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."

Weak acid–weak base reactions | Acids and bases | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

Ask Sal Anything! Homeroom - Thursday August 27

View All

The Marker | Life Below Zero

The hailstones are returning to Camp from a hunting trip, but without a marker to guide them along the treacherous River, their path home is uncertain. “This is it right here. You see how hard that was? This is just inches off the surface of the water. Y…

Guardians of the Okavango | National Geographic

I’m a guardian of the guardians. I feel a duty to protect these guardians from what is the outside world, encroaching. I work within the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project as the community liaison with the people living in these Angolan highl…

"Where Love Is Illegal": Chronicling LGBT Stories of Love and Discrimination (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live

I’m really grateful to be here, and the reason I’m so grateful is actually, you’re really helping me out. I made a promise to the people whose photograph… photographs who you’ll see tonight. I promised them that their stories would be heard, and you’re he…

Genetics 101 | National Geographic

[Narrator] Genetics helps us understand the biological programming behind all life forms. But what exactly is the science of genetics? And what does its future hold? Genetics is the study of heredity. The expression of traits and how they are passed fro…

Identifying quadratic patterns | Polynomial factorization | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy

We’re told that we want to factor the following expression, and they ask us which pattern can we use to factor the expression. U and V are either constant integers or single variable expressions. So we’ll do this one together, and then we’ll have a few mo…

Daily Homeroom: Congratulations Class of 2020!

Hi everyone! Welcome to Khan Academy’s daily homeroom live stream. For those of you all who do not know what this is, this is something that we thought of when we started seeing mass school closures. We know that people are going to be at home, socially d…

The Power of Transportation | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles