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."

Angular momentum of an extended object | Physics | Khan Academy

The Middle Class Just Got FINANCIALLY RUINED

View All

Help support Khan Academy

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy, and I just wanted to remind you that we are a not-for-profit, and we can only exist through donations from folks like yourself. Our goal is for everyone to reach their potential. Potential is everywhere; unfo…

Titrations of polyprotic acids | Acids and bases | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

A polyprotic acid is an acid with more than one proton that it can donate in solution. An example of a polyprotic acid is the protonated form of the amino acid alanine. Here’s a dot structure showing the protonated form of the amino acid alanine, and we c…

National Geographic goes to space with Disney and Pixar's Lightyear

(Heroic music) I’m Nadia Drake with National Geographic. Today, we’re at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Chris Evans, who plays Buzz Lightyear in the new Disney and Pixar movie Lightyear. Hanging out with the intrepid freshly returned from orbit, as…

Getting Water in the Arctic | Life Below Zero

[Music] Not everything goes the way you want it to go. You don’t get to choose how life unfolds; you just get to live it. [Music] Looks like I’ve got good moving water, but it looks like it’s out there quite a ways right now here in Kavik. This is the cha…

Curvature of a helix, part 2

So where we left off, we were looking at this parametric function for a three-dimensional curve and what it draws. I showed you was a helix in three-dimensional space, and we’re trying to find its curvature. The way you think about that is you have a circ…

Taking a break from stocks

What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here. So, I think it’s really important that we talk about a concerning new trend that’s just started to surface in the stock market over the last few weeks. And listen, I get it. These last few months have been rather eventf…

The Power of Transportation | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles