- 6 months ago
Από το Big Bang στο Σήμερα (Deep Time History)
2016 | Επ. 3/3 | HD
Σε αυτήν τη σειρά, γκρεμίζουμε τα τείχη μεταξύ επιστήμης και ιστορίας για να αποκαλύψουμε πώς η ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας επηρεάζεται συχνά από γεγονότα από τα αρχέγονο παρελθόν. Αρχαία υπερκαινοφανή αστέρια, οι συγκρούσεις ηπείρων, ο σχηματισμός των μορίων, όλα αυτά διαμόρφωσαν διακριτικά την ιστορία όπως την ξέρουμε. Ο πολιτισμός μας και οι καινοτομίες, τα ταξίδια μας και οι μάχες δεν επηρεάζονται μόνο από τις αποφάσεις μας, αλλά και από τη φυσική, τη γεωλογία, τη βιολογία, τη χημεία – από δυνάμεις που είναι πολύ μικρές για να τις διακρίνουμε…ή τόσο παλιές που ο μόνος τρόπος για να κατανοήσουμε την επίδρασή τους είναι να αλλάξουμε τρόπο σκέψης.
Η Βιομηχανική Επανάσταση και η εμφάνιση του σύγχρονου πολέμου έχουν τις ρίζες στα βάθη των χρόνων – στη φυσική διαδικασία που εμπλουτίζει τη γη. Πώς τα προϊστορικά δάση συνδέονται με την εξέλιξη των ατμομηχανών και την εμφάνιση της σύγχρονης βιομηχανίας;
2016 | Επ. 3/3 | HD
Σε αυτήν τη σειρά, γκρεμίζουμε τα τείχη μεταξύ επιστήμης και ιστορίας για να αποκαλύψουμε πώς η ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας επηρεάζεται συχνά από γεγονότα από τα αρχέγονο παρελθόν. Αρχαία υπερκαινοφανή αστέρια, οι συγκρούσεις ηπείρων, ο σχηματισμός των μορίων, όλα αυτά διαμόρφωσαν διακριτικά την ιστορία όπως την ξέρουμε. Ο πολιτισμός μας και οι καινοτομίες, τα ταξίδια μας και οι μάχες δεν επηρεάζονται μόνο από τις αποφάσεις μας, αλλά και από τη φυσική, τη γεωλογία, τη βιολογία, τη χημεία – από δυνάμεις που είναι πολύ μικρές για να τις διακρίνουμε…ή τόσο παλιές που ο μόνος τρόπος για να κατανοήσουμε την επίδρασή τους είναι να αλλάξουμε τρόπο σκέψης.
Η Βιομηχανική Επανάσταση και η εμφάνιση του σύγχρονου πολέμου έχουν τις ρίζες στα βάθη των χρόνων – στη φυσική διαδικασία που εμπλουτίζει τη γη. Πώς τα προϊστορικά δάση συνδέονται με την εξέλιξη των ατμομηχανών και την εμφάνιση της σύγχρονης βιομηχανίας;
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:03Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:33Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
02:03Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
02:33Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
03:02Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
03:04Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
03:36Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
03:38Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
03:40Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
03:42Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:14Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:16Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:18Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:20Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:22Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:24Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:28Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
04:32Μετά την τελειογγελή της ορκογγελής της χρήσης, θα έρθει πόλετα από 100,000 χρόνια.
04:43Μετά, όταν οι φωτές τελειώσαν τελειώσαν,
04:49τελειώσαν πλήρες από το πλήρυμα στον πλήρμα,
04:53μακρινά τα 93 χωρίς της Ισόλας,
04:56από 8 στους 20 στους.
05:02Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
05:33These photons hit chlorophyll.
05:37Chlorophyll takes carbon dioxide and uses the energy of light
05:42and creates as a waste product oxygen
05:44and in the process creates organic chemicals that have energy stored in them.
05:53This, of course, is photosynthesis.
05:56For millions of years, it powers the trees of the world's first forest.
06:05These early trees have thin bark and shallow roots.
06:12Over the years, they fall, pile up and decay.
