Food, Fire and Water Supersized Earth

This is our home.

From up here, it looks the same as it has done for thousands of years.

But if you get a bit closer you can see we've made a few changes.

We've been busy re-designing our world.

'Wherever you look...'

Welcome to the top of the world!

'..you can see the scale of our achievements.'

Oh, my God! This is actually freaking me out.

Just don't, whatever you do, look down.

'Our generation is changing the face of the planet as never before.

'I'm Dallas Campbell,

'and I'm going to show you how we're shaping the modern world.'

Like someone's covered the whole thing in clingfilm.

'We're changing vast landscapes to feed a growing population.'

This is Brazilian cow number two hundred and ten million and one.

'And harnessing the Earth's resources to power our planet.

'Today, we act on a scale previously unimaginable.'

Three, two, one...

'We have become a force of nature.

'We're making the impossible possible.'

When I was a kid, we used to have this golden camping rule,

which was, "If you can't carry it, it doesn't come,"

because, ultimately, the fun of camping

is just about stripping life back to its absolute basics.

'And the basics of life are food, water and energy.

'Now, think of that on a global scale

'and just imagine how much we get through.'

Take a city like New York.

Every day, New Yorkers use 1.5 billion gallons of water,

enough to fill five Empire State Buildings.

In just three days, they eat enough grain

to turn all the roads in Manhattan into gigantic fields of wheat.

And the city uses as much fuel as you'd get from six massive oil rigs,

running round the clock.

Of course, the real world works rather differently.

So how do you get enough fresh water, enough meat, enough bread,

enough fruit and vegetables onto people's dinner plates?

Well, really, within our own lifetimes,

we've been reshaping the planet and we've done it on a scale

the likes of which we've never seen before.

'We survive by harnessing the Earth's resources.

'And the most important is water.'

-It's a nice day!

-Yeah.

HE CHUCKLES

-Can you give me a bit of a shove?

-Yes, certainly.

-Brilliant.

'At 23 miles long,

'Loch Ness is the largest body of fresh water in the UK.'

It's absolutely vast and very, very deep,

there is a lot of water in here

but, obviously, in terms of the total amount of water on the planet,

it's a tiny fraction of a drop

of the 1.4 billion cubic kilometres in total,

which sounds like a lot of water, but there's a catch.

'Only a tiny fraction of the water on Earth is drinkable.'

Right.

Now, I want you to imagine

that all the water in my bucket here represents all the water on Earth.

Now, most of that is seawater, salty seawater

and it's no good for humans to drink at all.

Now, if I put my hands in,

the water I can hold in my hands

represents all the freshwater on Earth, it's about 3%,

but most of that is actually tied up in ice or deep underground,

and it's very difficult for us to get to.

And if I let that go, just the water that remains on my damp hands

is the water that's available to us and it's hardly anything at all.

'There are 16 billion gallons of fresh water here.

'But not everyone can live near enough to use it as drinking water.'

And it's the same the world over.

We're surrounded by water,

but often it's the wrong sort or it's in the wrong place.

'One of our greatest challenges

'has been getting water to where it's needed.

'The Grand Canyon.

'And winding through it, the majestic Colorado River.'

What can I tell you about the Grand Canyon

other than it lives up to its star billing?

The cliffs are just stacked on top of each other

and the Canyon just plummets down seemingly for ever.

It's that powerful flowing water

that's sculpted the landscape so dramatically.

But in OUR search for water

we've transformed the planet in ways that are just as spectacular.

'Flying out of the Grand Canyon,

'you come across something you might not expect.

'A huge lake.'

This may look like a natural wonder,

but, in fact, it's man-made -

Lake Mead.

At 110 miles long,

it can hold a vast amount of fresh water.

It's one of the largest man-made lakes in the world.

And THIS is the structure that started it all - the Hoover Dam.

If anything can stop a river in its tracks, this can.

A seven million tonne curve of concrete

that transfers all the force of the water from Lake Mead

into the rock walls of the Canyon.

It's only ten o'clock in the morning,

and it's absolutely rammed packed with tourists,

people coming and driving over the Hoover Dam,

because it is box-office!

80 years on, it still has this magnetic draw to it.

You can see just how beautiful it is,

the way this concrete bowl sweeps down into the valley floor.

And it is one of the great American stories -

this was built in the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression.

And yet, it became this symbol of optimism,

as well as being one of the great engineering and science stories.

Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before.

220 metres tall and a staggering 370 metres wide,

apparently, it contains enough concrete to build a pavement all the way round the equator,

subject to planning permission, of course.

