Time...
That relentless force that transports us from what was to what will be.
Though no one can say exactly what time is
we do know what time it is.
54321
For Millennium, this is a landmark a special moment in time.
But far from all the commotion
millions of others count their years very differently.
For Buddhists
the year 2000 came and went more than five hundred years ago.
In the Muslim world it was only the year 1420.
While for many Jews it's the year the date was 5760.
Nevertheless the observance of this year 2000
is a singular opportunity...
to listen to the heartbeat of the planet.
The National Geographic Society has long been capturing time:
Making it stop, slowing it down,
and speeding it up...
All to better comprehend the relentless flow from what was to what will be.
We invite you now to see the world through our eyes
as we explore the epic adventure of life through time.
For Time is the measure of our universe...
and only over time can we understand the natural world.
And it is our unique grasp of Time
that helped give rise to science and culture... to civilization itself.
Take time, add exploration and the quest for knowledge
and you have the human story.
A story of constant and accelerating change.
But now perhaps
we are at a most critical point on the verge of controlling nature
and on the brink of destroying it.
What kind of world will we leave to our children?
Only Time will tell.
In a single, ferocious instant an explosion of heat and light
Time, as we know it, began.
It was the big bang.
Some thirteen billion years later the cosmos defines our sense of wonder...
strewn with things unimaginable like black holes
and towering nebulae trillions of miles high spawning countless stars.
About two-thirds of the way through the history of time
our own solar system was born.
A handful of planets and assorted debris orbiting
an unremarkable star.
In this immense universe our own planet is like an insignificant
blue ornament tenuously protected by a paper thin atmosphere.
But a closer look reveals that there's something wonderful going on here
something rare perhaps or even unique.
Something called Life.
To see the origin of life we need only look beneath the waves.
Here, hundreds of millions of years ago
the sea was a living soup of tiny organisms.
In this vast incubator life slowly evolved from the simple to the complex.
Then, about 540 million years ago there was an explosion of innovation.
Quite suddenly, entirely new forms of life began to emerge.
In the millions of years that followed armor plate
and prickly spines appeared to protect creatures from a new threat:
Predators.
In time, deadly jaws appeared...
and sinewy creatures who muscled their way into the arms race.
Some animals have changed very little over millions of years.
Among these living fossils are sharks: Part time machine, part killing machine.
We still are trying to understand
the elusive ways of these remarkably well-adapted predators.
On the windswept Farallon Islands off the coast of California
researchers have spent years following the hunting patterns
of individual great white sharks.
...this bite looks like it could be a seal or a sea lion, you know...
"Over seven years up to forty great whites have been identified.
Some are observed in one season and then never seen again.
While others come back every year.
One of these is a massive eighteen-foot female named Stumpy -
so called because the tip of her tail fin is missing."
"We don't know where Stumpy is during most of the year,
but we do know that she shows up here every Autumn at the Farallons."
...so pretty consistent.
She's almost always in the same area."
"What's more she appears to come each year to the same spot to hunt.
How do you know Stumpy is here?
You set the board out... and she lets you know...
This is how a great white kills an elephant seal in the first hit...
In one precise torpedo-like blow the shark hits the prey from below.
The stunning impact of the first lightning strike may incapacitate the seal.
This strategy saves energy
and may minimize the rise of injury to the shark."
This surprising sequence of attack retreat and feast has served
the shark well for a very long time.
But Nature was not content to have only the seas populated with living things.
After hundreds of millions of years of preparation out of the water crept life.
It took countless generations for gills to become lungs
and flippers to evolve into wings or feet.
Eventually, a profusion of crawling
flying and running creatures claimed the land for their own.
Reptiles began a one hundred and fifty million year
sovereignty over the planet.
It was the age of the dinosaurs.
They were the biggest creatures ever to walk the earth.
Gone now some 65 million years...
they live on in our collective imagination.
Among the departed was one of the strangest dinosaurs that ever lived.
It was called Ovirapto and it was swift, smart and lethal.
This expedition is traveling to a remote part of Mongolia
to uncover the secrets of the Oviraptor's world.
Michael Novacek and Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History
come to this desolate place to piece together a puzzle
of evolution and extinction.
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven eight, nine..."
"...and then three over there... twelve.
Twelve eggs... All right."
You know this is really a great fossil find
because it's one of the rare instances
where we can capture a little bit of behavior
that's 80 million years old.
Here we have a- a sort of a day in the life or
or the death of a- of a creature of a dinosaur
in association with something it did during its life.
This one was fossilized where it dropped
and it happened to drop right on top of its own nest.
"She didn't just drop there.
The good mother oviraptor was sitting on the nest.
They probably brought food to their nest as birds do.
And the good mother tended her eggs.
Like a bird,
she prodded them into a circle.
The fearsome carnivore of the Gobi was parenting."
Then, with remarkable swiftness the age of dinosaurs was over.
What happened exactly remains a mystery.
Many scientists believe an asteroid perhaps six miles wide slammed into Earth
and helped snuff out the masters of the world.
"From our perspective, of course,
this mass extinction event is not a big problem
because we're part of the group that survived...
and started evolving into bats and
and large hoofed animals and lions and tigers and bears."
With the great reptiles gone, smaller but more adaptable creatures took over.
Each learned to succeed in its own way.
Some rely on speed and powerful jaws.
Others, strength and a thick skin.
But no matter how adaptable a species
may be in the savage struggle between life and death,
there is but one simple rule:
Those who survive pass their traits to their young.
Those who die do not.
Every creature is a history book of genetic code.
These living ghosts are the product of all the life
and death moments endured by all the generations before them.
"An ancient species related to both antelopes and pigs
the water chevrotain has been feeding on flowers
fruit and fungi here for over twenty million years.
All that time predator and prey have been evolving together
Honing skills and strategies
that make them well-matched in the game of survival...
Under sharp-eyed surveillance the chevrotain submerges again.
She is completely at home here.
She doesn't swim but simply walks on the bottom
just like a little hippo.
Her huge eyes are open wide
but she sees rather poorly - probably much as a human does underwater...
eeping her belly close to the ground to avoid being lifted by the flow
she simply walks away from danger... four feet below the surface."
In the most extreme environments we find the most astonishing adaptations.
Forbidding deserts call for new tools for survival.
Out-maneuvered by a hungry coyote
this creature seems ready to accept its fate.
But the horned lizard has evolved a surprising solution
to a desperate dilemma.
"The swelling below his eye is not a wound it's the lizard's last defense.
Squirted from a specialized tear duct a stream of blood is aimed
at the coyote's face.
The blood is laced with substances
that are so distasteful the coyote wants nothing more to do with the lizard."
Here on the barren ice floes of the Arctic it's hard to imagine any creature -
much less a thousand pound brute finding sustenance.
But the polar bear is a resourceful predator with infinite patience.
"The seal is safe for the moment
but each new trip to the surface to breathe could end in another ambush.
It's an over-sized game of cat and mouse."
Mammals thrive by capitalizing on a key innovation
rarely found in reptiles: Parental care.
They are capable of bonding
mother to child, parent to parent to herd, pod or pack.
But as youth gives way to maturity animals demonstrate other important
capabilities as well...
Many of these battles are to seize the most critical moment in animal time:
The moment their genes are passed to the next generation.
The next chapter in the Book of Life began with creatures that could grasp
not only branches - but complex ideas as well.
It is here, among the primates, that we begin to see ourselves.
"We know that the earliest stage of human evolution happened in a habitat
just like this, East African woodland that's got open areas...
onto which our ancestors eventually moved and adapted to.
So to be able to study hunting here is the best way to give us some kind of
window onto the earliest origins of meat eating in our own ancestors four
or more million years ago.
As colobus monkeys are pursued by a band of chimpanzees
we witness the terrifying tenacity of both predator and prey.
"As the chimps climb up the colobus retreat to the highest branches,
too slender to bear the chimps' weight.
The male colobus stand their ground against chimps up to four times their size.
They will even take the offensive momentarily driving the chimps back.
Holding his tail out of the chimp's reach
this male buys precious time for the escape of the females and young.
With chimps climbing everywhere one monkey leaps into the arms of death.
Even a rear attack by the defending colobus cannot save him."
Resourceful, sociable, intelligent the chimpanzee has been content to
remain in the forest for millions of years.
Only occasionally do they wander out into open areas.
But one related species -
the ancestors of early humans - left the forest for good...
and the world was changed forever.
Genetically, all humans, no matter what their heritage are 99.9% identical.
It is not what we are, but who we are,
what we learn, believe and create that determines our group identity.
And that identity often determines our relationship with time.
In many places, time seems to have accelerated at a maddening pace.
In other societies, though time is like an easy traveling companion,
as one moves through life in the eternal "now".
In the highlands of Papua New Guinea,
lives a remote society with their own understanding of time.
"For thousands of years,
this Stone Age group had been hidden from the outside world.
As time and exposure worked their changes on most other peoples
Hagahai culture remained more or less the same.
A living secret deep in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Possibly the last unknown group on earth."
Carol Jenkins, a medical anthropologist,
began working with the Hagahai helping them cope with malaria
and other diseases that threatened their very existence.
She found their concept of time fascinating.
"Their sense of time is much more like
what people say of the Australian aborigine time
the dreaming that is it's always the same it goes over and over again
it's a connection in an almost mystical sense
between the ancestors and today.
Much of human culture is anchored in our traditions
and often, these traditions are linked to our sense of time.
Everywhere, we commemorate rights of passage
and shared beliefs that mark our voyage through life...
and we celebrate them in the language of music and dance.
Like it or not, much of our precious time
on this planet is consumed by work.
The sheer diversity of labor reflects the vast scale
and scope of the human experience.
On the Indian subcontinent much work is still done by hand.
Here north of Mumbai mostly barefoot workers disassemble
giant steel ships, reducing them to scrap.
The work is dangerous the rewards are meager
but to make a living they persist.
But all work in India is not this punishing.
In sheer numbers India has the world's largest middle class.
The country's railways are a lifeline for all of India's one billion people
crossing not only vast distances but bridging diverse cultures.
Over one and a half million workers keep the trains running on schedule.
In many ways, the railway has become the country's grand
and reliable time keeper.
"At Borivli Station fifteen men have been meeting up for ten years.
They call themselves the '8:54 Group'
and every morning they stake out strategic spots along the platform.
With speed and luck they can claim a few seats that
they'll share between them.
They have only thirty seconds before the train pulls out again
and consider their daily ritual like a workout at the gym."
Very few of us choose to risk our lives on a regular basis.
For those who take up hazardous occupations the excitement, danger
and rush of adrenaline can be addicting.
"When does a job become a mission?
A career become a quest?
How do you face each day at work when you know it could be your last?"
"Who was Al? Al was our friend.
And I'm gonna miss him a hell of a lot."
The way we live our lives is often shaped by our attitude towards death.
But few embrace the dead as wholeheartedly as the Ngaju Dayaks
of central Borneo.
Anthropologist Anne Schiller has spent almost 15 years studying the death rites
of the Dayak peoples.
She takes part in a ceremony called Tiwah during which the villagers dig up
the bones of their dead parents spouses and children.
They do this so the spirit of their loved ones might go
in the afterlife to what they call the prosperous village.
"If the head of a family hasn't been able to hold a Tiwah
he is very troubled and unsettled in his mind.
He asks himself, how can I save my parents
so they can go to the prosperous village?"
"This is all about taking care of their parents
I mean what these people are doing is they're- they're giving life to
their parents in the way their parents gave life to them...
so they're caring for them the way you care for a child.
You- you're washing it...
and you're nurturing it and you're making sure it's comfortable."
Now that the bones have been exhumed the Tiwah progresses
to the ritual blood sacrifice.
"Blood protects you from illness it protects you
from evil supernatural beings that might bother you
and so sacrifices are held because you need that blood of the chicken
or the pig or the cow or the water buffalo in order to anoint people
and to anoint things to make sure that the people and the things remain safe.
From a culture that honors death to the death of cultures themselves...
All over the world unique societies are under threat
their cultures as vulnerable as endangered plants or animals.
According to some estimates nearly half of the world's six thousand languages
will disappear in the next century.
The realities of an emerging global culture and economy
often provide little incentive for preserving them.
"Good morning, sir."
"Good morning children. How do you do?"
"How do you do? Thank you."
"Sit down."
"Thank you, sir."
How does a people hold on to its own identity
its own traditions and still remain open to the outside world?
Disappearing cultures have much to tell us.
If only we can take the time to listen.
Long before maps and compasses those who ventured into unknown places
would leave a sign for those who followed that said "We were here".
The idea of being first of leaving one's mark in time and space
inspires modern explorers as well.
They helped to define and describe our world.
The exploits of 20th century adventurers continue to fascinate and inspire.
Many indeed have achieved a measure of immortality.
Among them, Admiral Robert Peary and
pioneering African-American explorer Matthew Henson
considered to be the first men to reach the top of the world.
Admiral Richard Byrd was credited as being the first
to fly over both poles.
Hiram Bingham discovered the fabled lost city of Machu Picchu.
While William Beebe and Otis Barton were the first to probe the deep ocean.
In our own era, Jacques Cousteau allowed us all to be explorers
of a wonderful new realm and championed our need to preserve it.
Today, being first is the passion of many.
But the goal is often not a place on the map.
For these brave souls it's not so much where they're going
as how they get there.
Mount Everest, first conquered in 1953 has been climbed by the hundreds.
Still for every seven that reach the summit one climber will die.
"It's a mountain that you regard with considerable respect."
"I don't know anybody who has a feeling of affection uh, for the mountain."
"You could climb it...
three times, five times, a hundred times you don't conquer it, you survive it."
"If there is a cold day it's not twenty below, it's forty below.
Forty-five, fifty below say of Celsius...
and this is hard for human beings.
If there is a storm coming
it's much stronger because you're much higher up."
"Windy... very cold. Strong. Really cold.
Is difficult."
"It's really very difficult to do anything.
All you wanna do is lie down and even that's hard work."
"Physically I experienced an awful lot of problems.
I had a- an ulcerated toe with the bone...
showing, an intestinal parasite I lost thirty-five pounds in five days
going to the summit."
"I'm nearly at the summit.
Just a few more steps... not far now."
"But this overwhelming feeling...
incredible difficulty, pain, suffering is suddenly over."
"Well I'm on top! I've made it!"
"It's difficult to really understand how important it is to be there.
And I know instinctively I really wanted to stand...
on the highest point of earth as I think most climbers do."
"I'm on the summit."
"You're both great heroes.
We're absolutely proud to death."
If the roof of the world is becoming a little crowded
much of the deep ocean remains a mystery to scientists like Dr. Robert Ballard.
His early expeditions included the first exploration of
the mid-Atlantic ridge and the discovery in the eastern Pacific
of hot water vents surrounded by incredible new life forms.
But Ballard is perhaps best known for exploring the most storied shipwreck
of the 20th century.
And since Titanic he's been probing further and further back in time.
"We're sitting right now in- in ruins that are on the island of Sicily.
To travel from civilization to civilization here in the Mediterranean
you must cross the Mediterranean and many of those ships didn't make it.
Many of those ships went to the bottom and many of them went into the deep sea.
Between ancient Carthage and Rome it's twelve thousand feet deep."
Using the remotely operated vehicle Jason, and a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine
Ballard has led a team of archaeologists to the largest concentration
of ancient shipwrecks ever found in the deep sea.
Almost a half a mile below an ancient trade route
thousands of artifacts from eight ships were found strewn all over the sea bed.
Later they returned to the site and recovered Roman clay jars
that once contained ancient trade goods like olive oil and wine.
There's glass. L- I'm just...
Among the bounty were glass cups traded by Arab merchants
who sailed these same waters fifteen hundred years later.
What has surprised me the most is that uh we thought this was one event
that this was a fleet of ships a group of ships that sank together
and it's not at all.
We have... ships spanning over one thousand five hundred years of history.
"I feel very good, l- I feel that this really is a historic expedition.
This is the first major deep sea archaeological expedition."
The Age of Exploration is still far from over.
Lan Baker and en Storm are in search of a hidden waterfall that others claimed
to have glimpsed from afar but none have ever mapped or measured.
They follow footsteps from the past.
"In 1924, British botanist Frank ingdon- Ward, led an expedition
to Tibet searching for a waterfall as grand as Africa's Victoria Falls.
He pushed his way through much of the wild and forbidding Tsangpo gorges
but never found what he was seeking.
On this expedition en and lan are determined to finish
ingdon-Ward's journey."
"It's a place that gives life but it's a place also of enormous danger
that can take life at any moment."
The Tsangpo gorge can plunge over sixteen thousand feet
three times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
A single misstep could send a traveler a thousand feet to his death.
It was near here that ingdon-Ward's exhausted guides insisted on turning back.
And sure enough this modern team had doubts as well.
"I think we all reached a point where we were suddenly questioning
whether it was really going to be possible at all."
Despite seventeen days of difficult trekking
the expedition decides to press on.
Finally, they punch their way through a clearing.
"Oh, all of the Tsangpo is... pouring into that energy.
Can you imagine?!"
"Incredible!" "Every drop...
from the ailas Mountain all the way past Mount Everest
all the way to this point!"
After a century of speculation
the great falls has finally been placed on the map.
Named Hidden Falls of Dorje Phagmo it measures between a hundred
and a hundred fifteen feet with an enormous volume of water
that makes it so extraordinary.
"To actually come upon something new
and undiscovered late in the 20th century is remarkable."
Even in places that are mapped there are new worlds to explore
like the lush rain forest canopy.
"I realized at that moment that first rope climb
I knew where I was goin' for the rest of my life.
I was going up to the canopy."
"It takes hard work and courage to conquer this new world.
But when they climb Nalini and other canopy researchers
are also returning to a very old world."
"We really felt like pioneers.
We felt like we were frontiersmen going to where no human had ever gone before
and everything we picked up was something new and something different
- new species, new interactions."
For aerialist Philippe Petit a life in balance is a challenge in itself.
Here he undertakes a daring walk over three hundred feet
above the medieval Swiss village of Saillon.
"I am discovering, conquering uh a new world
a world that is actually no-man's land.
It is dangerous - yes if I miss the wire I am not here anymore
but it's so simple, so beautifully simple the left or right, the center, the balance.
It's the essence of life...
What I do is seemingly useless but actually is an inspiration.
Looking up is, is flying your own way.
People who don't have wing they can fly by looking up."
The earth is some four and a half billion years old
yet little time remains to undo the damage
that we've wrought in our own brief moment on the planet.
The oil fields of uwait
1991... the aftermath of a brief but destructive war.
The fires have now raged for months.
The damage to the environment is nothing short of catastrophic.
But much sooner than anyone expected an international team
of workers snuffed out the flames one by one.
Many of these people had never done such work before.
"We have proved so many things that we- nobody took a chance before to do it.
Nobody was daring before to do it.
We proved that yes, we can do it.
Once you have the will, you can do anything you'd like to do
and we were given a chance to prove this and we did prove it."
All over the globe concerned citizens have mobilized to preserve
and protect endangered species and habitats.
The power of such dedicated people is proved today by the continued existence
of creatures once nearly annihilated by man:
The great whales.
Today, they are known and loved with such passion that the survival
of most species of whales seems assured.
But for other creatures time is running out.
In central China, Professor Pan Wenshi dedicates his life
to the imperiled population of giant pandas remaining in the wild.
"My friends in Beijing always ask why do you continue to work
in the field year after year?
When will it end?
Your work has been published why don't you stop?
I tell them my goal is to protect the panda
and to establish a refuge for them in the wild.
That is my mission but it will be difficult.
Achieving this goal may take my entire lifetime
and even that may not be enough."
In suburban Atlanta Sue Barnard tries to overcome popular fears
about a creature valuable to the ecosystem.
"We're gonna see some bats, okay?
Are you ready?"
"Yeah..." "Are you ready? All right.
"The children, the children are our future and they're marvelous.
They're open to learning.
They see and they form their own opinions by what they're seeing.
The bat's got friends but the bat's got to have more friends."
From the suburbs to the inner city,
conservationists are often where you least expect to find them.
Arthur Bonner, ex-gang member
spent seven years in juvenile detention and prison.
"Good morning.
My name is uh, Arthur and uh you guys are out here to help us out
to save an endangered species.
It's called a Palos Verdes..."
When Arthur got out of jail he joined the LA Conservation Corps.
His life was soon turned around by a tiny 6-legged companion
called the Palos Verdes Blue butterfly...
Arthur is one of just three people who are permitted to gather the butterflies...
"I'm very dedicated to coming down here.
I love to do what I'm doing I love my work."
"He uses all his powers of persuasion to help his captives reproduce."
"Okay girls, which one of you laid some eggs for me today?"
"The uh, 5 females I collected out in the wild.
I bring them in I have to watch them lay their eggs..."
"There you go, you gave me one..."
The butterfly only has a five day life span...
and it's up to me to keep her baby alive.
"For ten years the Palos Verdes Blue butterfly was thought to be extinct.
It is still considered one of the rarest butterflies in the world."
"Those are my girls.
I love them all.
They actually kept me from being extinct
as much as I'm saving them from being extinct.
They're saving me and I'm saving them."
"It's very easy to dismiss...
the bugs and the weeds of the world
but science is revealing every year...
just how important are these little things on which
we and other larger organisms depend.
They cleanse the water they create the soil,
they generate the very air we breathe."
The case for protecting all life forms
has been made powerfully by Dr. Jane Goodall.
She now speaks to the next generation for it is our children
who must carry the message forward.
"It's terribly important I think that children should grow up
not having this incredibly arrogant view that the world was made for us humans.
We all matter we all have a place in the world.
Each species whether it's human or non human has been evolved over
countless thousands and thousands of years into a perfect organism
and we should respect that."
Our growing understanding and respect for all life
is the key to a sustainable future for planet earth.
For it inevitably means that the human animal like all others
must respect certain limits.
If we make the planet safe for every creature
it will be safe for us.
Then, only the searing fire of a dying sun can put an end to us
and that's not for billions of years.
If we make the planet safe for every creature
there will be plenty of time.