Planets are now being discovered outside Earth's solar system on a regular basis, and these strange new worlds are forcing scientists to rewrite the history of how the Sun and the planets, satellites, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets that orbit it came into being. This programme reveals that far from a simple story of stable objects orbiting a star, the development of the solar system was a potent combination of hellfire, chaos and planetary pinball that makes it somewhat of a miracle that Earth was created at all.