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]

2016 Breakthrough Junior Challenge with Priscilla Chan | National Geographic

15 Traps to Avoid in Life

View All

15 Things You Can LEARN from LUXURY BRANDS

We all have our favorite luxury brands, brands that tug at our heartstrings when we see them in store windows, as we slow our pace down to absorb the beauty of the products on display. But it’s more than just the beautiful display, isn’t it? Everything ab…

Worked example: Parametric arc length | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy

Let’s say that X is a function of the parameter T, and it’s equal to cosine of T, and Y is also defined as a function of T, and it’s equal to sine of T. We want to find the arc length of the curve traced out, so the length of the curve from T equals 0 to …

Dan Savage on the AIDS Epidemic | Generation X

People didn’t believe that our love was the equivalent of heterosexual love. Uh, not even people who considered themselves down with the gays believed that. I think it was Harvey Milk in “Torse Trilogy” who said that it would be great one day if we all gr…

Speaking the Language | Saints & Strangers

You’ll want them in my saucer. II Hello, catch! Working with the Aventa key language is a huge opportunity. It’s something that I welcomed with open arms. It was something that I felt was a responsibility as a native actor. And I can’t come to me! I ha…

How To Use The 2023 Recession To Build Wealth

Despite the 2023 economy looking pretty shaky, with high inflation, the Federal Reserve raising rates, and the stock market suffering over the past 12 months or so, many of the world’s best investors have been busy buying into the market. While most other…

Extinction | Common ancestry and phylogeny | High school biology | Khan Academy

When we think of the term extinction, we tend to think of events like what happened, what we believe happened, 63 million years ago when a large meteor hit the Earth and killed most of the dinosaurs. I say most of them because a lot of animals that we kno…

Our Fight Against Death | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles