BBC - Earth: One Planet, Many Lives (2023)

There's nothing else like it. Chris Packham reveals the epic, 4.5-billion-year story of our home - from its dramatic creation to the arrival of human life… and whatever's next. A BBC production for the Open University.

Part 1: Inferno
There's nothing else like it. Chris Packham reveals the epic, 4.5-billion-year story of our home - from its dramatic creation to the arrival of human life… and whatever's next.

Part 2: Snowball
How Earth's terrifying journey into the deep freeze started with fire, not ice. 800 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, indeed any animal life, the giant supercontinent Rodinia broke up. Earth's vast powerful tectonic forces ripped the land apart, kicking off a series of events that resulted in huge amounts of carbon dioxide being sucked from the atmosphere and sending global temperatures plummeting.

Part 3: Green
Chris Packham tells the miraculous story of how plant life turned the Earth from a barren rock into a vibrant green world - a 4.5-billion year-saga of extraordinary highs and lows that almost wiped out all life on the planet. The Earth began as a water world without land masses. Then, a giant asteroid bombardment triggered its plate tectonics, leading to huge fungi, soil and giant swamp forests. But the early plants locked so much carbon dioxide that global temperatures suddenly plunged.

Part 4: Atmosphere
When the Earth first formed from clouds of dust and gas 4.6 billion years ago, it was - like so many other lifeless worlds in the universe - devoid of an atmosphere, an inhospitable rock floating in the black void of space. But as the young planet is pummelled by asteroids, a period of extraordinary upheaval begins.

Part 5: Human
Today, Earth is a human world, home to eight billion people and counting. Humans now have a greater effect in shaping Earth's surface than many natural processes. Chris Packham explores how dramatic twists in Earth's story enabled humans to go from being part of nature to controlling it and what can be learnt from this epic tale before it's too late.