
Asteroids: Spark of Life? Preview
Preview: Season 53 Episode 1 | 30sVideo has Closed Captions
What if violent asteroid impacts actually jump-started life on Earth? Explore a dramatic theory.
What if asteroids, long feared as destroyers of life, were key to our existence? Explore a revolutionary theory that these violent collisions provided the essential ingredients – water, minerals, and energy – needed to jumpstart life on Earth.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
National Corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Carlisle Companies. Major funding for NOVA is provided by the NOVA Science Trust and PBS viewers.

Asteroids: Spark of Life? Preview
Preview: Season 53 Episode 1 | 30sVideo has Closed Captions
What if asteroids, long feared as destroyers of life, were key to our existence? Explore a revolutionary theory that these violent collisions provided the essential ingredients – water, minerals, and energy – needed to jumpstart life on Earth.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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NOVA Labs is a free digital platform that engages teens and lifelong learners in games and interactives that foster authentic scientific exploration. Participants take part in real-world investigations by visualizing, analyzing, and playing with the same data that scientists use.Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- [Narrator] Asteroids, agents of destruction, but in early Earth, did they make life possible?
- Asteroids could have delivered the building blocks of life.
- Through ancient rock... - Woohoo!
- [Narrator] Moon, craters and asteroids.
- [Host] The early Earth was a big experimental laboratory doing prebiotic chemistry.
- [Narrator] A radical theory of life's beginning.
- I did not believe what I was seeing.
- [Narrator] "Were Asteroids the Spark of Life?"
on Nova.
(dramatic music)
When Earth Was Bombarded by Asteroids
Video has Closed Captions
Clip: S53 Ep1 | 3m 41s | What studying the surface of the Moon revealed about Earth’s apocalyptic youth. (3m 41s)
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National Corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Carlisle Companies. Major funding for NOVA is provided by the NOVA Science Trust and PBS viewers.


