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."

Digging the Scrap Heap | Port Protection

BITCOIN TO $500,000 - What You MUST Know

View All

Three things to know about stocks

When you own a stock, you’re owning a fractional share of a company. Now, there’s three things that I always like to keep people wary of when they buy a stock. The first is, is there’s sometimes a perception that the stock prices everything, that maybe a …

Laura Overdeck on reducing math anxiety and connecting math with real life | Homeroom with Sal

We’re seeing questions come on YouTube, uh, ask Laura and I anything, and we have team members who are looking at them, and we’re going to surface, uh, them. And actually, I’ll start with a question from YouTube, and that did help. Thanks, Laura. So this…

Can Money Buy Happiness? Yes, According to Philosophy & Science

Some people claim that money is the root of all evil, pointing at the enormous amounts of violence humanity imposes on itself motivated by acquiring it. Others argue that not money but the lack of money is the root of evil, as people, out of fear of being…

Computing a Jacobian matrix

So just as a reminder of where we are, we’ve got this very nonlinear transformation. We showed that if you zoom in on a specific point while that transformation is happening, it looks a lot like something linear. We reasoned that you can figure out what l…

The U.S. Economy Just Hit a Big Turning Point. (Howard Marks' Sea Change Is Here)

People believe in the ability to predict the future, and in general, uh, I agree with uh, John Kenneth Galbraith, who said, “There are two kinds of forecasters: the ones who don’t know and the ones who don’t know they don’t know.” There is Howard Marks, …

Using right triangle ratios to approximate angle measure | High school geometry | Khan Academy

We’re told here are the approximate ratios for angle measures: 25 degrees, 35 degrees, and 45 degrees. So, what they’re saying here is if you were to take the adjacent leg length over the hypotenuse leg length for a 25-degree angle, it would be a ratio o…

The Power of Transportation | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles