorten that transmission time from days or weeks, from city to city, into seconds.

And shrinks the size of the communications world almost to nothing.

-But the real test of the telegraph would come not from connecting a country, but from connecting continents.

July 29th, 1858.

In the mid-Atlantic, two ships are moving closer together.

Both carry cable made from seven wound copper wires.

Slowly and carefully, the cables are bound together, creating the first Transatlantic telegraph cable.

-And so for the first time, Europe and America became joined by an electrical wire, and we could harness electricity to send messages to each other.

-On August 16th, 1858, Queen Victoria sent a telegraph message to President Buchanan.

"The Queen desires to congratulate the president upon the successful completion of this great international work, which now connects Great Britain with the United States."

In all, Her Majesty's message of 99 words took 17 hours and 40 minutes to transmit, laughably slow by today's standards, but the significance is stark.

-When you think about what that actually meant is that people were communicating across this vast ocean far, far quicker than a letter could ever have been sent by boat.

-It's bringing two continents together.

It was a huge achievement, phenomenal.

-Fast forward to today, and over half a million miles of submarine fiber optic cable connects every continent on Earth.

This communications network has doubled in size in the last five years alone.

This is the South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 3 cable.

It's an engineering masterpiece, stretching almost 24,000 miles, linking 33 countries directly to each other from Belgium to Japan.

Through it, we send the equivalent of 200 billion words every second.

-If you and me were to speak these words, we would have to start babbling at the time Jesus Christ was on this planet and talk day and night without sleeping, without stopping, without eating, and we would still be talking right now.

-This amazing modern network isn't confined to the ocean floor.

Around 35 million miles lace America alone.

Together, these cables have created the ultimate communications network, one that defines how we interact and communicate today -- the Internet.

-With all of these data networks and the Internet, for the first time, really, in human history, we can communicate to any other person anywhere on the planet whenever you like.

-Hip-hop dancers in Shanghai are learning and swapping ideas with hip-hop dancers in Harlem and in Soweto.

-Now, you can be in the Rocky Mountains or on the plains of Tibet, and you can have access to 100 times more information than even the best-informed person did 20 years ago.

-The Internet is the pinnacle of our interconnected society, an innovative achievement that defines our world today.

It shapes almost every aspect of our daily lives... ...from socializing and shopping to moving money and conducting business.

We can do all this instantaneously from anywhere in the world.

The Internet shows just how global our civilization has become.

We've come a long way in the last 12,000 years.

Driven by ground-breaking innovations, we've constructed a global network of breathtaking complexity.

Layer by layer, this network supplies us with food... power... goods... transportation... and communication, revealing that we now live in a truly interconnected society.

These layers help us understand how we built the modern world and how it functions.

But what we're really learning is these networks can help us in a more surprising way.

They can give us an insight into our future world.

In today's global society, almost everything we do leaves an invisible trace.

Modern technology records every minute detail of our lives.

It's why each year, we generate more information than the whole of human history before us.

Globally, the world hoards an unimaginable 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.

-If you would store this in CD-ROM's, you could make seven or eight piles of CD-ROM's that go from here to the moon -- seven or eight of them.

-Today is the day of data.

-This data has become incredibly valuable.

It allows us to build a detailed picture of our modern world.

But more importantly, it helps expose our vulnerabilities.

-This extraordinary intensity and richness of data allows us, for the first time, to get a better sense of the future.

To be able to work out how our present actions are likely to play out in the future.

-This is the world's population clock.

With each click, it registers another person on the planet.

The number increases by over 200,000 people each day.

There are now 7.3 billion of us.

How did we reach this number?

And how much bigger will it get?

For most of humanity's existence, our population was stagnant.

It took 11,500 years to reach 1 billion people.

But only another 130 years to double that.

-We've been very effective at successful agriculture and feeding our own mouths and extracting the raw materials out of the ground, out of the earth, and converting them into the crucial materials we're building our society out of.

-In the last 50 years, our population has doubled again.

Our success has set us on an irreversible track.

In just 15 years, our population will swell to 8 billion.

20 years later, it's predicted to peak at over 9 billion.

An increase of 2 billion people not in thousands of years, but in a single generation.

-We're about 7 billion people now.

But this massive increase of at least 2 billion people over the next 35 years or so is unprecedented.

The world's population has never increased by so many.

-Innovation has led us to this unprecedented population growth.

The big question is are we becoming victims of our own success?

-There's gonna be some very big challenges in the near future for how we can sustain this human population ourselves without ravaging the natural environment of the planet we live on.

-These challenges revolve around food... -Food is life.

Without it, we die.

I can't state it more simply.

Food really is life.

-...Water... -Just about everything that humans do requires water, so whether it's growing the crops that provide us with food or running our industries, we need water.

-...and a source of power.

-How are we going to tackle this problem of keeping the lights on?

Keeping our vehicles powered?

-The clock is ticking.

With every day that passes, our rapidly growing population demands more food... water... and energy.

How can we meet the demand on a plenty with finite resources?

And can we do it while keeping the accelerating pace of change from spinning out of control?

-As scientists, we know that our climate changes naturally.

We've always known that, but now there's a human contribution coupled with that natural change, and like a magnifying glass, it's really amplifying how our systems change.

-This amplification is set to continue as technology changes human behavior across large areas of the planet.

-So, as we see increases in productivity and population growth in the developed and developing parts of our world, fossil fuel plants coming online, less use of bicycling and more use of automobiles, those types of things lead to increases in CO2 emissions.

-Nowhere is this effect of humanity on the climate clearer than from space.

NASA's Terra satellite orbiting 440 miles above the Earth reveals the extent of air pollution over vast areas of the globe.

Here, the Himalayan mountains form a natural barrier to pollution over India.

Vast, gray clouds of smoke stretch for thousands of miles across central China.

And in western Europe, manmade haze hangs over the continent.

These clouds of pollution are the result of thousands of tons of carbon particles lofted into the air as we burn fossil fuels.

-The way we do it now cannot last forever, and so we're going to have to find some alternative solutions.

-These are challenges that we face, and when you throw in 2 billion people more over the next 35 years, it should be apparent what the scope of the problem is.

-The wealth of data we generate today exposes the weaknesses of our modern world.

But it's also a powerful tool in focusing our ingenuity to alleviate the issues we face, Allowing us to better prepare for the problems a rapidly growing population present.

-We can use this data to understand the future, the patterns that are shaping how civilization will evolve.

Human ingenuity has led to a population growth the like of which we've never experienced before.

Adding another 2 billion people by 2050 will challenge the way we live.

One of our greatest issues will be food.

-How to feed 9 billion people is obviously a headache-inducing question.

This is not an easy thing to do.

-Feeding the world is a tall order.

It uses a vast amount of land for crops and cattle... millions of gallons of water... ...and energy to raise... produce... ...and transport the food we eat.

All of this takes its toll on the environment.

-These all release carbon dioxide.

And in fact, the biggest releaser is our own agriculture.

-The challenge is to find ways of producing enough food for everyone with the finite resources of the planet.

-Imagine you had a beautiful garden, and it was full of all the food you needed to grow to feed yourself for a year.

Fantastic.

And now imagine that every year, the garden shrank by a meter.

And yes, you can probably cope for a while, but in the end, you know, there's just a problem.

What do you do then?

-Today, agriculture is the single greatest activity undertaken by humanity... the consequences of which affect every one of us on the Earth.

-When you look down from low Earth orbit, you see these patchworks of farms.

We're 250 miles away, so you can imagine that the large ares of land are being used for agricultural crops.

-The ability to peer down on our Earth from space lets us see our enormous imprint on the planet.

-We use 10% of the Earth's land surface to grow our crops and more than double that to rear our livestock.

The largest cattle farm in the world is bigger than Israel, and we grow wheat on an area the equivalent of Greenland.

Incredibly, to feed us takes almost half of the land on the planet, a figure that's rapidly increasing as our population grows.

With rising population, the amount of land available to sustain us will rapidly decrease.

Today, feeding the average American uses around 2 acres of land.

But by 2050, it's predicted 2 acres of land will have to feed not one, but 4 Americans.

-At this point, we've used pretty much all of the arable land in the world.

-So to feed the world in the future, we must seek new innovations now.

Chicago, on the shores of the Great Lakes.

It's home to the Green Sense Farm.

It may not look green inside, but substituting the sun with these pink LED lights allows for a very different way of planting.

The crops here are grown vertically, cutting the amount of land used by 90%.

