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00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30And how can this bizarre red moon rock contain signs of life?
00:36As you start to look closer, things just get even more weird.
00:42These are the most remarkable and mysterious objects on Earth.
00:48Hidden away in museums, laboratories and storage rooms.
00:54Now, new research and technology can get under their skin like never before.
01:00We can rebuild them, pull them apart, and zoom in to reveal the unbelievable, the ancient, and the truly bizarre.
01:16These are the world's strangest things.
01:21In the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, is one of the greatest treasures of the pharaohs.
01:39The pectoral of Tutankhamun.
01:45This stunning piece of jewelry was worn on the front of the king's garments.
01:50And it was meant to keep the boy king's body whole on its journey to the afterlife.
01:54This item is extraordinarily beautiful.
01:59Now, using the latest technology, we can finally solve an ancient mystery.
02:05Nearly 15 centimeters tall, the 3,000-year-old royal ornament is made of silver and gold
02:16and covered in expertly crafted decorations.
02:20This pectoral was really laden with meaning.
02:24There are lots of hieroglyphs in there, and it's inlaid with precious jewels.
02:29At its heart lies an object both eye-catching and unexplained.
02:34In the very center, there's a scarab beetle with the wings of a falcon.
02:39And this represents the god Ra, the sun god.
02:43This scarab is carved from a single piece of stunning glass.
02:48It's yellowy-green.
02:50It's incredibly clear, translucent.
02:53It really is a perfect piece of glass.
02:56Too perfect.
02:59Across the entire planet, no other glass artifact this ancient is so flawless.
03:06Now, new research can reveal the secrets of Tutankhamun's scarab.
03:13Where did it come from?
03:15How was it formed?
03:16What makes this scarab so unique?
03:25The ancient civilization of Egypt.
03:30Buried in the sand and rock here are thousands of years of history, culture, and massive ancient monuments.
03:37And a hundred years ago, English archaeologist Howard Carter hits the motherlode.
03:47Carter famously said when he was peering into the tomb, he had seen wonderful things.
03:52Carter has unearthed the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, the boy king of Egypt's 18th dynasty.
04:02He died over 3,000 years ago.
04:05His tomb contains unimaginable treasures.
04:09There were about 5,000 items in the tomb, so it really was a fantastic moment in history.
04:17Statues, gold, jewelry, chariots, model animals, and of course the famous sarcophagus and mask of Tutankhamun himself.
04:28It is one of the most important discoveries in the history of archaeology.
04:33Hidden amongst these treasures, Carter finds the most extraordinary object.
04:39Tutankhamun's pectoral.
04:44At its heart sits the scarab beetle, made of a glass unlike anything else from ancient Egypt.
04:54The scarab was extremely symbolic and important for the ancient Egyptians.
04:59It represented, amongst other things, transformation.
05:02And part of this reason is because the scarab beetle stood for something that helps the sun to go across the sky every day,
05:11and was therefore also associated with regeneration and rebirth.
05:16Which makes the choice of glass for such an important symbolic object a little mystifying.
05:22Ancient Egyptian pharaohs had a huge amount of control over territory, not just within Egypt, but outside as well.
05:30And this allowed them access to precious gems, gold, jewelry, and all sorts of things like that.
05:37So what's a piece of glass doing in the middle of this pectoral when it could be gold, silver, lapis, turquoise?
05:45It's not as though glass is particularly difficult to produce.
05:50Glass is a pretty easy material to make.
05:54All you need is sand and a source of heat.
05:58You melt sand at very high temperatures.
06:01And then you can add other materials like metallic oxides, which give the glass color.
06:07But glass is rare in ancient Egypt.
06:11And they are fascinated by it.
06:13Even the blue stripes on Tutankhamun's iconic death mask are made of glass.
06:19Glass had almost magical qualities to it.
06:23The Egyptian hieroglyph for glass is stone of the kind that flows.
06:28It was a skill and a material that they knew how to make, but weren't the masters of.
06:35So it still had some lingering mystery to it.
06:38So all Egyptian glass is flawed.
06:43Ancient Egyptian glass doesn't look like modern glass does today.
06:48It's not that beautifully transparent material.
06:51It's got all these bits and inclusions and bubbles in it.
06:53And that's because their furnaces weren't able to get up to hot enough temperatures
06:57in order to properly melt the glass into a really runny material.
07:02The glass in the scarab lacks such imperfections.
07:05It is flawless.
07:08Which means the scarab glass can't have been made by the ancient Egyptians
07:12or any other humans from that time.
07:15So really the question becomes, what is it?
07:18Where did it come from?
07:19It's a real mystery.
07:22Not all glasses are man-made.
07:24There are natural glasses.
07:26One of the classic ones is obsidian.
07:30Obsidian is created by one of the most powerful natural forces on Earth.
07:39Obsidian is formed from a very silica rich magma
07:44when it erupts at the Earth's surface and cools quickly.
07:47It doesn't have enough time to form a crystalline structure
07:50so you get this amorphous glassy structure.
07:53You can use it for tools, you can use it for weapons.
07:57You can even use it to shave.
08:00Could the Egyptian scarab glass be volcanic obsidian?
08:05One of the key properties of obsidian is this jet black shiny nature to it.
08:10It's not just pure silicon and oxygen.
08:14There's lots of impurities, there's iron oxides.
08:17There can sometimes be small crystals as well and that gives it a dark opaqueness.
08:22and clearly this is not what you see in this piece of jewellery.
08:27You see something which is colourful, you can see through it, it's translucent.
08:33This cannot be obsidian.
08:35But obsidian is not the only natural glass.
08:42Glass can also form when lightning strikes sand.
08:47It fuses the material on the ground.
08:53Very high temperatures at the tip of the lightning strike
08:56and you get these bits of rock called fulgurites.
09:04Could lightning strikes be the source of the scarab glass?
09:08Fulgurites are very small and thin.
09:11They're just the very edge lining of where the lightning struck.
09:15It's quite difficult to fashion something reasonably large out of that sort of material.
09:21Again, not what we see on the piece of jewellery.
09:25So, if the scarab glass isn't made by lightning, volcanoes or humans,
09:31where does it come from?
09:33For years, archaeologists have no explanation for the origins of the scarab glass.
09:43The first clue is uncovered on an expedition into the largest desert on the planet, the Sahara.
09:50In the 1930s, there were a group of treasure hunters who went to the Egyptian-Libyan border
09:55to look for a mythical ancient city called Zazura.
09:59One of the party was a British surveyor, Patrick Clayton,
10:03and as he was whizzing across the desert in his vehicle, he heard a crunch.
10:08To his amazement, the desert floor is littered with chunks of clear green-yellow glass.
10:14He brings them back to the UK where he takes them to the Natural History Museum,
10:20but they really have no idea what these are.
10:23It's almost 50 years before an Italian team of scientists follows up Clayton's discovery with some hard science.
10:35The Italian team go into the desert and collect bits of the Libyan desert glass,
10:40and they also look at the glass in the scarab,
10:43and they analyze it and demonstrate that they're geochemically identical.
10:48The fingerprint is identical.
10:50It is definitive proof.
10:53The scarab is made of glass found in the sands of the Libyan desert.
10:59But that leaves an even bigger mystery.
11:02How does this perfect, flawless glass end up in the middle of the Sahara in the first place?
11:09The answer may lie seven and a half thousand miles away in the Jornada del Muerto desert.
11:20There is glass on the sand here that forms a circle 300 meters across.
11:25The pattern is so perfect it looks almost man-made.
11:30Because it is.
11:32July 16th, 1945, the Trinity Test and the first successful atomic explosion happens.
11:49This was the first product of the Manhattan Project, and they needed to find out if it worked.
11:55They set off this bomb to sort of perch on a platform in the desert.
12:04A ball of fire tears through the sky, reaching temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun.
12:10A giant mushroom cloud surges 12 kilometers into the atmosphere.
12:16The world will never be the same again.
12:26It detonated with the force of around 20,000 tons of TNT.
12:33The test produces an unexpected by-product.
12:38When scientists went back to investigate the site, there were these little blobs of what looked like glass.
12:48They were given the name trinitite.
12:51Some of it looks very similar to the scarab glass.
12:55But surely they cannot have the same origins.
12:59Clearly that's not where that glass came from.
13:03There weren't any nuclear bombs in ancient Egypt.
13:07There's no natural force on Earth that can produce the concentrated power of an atomic blast.
13:16So where could the immense energy needed to create the scarab glass have come from?
13:23Could Tutankhamun's tomb hold a clue?
13:28Another object that has stirred some controversy and encouraged us all to ask questions is a dagger.
13:35It was found inside Tutankhamun's sarcophagus, which in itself is not particularly unusual.