06:20Then, around a quarter billion years ago,
06:25tectonic plates that are always on the move lift and fold the land.
06:31The remains of the world's first forest are buried deep in the earth.
06:41Tectonic plates shift four million square miles of land mass
06:45more than 3,000 miles north, forming the continent of Europe.
06:55As glaciers advance and retreat,
06:58seas fall and rise.
07:02By 7,000 BC, what was once the northern coast of Europe
07:14is cut off by the sea.
07:17Britain, once a tropical land, is now a colder place,
07:34filled with a different kind of forest.
07:37New photon-powered trees like towering pines and sturdy oaks.
07:46Trees with strong, thick trunks.
07:52Which is why they were cut down.
08:00Over the centuries, forests all across England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales
08:05are cut down.
08:07and burn for fuel.
08:14When wood is heated,
08:17its atoms get agitated.
08:20Solid matter breaks down
08:22and the stored solar energy is released
08:25as fire.
08:30Medieval Britons don't know about photons,
08:33but they do know that if you want fire,
08:36you chop down trees.
08:48At the time of the Norman conquest in 1066,
08:52forests covered 15% of England.
08:57By the 18th century,
09:05almost half that forest is gone.
09:08But the trees aren't just disappearing to keep peasants warm in the winter.
09:17Trees are vital for war.
09:19A lot of timber has been used.
09:20The mighty oak trees, for example, to construct the enormous British Navy.
09:28The British Navy was responsible for significant deforestation in Britain.
09:32The largest warships each need 4,000 oaks.
09:41And between the end of the 16th century and the start of the 18th, Britain's fleet nearly triples in size.
09:47So, because of cold weather and war, by the 18th century, the people of Britain are facing a real energy crisis.
09:58They have to find something else to heat their homes with.
10:01But what?
10:02As it turns out, it's right beneath their feet.
10:06Remember the world's first forest?
10:11When it was crushed beneath the earth, the pressure heated it and transformed it.
10:19You have sediments that pile on top, creating pressure.
10:25And this pressure created chemical reactions inside the decaying plants.
10:31Those crushed and buried plants and trees turned into something new.
10:36And England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales are packed with the stuff.
10:40Something that looks like a rock, but isn't.
10:43Coal.
10:44A fossil of the first forest.
10:46They can be used for energy.
10:49A fossil fuel.
10:50Because, like wood, it burns.
10:53The key to the fact that we get our energy from fossil fuels goes back to photosynthesis.
11:05From a deep time perspective, coal is not just the fossilised remains of ancient plants.
11:12It's a packet of solar energy, frozen in time.
11:18And because the atoms of coal are more tightly packed together than atoms are in wood, a pound of coal has at least twice the energy of a pound of wood.
11:31So, at the beginning of the 18th century, the British realise they're standing on an ancient treasure trove of energy.
11:46Britain is so full of coal that early mines don't have to go that far down.
11:50In many cases, less than a hundred feet down.
11:53The trouble is, there's more than coal underground.
11:57There's water.
12:02Underground aquifers, constantly filled by rain or melted snow.
12:09With the stroke of a pickaxe, miners could set off a flood.
12:20Getting this new energy source could be a deadly challenge.
12:24So that's where the story could have ended.
12:29British miners and mine owners could have given up.
12:32The Industrial Revolution might have happened somewhere else, or not at all.
12:37But then, something amazing happened.
12:40And it happened in a kitchen.
12:42Look at this kettle.
12:47A lot of people in England do just that in the 17th and 18th centuries.
12:52As coffee and tea from far away places make boiling water a familiar sight in countless homes.
13:00One of these homes is in the town of Dartmouth.
13:03Where a man named Thomas Newcomen is said to have watched over and over the actions of his kettle on the fire.
13:18Inside the kettle, heat agitates the water molecules.
13:24They move apart as liquid changes to gas.
13:28The gas expands.
13:31But it's trapped inside the kettle.
13:37Struggling to escape the kettle,
13:41the gas moves the lid up and down.
13:45That's what Thomas Newcomen and others saw.
13:49Steam, something that isn't solid,
13:53can move solid objects.
