Supersized Earth
Supersized Earth traces the spectacular story of how humans have transformed our world in a generation. Dallas Campbell travels the globe, visiting the world's largest and most ambitious engineering projects, exploring the power of human ingenuity and the making of the modern world.
Genre: Documentary
Cast:Dallas Campbell , Rachel Atherton , Chris Gerdes , Suni Williams , Zhang Hangming
S1.E1 ∙ A Place to Live
Dallas Campbell visits cities to demonstrate and experience how human building activities, mainly there, changes our environment. Dhubai's highest building is the pinnacle of a long dream of scraping the sky even higher, which took a huge flight in a century thanks to advanced engineering, new materials and aerodynamics. Mexico city poses an extreme case of mega-efforts required for public facilities, such as sewage disposal. China over the latests decades dwarfs all records in urban expansion, which already houses half of the world population, yet on 'only' one percent of the land mass.
S1.E2 ∙ The Way We Move
Besides living, humanity also throughly transforms the planet for its ever increasing transport needs. In a few decades, China overtook even the US in building land roads, including bridges, tunnels etcetera. Shipping containers allowed multiplying far export manifold, m-turning the world into a single commercial market. Air transport shrunk distances for personnel travel, even space is becoming a 'regular' transport option.
S1.E3 ∙ Food, Fire and Water
Besides homes and transport, population growth itself requires humanity to change its home planet ever more drastically. Food production has increased and mutated as never before, with new techniques allowing previously barren areas to become world class exporters of major produces. Key to all engineered activities however is mining and energy, where we finally start switching from frightfully finite and polluting fossil fuels to eternal powers sources, like wind.
