Asteroids: The Spark of Life

Documentary Film

Runtime 52:00

Ruth Berry, Australia/France

When a giant meteorite collides with the Earth at extremely high speed, the shock wave is such that it releases huge quantities of energy, causing deep circular scars on its surface: these are called impact craters. It’s hard to imagine that such an event could provoke anything other than a cataclysm, as it did 66 million years ago, when a space rock crashed into the Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs...However, while scientists have hitherto viewed these collisions only in terms of destruction, a genuine paradigm shift is now underway... And it concerns one of the most fundamental questions of our time: the origins of life on Earth.