(dramatic instrumental music)
Many of the world's greatest stories begin
with a journey.
A quest to answer life's most intimate questions.
Where do we come from?
Why are we here?
From the dawn of time, all cultures have created stories
to help explain the ultimate nature of things.
And perhaps a new story is emerging in our time.
One grounded in contemporary science,
and yet nourished by the ancient religious wisdom
of our planet.
What if the universe, even the Earth itself,
has its own unique story to tell.
One in which we play a profound role.
(orchestral music)
We're on the Greek island of Samos,
just a mile off the coast of Turkey.
We could tell the story of the universe anywhere.
Each place would offer its own unique possibilities
for the telling.
But we chose Samos because it's one
of the great crossroads of human history.
Europeans, Asian and Africans have all made their way here.
And by telling the story on an island,
surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea,
we will be reminded that we live on this shining planet,
sailing through the great ocean of the universe.
And there's another reason we have come to Samos.
And that is because 2,600 years ago,
Pythagoras was born here.
Pythagoras, a mathematician and philosopher,
was one of the first humans to realize
that the harmonies and relationships in the universe
could be given expression using numbers.
The kind of foundations he generated led eventually
to all of modern mathematical science.
He was also a great teacher.
In fact, legend has it that he invented
the word philosophy, a love of wisdom.
We'll spend a day here on Samos.
Before the clock strikes midnight,
we will have recounted the great events
of our 14 billion year cosmic evolution.
Our immense journey told in a single day
on one of Earth's magical islands.
How did it all start?
An awesome question, certainly.
But it appears there really was a beginning.
Some scientists refer to this as the Big Bang.
I like to call it the great flaring forth.
Imagine the universe beginning like this.
(match strike)
14 billion years ago, everything in the universe,
all the bright matter of the stars and galaxies,
as well as all the dark matter no one has ever seen.
All of it existed in a single point
so energetic it was trillions of degrees hot.
Instantly this micro-universal rushed apart
even faster than the speed of light.
The discovery that the universe has expanded
and is still expanding is one of the greatest
of human history.
The common understanding had been
that the universe is simply a vast space.
A vast space in which things existed.
Large things like galaxies and small things like atoms.
Scientists knew that matter changed form in the universe,
but everyone assumed that the universe
as a whole was not changing.
But no, the universe is changing,
and has changed dramatically.
The universe has a story.
A beginning, a middle where we are now,
and perhaps in some far distant future, an end.
In the 1920s, the cosmologist Edwin Hubble
trained his 100-inch at the night sky.
He was trying to determine if our Milky Way
was the only galaxy in the universe.
Not only did he discover the universe
was filled with galaxies,
he also determined that all of them are rushing
away from each other.
With Hubble's work, humanity learned
that the universe began with a massive explosion
that has been carrying the galaxies apart
for billions of years.
(rhythmic drums)
Another special quality about the universe
is the rate of expansion.
If the rate of expansion had been slower,
even slightly slower,
even a millionth of a percent slower,
the universe would have re-collapsed immediately.
That would've been it.
After a million years, the universe would have
imploded upon itself and formed a massive black hole.
On the other hand, if the universe
had expanded a little more quickly,
even slightly more quickly,
even calculations show one millionth
of one percent more quickly,
the universe would have expanded too quickly
for structures to form.
It would have simply exploded.
There would have been no galaxies,
no structure, no life,
nothing but dust for all time.
So what we've discovered is that we're living in a universe
that is expanding at exactly the rate necessary
for life and structure to come forth.
It could be then, that even though we can't
call the early universe alive,
we can understand it as life generating.
One of the physicists who was reflecting on this
is the celebrated Freeman Dyson.
And he, he mused that the more he reflected
on the structures of the early universe,
the more he became convinced that in some sense
the universe must've known from the very beginning
that life was coming.
The light from the beginning of time
has been traveling for 14 billion years.
Meanwhile, life has been evolving.
With the recent emergence of advanced technology,
we're at last able to see the story these photons tell
about the birth of the universe
and where we ultimately come from.
