Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

We’re going back to the moon. Plans are being made, hardware is being designed, built, and tested to return humans to the moon and beyond in a new era of American space exploration. This episode explores how we did it in the past, and how and why we will do it again. The moon is critical to future explorations: it will be where we learn to build sustainable colonies on other worlds.

From the first flicker of life billions of years ago to the extraordinary diversity of animals alive today, Chris Packham embarks on an epic journey through evolution. Combining cutting-edge science, spectacular wildlife and vivid reconstructions of long-vanished creatures, he reveals how countless generations of innovation, adaptation and chance transformed simple cells into bodies capable of movement, reproduction, flight, intelligence and astonishing complexity. Along the way, familiar animals become gateways into some of the greatest mysteries in the history of life.
In the first two episodes, Packham traces two remarkable evolutionary stories. In Kenya, he asks how a microscopic cell could ultimately give rise to the enormous, intelligent and highly social elephant, uncovering the crucial breakthroughs that made complex bodies, lungs, limbs and giant size possible. Then, in South Africa, the ostrich and its extraordinary egg open the door to the evolution of reproduction itself: From the origins of sex to the appearance of eggs, feathers and flight. Together, these episodes reveal that some of nature’s most spectacular creatures are the result of billions of years of unlikely experiments, lucky accidents and relentless adaptation.