13:42But the dagger is made of iron.
13:47Which is a problem because ancient Egypt is still in the Bronze Age.
13:52There's no evidence of iron smelting in ancient Egypt until 800 years after Tutankhamun died.
13:58So there's no way that this dagger blade could have been made by the ancient Egyptians.
14:03Like the glass in the scarab, the iron in the dagger is a mystery.
14:07Scientists did X-ray chemical analysis on the metal blade.
14:13And what they found was quite a lot of nickel inside.
14:1611% of the blade is nickel.
14:20No naturally occurring iron on the Earth has a nickel content close to that level.
14:26Only one natural source of iron does.
14:29The heart of a meteorite.
14:34Meteorites are hitting the Earth all the time.
14:39Most of them are almost too small to detect.
14:42But every so often something a lot bigger comes along.
14:45February the 13th, 2013, Chelyabinsk, Russia.
14:53A meteor the size of a six-story building slams into the atmosphere.
14:58This meteor traveled through the Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 miles per hour.
15:04It actually exploded 15 miles above the Earth's surface.
15:09And the energy it released was 22 times that of the Trinity bomb.
15:16If it had struck the Earth's surface,
15:18it would have been powerful enough to turn sand into glass.
15:24Could the scarab glass in Tunang Kamen's pectoral
15:27have been produced by a meteor impact in the Sahara Desert?
15:32In 2019, a couple of geologists were looking in detail
15:35at the structure within the desert glass.
15:37and they found that one of the impurities they could measure was zircon.
15:42They recognize an unusual arrangement of atoms in this mineral.
15:47It's a crystalline signature only seen in zircon
15:50that has formed from the decay of a very unstable, very rare crystal called redite.
15:57Redite only forms when high temperatures and high pressures
16:01squash the atoms together into a certain formation.
16:05On Earth, you only really get these high temperatures and high pressures in one place.
16:10The glass from the scarab must have formed in a catastrophic meteor strike.
16:15We think that it formed 29 million years ago
16:20when a meteor struck the Great Sand Sea.
16:23That leaves one last mystery.
16:38If it is a meteor strike that creates the scarab glass, where is the crater?
16:43A meteorite with enough energy to turn sand into glass would have left an impact crater of about 20 miles in diameter.
16:55The problem is nobody can find the crater.
17:00Unfortunately, you probably couldn't pick a worse place to look.
17:05A desert system is dynamic.
17:08It constantly keeps retracing itself.
17:10If you imagine walking up a sand dune and coming back two days later,
17:14the wind will have erased your footprints.
17:17Could that be what happened to the crater?
17:20It's quite possible that the structure is there beneath the Saharan Desert Sand Sea, but we haven't found it yet.
17:31The ancient Egyptians may not have grasped the astonishing extraterrestrial origins of the scarab,
17:37But they clearly knew they had something very, very special.
17:42While it's fair to say that the ancient Egyptians probably didn't know where this glass had come from,
17:47what they did recognize was the fact that it was rare, particularly beautiful, I mean really flawless,
17:54and therefore really only fit for a king.
17:58This perfect piece of glass, created by a meteorite, is literally out of this world.
18:15Over 100,000 of these ancient clay Mesopotamian tablets have been found across the Middle East.
18:22They are the work of one of the oldest civilizations on Earth.
18:26But in the last decade, one of them has rocked the world of archaeology.
18:36This tiny ancient tablet.
18:39Made from sun-baked clay, it measures just 11.5 by 6 centimeters.
18:47The surface of this 4,000-year-old tablet is covered in the oldest writing system on Earth, cuneiform.
18:55It has about 60 lines, so it's quite small, very compressed kind of writing on it.
19:01When the tablet is translated in 2009, it turns out to be an astonishing instruction manual.
19:07The tablet features a set of instructions for building a boat, a large boat, about half the length of a football field.
19:16And it explains what this boat is for.
19:20What we have here is the appeal of a god to a man and the instructions of what to do to save his family and his flocks.
19:30It sounds like a familiar biblical story.
19:35But there's one very big catch.
19:39This tablet was written 1,000 years before the Old Testament story of Noah.
19:45How is this possible?
19:47The tablet's wedge-shaped cuneiform writing tells a great tale.
19:55The story in the art tablet is a message from the god Enki to a man called Atrahasis saying,
20:02Sell your possessions, build a boat, fill it with animals.
20:05It gives astonishingly detailed building instructions.
