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, an 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?"
-- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
II. Life
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
Forebears 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
Forebears 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
Forebears 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 these 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?"
-- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
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."
-- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
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