Encounters at the End of the World Page #4

Sam Bowser is the head

of the scientific field team

We found him in a pensive mood

HERZOG:
Sam Bowser,

this is a special day for you?

Well, I think

I think everyone should stop

when they've reached a point

where they've done

what they've wanted to do,

and today is probably gonna be

my last Antarctic dive, I think

I think we've accomplished what

At least, I've accomplished

what I've set out to do here,

and it's time to pass the ball off to

the next generation of biologists, I think

So, it is a bit of a special day

HERZOG I had heard that he was also

a great science fiction fan

The creatures that are down there

that are like science-fiction creatures,

they range in the way that they would

gobble you up from slime-type blobs,

but creepier than classic

science-fiction blobs

These would have long tendrils

that would ensnare you,

and as you tried to get away from them

you'd just become more and more ensnared

by your own actions

And then after you would be frustrated

and exhausted,

then this creature would start to move in

and take you apart

So that's one example

of one of the creatures

Then there are other types of worm-type

things with horrible mandibles

and jaws and just bits to rend your flesh

It really is a violent,

horribly violent world that

is obscure to us

because we're encased in neoprene,

you know,

and we're much larger than that world

So it doesn't really affect us,

but if you were to shrink down,

miniaturize into that world,

it'd be a horrible place to be Just horrible

HERZOG:
And this is a world

earlier than human beings

Do you think that the human race

and other mammals

fled in panic from the oceans

and crawled on solid land to get out of this?

Yeah, I think undoubtedly

that's exactly the driving force

that caused us to leave the horrors behind

To grow and evolve into larger creatures

to escape

what's horribly violent

at the miniature scale, miniaturized scale

Yeah

HERZOG The water under the ice is

minus 2 degrees Celsius

That keeps us insulated from the cold

Want me to open it up?

- Yeah Ready?

- Yeah

Dive operation Time right now is

I'll give you a call back at about 2:30

To me, the divers look like astronauts

floating in space

But their work is extremely dangerous

They are diving without tethers

to give them more free range

But here you can't trust a compass

So close to the magnetic pole, the needle

would point straight up or straight down

Somehow you have to find

your way back to the exit hole

or you are trapped under the ceiling of ice

So I selected some areas

that have the tree foraminifera,

and they're the ones we're interested in

right now, to find out if they're carnivores,

whether or not they eat shrimp-like

creatures, multi-cellular creatures

And also I found a few of the urchins

that have, I think,

they're the ones that have

a parasitic worm that lives in their anus

It's a pretty beautiful scarlet worm,

but it must be a horrible way to make a life,

I would think

ANNOUNCER ON TV I tell you, gentlemen,

science has agreed

that unless something is done,

and done quickly,

man as the dominant species of life on Earth

will be extinct within a year

HERZOG Sam Bowser likes to show

doomsday science fiction films

to the researchers

Many of them express grave doubts about

our long-ranging presence on this planet

Nature, they predict, will regulate us

ANNOUNCER Stay in your homes

I repeat, stay in your homes

Your personal safety,

the safety of the entire city

depends upon your full cooperation

with the military authorities

Yes! Cities, nations, even civilization itself

threatened with annihilation

Because in one moment of

history-making violence,

nature, mad, rampant,

wrought its most awesome creation

For born in that swirling inferno of

radioactive dust

were things so horrible,

so terrifying, so hideous

there is no word to describe them

We may be witnesses to

a biblical prophecy come true

And there shall be destruction

and darkness come upon creation,

and the beasts shall reign over the Earth

ANNOUNCER Yes, the Earth,

infested by swarms

BOWSER:
This is just the flower part

The body is somewhere in the dirt over there

HERZOG All that the divers had brought

back from the ocean floor

were a few spoonfuls of sand containing

the strange single-celled creatures

the scientists are studying here

They are known as tree foraminifera,

primordial single-celled organisms

They branch out in the shape of trees

The branches give off pseudopodia,

microscopic false feet

that gather and assemble grains of sand

into a protective shell around the twigs

BOWSER:
These are the pseudopodia

that are secreted by foraminifera

They're long, thin, tendril-like projections

What the foram does is it wakes up,

sends out the pseudopods and then just

grabs every particle in its environment

and pulls them in toward its body

There's a certain pattern to the way

that they sort the particles

They can select particular grains

out of everything in the environment

and just end up with them

They're beautiful masons

HERZOG:
Could that be

a very early appearance of intelligence?

- I say it with great care

- Yeah, I have to say it with great care, too,

because there are stories about

how these particular organisms

have fit into that debate

Turn of the last century, for example,

there was a scientist,

a British scientist named Heron-Allen

who, apparently, during one of the debates

in one of the British societies was

pointing out the fact that

every definition of intelligence

that was being formulated could be

fulfilled by these single-celled creatures

Borderline intelligence,

yeah, at the single-celled level

I mean, it is a manifestation

of the best of our abilities, really,

the way that they build their shells

It's almost art

(DRILLING)

HERZOG I noticed that the divers,

in their routine, were not speaking at all

To me,

they were like priests preparing for mass

Under the ice, the divers find themselves

in a separate reality,

where space and time

acquire a strange new dimension

Those few who have experienced the world

under the frozen sky

often speak of it as

going down into the cathedral

HERZOG Back from the strange world

underwater, scientists study the samples

One of the foremost scholars in the world

in his field, Dr Pawlowski,

studies the DNA sequences of foraminifera

What looks esoteric is in fact one of the

fundamental questions about life on Earth

In the same way that cosmologists search

for the origins of the universe,

the scientists here are tracing back

the evolution of life to its earliest stages

Sometimes the building blocks

of the sequences all seem to fit

Jan, what have you found today so far

on the sample that we found?

- Three new species

- Three new species

Three new species on the dish

That's fantastic

- This is from the ROMEO site

- Yeah, from the ROMEO site

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