The Greatest Show On Earth

Album: Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015)
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  • Archaean horizon
    The first sunrise
    On a pristine gaea
    Opus perfectum
    Somewhere there, us sleeping

    After sleeping through a hundred million centuries
    We have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life
    Within decades we must close our eyes again
    Isn't it a noble and enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun
    To work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

    The cosmic law of gravity
    Pulled the newborns around a fire
    A careless cold infinity in every vast direction
    Lonely farer in the Goldilocks zone
    She has a tale to tell
    From the stellar nursery into a carbon feast
    Enter LUCA

    The tapestry of chemistry
    There's a writing in the garden
    Leading us to the mother of all

    We are one
    We are a universe
    Forebears of what will be
    Scions of the Devonian sea
    Aeons pass
    Writing the tale of us all
    A day-to-day new opening
    For the greatest show on Earth

    Ion channels welcoming the outside world
    To the stuff of stars
    Bedding the tree of a biological holy
    Enter life

    The tapestry of chemistry
    There's a writing in the garden
    Leading us to the mother of all

    We are one
    We are a universe
    Forebears of what will be
    Scions of the Devonian sea
    Aeons pass
    Writing the tale of us all
    A day-to-day new opening
    For the greatest show on Earth

    We are here to care for the garden
    The wonder of birth
    Of every form most beautiful
    Every form most beautiful

    We are one
    We are a universe
    Forebears of what will be
    Scions of the Devonian sea
    Aeons pass writing the tale of us all
    A day-to-day new opening
    For the greatest show on Earth

    After a billion years The show is still here
    Not a single one of your fathers died young
    The handy travelers out of Africa
    Little Lucy of the Afar

    Gave birth to fantasy
    To idolatry
    To self-destructive weaponry
    Enter the God of gaps
    Deep within the past
    Atavistic dread of the hunted

    Enter Ionia, the cradle of thought
    The architecture of understanding
    The human lust to feel so exceptional
    To rule the Earth

    Hunger for shiny rocks
    For giant mushroom clouds
    The will to do just as you'd be done by
    Enter history, the grand finale
    Enter ratkind

    Man, he took his time in the sun
    Had a dream to understand
    A single grain of sand
    He gave birth to poetry
    But one day'll cease to be
    Greet the last light of the library

    Man, he took his time in the sun
    Had a dream to understand
    A single grain of sand
    He gave birth to poetry
    But one day'll cease to be
    Greet the last light of the library

    Man, he took his time in the sun
    Had a dream to understand
    A single grain of sand
    He gave birth to poetry
    But one day'll cease to be
    Greet the last light of the library

    We were here!
    We were here!
    We were here!
    We were here!

    "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones
    Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
    The potential people who could have been here in my place
    But who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara
    Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton
    We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA
    So massively exceeds the set of actual people
    In the teeth of those stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here
    We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds
    How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state
    From which the vast majority have never stirred?"

    There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers
    Having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one
    And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity
    From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been
    And are being, evolved Writer/s: MARCO HIETALA, TUOMAS HOLOPAINEN
    Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
    Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

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