42 – The Answer to Almost Everything

What if the world were different than you had always believed? The new knowledge series 42 promises surprises and entertainment, a clever, non-standardized train of thought, and fresh visuals. Each new episode leaves you eagerly awaiting the twist, the clever idea, the witty animation, the allegory... As children, we all wondered whether we could dig our way through the Earth. If we started digging in Paris and kept going straight down, we would end up in the ocean 12,700 kilometers away, just off the coast of New Zealand. But it's not that simple. Deep-earth explorers from Germany, France, and Italy have shown us that exploring the layers of the Earth is hard work. Drilling is expensive and technically demanding, emphasizes Ulrich Harms, head of research drilling at the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP). Rock or ice cores are our Earth's archives, enabling us to document climate change, for example. And no matter where researchers drill, they find something new. Deep beneath us, there is a habitat: the microorganisms may not be as fantastical as in Jules Verne's “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” but the depths are teeming with life. “We are dealing with a global ecosystem that we cannot see, but it is there,” says Jens Kallmeyer from the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam. These underground survivalists still hold many mysteries for geomicrobiologists. Fabrizio Nestola, a mineralogist at the University of Padua, works with the deepest intact material we can hold in our hands from the Earth's interior. He researches so-called super-deep diamonds; more precisely, he is interested in the mineral inclusions within them. And to get to them, he sometimes destroys a gemstone – with astonishing results.