When it was built, it was the largest concrete structure on Earth.

Cocooned deep inside the dam is a mysterious, hidden world of tunnels.

'The biggest fear engineers faced

'was whether the dam would be strong enough.'

If you've ever worried about cracks in your plaster at home,

spare a thought for the builders of the Hoover Dam.

Obviously, they were working at the very limits of engineering,

so they were a little bit worried about cracks and the whole lot coming down.

And you can see, look, it's been somebody's job

to inspect these hairline cracks.

You can see a little one just coming down there.

And he's put a mark alongside just to highlight it

and he's initialled it, Mr OBS,

and he did that in 1943.

This is the end of the tunnel.

Now, I've got a little camera here, a little video camera,

and I wanted to just show you what it looks like looking back up.

'Up close, you can see the dam isn't one solid wall,

'but layers of interlocking blocks.'

If they had poured it in one lump,

it would have taken 100 years to harden,

because concrete gives off heat when it sets.

A bit of a problem in the intense desert heat.

So small sections, cooled with refrigerated pipes,

got the job done in just two years.

For the next two decades, the Hoover Dam was the tallest in the world.

A record breaker that showed

what a new generation of engineers could achieve.

We'd created a man-made lake,

so big it's a landmark as indelible as the Grand Canyon itself.

The Hoover Dam was a turning point.

But now, with so many dams across the globe that are even bigger,

we've harnessed one third of the world's entire river flow.

In fact, we've captured so much water,

we've altered the spin of the Earth -

it now rotates a fraction of a second slower.

'By harnessing water on this scale,

'we can live in some of the harshest places on Earth.

'Where there was once just wilderness,

'whole towns are springing up out of the sand.'

We can build entire cities...

'..like this one - Las Vegas.'

With Lake Mead on its doorstep,

Vegas has tripled in size in just 30 years.

There used to be just 8,000 people living here.

Now, there are two million.

And another 40 million visitors flock here every year.

All to one of the hottest places on Earth.

Whatever you think of Las Vegas, they are extraordinary, aren't they?

Just over 100 years ago, none of this was here at all.

Las Vegas, literally, was just a railroad stop.

That is it - desert.

35 years ago, none of the big hotels were here.

If you want a symbol of sheer speed of transformation,

Las Vegas wins hands down.

Damming rivers is one way to provide our water,

but what do you do when the rivers run dry?

Take China.

Most people live in the north of the country in cities like Beijing,

but droughts here are leaving rivers and lakes empty.

By contrast, the south, with fewer people, has six times more water.

So the Chinese are diverting water northwards

by building an artificial river.

Stretching around 700 miles,

it rivals some of the world's longest natural rivers.

The Shahe Aqueduct, a giant race canal

and, currently, part of the world's largest engineering project.

The idea for this project has actually been knocking around for quite a while now.

In fact, it was China's leader Chairman Mao who, in 1952, said,

"The south has a lot of water, the north a little,

"so, if possible, it's OK to lend a bit."

And here we are, 60 years later, with an answer to that -

it is possible.

It's going to be difficult, it takes a lot of human ingenuity,

but China is doing it.

To build on such a gigantic scale,

the Chinese are constructing the aqueduct on site

in separate 45-metre-long sections.

Each one starts off as a giant framework of steel rods.

It's fascinating just to stand here and see all this steel.

It's about 80 tonnes of it,

all welded together and wired together

to create this bird's-nest skeleton.

The whole structure is encased in concrete

and then moved into position.

This crane can lift a whopping 1,200 tonnes,

and each one of these sections weighs 1,200 tonnes,

so we are at maximum crane lifting capacity here.

No pressure, then, for 25-year-old crane driver Guang Ah Fang.

Building an aqueduct over such a long distance

isn't just about brute force.

It's worth remembering, of course,

there's no pumps here to pump the water down.

It's all completely reliant on gravity,

which means you have to engineer a very, very precise gradient in it from north to south.

And when you consider

that this whole thing is about 1,200 km long...

..that's some extreme plumbing!

Positioning is absolutely critical.

To keep the water flowing,

one end of each section has to be lower than the other

by exactly one centimetre.

The aqueduct is so long it won't be fully operational until 2030.

But, when it's complete, millions in northern China will benefit.

Harnessing water has led to the largest engineering project on Earth.

But it's our need to feed ourselves

that's really transforming the face of our planet.

A small plot of land on the local allotment

used to be a common way to provide fruit and veg for the family.

If you were prepared to spend a few hours a week tending it.

And, for some people, that's never changed.

Len Spaulding has been growing veg on his allotment for over 40 years.

-During the war, they was created because no-one had no food.

-Yeah.

And that's what they were made for.

Wow, these are some fine-looking carrots.

There we go, let's get this one, this is a monster.

I'm going to need a bigger fork.

Look at that!

That is the kind of carrot that's going to win prizes.

That surprised me more than it surprised you, quite frankly.

-It's a beauty, isn't it?

-This is a proper Bugs Bunny carrot.

-Yes.

What is it about growing your own veg that's so satisfying?

Well, it's the excitement of what's coming out.

I've got carrots here, asparagus there,

potatoes there, parsnips there,

plums, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries...

And I can't think of anything else.

THEY CHUCKLE

But we can't all grow our own food.

In the modern world, others tend to do it for us.

After all, it's become a fairly big operation.

Try to imagine just how much food we get through globally each day.

Every single day, we produce nearly a million tonnes of meat.

And nearly three million tonnes of grain.

The amount we produce has almost tripled in just 50 years.

It is absolutely mind-blowing

just how much food the human race now consumes,

so much so we've had to completely rethink the way that we produce it.

When we first started growing food,

our farming was dictated by nature.

But today we're controlling nature

and on a vast scale.

It may not look like it, but one place where that's happening

is right here, on the south coast of Spain.

I just love landscapes, love this...

just unforgiving and dramatic,

but, you know, not very productive.

You just come down, you can feel just how dry the soil is,

absolutely no moisture at all.

Obviously, you've got the kind of desert scrub plants

which kind of eke out a living.

This region is one of the driest parts of Europe.

On the face of it, it's a dust bowl.

But this arid landscape has become the site

of an agricultural revolution.

'In the 1950s,

'local farmers found that any crops they could actually get to take root

'were just blown down by the wind.

'Until they made a remarkable discovery.'

It's interesting just how much human innovation happened by chance.

Growers would put up this vertical plastic sheeting

in order to protect their crops from the wind.

But then they had this eureka moment when they realised that it had an added benefit -

in that it actually made their crops ripen earlier.

Protecting crops meant farmers could make the barren landscape fertile,

with the added bonus of an extended growing season.

It was the start of an amazing physical transformation.

'Farmers here had spotted an opportunity

'to change this arid region into a gigantic market garden.'

So, production on that scale,

you can forget about your greenhouse at the bottom of your garden,

you're going to need something a little bigger.

Inside this ginormous greenhouse,

there are a quarter of a million kilos of tomatoes.

But it's not just growing under cover that's the key to their success.

Nature itself no longer always gets a look in.

Lola Gomez Ferran has spent her working life

perfecting a very different way of growing tomatoes.

The variety, the name is "angel".

-Angel?

-Angel?

-Angel.

-Angel. It's very good.

What I notice here, you know, the interesting thing,

here we are, we're inside this huge greenhouse

and none of the tomato plants are actually growing in the ground.

Yes, normally they grow hydroponically.

Yeah. So just in grow bags,

like you might get in the garden centre at home.

And this isn't soil in here, is it, this is basically loft insulation.

Yes, the advantage is that

the system permits reuse all the water and all the nutrients.

Never contaminate underground.

It's interesting to know

that they get the water through these irrigation tubes,

and their nutrients, so water drips along here and at the bottom.

And the result is these beautiful tomatoes,

absolutely gorgeous.

'It's an industrial way of growing crops,

'a factory farm for vegetables.'

It is nice to think that,

when you buy your tomatoes from the supermarket

and it says "Product Of Spain,"

this is actually where they come from.

They can grow two entire crops like this one over the year.

But there's not just one big greenhouse.

There's quite a few.

'Which means there's really only one way to appreciate them.'

Keep running.

-From the air!

-Keep running, keep running.

Wow, we're up! That was great!

'It's a shimmering sea of greenhouses -

'the largest concentration in the world

'and a monument to the way we now produce food.'

That arid desert just drops off, suddenly there's a clean line

and then it just becomes white.

It is just like it's been snowing down here,

it's as if we're flying over a snowfield.

It is bizarre, like someone's, er...

covered the whole thing in clingfilm.

'Suddenly, we hit a pocket of rising air.'

Woo!

Agh!

Agh!

-Agh!

-This is the hot air from the plastic.

-Oh, man!

-What is it, the hot air from the plastic?

-Yeah.

Amazing!

