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]

Monetizing Podcasts and Newsletters - Chris Best of Substack and Jonathan Gill of Backtracks

ALL MY ACCOUNTS WERE HACKED *How this happened*

View All

The Less You Want, The More You Have | Minimalist Philosophy for Living in Abundance

Imagine that we need one million dollars to be happy. If that’s the case, then as long as we don’t reach this amount, we’re unhappy. If we look at humanity’s poverty and its small percentage of millionaires, we can conclude that happiness is scarce if it …

Chaos: The Science of the Butterfly Effect

Part of this video is sponsored by LastPass. More about LastPass at the end of the show. The butterfly effect is the idea that the tiny causes, like a flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil, can have huge effects, like setting off a tornado in Texas. Now …

The rise of industrial capitalism | AP US History | Khan Academy

[Instructor] The period from the end of the Civil War to the start of the 20th Century was one of incredible economic transformation in the United States. In 1865, the United States was the 4th largest industrial economy in the world. By the 1890s, it had…

Shells, subshells, and orbitals | Atomic structure and properties | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

We’ve learned in other videos that the atom is, in fact, made up of even smaller constituent particles, which is pretty amazing because atoms are already unimaginably small. Those particles are the protons, which have a positive charge; you have your neut…

Honest Q&A About My Relationship, Smoking, Marriage, and More

Hello, hello! Let’s do a little Q&A. I basically collected some questions on my Instagram story. If you’re not following me on Instagram, what are you doing? Okay, I promise I’m going to be more active. Okay, I say this like every single month, and th…

Weak base equilibria | Acids and bases | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

An example of a weak base is ammonia (NH3), and ammonia will react with water. In this reaction, water functions as a Brønsted-Lowry acid and donates a proton to ammonia, which functions as a Brønsted-Lowry base and accepts a proton. A proton is H+. So, i…

Our Fight Against Death | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles