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?
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
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
Please sing with us
We were here!
We were here!
Range your voices up with the band please and down here everybody as loud as you can
We were here!
A big one coming
We were here!
And the last one
We were here!
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?"
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death
the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows
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.
