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00:00Many of the world's greatest stories begin with a journey, a quest to answer life's most intimate
00:12questions. Where do we come from? Why are we here? From the dawn of time all cultures have
00:23created stories to help explain the ultimate nature of things. And perhaps a new story is
00:29emerging in our time, one grounded in contemporary science and yet nourished by the ancient religious
00:36wisdom of our planet. What if the universe, even the earth itself, has its own unique story to tell,
00:46one in which we play a profound role?
01:16We're on the Greek island of Samos, just a mile off the coast of Turkey. We could tell
01:25the story of the universe anywhere. Each place would offer its own unique possibilities for
01:30the telling. But we chose Samos because it's one of the great crossroads of human history.
01:35Europeans, Asians and Africans have all made their way here. And by telling the story on an island
01:42surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea, we will be reminded that we live on this shining planet,
01:48sailing through the great ocean of the universe.
01:56And there's another reason we have come to Samos, and that is because
01:592600 years ago, Pythagoras was born here. Pythagoras, a mathematician and philosopher,
02:06was one of the first humans to realize that the harmonies and relationships in the universe
02:11could be given expression using numbers. The current of thought he generated led eventually to all
02:19of modern mathematical science. He was also a great teacher. In fact, legend has it that he invented
02:29the word philosophy, a love of wisdom.
02:40We'll spend a day here on Samos. Before the clock strikes midnight, we will have recounted the great
02:46events of our 14 billion year cosmic evolution. Our immense journey told in a single day on one of Earth's magical islands.
02:59How did it all start? An awesome question, certainly. But it appears there really was a beginning.
03:08Some scientists refer to this as the Big Bang. I like to call it the Great Flaring Forth. Imagine the universe
03:16beginning like this.
03:1714 billion years ago, everything in the universe, all the bright matter of the stars and galaxies,
03:29as well as all the dark matter no one has ever seen. All of it existed in a single point,
03:36so energetic it was trillions of degrees hot. Instantly, this micro universe rushed apart even faster than the speed of light.
03:48The discovery that the universe has expanded and is still expanding is one of the greatest of human history.
03:59The common understanding had been that the universe is simply a vast space, a vast space in which things existed.
04:05Large things like galaxies and small things like atoms. Scientists knew that matter changed form in the universe,
04:12but everyone assumed that the universe as a whole was not changing. But no. The universe is changing,
04:20and has changed dramatically. The universe has a story, a beginning, a middle where we are now,
04:29and perhaps in some far distant future, an end.
04:40In the 1920s, the cosmologist Edwin Hubble trained his 100-inch telescope at the night sky.
04:48He was trying to determine if our Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe.
04:52Not only did he discover the universe is filled with galaxies, he also determined that all of them are rushing away from each other.
05:04With Hubble's work, humanity learned that the universe began with a massive explosion
05:09that has been carrying the galaxies apart for billions of years.
05:14Another special quality about the universe is the rate of expansion.
05:26If the rate of expansion had been slower,
05:30even slightly slower,
05:34even a millionth of a percent slower,
05:39the universe would have re-collapsed immediately.
05:41That would have been it.
05:44After a million years, the universe would have imploded upon itself and formed a massive black hole.
05:52On the other hand, if the universe had expanded a little more quickly,
05:57even slightly more quickly,
06:01even, calculations show, one millionth of one percent more quickly,
06:06the universe would have expanded too quickly for structures to form.
06:13It would have simply exploded.
06:16There would have been no galaxies, no structure, no life, nothing but dust for all time.
06:24So what we've discovered is that we're living in a universe that is expanding at exactly the rate
06:29necessary for life and structure to come forth.
06:34It could be then that even though we can't call the early universe alive,
06:40we can understand it as life-generating.
06:45One of the physicists who is reflecting on this is the celebrated Freeman Dyson.
06:50And he mused that the more he reflected on the structures of the early universe,
06:58the more he became convinced that in some sense,
07:01the universe must have known from the very beginning that life was coming.
07:05The light from the beginning of time has been traveling for 14 billion years.
07:18Meanwhile, life has been evolving.
07:22With the recent emergence of advanced technology,
07:25we were at last able to see the story these photons tell
07:29about the birth of the universe and where we ultimately come from.
07:35The first day of creation and wandering around here, you feel like the first person.
07:48Inevitably, humans would ask, what gave birth to all of this beauty?