13:58It may have been something like that.
14:01Boiling and scooping their own tea and coffee.
14:04That triggered the genius of these early Industrial Revolution inventors.
14:09We could trap the steam within some mechanism.
14:13We could use this to drive pumps to clear the water out.
14:18Thomas Newcomen creates a steam pump
14:22that removes the underground water from the coal mines.
14:27This makes the mines safer so the British can dig deeper, the more coal.
14:33The more steam power you have, the more coal you can dig.
14:38And the more steam power you can make from coal.
14:42From 1700 to 1850, British coal production increases more than 18 times.
14:51By the middle of the 18th century, another cattle watching Brit, a Scot named James Watt,
15:05transforms the steam pump into a steam engine that can be adapted to many uses.
15:14Like powering mills that grind grain or weave textiles.
15:17It's hard to overstate what an advance this was in using energy from the sun to power human work.
15:38Once, the only way to get work done...
15:41was through human muscles.
15:51Then as now, our muscles access solar energy through photosynthesis.
15:58We ate plants, or animals that fed on plants.
16:02In the agricultural revolution, we added animal muscle and increased our power.
16:13First, by about four times.
16:17And later, by breeding bigger draft animals up to ten times.
16:26But steam power was the real game changer.
16:29steam was stronger than animals.
16:36James Watt advertised his first engines as being ten times as powerful as the horse.
16:41Which is where we get the term horsepower.
16:46About a century after those early engines,
16:49the largest coal-powered steam turbine can increase human power a hundred thousand times.
16:55In the 18th and 19th centuries, work, production, and energy use make the leap into a new age.
17:12The textile industry is the first to be radically transformed.
17:22As steam-powered machines replace hand-weaving.
17:27Between the mid-1700s and mid-1800s,
17:30English cotton processing increases more than 29,000 times.
17:40From 1250 tonnes to 366 million tonnes.
17:45Other products also become industrialised.
17:48And Britain's mass-produced exports increase 500% in the first half of the 19th century.
17:53Before this, people were often making their own clothing, were growing their own food and so on.
18:02But mass production technology inside huge unhealthy factories becomes the norm.
18:09Your job is to stand at two square feet of space in front of a production line.
18:14You've lost all connection with the finished product.
18:20It's become this sort of mind-numbing, repetitive task that you do over and over again
18:25for 11, 12 hours a day, often under brutal conditions.
18:29This is the way the Industrial Revolution transformed work
18:32and in a sense enslaved people made them captive now to this new model of manufacturing.
18:45Replacing an old energy source, wood, with a new one, coal,
18:50has inadvertently unleashed a steam-powered revolution.
18:55From the perspective of deep time history,
18:57this is the harnessing of the physics of the universe.
19:00To create a new way of powering our civilisation.
19:06Triggering this pressure change takes the heat of a fire.
19:10And it turns out, the Earth's ability to sustain fire may be a very rare gift indeed.
19:21In order to create a fire, you have to have two ingredients.
19:25One is you have to have the basic fuel, that is, hydrocarbons that have energy stored in them.
19:33And you also have to have an oxidiser, like oxygen.
19:38And the combination of the two with a spark will cause a fire.
19:41So, no oxygen, no fire.
19:42Look at Titan, a moon of Saturn, with hundreds of square miles of methane lakes.
19:58methane's flammable, but those lakes won't burn.
20:04One, it's very cold, and second of all, there's no oxygen.
20:11We live on the only planet we know of, where we can use fire to, among other things, unleash the power of steam.
20:25But steam power needs a strong material to keep it contained.
20:34And the forces of deep time have provided that material.
20:37An element that formed with our planet.
20:40Part of the cosmic debris from a dead star.
20:42In fact, it's the debris that helps snuff out the star in the first place.
20:47When you wonder, where did the elements of the universe come from?
20:55You have to realise that they came from stars.
20:58Stars are like ovens.
21:02Nuclear powered ovens that bake elements.
21:06The larger the oven, the more elements you get out of it.
21:11Now, our sun is a rather small star.