Morning on a Greek island is like the first day of creation.
And wandering around here, you feel like the first person.
Inevitably, humans would ask,
what gave birth to all of this beauty?
What was the form of creativity
that brought this forth?
(flowing instrumental music)
Consider galaxies.
What brought the galaxies forth?
You know, even a century ago,
this was hard to imagine.
We didn't know if there were two galaxies
in the entire universe.
That was the main focus of tension among scientists.
Now were know there are 100 billion,
maybe even a trillion galaxies.
What is the creativity that brought forth
a trillion galaxies?
Let's consider our own Milky Way galaxy.
It's a galaxy with huge spiral arms.
When we first began to discover galaxies,
we thought maybe these spiral arms
were composed of physical matter.
But actually, it's much more interesting.
The arms are actually waves that are
passing through the galaxy.
They're called density waves.
And as they pass through clouds of hydrogen and helium,
they ignite star birth.
That's the way to picture the Milky Way galaxy.
Not so much as a thing,
but rather as an activity.
It's an ongoing activity of bringing forth stars.
We live in the midst of this intense creativity.
Come into this little church.
I want to show you something.
The ceiling, as you can see,
is filled with stars.
The same is true of most of the churches
on the island of Samos.
The ancient Greeks, like Pythagoras,
thought the stars were alive, even divine.
Throughout history every culture has been stunned
by the presence of stars in the vastness of the night sky.
♫ Hallelujah
♫ Hallelujah ♫
So deeply moved by the majesty emanating
from the brilliance of the stars,
we have built our lives around them.
We've even organized entire civilizations
upon their beauty and order.
♫ Hallelujah ♫
Here's the essence of the universe story.
The stars are our ancestors.
Out of them everything comes forth.
Stars are dynamic entities.
They're born.
They develop.
They even die.
Star birth occurs when gravity squeezes
together a cloud of atoms so tight
that nuclear fusion ignites in the center.
In the process, hydrogen fuses in the helium.
This nuclear energy expands outwards
and opposes gravity.
So stars represent an amazingly creative balance
between the powers of gravitational collapse
and nuclear explosion.
And once a star's nuclear fuel is spent,
there's nothing left to prevent gravity
from collapsing inwards, causing the death spiral to begin.
This super-concentrated dot of matter,
which we call a supernova, explodes outward
with the power of 100 billion stars.
And as it expands, it creates all of the elements,
phosphorous, oxygen, carbon, gold.
These are spewed out into the Milky Way galaxy,
and then the whole process starts again.
They drift as a cloud and then they collapse,
give birth to a star, the Earth.
It's by stupendous process that we can say
the stars are our ancestors.
(Greek music)
It's just such an amazing discovery.
The 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.
In pondering the source of the Sun's power,
we can now reflect on something
no earlier humans could know.
The Sun is converting four millions tons
of its mass into energy every second.
All of life feeds on the roaring energy of the Sun.
Our solar system then is a self-energizing
womb of creativity.
And all of this had its start in a cloud of dust.
(Greek music)
It was really difficult for humans to realize
that we live on a planet circling a star.
I mean we were here for hundreds of thousands of years
before Aristarchus, 2,000 years ago,
right here on Samos realized we are spinning
around the Sun.
That was such an amazing insight
that it vanished actually.
And it wasn't until Copernicus discovered it again
in the 16th century that humans really
began to absorb the fact that we are
on this planet.
Let me use these vegetables to explain our solar system.
So here we have the Sun, this cabbage as the Sun.
Now actually, if this were to be in scale,
this cabbage would have to be a million times
the size of this pepper.
Budgetary considerations made that impossible.
So you just have to use your imagination.
Now what we've learned in the 20th century
is about the composition of the planets.
First we have the large planets.
So we have Jupiter here,
and we have Saturn and Uranus, and Neptune.
These are large enough to hold on
to all the lighter elements so that
they actually are gaseous.
Too small to be a star,
but yet too large to be solid.
The other kind then, we have indicated here
with these rocks.
So we have Mercury.
Then we have Venus.
Jump over to Mars.
These are the rocky planets, most of which are solid.
But there's one special rocky planet.
One that's not too small and not too big.
One that's not too hot and not too cold.
One that's not exactly solid,
but not exactly liquid.
We call it home.
Earth is very much like an egg.
The core of the Earth is like the yolk.
The mantle of the Earth is like the egg white.
And the crust of the Earth is like like the eggshell.
What happens is that early on
when the Earth is in a molten state,
all of the really heavy elements like iron and nickel
sink into the core.
And then the elements like magnesium
form this outer layer around the core, the mantle.
The crust is only 10 to 50 miles thick,
and that's the only solid part of Earth.
All the rest is in motion.
Plumes of molten rock will rise up from the mantle
and harden into plates that form the crust.
As these plates slide around the surface of Earth,
they collide and crumple into majestic mountain ranges.
Or they're forced back down,
or they melt and sink toward the center of Earth.
This discovery, which originated with Alfred Wegener,
is called plate tectonics and is one
of the greatest of history.
Earth became encircled by great tidal oceans
and held by a thin layer of atmosphere.
A churning volcanic Earth could now
bring forth the next wonder of existence,
the living cell.
(waves crashing)
How are we gonna tell the story of life?
How did it all begin?
What theory shall we offer to explain this?
The simple truth is that no one knows
with full certainty.
But even though the detailed explanation still eludes us,
scientists have began to approach
the whole question of life from a radical new perspective,
that of self-organization.
You see during the modern period,
we thought of the world as machine-like,
and that life was an accident.
But now, with the work of a number of chemists,
notably Ilya Prigogine who won a Nobel Prize for this work,
we are beginning to discover the act of patterning
in matter itself.
It's intrinsic to matter.
From this new perspective,
life is not an accident.
Life is inevitable.
A planet weeks in a certain complexity of its matter,
and then life at last comes forth quite naturally.
Consider whirlpools.
This spiral swirling action can appear anywhere
so long as there is a body of liquid moving water.
It is not the water itself that endures as a spiral,
because the water molecules are constantly
flowing in and out of the whirlpool.
It is rather the emergent dynamic structure that endures.
Such is the nature of life.
The universe began as a great outpouring
of cosmic breath, cosmic energy,
but then swirled and twisted and complexified
until it could burst forth into flowers and animals
and fish and all of these elegant explosions of energy.
But it's not just energy.
And it's not just living energy.
This is energy that is aware.
By awareness or sentience we mean something
that is more than what takes place
in the realm of elementary particles.
And yet, less than full human consciousness.
So where do does such awareness arise?
Some biologists are beginning to speculate
that awareness has its foundation
in the very self-organizing dynamics of the universe.
For cell biologist Ursula Goodenough,
this awareness is a kind of primitive discernment,
and it reveals itself especially
in the membrane of each cell.
That thin skin-like layer that covers every cell.
(waves crashing)
If we had microscope for eyes,
we could see it all happening right here
in these tide pools
where millions of cells are swarming about,
and they're encountering molecules over and over again.
And with every encounter, discernment emerges.
Why? Because a decision has to be made,
an intelligent decision.
Up in the cliff over here there's an ancient castle
that will help me explain.
This church, which is called Metamorphosis,
is nearly 1,000 years old.
Above it is a castle that once guarded entrance
into the magical Ptolemy Valley.
The castle is built to do what membranes do.
Let your friends in, keep your enemies out.
The ongoing creativity of the universe is seen
in the complex development of life itself.
(gentle piano music)
After it had circled the Sun for hundreds
of millions of years, Earth's most primitive organisms
developed molecules that would resonate with the Sun.
How are we to picture this process involving Earth and Sun
bringing forth photosynthesis?
As an engineering project?
I guess, but try a new metaphor.
Imagine two lovers longing for each other.
What is it they truly desire?
The relationship is charged with energy and promise.
There is the Sun exploding with brilliance.
There is the Earth basking in the Sun's rays.
But Earth is not passive.