20:14The tablet tells you to make what is effectively a reed rope coracle.
20:20In other words, a boat using reeds from swampland, bonding them together with ropes, and then waterproofing them with bitumen.
20:28Modern-day Iraq is known for its oil, and pitch is a byproduct of oil.
20:34So if you were in ancient Mestamia, you can grab your pitch, something resembling modern asphalt,
20:40and put it on your boat, and seal your boat, and make it waterproof.
20:43And you can basically traverse the oceans, which we know the ancient Mestamians did, with these reed boats.
20:48The fundamental design of these boats hasn't changed for thousands of years.
20:53And they're still in use today.
20:58But according to the tablet, this is no ordinary boat design.
21:03This boat that's described in the tablet is effectively to the scale of a football pitch.
21:09One line of text reads,
21:12Let her floor area be one field.
21:15A field is an ancient measurement of roughly 3600 square meters,
21:20giving the boat a diameter of 67 meters.
21:23If you dropped it in Yankee Stadium, it would cover more than half the playing surface.
21:28And the scale of the boat is not the only striking similarity to the story of Noah and his ark.
21:37The tablet says that the animals should be put in the boat, Shana.
21:43Or in other words, two by two.
21:45The poor story of a flood and a person with his family being saved by a god has remained.
21:54And of course, we would immediately recognize that this is like our Genesis flood story.
21:58It seems unlikely that there have been two identical great floods.
22:05Is it possible that the story of Noah has just been adopted from a more ancient culture?
22:11The markings in the clay are written in the ancient language of Akkadian.
22:20It was the language of Mesopotamia.
22:24Mesopotamia covers modern-day Iraq, parts of southern Turkey, a little bit western Iran, as well as eastern Syria.
22:30Mesopotamia, along the edges of the Euphrates River, is considered by many the origin of human civilization.
22:41They developed all kinds of innovations, everything from the first canals and irrigation networks,
22:47to the first laws, to the first idea of governments, to a whole host of firsts.
22:51One of the greatest of those firsts is the invention of writing.
22:59The point when writing is invented is the time when cities were beginning to arise for the first time.
23:04That meant a lot of goods had to come and feed these people to bring the kind of things that we need to survive, but also, of course, to thrive.
23:12Early cuneiform develops as a way to keep track of goods and maintain records.
23:17If I have given you a certain quantity of grain to store for me, it is useful to have a way of proving that.
23:25Which leads to one inescapable conclusion.
23:29Effectively, writing is invented by accountants.
23:34By around the third millennium BC, cuneiform has evolved into the sophisticated writing found on the Ark tablet.
23:40Including this story describing a giant boat with animals entering two by two, almost a thousand years before the first Judaic texts about Noah.
23:53Could this ancient Babylonian story be the origin of the one in the Jewish Bible?
23:58The Babylonian civilization was at war on several occasions with Judaic civilization.
24:09Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem on two occasions, and he enslaved people and carried them back to Babylon.
24:16The book of Daniel describes the story of the Jewish peoples in Babylon in some detail.
24:23They would have encountered the Babylonian traditions, the stories that hark back to the ancient Mesopotamian stories, such as the flood.
24:31And they would have incorporated these stories into their own texts.
24:34So, is the story of Noah and the flood just a Mesopotamian tall tale? Or could it be real?
24:46The flood story is surprisingly common in cuneiform writings.
24:50While the Ark tablet does not describe the flood, there are at least three other instances on cuneiform tablets where such floods are described.
24:59The Eridu Genesis tablet tells an almost 4,000 year old Sumerian story of a king being told by God that mankind will be destroyed by a great flood.
25:13It describes a huge storm and rain that lasts for seven days and seven nights.
25:18Some recent theories believe all these stories could be explained by a massive flood in the Black Sea.
25:29The Black Sea is linked to the Mediterranean through a fairly narrow channel called the Bosporus Channel.
25:36In 1997, a couple of marine geologists suggested that a great flood could have happened through the Bosporus Channel about 7,000 years ago.
25:46The theory is that the flood is caused by the end of the last ice age.
25:51There's a lot of water trapped in the ice. Sea levels are really low.
25:55But as you melt that ice, you dramatically rise the sea level.
26:02Eventually, sea levels in the Mediterranean rise high enough to breach the Bosporus Channel.
26:07A huge wall of water cascades into the Black Sea.