21:13As a consequence, it is not hot enough to create the higher elements.
21:18Our sun can make helium and a few other light elements, but not much beyond that.
21:24A larger star, say eight or ten times the mass of the sun, can bake up a lot of elements like sulfur, chlorine, calcium and others.
21:35But the more it bakes, the more lighter elements fuse into heavier ones.
21:39And the more of its fuel the star uses up.
21:44The heavier an element is, the harder it is to cook.
21:50Finally, like a fire of coal or wood, the star uses up all its fuel.
21:58All its fuel.
22:00And what's left at the core of the star?
22:05The tremendous amount of iron.
22:10For a star of this size, iron is the limit.
22:17The star collapses, creating a final surge of energy.
22:20The oven explodes.
22:21It's an event known as a supernova.
22:31Everything in it is scattered for millions of miles.
22:37Until gravity starts collecting it and the remains of other exploded stars together.
22:43In a place like Earth.
22:47Which is what happened 4.6 billion years ago.
22:51Iron was part of the early planet as it formed.
22:56Much of our iron sank to the centre of the Earth.
22:59However, when the crust formed, the crust froze many of the elements in their position as they are today.
23:13So not all the iron settled to the centre.
23:16And that, plus impacts from iron rich asteroids early in our planet's history, is why 5% of the Earth's crust is made up of this one metal.
23:37Iron is stronger than copper.
23:40Stronger than bronze.
23:41Strong enough and heat resistant enough to keep steam power under control.
23:51Steam power controlled by iron made coal so valuable, so essential, that faster ways had to be found to move these frozen packets of ancient solar energy from the mines to the factories.
24:05At first, horses are employed to drag carts of coal along rails, but that's not fast enough.
24:14So horses are switched out for steam engines.
24:19And the railroad is born.
24:26Starting in the 1820s, trains are carrying every kind of product, as well as people, at speeds never before imagined.
24:33Consider this.
24:38In 2350 BC, Sargon of Akkad, history's first great conqueror, went to war at maybe 15 or 20 miles per hour.
24:49For 4,000 years, no one could go any faster.
24:54Not the Spanish conquistadors, or any king or soldier.
24:59But by the late 1800s, many passenger trains are hurtling ahead at up to 100 miles per hour.
25:03trains annihilate time and distance, so that economic centers, hundreds of miles apart, are only hours or days away.
25:21The age of discovery connected the world.
25:26The Industrial Revolution speeds up those connections and forges new ones.
25:31The railroad was critically important to industrialization in a number of ways.
25:40They facilitate nation building, nation unification, they facilitate trade and commerce in a way that was not possible before.
25:47For better or worse, industrialization had transformed work and business.
25:56It was about to alter the face of war.
26:00We see warfare on a scale not seen before with industrialization because we've got weapons that are far more efficient and far more murderous in a sense.
26:11The future of war arrives in 1861.
26:17The American Civil War has been called the first modern war.
26:26Hundreds of thousands of troops are handed mass-produced rifles and shipped to battlefields on coal-powered trains along more than 30,000 miles of iron rails.
26:36And along a branch of the Potomac River, a battle is fought that looks like science fiction.
26:41In the Civil War, both the Union and Confederate capitals stand on outlets of the Chesapeake Bay.
26:50Control of these waterways is a matter of life and death for both sides.
27:00In 1862, the Confederate Navy salvages a sunken Union steamship, the Merrimack,
27:07and armours it from stem to stern with iron plates.
27:14She's one of only a handful of ironclad ships in the world.
27:20Coal powers the ironclad into battle.
27:27In vulnerable to cannon fire, the Merrimack destroys two Union ships and disables a third
27:35in the waters of Hampton Roads.
27:41But on the morning of March 9th, 1862, as the Merrimack closes in for the kill,
27:50she's confronted by another coal-powered ironclad.
27:55The Monitor.
27:59Built by the Union in response to early news of the Merrimack,
28:02The Monitor is the most original vessel in the world at that time.
28:08As people from north and south watch on opposite banks, the two ironclads clash.
28:16After four hours, the Merrimack has driven off.
28:26It's a strategic victory for the Union.
28:31But that isn't what makes the world sit up and pay attention.
28:37This is.
28:39One ironclad defeats three wooden warships in quick succession.
28:43But when two ironclads fight it out for four hours, there isn't a single fatality on either side.
28:48The world understood that the wooden warship, after 3,000 years, was suddenly yesterday's news.
28:58No more floating forests.
29:01Iron and steel will rule the waves.
29:04And with metal navies, the industrialized nations conquer the world.
29:10In the Age of Discovery, Europeans conquered overseas countries for gold and silver.
29:22With the Industrial Revolution, there's even more incentive to colonize.
29:28In the 19th century, one of the reasons Belgium colonizes the Congo is for its coal.
29:33And France conquers Algeria in part for its iron.
29:39There's no doubt that one of the great motivators of the Age of Imperialism, if we can call it that,
29:44is to acquire resources all around the world,
29:47and also to acquire captive markets to sell their manufactured products back to.
29:52While the Industrial Revolution spurs wars of conquest around the globe,
29:56The second part of that revolution is about to begin on a country road in the United States.
30:06It involves a steam engine,
30:12and a teenage boy who will come to represent the Industrial Age.
30:16This is young Henry Ford.
30:17And his story is a perfect example of the surprising connections between apparently unrelated events in history.
30:32Because he wouldn't be here in Michigan in 1876 if not for something that happened 300 years earlier in the mountains of Peru.
30:41So the potato in South America gets exported to Europe in the 16th century.
30:52It's a good entry-level crop for poor farmers, which is why it gets established so effectively in Ireland.
30:59But in the 1840s, blight devastates Ireland's potatoes.
31:09Two million Irish starve.
31:13And another million flee for foreign shores.
31:16One poor Irish farmer, William Ford, ends up in Dearborn, Michigan.
31:27Where in 1876, his 13-year-old son Henry first sees a steam engine moving on its own iron wheels.
31:36Henry Ford is inspired to someday build a moving machine of his own.
31:42But as Ford grows up, he realizes that his machine won't run on coal.
31:49Coal was beginning to seem old-fashioned and inefficient.
31:56Despite coal-powered steam engines being central to the Industrial Revolution,
32:02at least 80% of their energy was wasted.
32:12In coal-driven steam trains, as little as 5% of the power goes to the wheels.
32:17For the sort of, what we might call almost the second wave of the Industrial Revolution, a new sort of form of energy is required.
32:30There was a new form of energy available.
32:36Like coal, it's something the planet had been building up since the time of the dinosaurs.
32:41But while coal is basically crushed plants, this resource is mostly what's left of small marine creatures like plankton called diatoms.
32:51Like plants, they store solar energy.
32:55And when trillions of dead diatoms are crushed and heated by millions of years of underground pressure,
33:01something new is created. Petroleum.
33:03And starting in the mid-1800s, a by-product of petroleum, oil, gives the Industrial Revolution the energy boost it needs.
33:23Just as coal is more densely packed with energy than wood, so petroleum is more densely packed than coal.
33:28In fact, it has around 50% more energy per pound.
33:35Adding to its efficiency, it's more easily stored and can be transported through pipes instead of by train.
33:42With oil, a ship's boiler can be smaller, but the ship can go farther.
33:47And the oil product gasoline is the essential ingredient for a European invention that spreads around the world.
34:03The internal combustion engine.
34:07It takes 90 tons of crushed diatoms and other fossils to make one gallon of gasoline.
34:18Ford doesn't invent the internal combustion engine or the automobile.
34:23But as gasoline-powered cars will dominate the early 20th century and put an end to humanity's 3,000-year dependence on the horse for personal mobility.
34:40But the automobile would be almost useless without another material.
34:44Another vital resource for the Industrial Revolution was the development of rubber.
34:57Rubber is essentially a form of tree sap.
35:00And like so many useful molecules, it evolved as a nasty-tasting defence mechanism for plants against predators.
35:10People eventually realise, particularly after it's balkanised through this particular process,
35:17that it has tremendous applications to industry in various ways.
