Name: The history of the universe explained in 4 minutes | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2022-04-01T09:12:56.000Z
Duration: 4 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

Our Universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang.

Adverbs of degree

consisting of little more than hydrogen and helium

no planets and certainly no living creatures.

Then, gradually, more complex things appeared.

probably appeared within about 200 million years of the Big Bang.

As big stars lived and died, they blew up and created new elements.

Those new elements allowed the creation of new materials

such as the dust and ice and rocks and minerals

Our Sun and solar system appeared about 4.5 billion years ago,

it's likely that life had emerged on Earth.

but most of it consisted of tiny, single-celled organisms

until, about 1 billion years ago, the first many-celled organisms appeared.

From about five hundred million years ago,

from trilobites to trees to tyrannosaurus rex.

the appearance of humans turned out to be hugely important

because humans were able to share ideas and information

better than any other species that ever existed.

our ancestors gradually built up stores of information

that allowed them to control their environments

The process accelerated until, in just the last 100 years,

we have become so powerful that what we do in the next few decades

the climate, and of most other species on Earth,

Many scholars believe that this represents a new geological epoch.

we humans have begun to control energy and resources

on such a vast scale that we are transforming the land,

the seas and the atmosphere of the Earth.

So, planet Earth is at a turning point in its history.

will either lead the biosphere towards a flourishing future,

that could ruin swathes of the planet in just a few hours,

or caused more slowly by the continued release of greenhouse gases

and global climates are too hot to grow enough food.

determined the future of the entire biosphere.

The good news is that we understand the science,

and we already have many of the technologies needed

What's missing now is the political technology.

be encouraged to see the challenges that they all share,

rather than simply defending their own local and immediate interests?

Only by collaboration can we avoid the many dangers we face today.

Can we steer planet Earth towards a prosperous future in which humans

and all the other organisms on which we depend can flourish for thousands,

even perhaps, for millions of years into the future?

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The history of the universe explained in 4 minutes | BBC Ideas

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