Journey of the Universe weaves together the discoveries of the evolutionary sciences together with humanities such as history, philosophy, art, and religion. This course draws on the Journey of the Universe Conversations, a series of 20 interviews with scientists and environmentalists. The first 10 interviews are with scientists and historians who deepen our understanding of the evolutionary process of universe, Earth, and humans. The second 10 interviews are with environmentalists, teachers, and artists who explore the connections between the universe story and the practices for a flourishing Earth community.
Journey of the Universe (full film)
Loading...
From the course by Yale University
Journey Conversations: Weaving Knowledge and Action
57 ratings
Yale University
57 ratings
Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Journey of the Universe: A Story for Our Times
From the lesson
Introduction – Journey of the Universe Conversations
The universe’s evolutionary development forces it to leave eras and to start new eras, which is taking place in our own moment in time. We’re in one such moment. We are being pushed out of the industrial era into a new era of Earth’s history”
Meet the Instructors
Mary Evelyn TuckerSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
John GrimSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
[MUSIC]
Many of the worlds greatest stories begin with a journey,
a quest to answer life's most intimate questions.
Where did 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.
[MUSIC]
We're on the Greek island of Samos, just a mile off the coast of Turkey.
We could tell this 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, Asians 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 shiny 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 current 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.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
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 foreign.
Imagine the universe beginning like this.
14 billion years ago everything in the universe, all the bright matter of
the stars and galaxies, as well as all of the dark matter no one has ever seen.
All of it existed in a single point so energetic,
it was trillions of degrees hot.
[SOUND] Instantly,
this micro-universe washed 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.
[MUSIC]
In the 1920s,
the cosmologist Edwin Hubble trained his 100 inch telescope at the night sky.
He was trying to determine if our Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe.
[MUSIC]
Not only did he discover the universe is 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.
Another special quality about the universe is the rate of expansion.
If the rate of expansion had been slower, [SOUND] even slightly slower,
[SOUND] even a millionth of a percent slower,
[SOUND] the universe would have recollapsed immediately.
[SOUND] That would have been it.
After a million years, the universe would have imploded upon itself and
formed a massive black hole.
>> In the other hand, if the universe had expanded a little
more quickly [SOUND] even slightly more quickly [SOUND] even,
calculations show, one-millionth of 1% more quickly [SOUND]
the universe would have expanded too quickly for structures to form.
It would have simply exploded.
[SOUND] 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.
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 have known from the very beginning that life was coming.
[MUSIC]
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 were 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?
[MUSIC]
Consider galaxies, what brought the galaxies forth?
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 attention among the scientists.
Now we know there are 100 billion, maybe even 1 trillion galaxies.
What is the creativity that brought forth 1 trillion galaxies?
[MUSIC]
Let's consider our own Milky Way galaxy.
It's a galaxy with huge spiral arms.
Now, when we first began to discover galaxies, we though, maybe,
these spiral arms were composed of physical matter.
But, actually, it's much more interesting.
The arms are actually waves passing through the galaxy.
They're called density waves.
And as they pass through clouds of hydrogen, and helium,
they ignite star birth.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
[SOUND] Come into this little church,
I want to show you something.
[MUSIC]
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 and
the vastness of the night sky.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
Here's the essence of the universe story.
The stars are our ancestors.
Out of them, everything comes forth.
[MUSIC]
Stars are dynamic entities.
They're born, they develop, they even die.
Star birth occurs when gravity squeezes together a cloud of atoms so
tightly that nuclear fusion ignites in the center.
In the process, hydrogen fuses into helium.
This nuclear energy expands outwards in opposes gravity.
So stars represent an amazing new creative balance between the powers of
gravitational collapse and nuclear explosion.
[MUSIC]
And once a star's nuclear fuel is spent, there's nothing left to prevent gravity
from collapsing inward, causing the death spiral to begin.
This super concentrated dot of matter, which we call a supernova,
explodes outward with a power of 100 billion stars.
And as it expands, it creates all of the elements,
phosphorus, 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 this stupendous process that we can say,
the stars are our ancestors.
[MUSIC]
It's just such an amazing discovery.
The carbon atoms of this beet and of the lettuce and of our brains,
our skin, all of it passed through an intense explosion of a star.
[MUSIC]
In pondering the source of the sun's power,
we can reflect on something no earlier humans can know,
the sun is converting 4 million tons of its mass into energy every second.
[MUSIC]
All of life feeds on the roaring energy the sun.
Our solar system then is a self-energizing womb of creativity.
And all of this had it's start in a cloud of dust.
[MUSIC]
It was really difficult to humans to realize
that we live on a planet circling a star.
I mean, we were here for hundred 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're on this planet.
[MUSIC]
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 was to be at 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.
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, we jump over to Mars.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
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 the egg shell.
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.
[MUSIC]
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
crumble into majestic mountain ranges, or
they are forced back down where 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 can now bring forth
the next wonder of existence, the living cell.
[MUSIC]
How are we going to 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 begun 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 then 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.
[MUSIC]
From this new perspective, life is not an accident.
Life is inevitable.
A planet reaches a certain complexity of its matter, and then life blossoms forth,
quite natural.
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.
[MUSIC]
Such is the nature of life.
The universe began as a great outpouring of cosmic breath, cosmic energy,
that then swirled, and twisted, and complexified,
until it could burst forth into flowers, and animals, and fish.
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 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.
[MUSIC]
If we had microscopes 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 on the cliff over here there's an ancient castle that'll 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 Potomy Valley.
The castle is built to do what membranes do, let your friends in,
keep your enemies out.
[MUSIC]
The ongoing creativity of the universe is seen in the complex development
of life itself.
[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?
[MUSIC]
Their relationship is charged with energy and promise.
There's the sun, exploding with brilliance.
There's 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.
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 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.
It's not a background
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
Consider temperature.
Life only exists in a very narrow band of temperature.
So something like this temperature has been true of Earth for 4 billion years.
[MUSIC]
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 4 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 atmosphere 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's 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.
[MUSIC]
A living cell has the power to learn though 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 organized itself for billions of years.
But through out that time, it never needs to learn anything new.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
One of the ways in which to understand the nature of life's memory is by
using the ideas of the mathematician and philosopher, Pythagoras.
A number of Pythagoras' idea was 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.
The cave there.
[SOUND] One of Pythagoras's 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 a number or pattern?
It is precisely this deep connection between life and
pattern that enables life to remember it's 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.
[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 in the Pythagoras' Cave.
[MUSIC]
Beginning billions of years ago,
the earliest cells began to develop 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 he have any fossil evidence, is from a trilobite,
500 million years ago.
The trilobite, intent upon piercing through the darkness,
invented an eye using calcite, a mineral.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
An entirely different form of seeing was invented by the worms and
carried forward by the fish.
This type of eye is the one we know best, for it's the one we inherited.
The water based eye.
[MUSIC]
Even after 500 million years, eyesight continues to evolve.
And humans' power of seeing deepens with a new kind of sight, insight.
We see on the inner screen of our imagination.
Life has learned yet another way of seeing.
One with the power to transform everything.
[MUSIC]
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, billions of years old.
[MUSIC]
With the insights made possible with conscience self awareness,
our vision extends back through billions of years of evolution.
[MUSIC]
We see not only the scurrying spider, but
the entire cosmic journey layered into the spider's body.
Including even the distant stars,
out of whose explosions its molecules were constructed.
[MUSIC]
And this capacity to see into the depths of time gives new meaning to death.
[MUSIC]
The universe, throughout space and time, is filled with violence and chaos.
Millions of galaxies have been destroyed.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
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 developes more acute eyesight and
the rabbit develops greater speed for escape.
[MUSIC]
Interdependent communities arise out of suffering and death.
The ultimate meaning of this escapes easy explanation.
We are confronted with the fundamental mystery in
which the small self of the individual dives into and
nourishes the whole community.
But living beings are not just linked together by food.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
And such desire resides at the very center of life.
[MUSIC]
With fish, the female deposits her eggs and the male later fertilizes them.
There's no contact between them.
[MUSIC]
100 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 commingle as one body, they can become so
profoundly bonded they remain in a relationship their entire lives.
[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.
[SOUND] 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' descendents, mammals and
birds, maternal care broadened.
Now, the offspring were not just protect from predators, but
were nourish 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 then that caring behavior among vertebrates expanded 500
million years before the emergence of homosapiens.
[MUSIC]
Earlier humans intuited this deepening compassion and
celebrated it with images of the divine feminine.
[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.
[MUSIC]
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
quantum as that which composes everything in the universe.
And we follow from the first cell, emerging four billion years ago.