35:20The internal combustion engine makes the automobile possible, as long as it can ride on rubber tyres.
35:30Imagine going on a road trip with steel rims.
35:35Not a pleasant thought, is it?
35:38Even more important, rubber molecules block one of nature's most powerful forces.
35:46Electricity.
35:47So rubber can be wrapped around wires and power cables.
35:54The industrial world becomes electrified.
35:58Thanks to the molecule that evolved as a defence mechanism in plants.
36:08By looking at things in a new way,
36:11by using natural resources that have been waiting under our feet for eons,
36:14like gifts wrapped up by deep time history,
36:18humans changed the world in two short centuries.
36:21Newcomen's first practical steam pump was built in 1712.
36:25Wind the clock forward to 1914, and what do we see?
36:29A world where Henry Ford has transformed the 19th century factory floor
36:39into the 20th century assembly line.
36:44A new combination of human and mechanical energy that will soon increase Ford's output ten times.
36:50Meanwhile, annual coal production has increased from 3 million tons to 300 million tons.
37:03And annual oil production has gone from nothing at all to close to 400 million barrels.
37:08And despite brutal working conditions and an increasingly polluted environment,
37:18by the beginning of the 20th century life expectancy is rising in the industrialised world.
37:23The population of Europe triples since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
37:37But this industrialised Europe is lurching towards a war the likes of which the planet has never seen.
37:43A war that hinges on another product of the deep past.
37:53Nitrates.
37:56A key ingredient in gunpowder and explosives,
38:00often created by explosive blasts of lightning.
38:02Electrical discharge is five times hotter than the surface of the sun.
38:18And when lightning strikes, it creates a chemical reaction in the air.
38:25Most of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen molecules, N2.
38:29But lightning, which is an electrical discharge,
38:33separates the nitrogen molecules into the individual atoms.
38:37Nitrogen atoms love to combine with oxygen.
38:41And they form nitrates.
38:45The nitrates then get dissolved in the water droplets in the air.
38:49They come raining down.
38:51They get fixated into the soil.
38:53That then gets used by plants.
38:55Amazingly, the same nitrates that can blow things up also fertilise the dirt where plants grow.
39:05So, in a sense, we owe our existence, because we eat plants, to lightning.
39:12In the early 20th century, industrial nations seeking fertilisers and explosives looked to distant deserts.
39:27Where ancient storms have left huge amounts of nitrate-rich deposits.
39:36Leaving behind this.
39:40Caliche.
39:42The mineral with the planet's highest natural concentration of nitrates.
39:45In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Germany's explosives industry depends on Caliche from the Atacama Desert in Chile.
39:58The British Navy moves swiftly to blockade Chile, cutting off Germany's supplies.
40:03But Germany has an industrial age solution.
40:07The Kaiser's army turns to science.
40:10And a patriotic chemist named Fritz Haber.
40:13One of the most important individuals of the 20th century.
40:17Haber had recently done something really extraordinary.
40:21He found a way to use nitrogen in the air and ammonia to create artificial nitrates.
40:31The basis for a century of synthetic fertilisers that revolutionised agriculture.
40:38Applying industrial technology, including industrial fertilisers and so on,
40:43to increasing food productivity around the world to try and bring an end to poverty,
40:47or at least alleviate that somewhat.
40:48Haber's goal is to feed the world.
40:53But the German High Command knows that his artificial nitrates can be used to kill people.
41:01Without artificial gunpowder, Germany might have had to surrender within months.
41:08Thanks to Haber, the war can go on for four years.
41:12This isn't Haber's only contribution to the war effort.
41:20He also uses his skills as a chemist to develop the defining weapon of the First World War.
41:31Poison gas.
41:32Poison gas.
41:35Poison gas.
41:48Poison gas!
41:50Poison gas.
41:52Poison gas.
41:53αλλά ο κόσμος κλάρα, ως χημός, είναι εξαιρετικότητα.
42:03Μετά από τη στιγμή από την πρώτη φορά,
42:08κλάρα χρειάζει η ζωή.
42:12Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
42:42Τanks, Airplanes, Troop Transport Vehicles, Submarines and Zeppelins.
42:49In just half a century after the Civil War, weapons have become far more destructive and energy intensive.
42:59One artillery shell flies over no man's land with a thousand times the energy of a bullet at Gettysburg.
43:06It's an industrial age war in every sense, even the choice of battlefields.
43:15For example, the German army is determined to occupy and control the southern part of Flanders because it's the source of 80% of France's coal.
43:27A lot of the strategic decisions that are being made during these wars are decisions to either acquire resources or cut off potential enemies from being able to acquire these resources.
43:4117 million dead, soldiers and civilians. Maybe twice that number wounded, including my own grandfather.
43:52In a way, those deaths are as much a part of the Industrial Revolution as the First World War.
43:58The idea of industrial progress survived the war, but just barely.
44:07Science and technology had been used by Fritz Haber and others to devastate a generation.
44:16Soon, industrialized warfare would reach frightening new heights in the Second World War.
44:30Planes and tanks rolled off assembly lines in staggering numbers.
44:35There were new technologies from radar to rockets.
44:38Both sides use Ford's industrial practices to make weapons production as efficient as possible.
44:47Both sides use harbors artificial nitrogen to make explosives.
44:54And another raw material created by deep time is turned into the ultimate weapon of war.
45:08Remember how supernovas create iron?
45:13The remnants of supernovas can create something even more amazing.
45:21You start with a supernova.
45:25After the star explodes, what's left? The corpse.
45:30The stellar corpses are called neutron stars.
45:35With the immense mass of a sun condensed into an object no bigger than Manhattan Island.
45:43And every now and then, in the depths of space, these superdense objects meet.
45:50When two neutron stars collide, you get a tremendous explosion, which we call a gamma ray burst.
45:56And in this explosion, very heavy elements like uranium can be produced by nuclear reactions.
46:14Like iron, uranium was part of the Earth as it formed.
46:19An element packed with three million times the energy of coal.
46:23President Truman called the weaponization of atomic energy a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.
46:37As for Fritz Haber, he died before the Second World War began, but his legacy lived on.
46:48Haber had helped develop a pesticide called Zyklon B,
46:53which was used after his death to murder millions of Jews,
46:58including some of Haber's relatives.
47:03And yet Haber's nitrogen formula, for which he shared the Nobel Prize,
47:11helped feed millions and then billions.
47:14And then billions.
47:19At least 40% of the people alive today directly owe their lives to the food grown with artificial fertilizer.
47:26More than that, 80% of the nitrogen in the tissues and muscles of everyone on Earth today
47:36came from food grown with Haber's process.
47:40Haber's name isn't as well known as Henry Ford's.
47:51But his influence on humanity has been at least as great.
47:56For good and ill.
47:58Their legacies and the legacy of the Industrial Revolution are still all around us.
48:12Think about this.
48:14Between the agricultural revolution more than 10,000 years ago
48:18and the eve of the Industrial Revolution,
48:19human numbers increased from 5 million to almost a billion.
48:24But per capita wealth, the wealth available to each human had barely increased at all.
48:30And then, an energy revolution.
48:33By the outbreak of World War I, per capita GDP had increased by 250%.
48:39And today, 7 billion humans.
48:43But with an average wealth per person, that's 10 times that of the pre-industrial world.
48:49That's why they call it an industrial revolution.
48:53Because it changed everything.
48:58You could say that the Industrial Revolution started when 18th century Europeans needed a new form of energy
49:05and found it in natural resources that had been there forever but could suddenly be used.
49:10But the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible if not for the subatomic particles at the heart of the sun.
49:23The ancient forests that were turned into storehouses of solar energy.
49:28And the metal that helped kill a star.
49:35And gave life to cars, ships and buildings.
49:41Stages of the multi-billionaire assembly line of deep time history.
49:46The first assembly line of deep time history.
49:49STAGUIRS
49:54STAGUIRS
49:58STAGUIRS
50:02Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
50:32Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
Comments