The Greatest Show on Earth
[1. 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?"
[Professor Richard Dawkins]
[2. 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 is 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 is 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 one
We are a universe.
Forbears in 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 in 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...
[3. 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 hunter.
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.
[3 Times]
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... [2 Times]
[4. The Understanding]
- Instrumental -
[5. Sea-Worn Driftwood]
"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?"
- Instrumental -
"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."
[Professor Richard Dawkins]
