the greatest show on earth

Nightwish

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?"
Professor Richard Dawkins

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
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

We are here to care for the garden
The wonder of birth
Of every form most beautiful


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

We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!


Iv. The Understanding


V. 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 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?"
[- Professor Richard Dawkins]

"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]