Paul Rosolie: evaluation

Transcript context

…What does the rainforest represent to you when you zoom out and look at the entirety of it? Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot resonated with a lot of people. That everything you’ve ever heard of, all the heroes, all the villains, all of your ancestors, every achievement, tragedy, triumph, everything has happened on that one spot. This one tiny, tiny little rock that has life on it. And to me, the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that as far as we know and to the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific brains at their fullest capacity, this is still the only place that we know that has life. And given that, the fact that there are still these tropical, towering, complex ecosystems that we barely understand, crawling and full of the most incredible life. To me, it’s so wonderful. It’s so incredible. The waterfalls and the birds and the macaws and the jaguars, it’s barely believable. If you were to theoretically tell a hypothetical alien, “I live on this planet and there’s just these places where everything is interconnected, everything means something to something else and the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive. And each tree is pumping air into the river, and there’s an invisible river above the actual river and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate.” And each little tiny leaf cutter ant somehow contributes to this giant, biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible. That is beautiful. I love that. And so the rainforests to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest challenge for us as a global society because if we can’t protect the crown jewel, the best thing, the most beautiful part, then we’re really, really missing the point. Yeah. The diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life that is at the core of what makes earth a really special thing. That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up. All right. You brought a machete to this fight. Luckily, the table is long enough where-…

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