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."

Dividing by 0.1 and 0.01

LA92 Panel - Live | National Geographic

View All

Camping on Sea Ice with Whale Hunters | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

An evo is an amazing word for something terrifying. It is when the pack ice that is floating on the other side of the ocean gets pushed by the wind, and it comes in and impacts the ice that we’re standing on. This is photographer Keely Wean. In 2018, he w…

Stolen Mummy's Left Hand Found and Returned to Egypt | National Geographic

We have a repatriation of ancient artifacts from Egypt. It includes a child sarcophagus about 2,600 years old, the top of another mummy sarcophagus, a burial shroud from inside a mummy sarcophagus, and finally, there is a mummified hand which was collecte…

Catch of the Week - Burn Blubber | Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks

[Music] That bird is up there waiting to get a little snack. All right guys, I got a more need to bite. Boy, need to bite bad! We’re on! We’re on! R on! Let’s get him! It’s going to be a nice one, baby! Look at that! Mark, that’s what you want right ther…

Breakthrough Prize Ceremony Live

The human mind is an incredible thing that can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark—the spark of enquiry and wonder. I don’t be…

Angle of x' axis in Minkowski spacetime | Special relativity | Physics | Khan Academy

We’ve been doing some interesting things in the last few videos. We let go of our Newtonian assumptions that the passage of time is the same in all inertial frames of reference, that time is absolute, that one second in my frame of reference is the same a…

LC natural response intuition 1

We’re going to talk about the natural response of an LC circuit, inductor-capacitor circuit, and this is an interesting one. This is a circuit that has two energy storage elements. In the past videos, we’ve done one energy storage element, either a C or a…

The Power of Transportation | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles