Thursday, May 28, 2009

You are Brilliant, and the earth is Hiring

My friend Greg pointed me at this. "Paul Hawken gave the commencement address for the University of Portland earlier this month." You are brilliant, and the Earth is hiring. He tries to inspire them to save the planet. Here are some fun facts from it...

"The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a 'little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.'"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am always at a loss to explain why more people aren't totally interested in science, or even just have some intrinsic curiousity as a human being about how all this, including themselves, came about.

Of course, you could just read the short version (Genesis) and have all your questions answered and curiosity sated simultaneously.

Howard said...

Sure it's a fine creation myth. In fact the first two chapters are two different (fine) creation myths.