Tonight ’s episode of Cosmos is about the fragility and durability of life . Our story set about in the cradle of civilization , Iraq , with the development of written language and the recorded legends of the Mesopotamian goddess Innana , the submarine Gilgamesh and the flood myth that found its final shape in the Old Testament and theAronofsky work .
More than any other trait , the written word is what discover humans from other cast of life . Any open human can document their intellection , feelings and experiences and communicate directly with any other human at any time in the future . The indite countersign create us effectively one big immortal being .
But the natural endowment that makes us so vastly muscular also make us immensely vulnerable . As each contemporaries climbs further up the ladder of giant ’s shoulder joint to reach new acme , our civilization becomes more and more dependant on knowledge of the past . Any break in the mountain chain of generational communicating and we will tumble back to the days of Gilgamesh and Innana , or sooner . Far from a hypothetical threat , the collapse of civilizations is something human race has seen many times in thousands of years .
From hard time in Mesopotamia , we move on to our New creative activity narration . Science , of course , has no classic theory of the pedigree of life , but we do have some hypotheses to give us an estimation of where to start looking for answers .
According to the primaeval soup theory , complex carbon molecules issue in the aboriginal soup and some finally gained the power to replicate themselves by way as yet strange . Replicators slowly became more complex , eventually forming cells which coalesce into multicellular lifeforms until , well , here we are .
According to the panspermia hypothesis , life originated elsewhere in the solar system , or perhaps elsewhere in the wandflower , and traveled to Earth in meteorites . During the period of heavy outpouring , Earth , Venus and Mars exchanged prominent amounts of thing . Any spirit present on one satellite was likely to make it to the other two finally . Michael Gerald Tyson intimate that Earth could even have reinoculated itself periodically after massive asteroid impacts when bacteria rich ejecta fall back to a sterilized Earth .
The paradox , of course , is while simple bacteria can survive these uttermost , major planet altering disasters , entire civilizations can be wiped out by picture to mere pathogens or by droughts that begin and end in a geologic blink of an center . It has always been one of the most disheartening proposed answer to theFermi paradoxthat civilizations are plainly too delicate to survive long enough make the journeying into space .
And so we render once again to climate variety . While it ’s dead on target that the mood has changed naturally over the aeon , sometimes radically , it is also true that the natural processes that led to some of the most radical faulting are now being replicated by human activity . And while it ’s dependable that living manage to hold up all along , it ’s also dead on target that civilizations have been wiped out by far milder shifts in clime than we look to from current world thawing .
As a species , our intelligence and our content for deep knowledge of our past is our wheelhouse . It ’s so core to who we are that we sometimes take it for grant , assuming that we will simply always roll in the hay how to build a city or saltation radar off the Sun Myung Moon .
But as the evidence for human impact on clime modification mounts , the hour has arrive for us decide if we ’re drop dead to practice that intelligence to the preservation the resources we all trust on or if , as theArchitect suggested in Matrix : Reloaded , there are levels of survival we are merely going to have to be inclined to accept .
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