Original subtitles

(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)