a warm, comfortable, familiar place

But walk away from the fire and look up

our thoughts soon leave home

Are we just insignificant specks?

Is the universe welcoming or hostile?

We could stand here forever wondering

or we could turn our back on this beach, leave home

to see the universe, from here to its edge

to discover its wonders

confront its horrors

beautiful new worlds

malevolent dark forces

the beginning of time

the end of the world

Would we have the courage to see it through

or would we run for home?

There is only one way to find out

The edge of space

only 100km up, just an hour's drive from home

Down there, life continues

The traffic keeps moving

stocks go on trading and Star Trek is still showing

But we have to leave all this behind

To dip our toe into the vast dark ocean beyond

Into the shallows

not too far from home

onto.. the moon

Dozens of astronauts have come this way before us

12 of them have walked on the moon itself

Just over 400,000km from home

3 days in a spacecraft

So close, it's as if we've barely left home

Familiar, safe

within the sight of earth

It looks like a deserted battlefield

bombarded by millions of meteorites and asteroids

But it's quieter now

It's obvious there have been no major collisions for millions of years

This brings back memories

the Apollo 11, lunar module

Neil Armstrong's first footprints

looks like they were made yesterday

there is no air to change them

They should survive for millions of years

may be longer than us

Our time is limited

We need to take our own giant leap

further than any human as ever travels

Out of the darkness, a friendly face

the goddess of love

Venus

The morning star, the evening star

Sometimes she welcomes the new day in the east

others she says good night in the west

The planet's spectacular yellow clouds reflect the sunlight

That's why this is the solar system's brightest planet

a sister to our planet

She is about the same size and gravity as earth

We should be safe here

But the Venus Express space probe is telling us these dazzling clouds

are made of deadly sulfuric acid

that the planet's atmosphere is choked with carbon dioxide

It's ringing alarm bells

Venus is one angry goddess

The air is noxious,

the pressure unbearable

and it's hot,

approaching 500 degree Celsius

Stay too long

and we'd be corroded, suffocated, crushed and baked

Noting can survive here

Like this,

it's a Soviet Venera robotic probe

its heavy armor has been wrecked by the extreme atmosphere

So lovely from earth,

up close, this goddess is hideous

She is the sister from hell

pockmarked by thousands of volcanos

All that carbon dioxide in its atmosphere is trapping the sun's heat

This is global warming gone wild

Before it was cold, maybe Venus was calm

more like her sister planet earth

If that's true, this could be our planet's future

Beginning to think we shouldn't be out here

that we should turn back

But there's something hypnotic about the sun

Like Medusa, too terrible to look at, too powerful to resist

luring us onwards,

on, like a moth to a flame

Dwarfed by, scorched by the sun,

it's Mercury

Get too close to the sun, this is what happens

Temperature swing wildly here

At night, it's -170 degrees

come midday, it's 400+

burnt, frozen

and look at those scars

a sign that Mercury had a violent past

The Messenger space probe, it's telling us something strange

For its size, this little planet has a powerful gravitational pull

It must be heavier than it looks

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

The core of what was once much larger planet

Maybe a stray planet slammed into Mercury

blasting away its out layers in a deadly game of cosmic pinball

Whole planets on the loose

destroying anything in their path, even entire planets

and we are in the middle of it:

vulnerable, exposed, small

everything is telling us to turn back

but who could defy this

the sun, in all its mesmerizing splendor

Our light, our lives

Everything we do is controlled by the sun

depends on it

and more than that

it's the Greek god Helios driving his chariot across the sky

The Egyptian god Ra, reborn everyday

the summer solstice sun rising at Stonehenge

For millions of years

this was as close as it got to staring into the face of god

150 million kilometers from home

a 20-year journey by plane

switch it off

and it's so far away

we wouldn't know about it for a whole 8 minutes

It's so big, you could fit a million earths inside it

So heavy, its gravity controls the entire solar system

But who needs numbers

we've got the real thing

We see it everyday

a familiar face in our sky

up close, it's unrecognizable

a turbulent sea of incandescent gas

The thermometer rises to over 5,000 degrees

Down in the core,

it's got to be tens of millions of degrees

Hot enough to trigger a nuclear reaction

turning millions of tons of matter into energy, every second

More than all the energy ever made by mankind

Back home, we see this energy as light

feel it as heat

But up close, there is nothing comforting about the sun

It's so full of electrical and magnetic activity

It's bursting out in this huge incandescent gas loops called prominences

Each one releasing more energy than ten million volcanos

You could get the earth through one of these loops

and still have tens of thousands of kilometers to spare

And when they burst through

it's exposing a cooler layers below

making sunspots

They're a fraction cooler than their surroundings

it's why they look black

but they are still hotter than anything on earth

and they are massive too

Some of these are at least 50,000km across

a solar flare

a superheated stream of electrified gas

blasting deadly radiation out into space

But one day, all this will stop

the sun's fuel will be spent

When it dies, that will be it for the earth as well

This god creates life and destroys it

demands we keep our distance

This comet has strayed too close

It's been boiled away by the sun's heat

creating a tail stretches for millions of kilometers

It's freezing in here

There's no doubt where these comets come from

the icy wastes of deep space

But look at all these steam, the geysers and dust

it's the sun again, melting the comet's frozen heart

A kind of vast dirty snowball covered in grimy tar