07:53What was the form of creativity that brought this forth?
08:00Consider galaxies.
08:01What brought the galaxies forth?
08:04You know, even a century ago, this is hard to imagine.
08:08We didn't know if there were two galaxies in the entire universe.
08:11That was the main focus of attention among scientists.
08:14Now we know there are a hundred billion, maybe even a trillion galaxies.
08:20What is the creativity that brought forth a trillion galaxies?
08:24We know there are a million galaxies in the entire universe.
08:29Let's consider our own Milky Way galaxy.
08:33It's a galaxy with huge spiral arms.
08:36Now when we first began to discover galaxies, we thought maybe these spiral arms were composed of
08:43physical matter. But actually, it's much more interesting.
08:46The arms are actually waves that are passing through the galaxy.
08:51They're called density waves. And as they pass through clouds of hydrogen and helium,
08:55they ignite star birth.
09:00That's the way to picture the Milky Way galaxy.
09:02Not so much as a thing, but rather as an activity.
09:07It's an ongoing activity of bringing forth stars. We live in the midst of this intense creativity.
09:21Come into this little church. I want to show you something.
09:23The ceiling, as you can see, is filled with stars. The same is true of most of the churches on the island of Samos.
09:37The ancient Greeks, like Pythagoras, thought the stars were alive, even divine.
09:43Throughout history, every culture has been stunned by the presence of stars in the vastness of the night sky.
09:49So deeply moved by the majesty emanating from the brilliance of the stars,
10:02we have built our lives around them. We've even organized entire civilizations upon their beauty and order.
10:08Here's the essence of the universe story. The stars are our ancestors. Out of them, everything comes forth.
10:22Stars are dynamic entities. They're born, they develop, they even die.
10:29Star birth occurs when gravity squeezes together a cloud of atoms so tightly that nuclear fusion ignites in the center.
10:38In the process, hydrogen fuses into helium.
10:42This nuclear energy expands outwards and opposes gravity.
10:48So stars represent an amazingly creative balance between the powers of gravitational collapse and nuclear explosion.
10:56And once a star's nuclear fuel is spent, there's nothing left to prevent gravity from collapsing inwards, causing the death spiral to begin.
11:07This super concentrated dot of matter, which we call the supernova, explodes outward with the power of 100 billion stars.
11:18And as it expands, it creates all of the elements, phosphorus, oxygen, carbon, gold.
11:28These are spewed out into the Milky Way galaxy.
11:31And then the whole process starts again.
11:34They drift as a cloud, and then they collapse, give birth to a star, the earth.
11:41It's by this stupendous process that we can say the stars are our ancestors.
11:47It's just such an amazing discovery.
12:08The carbon atoms of this beet and of the lettuce and of, you know, our brains, our skin, all of it passed through an intense explosion of a star.
12:20In pondering the source of the sun's power, we can now reflect on something no earlier humans could know.
12:31The sun is converting 4 million tons of its mass into energy every second.
12:39All of life feeds on the roaring energy of the sun.
12:44Our solar system then is a self-energizing room of creativity.
12:48And all of this had its start in a cloud of dust.
13:18It was really difficult for humans to realize that we live on a planet circling a star.
13:29I mean, we were here for hundreds of thousands of years before Aristarchus, 2,000 years ago,
13:35right here on Samuels realized we are spinning around the sun.
13:40That was such an amazing insight that it vanished, actually.
13:46And it wasn't until Copernicus discovered it again in the 16th century
13:50that humans really began to absorb the fact that we were on this planet.
13:59Let me use these vegetables to explain our solar system.
14:03So here we have the sun, this cabbage as the sun.
14:06Now, actually, if this were to be in scale,
14:10this cabbage would have to be a million times the size of this pepper.
14:14Budgetary considerations made that impossible, so you just have to use your imagination.
14:18And what we've learned in the 20th century is about the composition of the planets.
14:24First, we have the large planets.
14:27So we have Jupiter here, and we have Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
14:32These are large enough to hold on to all the lighter elements so that they actually are gaseous.
14:43Too small to be a star, but yet too large to be solid.
14:49The other kind, then, we have indicated here with these rocks.
14:52So we have Mercury, then we have Venus, we jump over to Mars.
14:57These are the rocky planets, most of which are solid.
15:04But there's one special rocky planet.
15:07One that's not too small, and not too big.
15:11One that's not too hot, and not too cold.
15:14One that's not exactly solid, but not exactly liquid.
15:19We call it home.
15:27Earth is very much like an egg.
15:29The core of the Earth is like the yolk.
15:31The mantle of the Earth is like the egg white.
15:34And the crust of the Earth is like the egg shell.
15:37What happens is that, early on, when the Earth is in a molten state,
15:42all of the really heavy elements like iron and nickel sink into the core.
15:47And then the elements like magnesium form this outer layer around the core, the mantle.
15:52The crust is only 10 to 50 miles thick, and that's the only solid part of Earth.
15:59All the rest is in motion.
16:05Plumes of molten rock will rise up from the mantle and harden into plates that form the crust.
16:12As these plates slide around the surface of Earth, they collide and crumple into majestic mountain ranges.
16:18Or they are forced back down, where they melt and sink toward the center of Earth.
16:25This discovery, which originated with Alfred Wegener, is called plate tectonics,
16:30and is one of the greatest of history.
16:34Earth became encircled by great tidal oceans and held by a thin layer of atmosphere.
16:40A churning, volcanic Earth could now bring forth the next wonder of existence.
16:49The living cell.
16:50How are we going to tell the story of life?
17:08How did it all begin?
17:10What theory shall we offer to explain this?
17:12The simple truth is that no one knows with full certainty.
17:18But even though the detailed explanation still eludes us, scientists have begun to approach the whole
17:23question of life from a radical new perspective, that of self-organization.
17:29You see, during the modern period, we thought of the world as machine-like, and then life was an accident.
17:35But now, with the work of a number of chemists, notably Ilya Prigogine, who won a Nobel Prize for this work,
17:42we are beginning to discover the act of patterning in matter itself.
17:47It's intrinsic to matter.
17:52From this new perspective, life is not an accident.
17:55Life is inevitable.
17:56A planet reaches a certain complexity of its matter, and then life blossoms form, quite naturally.
18:06Consider whirlpools.
18:09This spiral swirling action can appear anywhere, so long as there is a body of liquid moving water.
18:17It is not the water itself that endures as a spiral, because the water molecules are constantly flowing in and out of the whirlpool.
18:24It is rather the emergent dynamic structure that endures.
18:39Such is the nature of life.
18:42The universe began as a great outpouring of cosmic breath,
18:45cosmic energy, that then swirled and twisted and complexified,
18:49until it could burst forth into flowers, and animals, and fish, and all of these elegant explosions of energy.
18:58But it's not just energy.
19:00And it's not just living energy.
19:02This is energy that is aware.
19:04By awareness or sentience, we mean something that is more than what takes place in the realm of elementary particles,
19:14and yet less than full human consciousness.
19:18So where does such awareness arise?
19:22Some biologists are beginning to speculate that awareness has its foundation
19:27in the very self-organizing dynamics of the universe.
19:30For cell biologist Ursula Goodenhoff, this awareness is a kind of primitive discernment,
19:38and it reveals itself especially in the membrane of each cell,
19:42that thin, skin-like layer that covers every cell.
19:46If we had a microscope for eyes, we could see it all happening right here in these tide pools.
20:02There are millions of cells are swarming about, and they're encountering molecules over and over again.
20:08And with every encounter, discernment emerges.
20:11Why? Because a decision has to be made, an intelligent decision.
20:17Now, up on the cliff over here, there's an ancient castle that will help me explain.
20:25This church, which is called Metamorphosis, is nearly a thousand years old.
20:29Above it is a castle that once guarded entrance into the magical Potami Valley.
20:34The castle was built to do what membranes do.
20:37Let your friends in, keep your enemies out.
20:47The ongoing creativity of the universe is seen in the complex development of life itself.
20:53After it had circled the sun for hundreds of millions of years,
21:01Earth's most primitive organisms developed molecules that would resonate with the sun.
21:08How are we to picture this process involving Earth and sun bringing forth photosynthesis?
21:14As an engineering project?
21:17I guess.
21:19But try a new metaphor.
21:21Imagine two lovers longing for each other.
21:25What is it they truly desire?
21:30The relationship is charged with energy and promise.
21:34There's the sun exploding with brilliance.
21:37There's the earth, basking in the sun's rays.
21:45But Earth is not passive.
21:48Earth's systems attune to the sun,
21:51changing their molecular structures in order to draw in light and convert it to food.
21:56As the complexity of life deepens, entwinement itself also deepens.
22:06How are we going to tell the story of the living Earth?
22:21In particular, how are we going to tell the story of Earth to our children?
22:25This is especially important because in the last couple centuries,
22:32we have learned more about the Earth than in perhaps the previous 100,000 years.
22:37So the question is, how are we going to convey that, the essence of that, to the next generation?
22:45One thing is completely clear.
22:48The Earth is very different than what we thought.
22:50The Earth is not a platform. It's not a background.
23:01In fact, the great discovery is this.
23:06Life doesn't exist on top of the Earth.
23:09Life is a partner to the oceans, to the atmosphere, to the land.
23:15For instance, if we look at the atmosphere, it is 21% oxygen.
23:22This makes us unique among all the known planets.
23:27The only reason we have oxygen in our atmosphere is that life is pouring it forth each day.
23:34So the very composition of our air reflects the fact that life is here.
23:38In that sense, life is woven into the atmosphere.
23:47But an even more radical hypothesis is beginning to emerge in the minds of some scientists.
23:54Perhaps Earth is not only an integrated system.
23:59Perhaps Earth somehow maintains itself so that life can flourish.
24:03Consider temperature.
24:08Life only exists in a very narrow band of temperature.
24:12So something like this temperature has been true of Earth for 4 billion years.
24:19Now, scientists originally thought this was because the Earth just happened to be 93 million miles away from the Sun.
24:26But during the 1950s, we learned about the fusion processes taking place in stars.
24:32And so now we know the Sun's temperature has increased by over 25% over the last 4 billion years.
24:43Which means, somehow, Earth has had to adapt itself to maintain that stable, narrow band of temperature.
24:52How?
24:53We know some of the details.
24:56Early Earth had a thousand times the carbon dioxide as present-day Earth.
25:00So during that time, the Earth's system has drawn the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
25:07forming, for instance, the shells of marine algae.
25:10And then when the marine algae die, the shells go to the bottom of the ocean.
25:13So more and more carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere, which enables the Earth to cool down while the Sun heats up.
25:21But the question returns, is all of this being organized by the Earth as a whole so that life could flourish?
25:30If that's the case, then the atmosphere is not just stuff.
25:37It's something like a membrane.
25:40And we are not living on an Earth.
25:42We are actually participants in a vast, intricate system that is something like a living cell.
25:50A living cell has the power to learn through time.
25:58This is what distinguishes the first cells from all the other beings that existed prior to life's emergence.
26:05A star, for instance, has the power to organize itself for billions of years.
26:11But throughout that time, it never needs to learn anything new.
26:18Life learns.
26:20For life can adapt itself to new situations by changing its form and by remembering these changes.
26:26Life remembers the past by storing information in its DNA molecules.
26:35It is this power of memory encased in each living cell that enables life to learn and thus evolve.
26:46One of the ways in which to understand the nature of life's memory
26:50is by using the ideas of the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras.
26:55You know, a number of Pythagoras' ideas were revolutionary.
27:00And like a lot of revolutionary ideas, they weren't that popular.
27:04In fact, Pythagoras had to hide from the tyrant Polycrates, who was in charge of Samos.
27:10And tradition has it, this is where he hid, right here, halfway up the mountain, the cave there.
27:19One of Pythagoras' central convictions was that the essence of life
27:24is not air or water or fire, as the other Greek philosophers taught.
27:29Rather, the essence of life is number, pattern.
27:34It seems such an odd idea. I mean, life is so sensuous, it's so complex, so rich.
27:40How can the essence of that be something abstract, like number or pattern?
27:48It is precisely this deep connection between life and pattern that enables life to remember its crucial
27:54achievements. That's what DNA does. In the precise sequence of the nucleotides, DNA holds the essence of life.
28:02Life did not hand down the actual molecules to my body. Instead, life handed their essence in the form of genetic information.
28:14Because of this, our bodies can come alive a thousand different ways each day.
28:18Life has learned to learn.
28:31One of the central ways of learning for our species involves seeing.
28:38Life has invented so many different ways of seeing. The amazing thing is, this process is not yet
28:44over. Come with me into Pythagoras' cave.
29:00Life has invented so many different ways of seeing.
29:11Beginning billions of years ago, the earliest cells began to develop a sensitivity to light.
29:17They could sense it and move toward it. And it was this capacity that led eventually to the development
29:23of the eye. Now, the first eye for which we have any fossil evidence is that of the trilobite,
29:29500 million years ago. The trilobite, intent upon piercing through the darkness, invented an eye using
29:37calcite, a mineral. The trilobite was able to see only in the direction of these rods. A primal form of
29:47scene that proved so successful, we find it even now in the compound eyes of flies and lobsters.
29:54An entirely different form of seeing was invented by the worms and carried forward by the fish.
30:05This type of eye is the one we know best, for it's the one we inherited. The water-based eye.
30:12Even after 500 million years, eyesight continues to evolve. In humans, the power of seeing deepens with
30:26a new kind of sight, insight. We see on the inner screen of our imaginations. Life has learned yet another
30:34way of seeing, one with the power to transform everything.
30:43With this new way of seeing, we find ourselves blinking in a thrilling and yet unsettling light.
30:51Rooted in the center of immensities, we open our eyes and see each thing anew,
30:56each thing ablaze with the cosmic creativity, billions of years old.
31:10With the insights made possible with conscious self-awareness,
31:14our vision now extends back through billions of years of evolution.
31:18We see not only the scurrying spider, but the entire cosmic journey layered into the spider's body,
31:28including even the distant stars out of whose explosions its molecules were constructed.
31:35And this capacity to see into the depths of time gives new meaning to death.
31:52The universe throughout space and time is filled with violence and chaos.
31:59Millions of galaxies have been destroyed.
32:01Trillions of animals have been killed.
32:09Death and suffering are woven into the very heart of the universe.
32:16Usually such destruction is massive and senseless.
32:19A volcano erupts and kills every living being in its vicinity.
32:23But it can also happen that dealing with death leads to more complex, co-evolutionary relationships.
32:38For a rabbit, an eagle wears the face of destruction.
32:44But in this relationship, the eagle develops more acute eyesight and the rabbit develops greater speed for escape.
32:53The human being in the world.
32:57Interdependent communities arise out of suffering and death.
33:02The ultimate meaning of this escapes easy explanation.
33:08We are confronted with a fundamental mystery in which the small self of the individual dies into and nourishes the whole community.
33:18But living beings are not just linked together by food.
33:29Passion.
33:31Our urge to merge.
33:33What could be more intimate to our souls?
33:37Our passions determine so much of our lives.
33:40We are the wild, explosive energies of all of love and creativity.
33:48And such desire resides at the very center of life.
33:55With fish, the female deposits her eggs and the male later fertilizes them.
34:00There's no contact between them.
34:07A hundred million years later, when the lizards have evolved out of their fish and amphibian ancestors,
34:14the passion to merge has deepened considerably.
34:16With mammals and birds, passions reach yet a new crescendo.
34:26Not only are they able to commingle as one body,
34:30they can become so profoundly bonded, they remain in relationship their entire lives.
34:35We are not just similar to animals, we have been shaped by them.
34:46Our passions come from vertebrate evolution.
34:50Even our compassion can be understood as an expansion of what took place hundreds of millions
34:56of years ago in the ocean with the early fish.
34:59A hundred million years ago in the ocean with the fish.
35:02Biologists speculate that mutations led to a mother fish who scared away predators from her babies.
35:10This behavior was new at that time.
35:12What was more common among fish back then was a mother who ate her young.
35:18With the emergence of the fish's descendants, mammals and birds, maternal care broadened.
35:25Now the offspring were not just protected from predators,
35:28but were nourished directly by their mother.
35:34This care even included transmission of survival information of their group.
35:40And in some cases, this required years of training.
35:46We see then the caring behavior among vertebrates expanded for 500 million years
35:52before the emergence of Homo sapiens.
35:58Earlier humans intuited this deepening compassion and celebrated it with images of the divine feminine.
36:06As we enter into evening here on Samos, we approach one of the deep mysteries
36:22at the center of every traditional cosmic story.
36:26The nature and ultimate meaning of the human.
36:29We humans have our origin in the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago.
36:39And thus we are composed of the same energy and quanta as that which composes everything in the universe.
36:45And we follow from the first cell emerging 4 billion years ago.
36:52So we are genetic cousins to every living being.
36:58So what is distinct about us?
37:00Our current best evidence suggests that something took place between 6 and 7 million years ago in Africa.
37:19Something happened to ignite the human lineage in the primate world.
37:23A new line of energetic apes emerged that would, over several million years,
37:28bring forth massive brains and learned to dwell in a world saturated with dreams.
37:34Nothing like them had ever existed before.
37:38So what gave rise to us?
37:41We don't really know.
37:42We don't have the detailed knowledge of that transformation yet.
37:45We are forced to speculate on the data.
37:47And perhaps that's entirely appropriate here in the night.
37:52To be forced to dream about the origins of this dream-making animal.
37:58One theory offered by the scientists is particularly fascinating.
38:02It suggests that humanity had its origin in the prolongation of childhood.
38:10The idea is that mutations took place which slowed down our development.
38:14Humans went through the same phases as, say, the chimpanzees, but they remained in each stage for a longer period of time.
38:24In particular, this meant that the humans were childlike for more of their lives than other mammals.
38:33So, to understand what makes a human human, we can study the children of any mammalian species.
38:40They jump to play, they explore the world with their eyes, and they taste the world with their mouths.
38:51Simple existence thrills them.
38:55Their actions are, in some sense, free.
38:58So, after nearly four billion years, an animal emerged that could remain free, spontaneous, curious, flexible, open, impelled to try everything.
39:14So what was going to happen now?
39:18Early humans awoke to an incandescent consciousness.
39:22But where other animals were controlled by instincts, humans were liberated from such set reactions.
39:32Captivated by the thrill of movement, we could make dance or sports central to our lives.
39:39Astonished by the sounds of Earth, we could dedicate ourselves to the joy of making music.
39:53Or making love.
39:54The greatest creation in human history was what enabled humans to plunge into and to share their superabundant consciousness.
40:15This new invention was language.
40:20More simply, the symbol.
40:25The symbols of language and art and mathematics opened up new depths of consciousness.
40:32Each human began to carry an entire universe within.
40:37This new form of consciousness, called symbolic consciousness, would soon change everything.
40:42A crucial step in the process of becoming human was learning to externalize consciousness.
40:54To represent in the physical world what we had experienced within.
40:58This is the archaeological museum on the island of Samos.
41:01Come and have a look.
41:02By creating marks on bone or in wet clay, humans invented a way to fix their knowledge into an enduring form outside of themselves.
41:14The coding processes of life were bursting beyond the DNA molecule.
41:21So with human culture, experience itself can be remembered and passed down for thousands of years.
41:27Not just successful mutations, any valuable understanding, even if experienced by a single human being, can become part of the enduring legacy.
41:38The works of the mind and spirit flowed into Samos from every direction of the ancient world.
41:46From Athens and Mesopotamia, as well as Spain, Egypt, Persia.
41:51You know, in the early universe, concentrations of matter led to the emergence of galaxies.
41:58And something similar was going on here.
42:01In Samos and other cities, we find a concentration of symbolic constructions.
42:08What does this mean, really?
42:10It means that rare insights and deep feelings from around the planet and from different eras of time are all folded together here.
42:19Out of this powerful alchemical mixing, human consciousness complexified into new forms.
42:35Just think of it.
42:37For billions of years, rocks were just rocks.
42:41And then in a geological instant, all over the planet, they began to appear with these scratchings on them.
42:49Even more amazing, these little marks were organizing entire civilizations.
42:56With the appearance of the human, the coding process of life burst beyond the DNA molecule and began carving its information into stone.
43:05Symbols not only enabled humans to accumulate knowledge through millennia, they also offered a final and explosive possibility for human emergence.
43:21Symbols enabled humans to concentrate their consciousness upon consciousness.
43:26This was a development with magnificent and yet unexpected consequences.
43:33Like a magnifying glass focusing the sunlight upon a leaf.
43:37Symbols set fire to human possibility that it slumbered for a hundred thousand years.
43:42Look at this colossal form.
43:47Look at this colossal form.
43:49It's almost 15 feet high.
43:52Now imagine dozens of such statues.
43:55As the Greeks moved and lived among them, their self-conceptions would be changed.
44:00They would begin to imagine they were godlike, capable of anything.
44:04Such systems we call in science self-amplifying loops, consciousness giving birth to symbols, which then magnify consciousness.
44:14In this way, humans were not simply evolving.
44:17They were consciously participating in giving birth to themselves.
44:22And what was coming forth was a planet-altering species.
44:25For this activity was taking place not simply here on the ancient island of Samos, but actually throughout the planet, in every civilization.
44:36Supercharged with confidence, coming from reverberations of such symbols, human presence burst forth and altered the very face of the planet.
44:49Pyramids rose up from the African desert.
44:52Ancient rivers were diverted.
44:56Land as large as the eye could see was watered by irrigation systems.
45:02Even the forests scattered across the oceans in the form of sailing vessels.
45:09For the first time in Earth's history, seeds were not subject to the vagaries of climate,
45:15but received their watery nourishment with the precision and inevitability of logical thought.
45:22So, even the inner order of the seeds was captured by the science of genetics.
45:32What does it mean when even the seeds begin to live not just in the Earth, but in an Earth shaped by human consciousness?
45:40With their equations and their measurements, the early scientists discovered truths none of the classical scholars had known.
45:54In astronomy, chemistry, physiology, humans began to understand the world with their numbers and patterns.
46:03The defining characteristic of this new modern form of consciousness was the decision to employ our science and technology to control nature for our own use.
46:20The widespread conviction of the industrial world was that nature was inferior to us.
46:34Such a worldview in which only humans have sentient feelings allowed all of nature to become nothing more than a resource we could exploit in any way we wished.
46:45Even Rene Descartes, the most significant philosopher of the modern age, believed that when animals made crying sounds, they were not suffering.
47:00They were simply malfunctioning machines.
47:03Humans were gaining control of Earth's processes.
47:08And to what purpose?
47:10To create a better world.
47:11To eliminate hunger.
47:13To provide for our children.
47:14To have fun.
47:16And to fulfill this dream, we poured forth all of our energies, all of our technologies, and with stupendous results, in the blink of an eye, we exploded to 7 billion humans.
47:27The irony of it all, housing and feeding this many humans has already gutted our oceans and forests.
47:40We've ended up achieving something like the opposite of what we dreamt of.
47:44It's not just that we're using up all the energies of Earth, it's much deeper than that.
47:48We're changing life's dynamics, and in an irreversible way.
47:52We're just beginning to realize that over the last few decades, we have profoundly altered the evolutionary dynamics of Earth.
48:08The air.
48:11The climate.
48:14The rivers.
48:17The oceans.
48:18Even the DNA.
48:24We live on a different planet now.
48:26A planet where not biology, but symbolic consciousness is the determining factor for evolution.
48:32This great reversal has taken place.
48:35In the far distant past, life drew forth symbolic consciousness.
48:40But now symbolic consciousness has seized control of life.
48:43With our languages and our machines, we have become as powerful as the planet itself.
48:53Because of us, ice caps are melting.
48:56Because of us, coral reefs the size of mountains are bleaching white.
49:09But nothing shows this disaster more clearly than life itself.
49:13Because of us, thousands of species are going extinct each year.
49:22Nothing this devastating has taken place on Earth since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
49:30We are faced with a collective challenge no previous generation even contemplated.
49:46We are faced with a collective challenge.
49:58How are we to use this symbolic consciousness?
50:02To create a human presence that will enhance the well-being of the Earth community?
50:07We are beginning to understand the profound powers of the universe.
50:28And just as these powers have brought forth galaxies, stars, and life itself,
50:35perhaps the universe is now unfolding towards some new destiny.
50:42What if our ultimate destiny is to experience the universe so deeply,
50:46we come to realize that we are, in some sense, the mind and heart of the universe?
50:51Our deepest yearning is for a wholehearted participation in this flourishing.
51:05As we float in the midst of such mysterious immensities,
51:09is there any deep wisdom that might help us align our consciousness with the grain of cosmic evolution?
51:21Wonder will guide us.
51:24The human species has a genius for becoming astounded by almost anything in the universe.
51:29What can this mean?
51:30The body of the universe gave birth to our bodies.
51:40The self-organizing dynamics of the universe gave birth to our minds.
51:48We belong here.
51:51We've always belonged here.
51:52These deep discoveries of science are leading to a new story of the universe.
52:01It's a story that can be summarized in a single sentence.
52:05Over the course of 14 billion years, hydrogen gas transformed itself into
52:10mountains, butterflies, the music of Bach, and you and me.
52:22And these energies coursing through us may indeed renew the face of the earth.
52:40The latter means that he takes the union in the universe.
53:05They willian power to to enjoy
53:06the building of the universe.
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