Nightwish - The Greatest Show on Earth lyrics

I four Point Six

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
An 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?"
I I life

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
Forbears 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 here to care for the garden
The wonder of, birth of
Every form most beautiful
Every form most beautiful

I I I the Toolmaker

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

We were here

IV the Understanding

"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 these 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 it's 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"

V sea Worn Driftwood