Building the Future is a landmark series from the Discovery Channel about humankind's phenomenal ingenuity in engineering and shaping the world around us.

Each program focuses on a simple human need - shelter or water, energy or safety - and explores how that basic requirement has led to some of the most incredible, awe-inspiring achievements of our species.

We will take the viewer on journeys around the globe to see the projects that seem to defy the laws of physics or constraints of climate. And we will move through time to marvel at what was achieved centuries, even millennia, ago by our ancestors.

However epic the scale of construction, however mind-boggling the technological statistics, humans are the heart. We will see every project through a personal lens - an archaeologist uncovering an ancient wonder, an engineer grappling with present-day problems and dangers, a designer dreaming of the future.

And we will never forget that nature has a habit of fighting back - the possibility of failure is always present, and the higher we build, the harder we fall. This is not just a story of success ... Our planet has often brutally let us know that we have overstepped the mark.