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  • THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

  • I.) Four Point Six

  • Archaean horizon

  • The first sunrise

  • On a pristine Gaea

  • Opus perfectum

  • Somewhere there

  • Us sleeping

  • "After sleeping through a hundred million centuries

  • we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet,

  • sparkling with color,

  • bountiful with life.

  • Within decades we must close our eyes again.

  • Isn't it a noble and enlightened way

  • of spending our brief time in the sun,

  • to work at understanding the universe

  • and how we have come to wake up in it?"

  • II.) Life

  • Wake up!

  • The cosmic law of gravity

  • Pulled the newborns around a fire

  • A careless, cold infinity in every vast direction

  • Lonely farer in the Goldilocks zone

  • She has a tale to tell

  • From the stellar nursery into a carbon feast

  • Enter LUCA

  • The tapestry of chemistry

  • There's a writing in the garden

  • Leading us to the Mother of all

  • We are one

  • We are a universe

  • Forbears of what will be

  • Scions of the Devonian sea

  • Aeons pass

  • Writing the tale of us all

  • A day-to-day new opening

  • For the greatest show on Earth

  • Ion channels welcoming the outside world

  • To the stuff of stars

  • Bedding the tree of a biological holy

  • Enter life

  • The tapestry of chemistry

  • There's a writing in the garden

  • Leading us to the Mother of all

  • We are one

  • We are a universe

  • Forbears of what will be

  • Scions of the Devonian sea

  • Aeons pass

  • Writing the tale of us all

  • A day-to-day new opening

  • For the greatest show on Earth

  • We are here to care for the garden

  • The wonder of birth

  • Of every form most beautiful

  • Every form most beautiful

  • We are one

  • We are a universe

  • Forbears of what will be

  • Scions of the Devonian sea

  • Aeons pass

  • Writing the tale of us all

  • A day-to-day new opening

  • For the greatest show on Earth

  • III.) The Toolmaker

  • After a billion years

  • The show is still here

  • Not a single one of your fathers died young

  • The handy travelers

  • Out of Africa

  • Little Lucy of the Afar

  • Gave birth to fantasy

  • To idolatry

  • To self-destructive weaponry

  • Enter the god of gaps

  • Deep within the past

  • Atavistic dread of the hunted

  • Enter Ionia, the cradle of thought

  • The architecture of understanding

  • The human lust to feel so exceptional

  • To rule the Earth

  • Hunger for shiny rocks

  • For giant mushroom clouds

  • The will to do just as you'd be done by

  • Enter history, the grand finale

  • Enter Ratkind

  • Man, he took his time in the sun

  • Had a dream to understand

  • A single grain of sand

  • He gave birth to poetry

  • But one day'll cease to be

  • Greet the last light of the library

  • Man, he took his time in the sun

  • Had a dream to understand

  • A single grain of sand

  • He gave birth to poetry

  • But one day'll cease to be

  • Greet the last light of the library

  • Man, he took his time in the sun

  • Had a dream to understand

  • A single grain of sand

  • He gave birth to poetry

  • But one day'll cease to be

  • Greet the last light of the library

  • We were here!

  • We were here!

  • We were here!

  • We were here!

  • IV.) The Understanding

  • "We are going to die,

  • and that makes us the lucky ones.

  • Most people are never going to die

  • because they are never going to be born.

  • The potential people who could

  • have been here in my place but who will

  • in fact never see the light of day

  • outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.

  • Certainly those unborn ghosts

  • include greater poets than Keats,

  • scientists greater than Newton.

  • We know this because

  • the set of possible people allowed by our DNA

  • so massively exceeds the set of actual people.

  • In the teeth of those stupefying odds

  • it is you and I,

  • in our ordinariness,

  • that are here.

  • We privileged few,

  • who won the lottery of birth

  • against all odds,

  • how dare we whine at our inevitable return

  • to that prior state from which

  • the vast majority have never stirred?"

  • V.) Sea-Worn Driftwood

  • "There is grandeur in this view of life,

  • with its several powers,

  • having been originally breathed

  • into a few forms or into one;

  • and that whilst this planet has gone cycling

  • on according to the fixed law of gravity,

  • from so simple a beginning

  • endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

  • have been, and are being, evolved."

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

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