Racking up not 1, but 26 harvests a year.

Urban farming not only saves land, it saves water, too.

These crops use only 10% of the water they'd need out in the fields, and that's critical because having enough water is another challenge we're going to face in the future.

A shortage of water may seem paradoxical.

From space, it's clear to see the Earth is a water world, but most of it, we can't use.

-97% of the water on Earth exists as seawater, and only about 2.5% is present as freshwater.

-And the amount we can tap into is even less.

-The majority of that freshwater is tied up as glaciers and as groundwater that's too deep for us to pump.

So, only about 1% of the water on Earth exists as freshwater, and that's truly a limited resource.

-Of that 1% of freshwater, a staggering two-thirds is used to make our food.

Look how much goes into making an everyday meal, and it's clear to see why.

To grow a couple of potatoes takes an average 25 liters of water.

The salad uses around 140 liters.

Those two eggs?

Together, that's another 270 liters.

And the steak -- over 2,000 liters of water.

And the glass of milk you ordered -- 200 liters.

In all, it takes around 2,600 liters of water to create this meal.

And millions are eaten every hour.

-So much of the food that we eat was ultimately grown in a field where there was irrigated agriculture, so the vegetable, the meat, the glass of milk, all of those things took large quantities of water to make.

-It's why water is fast becoming one of our most precious commodities.

Looking at the world from orbit, we can see the consequences of our global thirst.

-I'll never forget wanting to take a picture of the Aral Sea, and it took a few orbits to actually find -- a few attempts to find the Aral Sea because it's no longer a sea.

-Over 20,000 miles of canals and 45 dams have robbed the Aral Sea of water.

-I didn't see any water there.

There were remnants of perhaps a shoreline there, but just a dusty brown gray is all that remains that I could see.

-It's not the only water that's vanishing.

The Yellow River in China, drained for agriculture, only 10% of its waters reach the sea.

The Indus River in Pakistan, again only around 10% of water is left in the river.

And in America, less than 10% of the waters of the Colorado ever reach Mexico.

By 2050, these rivers could all but disappear if we don't seek ways to preserve our water use.

It's why growing food that helps preserve land and water will continue to be critical in the future.

Urban farming can go a long way, but it won't safeguard our future food security alone.

To do that, we'll need to draw upon other innovations.

Harpenden, north of London.

At the Rothamsted Research Labs, these wheat plants look like any other.

But here, scientists are engineering them to produce more wheat.

Currently, wheat accounts for a fifth of the calories consumed by humans.

But with a rapidly expanding population, this soon won't be enough.

-The primary way that we've increased the amount of food that we produced is by increasing yield.

That is increasing the amount of food produced on the same area of land.

-A whole range of technologies have been developed to increase wheat yields.

-Irrigation, pesticides, fertilizer to put more nutrients in the soil.

-But these techniques come at a price.

They're known to damage the environment, poisoning wildlife and freshwater supplies.

At Rothamsted, scientists are improving two other technologies that can help increase yields -- selective breeding and genetic modification.

Selective breeding essentially takes the best qualities of a number of plant species and fuses them into one stronger strain.

-We've been breeding different kinds of plants for 10,000 or 12,000 years, and there's still a lot of potential with that technology which has served us well.

-More recently, genetic modification has proved another powerful tool.

GM can engineer plants to be more resistant to pests, drought, and produce greater yields.

These plants will eventually contain a gene that increases their photosynthesis, the way plants produce energy from sunlight, meaning they'll have more energy to produce wheat.

When finally grown in the fields, it's hoped the wheat yields will increase from around 8 tons to 20 tons per hectare.

-And so we've been looking to technologies like genetic engineering to keep our crops being as productive as we can make them.

-Not everyone recognizes GM plants as the way forward.

Some are concerned that they, too, may contaminate the environment, and that these potential problems could be worse than their cure.

But continued innovations in biotechnology could open up new possibilities of where we can grow the crops of the future.

We could see drought and flood-tolerant rice grown in India and Pakistan... ...drought-tolerant corn in west Kansas... ...Maize planted in parched parts of Uganda... and wheat harvested in the semi-arid areas of Africa... Australia... and South America.

The efficiency biotechnology offers in growing our food could also help in carbon climate change.

-Surprisingly, agricultural produces about one quarter of the greenhouse gases from human sources going into the atmosphere.