You can just feel the warm air picking us up and carrying us,

exactly like a bird flies on a thermal -

warm air rising from all this plastic, carrying us up even higher.

Oh, just glorious.

'The wind and the heat is exactly

'what made growing crops here so difficult

'until all these greenhouses were built.

'As far as the eye can see,

'almost every corner of the land is covered,

'which makes our next move a little tricky.'

OK, we're coming into land.

Ooh, oh...

HE LAUGHS

'Luckily for us, acres of plastic makes for the perfect soft landing.'

This plastic-coated corner of the Costa Del Sol

has now become one of the most eye-catching spots...

..on the entire planet.

A quarter of all those tomatoes end up here, in the UK.

Londoners eat over half a million tonnes of fruit and veg a year,

enough to fill Trafalgar Square

over half-way to the top of Nelson's Column.

Of course, some of us need to eat a bit more than others.

My name's James, I'm a cycle courier.

I eat a lot, you know, you definitely have to eat a lot.

I need to keep fuelled to keep riding.

On an average day, I suppose it's about 50, 60 miles.

I burn a lot of calories throughout the day.

If you're constantly cycling, you can burn out,

and I have burned out before when the day is very hot

and you haven't hydrated enough, when you haven't eaten enough.

So you need to replenish.

I've got a very healthy appetite.

My girlfriend says, "How can you eat so much and not get fat?"

HE CHUCKLES

But it's not just James.

Today, the amount of food we eat is on the increase the world over

and our hunger for one particular kind is growing spectacularly.

Meat.

The average American eats 2,000 animals in their lifetime.

This moving mountain of steak is a little on the rare side.

Though we're not in Texas or anywhere in North America.

This rodeo is in a completely different continent.

We're in Brazil!

There are now rodeos like this all over Brazil.

And that's because the beef industry has exploded in just a few decades.

20 years ago, this country was importing most of its food.

Today, things are very different.

I'm not here to show why the Brazilians are obsessed with rodeo,

but because it's places like this that really show

how radically a nation can change, almost overnight.

It's 7am and these ranchers

are about to round up one of their herds.

But it's not just any herd.

Welcome to the world of the mega-farm.

This ranch alone has over 125,000 head of cattle.

But this is nothing compared to the country as a whole.

Today, Brazil has more cattle than people - over 210 million.

It's now the largest beef exporter in the world.

Perhaps the biggest key to the nation's success is its sheer size.

Brazil is vast. Almost all of Europe could fit inside it.

In the north of the country,

the irony is that a lot of space was created

because of the loss of a precious ecosystem.

Only a generation ago,

some of what's now farmland was rainforest.

Deforestation has cleared vast tracts of land.

Huge effort has gone into halting this.

But much of the new space has become farmland.

'This farm never was rainforest,

'but it demonstrates a different reason for Brazil's success.'

This is the magic ingredient.

In here, we've got...

..bull semen.

Brazilians are at the forefront of bovine genetics

and this stuff gets sold all round the world.

Through cutting-edge breeding programs,

farms like this have crossed native Brazilian breeds with Indian cattle

to produce cows that not only reproduce quicker,

but also cope with the hot climate.

'They have, in effect, created a "supercow".'

Wow, look at that! Oh!

'And I'm about to meet the latest addition to the herd.'

Oh! Look at you! Hi!

Hi, there. Oh, my God, he's gorgeous, isn't he?

This is Brazilian cow number two hundred and ten million and one.

Born just a few hours ago.

Welcome.

Can I hold?

Under there? Ah, oh...

Blimey! You're heavy!

You're heavy! Oh, wow, look at that!

What's that, nine pound? No, more than that.

You are heavy, little thing, aren't you?

Cute as he is, though, these cows are big, big business.

This farm specialises in breeding.

Apparently, there's 20,000 expectant mothers per month

just on this ranch.

That's a lot of calves.

You'd better go back to your mum.

'Brazilian cows can naturally give birth to around 15 calves.

'Using artificial insemination, they can now produce up to 60.

'It's specialising in calves that's made this farm such a success.'

She'll be all right. She'll be OK.

'It looks like I've made a new friend.'

I'm not your mother!

Come on, you want to... Come on, you want to go this way.

There you go!

Come on. You want to go over there.

Your mum's going to be worried about you.

We should leave them in peace.

We'll leave them... Leave them in peace now?

Thank you very much, thank you for letting me see that.

It was amazing, amazing.

Today, mega-farms have spread all over the world.

Russia,

America

and Australia,

all have farms that have grown to thousands of square miles.

Over 10% of the Earth is now used for agriculture.

