The Power of Transportation | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[music playing] [motor revving]

JASON SILVA: What does it take to power a global civilization to connect billions of people across continents? It takes the power of transportation. From the beginning, speed and strength were paramount in the hunt, on the battlefield, for holding together far-flung empires. We sought new forms of power, harnessing the forces of nature to drive us forward—the horse, the wheel, steam power, jet engine. Every new innovation powered our next great leap.

Transportation has become our exoskeleton allowing us to transcend our biology. [music playing] Faster than sound, farther than the moon, our inventions give us a level of power we never imagined. With our machines we carved through solid rock, tunneled beneath the sea floor, connecting the world, mixing distant cultures. Freedom of movement has given us freedom of mind.

The flow of people and materials exposes us to new ideas and new understanding. This is the story of how transportation turned society inside out, how engines and animals powered the rise of civilization, and how the innovations that drive humanity forward made us modern. This is "Origins."

Inside a Dog Rehab Center | National Geographic

Three digit addition word problems

View All

Controlling a plane in space

Hello everyone! So I’m talking about how to find the tangent plane to a graph, and I think the first step of that is to just figure out how we control planes in three dimensions in the first place. What I have pictured here is a red dot representing a po…

The Harsh Bottom of the World | Continent 7: Antarctica

I think it’s important for people to know about what’s happening in Antarctica, not only just that the science that goes on down there, but what that science is actually trying to tell us about the future of this planet. Most of the research is really foc…

How minimum wage hurts workers (while profit and competition help them)

So this is a video primarily for—to be serious—you’ve seemed quite taken aback when I said that minimum wage regulations are usually harmful to workers. Now, this is a subject that’s already been addressed several times on YouTube, but I think it bears re…

The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1

Welcome to the eponymous novel podcast. The main topic that we started out on was timeless principles of wealth creation, and then we’ve been touching a little bit on internal happiness and peace and well-being. But I am, first and foremost, a student of …

Estimating a P-value from a simulation | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

So we have a question here on p-values. It says Evie read an article that said six percent of teenagers were vegetarians, but she thinks it’s higher for students at her school. To test her theory, Evie took a random sample of 25 students at her school, an…

Mitigation and Adaptation: Human Stories of Hope | Explorers In The Field

(soothing guitar music) Climate change is a human story. The causes of climate change are man-made, and the solutions must be man-made. How much of the landscape— In order to reduce climate change, in order to adapt to these changes and to mitigate our i…

The Power of Transportation | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles