Our Fight Against Death | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

Humanity's struggle against death has been our most enduring fight. History has given us one weapon in this existential battle: we fight back with medicine. Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors scavenged the natural world for remedies. Imagine the incredible leaps of faith we had to take in an effort to ease the pain, mend the broken, and revive the sick.

Medicine was a dark art, full of false starts and false gods. But when we struck upon some form of relief, it swept like wildfire through humankind. We built on every success until medicine became a form of science. That's when we discovered the real killers within us: microscopic armies hidden within our bodies, waging war on our species for thousands of years.

Medicine is our great weapon to fight back against invisible, unthinkable death. [Applause] From superstition to science, medicine has become one of humanity's most powerful tools. And with each new challenge, we may stumble, but we find a way to get stronger and smarter to beat back fatal diseases and extend our lifespans. We even crack open our genetic code.

This is the story of how our fight against death has determined our fate, how it became the driving force of our evolution, how our tireless pursuit of medicine has made us modern, and even made us superhuman. This is origins. [Music]

Motion along a curve: finding rate of change | Advanced derivatives | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy

Solving quadratics using structure | Mathematics II | High School Math | Khan Academy

View All

Human impact on aquatic environments| AP Environmental science| Khan Academy

When you go to the beach and you look at the ocean, it oftentimes might look fine. But as we’ll see in this video, we human beings have been stressing aquatic environments, and if we’re not careful, we might completely ruin them. For example, this is wha…

Evolution, Adaptive Beliefs and Tigers

Natural selection only cares about what’s adaptive. Both true and false beliefs can be adaptive as long as they increase an animal’s chance of survival. Why should we expect natural selection to favor true adaptive beliefs over false ones? Alvin Plantinga…

Metallic bonds | Molecular and ionic compound structure and properties | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

Now the last type of bond I’m going to talk about is known as the metallic bond, which I think I know a little bit about because I was the lead singer of a metallic bond in high school. I’ll talk about that in future videos, but let’s just take one of our…

Triangulation Is One of My Keys to Success

There are two schools of thought. Some entrepreneurs believe that mentors and coaches are a huge integral part of their life. I know that I’ve had spiritual mentors, financial mentors, career mentors. I’ve had mentors in every area of my life. I see you a…

Judgment Is the Decisive Skill

We spoke about specific knowledge. We talked about accountability. We talked about leverage. The last skill that Naval talks about in his tweet storm is judgment, where he says that leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment. We are now living in an…

Is America Actually Metric?

I’m here at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and I’m about to see some of the original kilogram standards. Patrick: You are, you are. When were these made? Well, the originals were made in the 1880s. There were 40 of them that were b…

Our Fight Against Death | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles