Our world, warm, comfortable, familiar...

Do we occupy a special place in the cosmos?

Or we could leave home, on the ultimate adventure.

Would we have the courage to see it through?

Our journey through time and space begins with a single step.

At the edge of space, only 6O miles up...

The traffic is awful, stocks go on trading...

When we return home, if we return home...

To dip our toes into the vast dark ocean.

Dozens of astronauts have come this way before us.

Just a quarter of a million miles from home.

They could survive for millions of years.

One million miles, 5 million, 2O million miles.

We're far beyond where any human has ever ventured.

She can welcome the new day in the east...

...she's about the same size and gravity as Earth.

But the Venus Express space probe is setting off alarms.

It's telling us, these dazzling clouds, they're made of deadly sulfuric acid.

The atmosphere is choking with carbon dioxide.

Never expected this. Venus is one angry goddess.

The air is noxious, the pressure unbearable.

Stick around and we'd be corroded, suffocated, crushed and baked.

Its heavy armor's been trashed by the extreme atmosphere.

So lovely from Earth, up close, this goddess is hideous.

All that carbon dioxide is trapping the Sun's heat.

Before it took hold, maybe Venus was beautiful, calm...

The beautiful spheres gliding through space?

Maybe we shouldn't be out here, maybe we should turn back.

But there's something about the Sun, something hypnotic, like the Medusa.

Too terrible to look at, too powerful to resist.

Luring us onwards on, like a moth to a flame.

Wait, there's something else, obscured by the Sun.

Get too close to the Sun, this is what happens.

The MESSENGER space probe is telling us something strange.

For its size, Mercury has a powerful gravitational pull.

It's a huge ball of iron, covered with a thin veneer of rock.

The core of what was once a much larger planet.

Maybe a stray planet slammed into Mercury...

...blasting away its outer layers in a deadly game of cosmic pinball.

Whole worlds on the loose careening wildly across the cosmos...

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Journey to the Edge of the Universe (HD) + english subtitles