Earth's systems attune to the Sun
changing their molecular structures
in order to draw in light and convert it to food.
As the complexity of life deepens,
entwinement itself also deepens.
(majestic instrumental music)
How are we going to tell the story of the living Earth?
In particular, how are we going to tell the story
of Earth to our children?
This is especially important because
in the last couple of centuries,
we have learned more about the Earth
than in perhaps the previous 100,000 years.
So the question is, how are we going to convey that,
the essence of that to the next generation?
One thing is completely clear.
The Earth is very different than what we thought.
The Earth is not a platform.
(flowing instrumental music)
It's not a background.
In fact, the great discovery is this,
life doesn't exist on top of the Earth.
Life is a partner to the oceans
to the atmosphere, to the land.
For instance, if we look at the atmosphere
it is 21% oxygen.
This makes us unique among all the known planets.
The only reason we have oxygen in our atmosphere
is that life is pouring it forth each day.
So the very composition of our air
reflects the fact that life is here.
In that sense, life is woven into the atmosphere.
But an even more radical hypothesis is beginning
to emerge in the minds of some scientists.
Perhaps Earth is not only an integrated system.
Perhaps Earth somehow maintains itself
so that life can flourish.
Consider temperature.
Life only exists in a very narrow band of temperature.
So something like this temperature has been true
of Earth for four billion years.
Now, scientists originally thought
this was because the Earth just happened
to be 93 million miles away from the Sun.
But during the 1950s, we learned about
the fusion processes taking place in stars.
And so now we know the Sun's temperature
has increased by over 25%
over the last four billion years.
Which means somehow Earth has had to adapt itself
to maintain that stable narrow band of temperature.
How?
We know some of the details.
Early Earth had 1,000 times the carbon dioxide
as present-day Earth.
So during that time, the Earth's system
has drawn the carbon dioxide out of the atmostphere
forming for instance the shells of marine algae.
And then when the marine algae die,
the shells go to the bottom of the ocean.
So more and more carbon dioxide
is taken out of the atmosphere
which enables the Earth to cool down
while the Sun heats up.
But the question returns, is all of this
being organized by the Earth as a whole
so that life could flourish?
If that's the case, then the atmosphere
is not just stuff.
It's something like a membrane.
And we are not living on an Earth,
we are actually participants in a vast intricate system
that is something like a living cell.
(flowing instrumental music)
A living cell has the power to learn through time.
This is what distinguishes the first cells
from all the other beings that existed prior
to life's emergence.
A star for instance, has the power to organize itself
for billions of years.
But throughout that time, it never needs
to learn anything new.
Life learns
for life can adapt itself to new situations
by changing its form and by remembering these changes.
Life remembers the past by storing information
in its DNA molecules.
It is this power of memory, encased in each living cell,
that enables life to learn and thus evolve.
One of the ways in which understand the nature
of life's memory is by using the ideas
of the mathematician/philosopher Pythagoras.
You know a number of Pythagoras' ideas were revolutionary.
And like a lot of revolutionary ideas,
they weren't that popular.
In fact, Pythagoras had to hide
from the tyrant Polycrates who was
in charge of Samos.
And tradition has it this is where he hid right here,
halfway up the mountain in a cave there.
One of Pythagoras' central convictions
was that the essence of life is not air,
or water or fire as the other Greek philosophers taught.
Rather, the essence of life
is number, pattern.
It seems such an odd idea.
I mean, life is so sensuous.
It's so complex, so rich.
How can the essence of that be something abstract
like number or pattern?
It is precisely this deep connection
between life and pattern that enables life
to remember its crucial achievements.
That's what DNA does.
In the precise sequence of the nucleotides,
DNA holds the essence of life.
Life did not hand down the actual molecules to my body.
Instead, life handed their essence
in the form of genetic information.
Because of this, our bodies can come alive
1,000 different ways each day.
Life has learned to learn.
(gentle instrumental music)
One of the central ways of learning
for our species involves seeing.
Life has invented so many different ways of seeing.
The amazing thing is, this process is not yet over.