-One of the biggest culprits is food transportation.

Take a pound of oranges.

Grown and eaten locally, they produce around a pound of carbon dioxide.

But fly them in, and the emissions rise by over 500%.

Biotechnology employed by urban farming drastically reduces the need for transportation.

Grown on an urban farm, lettuces typically travel around 50 miles to reach our table.

But if they're imported, they travel closer to 1,500 miles, producing far more greenhouse gases.

There's no silver bullet to securing our food in the future.

But changing how we grow it, where we grow it, and what we grow all help.

But that begs another question... ...will we have enough power to cook our food in the future?

Much of what we do every day demands power.

Manufacturing... moving... eating... having fun.

As the population races towards 9 billion, we'll need even more power.

300 years ago, the industrial revolution started a mass migration.

Since then, more and more of us have flocked to the cities.

-At the moment, we've got roughly 3.5 billion people living in cities, and astonishingly, the prediction is that by 2050, there's going to be 7 billion.

There's gonna be double the number, and this is a human transition at a scale that we've never seen before.

-What's truly amazing is that we're going to build more cities in the next 40 years than we've built in all of human history.

-Our cities of the future will need energy -- lots of it.

We'll need vast amounts of oil and coal to build them.

A ton of steel alone uses three-quarters of a ton of coal to make.

And when we finish building them, we'll need even more fossil fuels to power them.

By 2050, it's predicted 70% of the world's population will live in urban areas.

Such a rapid change means our society is driving headlong into a radically different future.

By 2050, getting between our cities means more of us on the move, surging by a staggering 600%.

Air passengers soar from around 3 billion today to 16 billion... ...the equivalent of flying 44 million people a day.

And the number of cars on the road leaps to 2 billion.

-So, China today has 250 million of those vehicles and is adding 20 million a year as the middle class discovers it wants the car and freedom that it conveys.

-In Beijing, the roads are already jammed with over 2 million cars.... ...a figure that grows by 1,500 every day.

Powering our predominantly urban society means our energy needs are predicted to double by 2050.

We'll need 110% more oil, the equivalent of guzzling an inconceivable 70,000 gallons every second.

And globally, we'll build over 1,000 new coal-fired power stations to meet the demand for electricity.

-Looking ahead into the future, the greatest increases and demand for energy are going to come from places like China and India.

People in these parts of the world are going to be driving more cars.

They're going to be flying more.

They're going to be using more devices that consume electricity.

-Both oil and coal have served us well in constructing the modern world.

But for how much longer can we depend on them?

Is there enough to meet our soaring energy demand?

At our current consumption rates, oil is likely to last for around 50 years.

Coal may see us through to the next century, so at least for a while, we might just have enough, but using what's left of these resources will get us into hot water.

-There's a lot of coal left in the ground, but if you burn all that coal to generate the power you need, you now have a very big problem with climate change.

You can't burn your way out of this.

-Using fossil fuels could add an extra 300 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2050... greatly increasing the effects of climate change... ...meaning powerful storms and rising sea levels will affect more of us more frequently.

-Look at Superstorm Sandy.

It's likely that Superstorm Sandy pushed more water into New York City in 2012 than it would have 100 years ago.

-And taking into consideration the location of our major cities and the predicted transient migration, the problem of storms like Sandy become all too clear.

-What's really interesting is that many of the world's largest cities, particularly in Asia, are near or on the coast, and more people every day are flocking to the coast, building homes, developing businesses there.

That places even greater populations at risk.

-Over the next 35 years, the populations in coastal cities in Asia is set to skyrocket.

Future predictions show just how many more people will be at risk.

Worldwide, coastal flooding threatens to invade up to a billion people by 2050.

In the coming years, cutting back on fossil fuels to produce carbon emissions won't be a matter for debate, it will be a necessity.

But there are alternatives already out there.

-Human beings have an amazing capacity for innovation.

We are supreme toolmakers.

We create things, and we are already beginning to create technologies and machines that will provide us with alternative ways of creating and gathering energy.

-This is the Ivanpah Solar Electric Plant.

Located in the Californian desert, it's the world's largest solar power station.

Over 300,000 computer-controlled mirrors focus sunlight on the top of this giant tower... ...turning water into super-heated steam driving electric-generating turbines.

-There was a time not that long ago, maybe just a few decades ago, when something like solar energy was seen as more of a sort of Utopian dream, a kind of niche fantasy.

-But plants like these are turning fantasy into reality.

Ivanpah alone produces enough electricity to power over 140,000 homes, The equivalent of saving around 45,000 tons of coal a year.

-I think that we've really seen that these large power plants have demonstrated that this technology has really come into its own.

The technology works.

We can produce large amounts of power using solar energy.

-Ivanpah is just a glimpse of what power is possible from the sun.

Our nearest star provides us with other sources of energy, as well.

Its heat drives the world's winds.

-Wind power is probably the single most successful form of renewable energy.

It is active all over the world.

There are entire countries now that are getting a significant portion of their energy through wind.

-And along with the moon, it raises and lowers our oceans around the world.

In the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, tides rise and fall by 55 feet a day.

Unlocking the energy within could help power the planet.

-There are scientists and researchers right now working on amazing technologies that are getting better every single day at being able to take the power of waves and make that useful for us.

-Each year, the sun delivers enough energy to meet our global needs 20,000 times over.

It's reliable, it's limitless, and most important of all, it's clean.

And we're tapping into it.

In the last five years alone, the energy provided by solar power has increased by almost 100%.

China can now produce almost 400 gigawatts of renewable energy at any given time -- more than twice the total energy consumption of Africa.

In Canada alone, wind power has risen almost 2,000% in 10 years, powering 1.5 million homes and businesses.

All with barely a whiff of greenhouse gases.

-Long before we ever started taking coal out of the ground and drilling for oil, we relied mainly, essentially, on the power of the sun.

Looking ahead, we will come full circle to once again relying on the sun to produce most of our energy.

There's only so much coal and oil in the ground, but the sun will shine on for billions of years.

The wind will always blow.

Water will always flow.

The sun offers a way to wean us off fossil fuels.

Technologies that harness its energy could significantly help meet the demand of our ever-growing energy needs.

So, do we have a bright future ahead of us?

The last 12,000 years has seen our society undergo an incredible transformation.

From sparsely scattered nomads... ...to building the modern world... ...one where innovation has led us to construct a vast, interconnected web... ...a web that now touches all of us.

-This incredible connectivity leads to greater interdependency.

It also means we have to care about the systems and each other more because what we do as individuals affects others more.

-We now have the ability to see how we are all connected.

The things we do during our daily lives generate vast amounts of information.

Put it all together, and we can see our species as never before on a global scale -- How we move, eat, trade.

And if you want to understand any aspect of our modern world, you can do it at the click of a button.

This is the breathtakingly complex planet we've created.

-For the first time in history, what all this data allows us to do is see ourselves in our fullness.

-But the success of our modern world hangs in the balance.

Our ingenuity comes at a price.

We've created a world that must support 7 billion people, and in just a human generation, the number is set to rise by another 2 billion, propelling us into an uncertain future.

-As a species, we certainly are facing some big challenges in the coming years.

-But our civilization has triumphed against adversity before.

-From looking back throughout human history, is that time and time again, we pull together, and we've solved those challenges.

-It's the same ingenuity that has led us to this point we must draw on in the future.

-We've showed throughout the ages that we are able to meet global challenges through technology, through our brain power.

We are inventive in ways that surprise even us, the very people who are being inventive.

-Today, we can draw upon a vast pool of resources to solve the problems that lie ahead.

-We have more knowledge than we've ever had before.

We have incredible ingenuity.

We have the ability to share knowledge, to spread knowledge, to build on knowledge.

-For the first time in human history, thanks to the digital network, we can now communicate with everybody at any time everywhere instantaneously.

-We've got so much data.

We've got so much information, I believe it would be a tragedy if we don't use it effectively, and we need to learn to use it.

And that period will give us the wisdom to understand how we've used it.

-How we decide to manage changes in the future with the information we have today will determine our outcome.

-Would I like to live in the future?

Which future?

'Cause I don't believe in the future, there's a single future ahead of us.

I want to make the future.

I believe we all make the future together, and so I want to live in a future that's even more connected than it is now.

I want to belong to a global society that binds us all together in ways where we can achieve our full potential, and I think that future is possible.

"Humanity From Space" is made possib "Humanity From Space" is available on DVD.

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