So we're genetic cousins to every living being.
What is distinct about us?
What is unique human?
[MUSIC]
Our current best evidence suggest 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.
We're forced to 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.
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.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
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?
[MUSIC]
Early humans awoke to an incandescent consciousness.
But where other animals were controlled by instincts,
humans were liberated from such set reactions.
[MUSIC]
Captivated by the thrill of movement we can
make dance or sports central to our lives.
Astonished by the sounds of Earth,
we could dedicate ourselves to the joy of making music.
[MUSIC]
Or making love.
[MUSIC]
The greatest creation in human history is what enabled humans to plunge into and
to share their super abundant consciousness.
This new invention was language.
More simply, the symbol.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
[SOUND] A crucial step in the process of becoming human
was learning to externalize consciousness.
To represent in the physical world what we have experienced within.
This is the Archaeological Museum on the island of Samos.
Come and have a look.
[MUSIC]
By creating marks on bone or in wet clay, humans invented a way to fix their
knowledge into an enduring form outside of themselves.
The coding processes of 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.
[MUSIC]
Works of the mind and
spirit flowed into Samos from every direction of the ancient world.
From Athens and Mesopotamia, as well as Spain, Egypt, Persia.
In the early universe concentrations of matter lead to the emergence of galaxies.
And something similar was going on here.
In Samos, and in other cities, we find the 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.
[MUSIC]
Just think of it.
For billions of years, rocks were just rocks.
And then, in a geological instant, all over the planet,
they begin to appear with these scratchings on them.
Even more amazing, these little marks were organizing entire civilizations.
With the appearance of the human, a coding process of life burst beyond
the DNA molecule and began carving it's information into stone.
[MUSIC]
Symbols not only enabled humans to accumulate knowledge through
the 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 of 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.
[MUSIC]
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 not on the ancient island of
Samos but actually throughout the planet in every civilization.
Super charged with confidence, coming from reverberations of such symbols.
Human presence burst forth and altered the very face of the planet.
[MUSIC]
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 forests 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.
[MUSIC]
What does it mean when even the seas began to live not just in the Earth but
in an Earth shaped by human consciousness?
[MUSIC]
With their equations and their measurements,
the early scientist discovered truths none of the classical scholars had known.
In astronomy, chemistry, physiology,
humans begin to understand the word with their numbers and patterns.
[MUSIC]
The defining characteristic of this new,
modern, form of consciousness was a decision to employ our science and
technology to control nature for our own use.
[MUSIC]
The widespread conviction of the industrial world was that nature was
inferior to us.
[MUSIC]
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 any way we wished.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
Humans are gaining control of Earth's processes.
And to what purpose?
To create a better world, to eliminate hunger, to provide for
our children, to have fun.
And to fulfill this dream we put fourth all of our energies,
all of our technologies, and with stupendous results.
In the blink of an eye, we exploded to 7 billion humans.
[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 the reusing up all the energies of Earth,
it's much deeper than that.
We're changing life's dynamics, and in an irreversible way.
[MUSIC]
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 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.
[MUSIC]
Because of us, ice caps are melting.
[MUSIC]
Because of us, coral reefs the size of mountains are bleaching white.
[MUSIC]
>> But nothing shows this disaster more clearly than life itself.
Because of us thousands of species are going extinct each year
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
>> How are we to use this symbolic consciousness to create a human presence
that will enhance the well being of the earth community?
[MUSIC]
We are beginning to understand the profound powers of the universe.
[MUSIC]
And just as these powers have brought forth galaxies, stars, and
life itself, perhaps the universe is now unfolding towards some new destiny.
[MUSIC]
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?
[MUSIC]
Our deepest yearning is for
a whole-hearted participation in this flourishing.
[MUSIC]
As we float in the midst of such mysterious immensities,
is there any deep wisdom that might help us align our
consciousness with a grain of cosmic evolution?
[MUSIC]
>> Wonder will guide us.
The human species has a genius for
becoming astounded by almost anything in the universe.
What can this mean?
[MUSIC]
The body of the universe gave birth to our bodies.
[MUSIC]
The self organizing dynamics of the universe gave birth to our minds.
[MUSIC]
We belong here.
[MUSIC]
We've always belonged here.
[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
Explore our Catalog
Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.
Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education,
partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online.
© 2018 Coursera Inc. All rights reserved.