That's equivalent to all of South America.

More than twice that is being used for grazing animals.

That's like all of Africa.

In fact, nearly 40% of the Earth's land surface

is devoted to producing food for us.

But to put a meal on our dinner tables we need something else.

Something we harvest from beneath our planet's surface.

Minerals and metals keep energy flowing

to our doorstep and beyond.

CHILDREN LAUGH

Every day in Britain,

millions of us kick-start the morning with toast and a cup of tea.

-Do you want some toast as well, Elliot?

-Yes, please.

But the most important meal of the day wouldn't be very hot

without a particular metal -

copper.

There's loads of it hidden away in all of our homes.

It's copper wires that channel the electricity that cooks our food.

OK, sit down.

Upstairs, Bonnie needs clean clothes.

Good girl, very good!

Should we go, then?

So, every day, millions of washing machines run in the UK.

Copper pipes take the water to the machine

and make the electric motors spin the drum.

In a world of entertainment on tap,

it's copper that brings the small screen to life.

In fact, we're so dependent on all this hidden copper in our daily lives,

we're now completely surrounded by it.

This miracle metal connects the modern world.

Which means just one thing...

..we keep needing more of it.

To fuel our ever-increasing demand for metal and minerals

we've had to push further and deeper into our planet.

Bingham Mine.

It produces enough copper every year

to replace all the wires in every home in America and Mexico.

Not surprisingly, it's the largest open-pit mine in the world.

On the way up here,

I saw a bumper sticker on one of the cars of one of the mine workers

and it said, "If you can't grow it, it's got to be mined."

And this right here kind of sums that whole thing up.

Everything that we use on the planet, everything we consume,

ultimately comes from here.

Not literally here.

The modern world relies on resources that come from underground.

Here, they've been mining for over 100 years.

The result is three miles wide

and, at nearly a mile deep,

it could swallow up the world's tallest building.

And this is what it's all about - this is copper in its rawest form.

And actually, when you look at it, it doesn't look like a whole lot,

and that's because the ore here on average is only about 0.6% copper.

But it's this low-grade ore that is the reason

that this place is so massive.

Seams of copper are so deep that they have to dig down for years

through waste rock to reach it.

For Matt Lengerich and his team, it's a waiting game.

This shovel will arrive at copper ore in roughly two or three years.

You've got to dig two or three years before you hit copper again?

No, we have to move waste rock for seven years.

He's already been doing it for four.

So seven years of getting rid of the waste,

that's before you're going to see copper again.

The giant diggers and trucks are just to take the rock away.

To get it out of the ground in the first place,

you need something with a little more oomph.

When you blast, is it very, very controlled

or is there a certain amount of fingers crossed

and hope it all goes...?

It's very, very controlled with a little bit of fingers crossed.

THEY LAUGH

Not too much fingers crossed, I hope. We'll be standing a long way that way.

'This may look small, but, as you know, size isn't everything.'

OK, ready?

Three, two, one...

Oh!

HE LAUGHS

That gives you a little ring in the ear.

Three blasts a day and 100 years of mining

have created the largest excavation in our history.

It's easy to forget that so much in the modern world comes from underground.

The minerals that keep our computerised world connected...

..and we use to build our cities.

And one resource above all others

that we use to power everything is our fuel.

Our man-made world needs an endless supply of energy,

which means we've gone to extraordinary lengths to get it.

We're just leaving a little harbour outside Nagasaki.

We're going to sail a couple of miles or so just out to sea

to a little island called Hashima.

'Locally, this little rocky outcrop is known as Battleship Island,

'and, though it may look like one,

'it's actually the remains of an entire town.'

This used to be the most densely populated piece of land on the entire Earth.

Population at its height - 5,000.

5,000 people used to live right there.

But this is no ordinary town.

None of these buildings would have been here at all without one thing -

coal.

'Hashima sat on top of a huge seam of it lying under the sea.'

Oh, my God.

Its residents were miners and their families.

Just 40 years ago, when this tiny island was crammed full of people,

it supported a vast coal mine

that helped fuel the mighty technological growth of Japan.

The modern world is literally built on coal, oil and gas.

You look around and it's kind of hard to imagine that this was a town,

with everything that a town had, you know,

apartment buildings, schools, hospitals.

Round the corner over there used to be a cinema.

This would have been a kind of market area with shops.

You would have shift-workers going to work and coming back exhausted.

We came to depend on fuel so much

that to get it we crammed an entire town on a rock

in the middle of the sea.

But the coal here began to run out.

Almost overnight, the miners returned to the mainland,

taking with them what little they could carry.

Our need for energy is insatiable

and demand is only ever going to increase.

Now, we're creating sustainable mega-projects

that harness a form of power that's never going to run out.

If you want to harness enough wind energy to power a town or a city,

you need to go where the wind is at its strongest.

And that's normally over open water like this,

simply because it's nice and flat,

and you don't have the land getting in the way to slow it up.

Which is why we're now turning the open sea into our power stations.

The largest offshore wind farm in the world

is rising from British waters.

This is the London Array, 20 miles from the Kent coast.

As I'm sure you can appreciate, getting these monsters out here

presents a whole host of engineering challenges.

Not least the wind itself,

the thing they're actually designed to harness,

makes the whole process of building them a complete nightmare!

'With the ever-present threat of stormy weather,

'it's hard to imagine a tougher construction site.'

With everything constantly moving, the wind going and the waves going,

you need somewhere solid to work from a solid base,

and this is the solution.

She's called Discovery,

a huge ship that can lift completely out of the water on giant stilts

to make a stable platform standing on the seabed.

Stacked on board are all the component parts

to build the giant turbines.

The most important are these blades.

They're engineered just like an aircraft wing.

And designed to capture as much energy as possible

from even light winds.

It is crazy to think that something this big, 60 metres long,

and, what's that, just over six feet in diameter,

can be driven by an eight-mile-an-hour wind.

That's how much energy is in the wind around us.

'Of course, something that's designed to catch the wind this well

'is a nightmare to build in windy weather.

'Today, for the team on board,

'there's nothing they can do but wait.'

Hi, Tony. Busy doing not a lot?

Yeah, the wind's too high at the moment, so we can't do any work.

So... How high is too high?

For blades that we're on now, that can be 11 metres per second.

11 metres per second.

Come with me, because there's a handy conversion chart there.

11 metres per second...which is 21 miles an hour.

I guess, given that we're in one of the windiest parts of the country,

building a wind farm...

Well, that's, yeah... It's a Catch 22, isn't it?

-You put them in a windy place, don't you?

-Yes.

THEY LAUGH

So I don't think we're going to get one in my shift.

-When's your shift end?

-I finish at six o'clock tonight. I don't think...

-Seriously?

-Yeah.

-Oh, man!

I don't think we're going to, but it can soon change.

And, lo and behold, a few hours later,

the wind does begin to drop and work can continue.

So this chap over here is co-ordinating the whole thing,

almost like a choreographer or a conductor.

It's an incredibly skilled operation,

but they make it look so easy.

Be in awe of the skill of these guys.

That's one down, two more to go.

On a calm day, they can install a whole turbine in 12 hours.

OK, we've got a bit of climbing to do today.

-Once you're attached... And you step off...

-Yeah.

-And off you go.

'I've decided to inspect the work a little closer.'

OK.

This is where the real climbing starts.

Oh.

Oh, man.

It's stiff.

Oh, wow! Look at this!

You can really understand why we're here

as you stick your head up through this hatch and you feel the wind.

And it's just quite awe-inspiring

seeing how enormous these turbine blades are.

When you're on the shore, they look so elegant and fragile

and, actually, they're just enormous.

I'm glad it's not too windy today. That's all I can say.

Each one of these turbines is a staggering 120 metres across -

that's the same as the London Eye.

Imagine 174 London Eyes, all spinning out here,

all generating power for us to use.

And each one of these turbines can power 3,000 houses...

something like that,

depending on whether you've left your power shower on.

And then, you multiply all that by 174

and you get a true sense of the scale of all of this.

This huge power station out here in the middle of the sea.

That's pretty awesome.

Being able to harness the wind on this scale

really could transform our energy future.

And you look out here,

it really is one of the marvels of the modern world -

a new landscape created by us.

Within a generation,

we've revolutionised the way

we harness our energy, our food and water.

As our population have grown, so too has our ambition.

We have entered an unprecedented age,

an age where we're transforming the face of the Earth as never before.

In order to thrive, we've become a force of nature.

Harnessing energy has powered our growth.

We've created incredible man-made landscapes.

We've shrunk our planet by moving faster and further.

THIS is the modern world we've engineered.

The place we call home has been reshaped within our lifetime.

And that incredible pace of change across the globe

has been driven by our ability to make giant leaps

beyond what we thought was feasible.

This combination of imagination, of ambition,

of creativity, of technology.

And, of course, our human achievements today

are drawing up the blueprints for the future.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd