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."

Evaluating exponent expressions with variables

Competition, predation, and mutualism | Middle school biology | Khan Academy

View All

DON'T TRUST THE STOCK MARKET | WHAT YOU MUST KNOW!

What’s up guys, it’s Graham here. So it’s official: as of May 26, the S&P 500 did something that very few people would have ever expected to happen a few months ago. It crossed above the very important psychological threshold of—wait for it—3,000. Tha…

Stars 101 | National Geographic

[Narrator] Like fireflies on a still summer night, they gently dot and illuminate the infinite velveteen sky. Stars. Be they millions or billions of years old, are all born in nebuli, clouds of dust and mostly hydrogen gas. Within these stellar nurserie…

15 Things You Buy That Make You Richer

Poor people think that spending money makes you poor, but that’s not a universal truth. When the average person spends money, they do get poorer; but smart and successful people have figured out ways to spend money and get richer because of it. By the end…

Capturing a Carnivorous Bat on Camera | National Geographic

[Music] When National Geographic asked me to photograph this bat story, I was really excited because it was an opportunity to work with some really interesting scientists, like Rodrigo. I get to work with the species I’ve never seen before. Very little h…

YC Tech Talks: Designing Game Characters with Deep Learning, from Cory Li at Spellbrush (W18)

My name is Corey, uh I’m the CEO at Spell Rush and I’m here to talk to you today about, uh, designing characters with deep learning. So, um, we’re Spell Rush. Uh, we’re a YC company as well. Uh, we’re building deep learning tools for art and artists. Uh,…

Judging outliers in a dataset | Summarizing quantitative data | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

We have a list of 15 numbers here, and what I want to do is think about the outliers. To help us with that, let’s actually visualize the distribution of actual numbers. So let us do that. Here on a number line, I have all the numbers from one to 19. Let’…

The Power of Transportation | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles