Lyrics The greatest show on earth Nightwish

The greatest show on earth

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?"

CHAPTER II. LIFE (4:22)

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 is 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 is 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

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
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

CHAPTER III. THE TOOLMAKER (6:45)

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

CHAPTER IV. THE UNDERSTANDING (3:46)

"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?"

CHAPTER V. SEAWORN DRIFTWOOD (3:19)

"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"