Come with me into Pythagoras' cave.
(dramatic instrumental music)
Begetting billions of years ago,
the earliest cells began to develop a sensitivity to light.
They can sense it and move toward it.
And it was this capacity that led eventually
to the development of the eye.
And the first eye which we have any fossil evidence
is that of the trilobite 500 million years ago.
The trilobite, intent upon piercing through the darkness,
invented an eye using calcite, a mineral.
The trilobite was able to see only
in the direction of these rods.
A primal form of seeing that proved so successful,
we find it even now in the compound eyes
of flies and lobsters.
An entirely different form of seeing
was invented by the worms
and carried forward by the fish.
The type of eye is the one we know best
for it's the one we inherited, the water-based eye.
Even after 500 million years,
eyesight continues to evolve.
In humans, the power of seeing deepens
with a new kind of sight, insight.
We see on the inner screen of our imaginations.
Life has learned yet another way of seeing.
One with the power to transform everything.
With this new way of seeing,
we find ourselves blinking in a thrilling
and yet unsettling light.
Rooted in the center of immensities,
we open our eyes and see each thing anew.
Each thing ablaze with the cosmic creativity millions
of years old.
(flowing instrumental music)
With the insights made possible
with conscious self-awareness,
our vision now extends back through billions
of years of evolution.
We see not only the scurrying spider,
but the entire cosmic journey layered
into the spider's body including
even a distant star out of whose explosions
its molecules were constructed.
And this capacity to see into the depths of time
gives new meaning to death.
(dramatic instrumental music)
The universe throughout space and time
is filled with violence and chaos.
Millions of galaxies have been destroyed.
Trillions of animals have been killed.
Death and suffering are woven
into the very heart of the universe.
Usually such destruction is massive and senseless.
A volcano erupts and kills every living being
in its vicinity.
But it can also happen that dealing with death
leads to more complex coevolutionary relationships.
For a rabbit, an eagle wears the face of destruction.
But in this relationship, the eagle develops
more acute eyesight, and the rabbit develops
greater speed for escape.
Interdependent communities arise out of suffering and death.
The ultimate meaning of this escapes easy explanation.
We are confronted with a fundamental mystery
in which the small self of the individual
dives into and nourishes the whole communtity.
But living beings are not just linked together by food.
Passion, our urge to merge.
What could be more intimate to our souls?
Our passions determine so much of our lives.
They are the wild explosive energies
of all of love and creativity.
And such desire resides at the very center of life.
With fish, the female deposits her eggs
and the male later fertilizes them.
There's no contact between them.
100,000 million years later, when the lizards have evolved
out of their fish and amphibian ancestors,
the passion to merge has deepened considerably.
With mammals and birds, passions reach
yet a new crescendo.
Not only are they able to co-mingle as one body,
they can become so profoundly bonded,
they remain in a relationship their entire lives.
(majestic instrumental music)
We are not just similar to animals,
we have been shaped by them.
Our passions come from vertebrate evolution.
Even our compassion can be understood
as an expansion of what took place
hundreds of millions of years ago in the ocean
with the early fish.
Biologists speculate that mutations
led to a mother fish who scared
away predators from her babies.
This behavior was new at that time.
What was more common among fish back then
was a mother who ate her young.
With the emergence of the fishes' descendants,
mammals and birds, maternal care broadened.
Now the offspring were not just protected from predators,
but were nourished directly by their mother.
This care even included transmission
of survival information of their group.
And in some cases, this required years of training.
We see them, the caring behavior among vertebrates
expanding for 500 million years before
the emergence of home sapiens.
Earlier humans intuited this deepening compassion
and celebrated it with images of the divine feminine.
(gentle instrumental music)
As we enter into evening here on Samos,
we approach one of the deep mysteries
at the center of every traditional cosmic story,
the nature and ultimate meaning of the human.
We humans have our origin in the birth
of the universe 14 billion years ago.
And thus, we are composed of the same energy
and quanta as that which composes everything
in the universe.
And we followed from the first cell
emerging four billion years ago.
So we're genetic cousins to every living being.
So what is distinct about us?
What is uniquely human?
Our current best evidence suggests
that something took place between six
and seven million years ago in Africa.
Something happened to ignite the human lineage
in the primate world.
A new line of energetic apes emerged
that would over several million years
bring forth massive brains and learn
to dwell in a world saturated with dreams.
Nothing like them had ever existed before.
So, what gave rise to us?
We don't really know.
We don't have the detailed knowledge
of that transformation yet.
But forces speculate on the data
and perhaps that's entirely appropriate here in the night.
To be forced to dream about the origins
of this dream-making animal.
One theory offered by the scientists
is particularly fascinating.
It suggests that humanity had its origin
in the prolongation of childhood.
(lighthearted instrumental music)
(children playing)
The idea is that mutations took place
which slowed down our development.
Humans went through the same phases
as say the chimpanzees, but they remained
in each stage for a longer period of time.
In particular, this meant that the humans
were childlike for more of their lives than other mammals.
So, to understand what makes a human human,
we can study the children of any mammalian species.
They jump to play.
They explore the world with their eyes.
And they taste the world with their mouths.
Simple existence thrills them.
Their actions are in some sense free.
So after nearly four billion years
an animal emerged that could remain free,
spontaneous, curious, flexible,
open, impelled to try everything.
So what was going to happen now?
(gentle instrumental music)
Early humans awoke to an incandescent consciousness.
But where other animals were controlled by instincts,
humans were liberated from such set reactions.
Captivated by the thrill of movement,
we could make dance,
or sports central to our lives.
Astonished by the sounds of Earth,
we could dedicate ourselves to the joy
of making music.
(dramatic instrumental music)
Or making love.
The greatest creation in human history
was what enabled humans to plunge into
and to share their superabundant consciousness.
This new invention was language.
More simply, the symbol.
The symbols of language and art and mathematics
opened up new depths of consciousness.
Each human began to carry an entire universe within.
This new form of consciousness called symbolic consciousness
would soon change everything.
(bell ringing)
A crucial step in the process of becoming human
was learning to externalize consciousness.
To represent in the physical world
what we had experienced within.
This is the Archaeological Museum on the island of Samos.
Come and have a look.
By creating marks on bone or on wet clay,
humans invented a way to fix their knowledge
into an enduring form outside of themselves.
The coding processes life were bursting
beyond the DNA molecule.
So with human culture, experience itself
can be remembered and passed down
for thousands of years.
Not just successful mutations.
Any valuable understanding,
even if experienced by a single human being
can become part of the enduring legacy.
Works of the mind and spirit float into Samos
from every direction of the ancient world.
From Athens and Mesopotamia,
as well as Spain, Egypt, Persia.
You know in the early universe,
concentrations of matter led to the emergence of galaxies.
And something similar was going on here.
In Samos and in other cities, we find a concentration
of symbolic constructions.
What does this mean really?
It means that rare insights and deep feelings
from around the planet and from different eras of time
are all folded together here.
Out of this powerful alchemical mixing,
human consciousness complexified into new forms.
(triumphant instrumental music)
Just think of it.
For billions of years, rocks were just rocks.
And then, in a geological instant,
all of the planet that began to appear
with these scratchings on them.
Even more amazing, these little marks
were organizing entire civilizations.
With the appearance of the human,
the coding process of life burst beyond the DNA molecule
and began carving its information into stone.
Symbols not only enabled humans
to accumulate knowledge through millennia,
they also offered a final and explosive possibility
for human emergence.
Symbols enabled humans to concentrate their consciousness
upon consciousness.
This was a development with magnificent
and yet unexpected consequences.
Like a magnifying glass focusing the sunlight
upon a leaf.
Symbols set fire to human possibility
that had slumbered for 100,000 years.
Look at this colossal form.
It's almost 15 feet high.
Now imagine dozens of such statues.
As the Greeks moved and lived among them,
their self-conceptions would be changed.
They would begin to imagine they were godlike,
capable of anything.
Such systems we call in science self-amplifying loops.
Consciousness giving birth to symbols
which then magnify consciousness.
In this way, humans were not simply evolving.
They were consciously participating
in giving birth to themselves.
And what was coming forth was a planet-altering species.
For this activity was taking place not simply here
on the ancient island of Samos,
but actually throughout the planet
in every civilization.
Supercharged with confidence,
coming from the reverberation of such symbols.
Human presence burst forth and altered
the very face of the planet.
Pyramids rose up from the African desert.
Ancient rivers were diverted.
Land as large as the eye could see
was watered by irrigation systems.
Even the forest scattered across the oceans
in the form of sailing vessels.
For the first time in Earth's history,
seeds were not subject to the vagaries of climate
but received their watery nourishment
with the precision and inevitability of logical thought.
Soon, even the inner order of the seeds
was captured by the science of genetics.
What does it mean when even the seeds
began to live not just in the Earth,
but in an Earth shaped by human consciousness.
(gentle instrumental music)
With their equations and their measurements,
the early scientists discovered truths
none of the classical scholars had known
in astronomy, chemistry, physiology.
Humans began to understand the world
with their numbers and patterns.
The 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.
(dramatic instrumental music)
The widespread conviction of the industrial world
was that nature was inferior to us.
Such a world-view, in which only humans
have sentient feelings, allowed all of nature
to become nothing more than a resource
we could exploit in anyway we wished.
Even Rene Descartes,
the most significant philosopher of the modern age,
believed that when animals made crying sounds,
they were not suffering.
They were simply malfunctioning machines.
Humans were gaining control of Earth's processes
into what purpose?
To create a better world.
To eliminate hunger, to provide for our children.
To have fun, and 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 seven billion humans.
(gentle instrumental music)
The irony of it all,
housing and feeding this many humans
has already gutted our oceans and forests.
We've ended up achieving something like
the opposite of what we dreamt of.
It's not just that we're using up all the energies of Earth.
It's much deeper than that.
We're changing life's dynamics,
and in an irreversible way.
We're just beginning to realize
that over the last few decades,
we have profoundly altered
the evolutionary dynamics of Earth,
the air,
the climate, the rivers,
the oceans,
even the DNA.
We live on a different planet now.
A planet where not biology but symbolic consciousness
is the determining factor for evolution.
This great reversal has taken place.
In the far distant past,
life drew forth a symbolic consciousness.
But now symbolic consciousness
has seized control of life.
With our languages and our machines,
we have become as powerful as the planet itself.
Because of us icecaps are melting.
Because of us coral reefs the size of mountains
are bleaching white.
But nothing shows this disaster more clearly
than life itself.
Because of us, thousands of species
are going extinct each year.
Nothing this devastating has taken place on Earth
since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
We are faced with a collective challenge
no previous generation even contemplated.
(dramatic instrumental music)
(gentle instrumental music)
How are we to use this symbolic consciousness
to create a human presence that will enhance
the well-being of the Earth community?
We are beginning to understand the profound powers
of the universe.
And just as these powers have brought forth galaxies,
stars and life itself, perhaps the universe
is now unfolding towards some new destiny.
What if our ultimate destiny is to experience
the universe so deeply we come to realize
that we are, in some sense, the mind and heart
of the universe?
Our deepest yearning is for a whole-hearted participation
in this flourishing.
As we float in the midst of such mysterious immensities,
is there any deep wisdom that might
help us align our consciousness
with the grain of cosmic evolution?
Wonder will guide us.
The human species has a genius when
becoming astounded by almost anything in the universe.
What can this mean?
The body of the universe gave birth to our bodies.
The self-organizing dynamics of the universe
gave birth to our minds.
We belong here.
We've always belonged here.
These deep discoveries of science
are leading to a new story of the universe.
It's a story that can be summarized in a single sentence.
Over the course of 14 billion years,
hydrogen gas transformed itself
into mountains, butterflies,
the music of Bach, and you and me.
And these energies coursing through us
may indeed renew the face of the Earth.
(gentle instrumental music)
(flowing instrumental music)