26:17They suggested that this was actually 200 times the flow rate of Niagara Falls and this would have cataclysmically flooded in a very, very short period of time the Black Sea.
26:26They estimate 100,000 square kilometers of land could be inundated by the Great Flood.
26:35But this theory remains controversial with some scientists.
26:40However, there is another idea that would also explain the story of a huge flood.
26:45And it fits in right where the Ark tablet is found.
26:50Around the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, there's lots of floodplains.
26:55And all of the river catchment areas feed into those floodplains.
26:58So if you actually have extreme weather events, extreme storms, massive snow melts, they can cause localized flooding.
27:08And if you're in the middle of a floodplain with flat land as far as you can see and that gets flooded, all of a sudden you're in the middle of what appears to be a sea.
27:16Scientists have actually found flood deposits three and a half meters deep, dating back to around 5,000 years ago, just before the Ark tablet is written.
27:28And right at the center of this big flood deposit is the city of Shurupak.
27:33And that's the place that always features in all of the Mesopotamian stories about this Noah-like character.
27:41So we know that a great flood is possible.
27:44But despite the impressive technical instructions for building a giant boat written on the Ark tablet,
27:51it's impossible to know if it is ever really constructed.
27:56Or is it?
28:00Could another tablet, one that we have already found, hold the answers we are looking for?
28:08There are over 130,000 stored at the British Museum alone.
28:12So it's important to remember that we have only read a very small fragment of what exists.
28:21Most of these tablets remain untranslated.
28:24This is a body of literature that's vast.
28:27There certainly will never be enough experts to really translate all the written material that derives from ancient cuneiform.
28:33To overcome this problem, researchers are turning to artificial intelligence.
28:43You basically feed in pictures of cuneiform and they can reconstruct what the meaning is.
28:49Sometimes directly read the actual symbols, but also guess what symbols might be.
28:53Often times you get a tablet and it's broken.
28:56So for instance, machine learning techniques can also reconstruct what symbols may have been missing.
29:01We can potentially read vast archives of cuneiform literally in minutes.
29:05If this works, who knows what new things we might learn in the coming years.
29:12Perhaps the full story of the Arc Tablet's boat is lying in one of these untranslated texts, just waiting to be read by a computer.
29:21Stored in a European museum, this unassuming chunk of rock was once valued at half a million dollars.
29:36Because it comes from the moon.
29:41Or does it?
29:42It weighs over 80 grams and measures roughly two centimeters by four centimeters, which is awfully big for a moon rock.
29:56It's huge. Everything about it looks strange.
30:02And that's because it is.
30:05When you look in detail, things are just not quite right.
30:08Scientists are deeply confused by this strange thing.
30:11As you start to look closer, things just get even more weird.
30:15Close up, it shows strange cell-like structures that no other moon rock has.
30:21And it's red, which is unique.
30:25That's not the only strange thing about it.
30:28Because this rock isn't in a NASA lab or part of a scientific research project.
30:33It's in an art gallery in the Netherlands.
30:36When the scientists finally get to look at it, it leads to controversy and questions about its authenticity.
30:46There's good reasons to suspect when you encounter an alleged moon rock that there's a strong potential that there's something shady going on.
30:54Now, new research is making us fundamentally rethink what we consider moon rock.
31:02So how does this chunk of the moon end up in a Dutch art gallery?
31:06Well, we do at least know how we got hold of most of our moon rocks in the first place.
31:15One small step for man.
31:17The US Apollo missions.
31:20One giant leap for mankind.
31:23But picking up bits of rock isn't really the point of Apollo.
31:28America is desperate to get to the moon because they want to get there before the Soviets do.
31:33It's a space race.
31:35You got to get there. You got to plant your flag.
31:37And even though there's no real strategic victory, it's sort of like the first person who gets there kind of owns the moon.
31:43On July 20th, 1969, America wins the race.
31:54For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives.
31:58NASA wants people to know that they got more for their 25 billion than simply getting one over on the Russians.
32:05They want to show that the mission has scientific value as well.
32:09Armstrong and Aldrin were there for just 21 hours.
32:14Now, in that time, they did some of the things we've seen, you know, like planting the American flag.
32:18But they also very critically gathered some samples of moon rock.
32:23I've got to get a rock in here.
32:25Scientists are queuing up to get their hands on the rocks to answer some pretty major questions about the moon.
32:32The two big ones were, what was the moon made of and how it was formed?
32:36And that's the first strange thing about this rock.
32:40If these moon rocks are so scientifically important, how does this one end up in a Dutch art gallery?
32:50The Apollo astronauts are global heroes.
32:53With a PR bonanza on his hands, U.S. President Richard Nixon wants to really drive home the scale of America's technological superiority across the globe.
33:02The idea that they come up with is a whistle-stop tour.
33:0824 different countries send the astronauts around.
33:13It's like a tour by the Beatles, right? Everyone knows who they are. Everyone's really excited to meet them.
33:19They are meeting dignitaries, kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers.
33:24Everyone wants to get a piece of the Apollo program and some of them are lucky enough to literally get a piece of the Apollo program.
33:32It's a massive PR coup for the United States.
33:38Fragments of Apollo 11 moon rock are gifted to every U.S. state and 135 countries around the world.
33:45And that's where the connection to the Rijksmuseum comes in.
33:49In 1991, it receives a collection of artifacts donated from the estate of Dutch former Prime Minister Willem Drees.
34:01Amongst the collection is the moon rock.
34:05Drees claims that the U.S. Ambassador gave it to him to commemorate the visit to the Netherlands of the Apollo 11 astronauts.
34:15That explains how a piece of the moon ends up in an art gallery.
34:21But why does this particular moon rock cause scientists so much alarm when they finally catch sight of it?
34:30The Drees moon rock lies forgotten in storage at the Rijksmuseum for 15 years until a new space exhibition brings its center stage for the public to view.
34:40The museum ensures it for $500,000.
34:46While on display, it grabs the attention of a scientist visiting the exhibit.
34:52But for all the wrong reasons.
34:55As you look closer, it really just doesn't quite sit right.
34:59For a start, there's its impressive size.
35:01This fist-sized piece of rock is about 89 grams in weight.
35:06And that's clearly way too big for a piece of moon rock.
35:10The Apollo missions only brought back a really tiny amount of samples.
35:13In fact, Apollo 11, its total haul of samples was just 22 kilos.
35:18So when the Americans went around the world giving gifts of moon rocks to all the other countries,
35:21they gave a few grams, little rocks no bigger than a grain of rice.
35:25But this is a massive lump of rock.
35:30And size isn't the only thing that bothers scientists about this rock.
35:36From the Apollo samples, they have learned something really important about the moon.
35:40It's gray.
35:42The Rijksmuseum rock is red.
35:48No moon rock that we know is red in color at all.
35:53It tends to be sort of dark gray, sometimes a bit lighter gray, sometimes almost black in color.
36:00Occasionally, you can see bits of green in it, but there's no red at all.
36:05And there's a very good reason for that.
36:07Most rocks in the world have a lot of iron in them.
36:14And that iron reacts with the atmosphere and with water and it rusts.
36:19And you don't get that on the moon.
36:22There's almost no atmosphere and there's very little water.
36:26There's nothing that's going to react to make the iron in the rock rust.
36:30And in 2009, when scientists put the Dutch rock under the microscope, things go from bad to worse.
36:40They found lots of small holes filled with quartz.
36:43Now that's a problem.
36:45Quartz is abundant on the earth because it takes heat and liquid water to form.
36:49The problem is neither of those are found on the moon.
36:56And there is something else about the rock, something even more extraordinary than quartz.
37:02Life.
37:03The elephant in the room was the fact that they could identify structures which were clearly organic, cell-like structures.
37:13This looked like the structures we find in wood.
37:15The moon rock isn't a rock at all.
37:21It is fossilised wood.
37:26So, in short, this strange sort of fist-sized red rock that was insured for over half a million dollars turned out to be a very, very old piece of tree.
37:35And that's a big problem for a moon rock.
37:40The moon is an arid, desolate rock.
37:44There's almost no water up there that we know of.
37:46There's almost no atmosphere.
37:48And that means that two of the fundamental things that plants need, air and water, simply aren't present.
37:53So the moon can't support plant life.
37:57Or can it?
37:59In 2019, a Chinese mission called Chang'e touched down on the surface of the moon.
38:03And on board was an experiment, a tiny miniature biosphere, which they were hoping would germinate a number of different kinds of seeds.
38:12There was little fruit flies in there that they were hoping would awaken and start to buzz around and live.
38:16And also some yeast for those fruit flies to eat.
38:19The flies in the yeast don't appear to have made it, but one of the seeds germinated.
38:24We got a single cotton seedling with just two tiny leaves.
38:27The Dres moon rock was once a plant, and the experiment suggested a plant could exist on the moon.
38:35Or maybe not.
38:37It's fair to say this experiment wasn't an unmitigated success.
38:39That cotton seedling died in the freezing cold lunar night, with temperatures falling as low as minus 170 degrees, which is going to cause a bit of frost damage.
38:49The idea of trees growing up there is completely implausible.
38:53Maybe once upon a time there was some tiny microscopic life, albeit very briefly.
38:58But the idea of a fully fledged forest? No way.
39:02The Dres rock isn't from the moon.
39:05So is the whole thing a fake?
39:08Is this criminal fraud?
39:10It wouldn't be the first time.
39:11The theft or seeking through illegal means of these moon rocks has been a problem from the very beginning.
39:23And the main reason is that they're extraordinarily valuable.
39:27I mean, there's God knows how many diamonds in this world, but there's only a couple hundred pieces of the moon, and each one of them is absolutely unique and absolutely precious.
39:36A big rock there. Sure is.
39:38Let's go down and get a chuck of the bedrock here.
39:42Over the past 60 years, some of the Goodwill rocks have been stolen and sold.
39:47The value of these things keeps going up, too.
39:50So in 1998, U.S. Customs officials seized the Honduran Goodwill rock, which had been stolen.
39:57And this is a rock the size of a fingernail, but allegedly it was going to fetch a price of $5 million.
40:05Could this explain the Dresch rock?
40:08There's certainly strong motivation to sell fake ones because the real ones are worth so much.
40:16But nothing about this moon rock suggests it was meant to defraud anyone.
40:21The construction of the plaque doesn't look like the construction of the other Goodwill rock plaques.
40:25Even the spelling is wrong.
40:28The word center appears on the Dresch plaque and it's spelled in the British way, C-E-N-T-R-E, rather than in the American way, C-E-N-T-E-R.
40:36A mistake this obvious simply doesn't fit with the idea that there's some kind of space fraud going on.
40:45It looks more like what it probably is, some kind of miscommunication.
40:50And even more importantly, there's no motive.
40:53We do have to remember that Dresch clearly had the best of intentions, you know, bequeathing his belongings to the museum.
41:02It's not like he was trying to sell it for $5 million or anything like that.
41:06He was giving everything away.
41:08And it was probably just a misunderstanding, you know, or misremembering.
41:13But there's no evidence that there's any intent to deceive or certainly to profit off of it.
41:19One thing is crystal clear.
41:22The Dresch moon rock is from Earth. Case closed.
41:26You don't find Earth rock on the moon.
41:31Or at least that's what people thought.
41:33But astonishing new research suggests that this isn't true.
41:39In 1971, Apollo 14 brings back a particularly sizable chunk of moon rock nicknamed Big Bertha.
41:47Big Bertha was a moon rock returned by the Apollo programs and reanalyzed in 2019.
41:53Inside it, the scientists find a 1.8 gram fragment of rock dated at around 4 billion years old.
42:01But it isn't the age that shocks scientists.
42:06Embedded within Big Bertha was bits of granite and quartz.
42:10Now, granite, of course, occur widely across the Earth, but very, very, very rarely on the moon.
42:16It has led the scientists to a shocking conclusion.
42:20What we have here is a piece of the Earth that's sitting on the moon.
42:24How did it get there?
42:25The current idea behind this is that in the very early solar system, in a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, things were pinging about all over the place.
42:36And meteorites and asteroids were hitting the Earth.
42:38The idea is that a giant meteorite impact on the Earth spewed up a load of debris and gave some of it enough energy that it was able to fly out of the Earth's gravity into outer space.
42:48And one of those bits of rock obviously crash landed on the surface of the moon and was then retrieved by the Apollo astronauts.
42:57Given that we managed to stumble across some Earth rock on only our third expedition on the surface of the moon, it seems pretty likely there might be more of that stuff up there.
43:04The Dres moon rock was declared a fake because it must have come from Earth.
43:12There's no doubt the Dres rock itself was never on the moon, but Big Bertha has turned the scientific arguments on their head.
43:21So petrified trees may be a stretch, but it turns out that you can find Earth rock on the moon.
43:26Let's rock on the moon.
43:56ssa бег.
43:57Let's rock on the moon.
43:58Let's rock on the moon.
43:59Let's rock on the moon.
44:00Let's rock..."
44:02PVK
44:04LLE
44:19Gig ,
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