Shadowing Practice: All Tomorrows: the future of humanity? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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All Tomorrows, a billion -year chronicle of the myriad species and mixed fortunes of man.
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Long ago, in the distant past, humans colonised Mars.
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It took centuries to terraform the Red Planet – first they made oceans, using the water from comets.
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Then they sent microbes to create breathable air, then introduced genetically modified plants and animals.
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It was only after Mars was transformed into a habitable world that the first people came to Mars in colony ships.
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So the first steps on Mars were taken not by astronauts, but by barefoot children on lush green grass.
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The people of Mars developed their own culture and identity separate to Earth.
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The low gravity made Martians tall and spindly, and they became almost a different species to the Earthlings.
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For hundreds of years, the two planets coexisted, but as Mars started to surpass Earth, tensions led to war.
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Interplanetary war wasn't glorious or exciting.
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There were no heroic pilots or massive spaceships.
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The war was fought by complicated, automated machines, in a slow,
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strategic, nerve -wracking contest that caused unimaginable destruction.
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Billions of people died in the war, and humans almost went extinct, so the survivors of Earth and Mars united,
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and made a plan to ensure this would never happen again.
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Humanity made massive reforms to their politics and economics, and they changed themselves.
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They genetically modified humanity into a new subspecies called the Star People, made to be better and smarter,
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and adapted to expand into space.
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And it worked.
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Within a few generations, the unified star people peacefully colonised the solar system.
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Other stars were too far away to fly to in person, so instead the star people sent out automated machines,
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that would fly to distant worlds and terraform them, then use genetic material to create people to live there.
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There was a weird problem with these colonies, where many humans fell in love with the machines that had created them,
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and died in mass identity crises.
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But the colonies that survived thrived, and expanded across the galaxy, starting a golden age for humanity.
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Trillions of people lived peaceful, utopic lives, their worlds united by communication across centuries of light.
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As the Star People explored space, they discovered some alien creatures, but didn't find any intelligent life.
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So they wondered, were humans alone in the galaxy?
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On one alien world, they found a fossil of a bird -like creature that didn't seem related to the other native life.
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The native creatures had three limbs and copper bones, but this bird had four limbs and calcium bones.
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It seemed related to an extinct dinosaur from Earth.
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So how the hell did this extinct Earth animal end up on this distant alien world?
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Some people thought God must have done it, and there was a resurgence of religion.
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But others thought aliens did it,
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that there must be some civilisation out there who had spaceflight and bioengineering millions of years before humans even had fire.
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Humanity hoped that these aliens would be peaceful, but just in case, they built weapons to defend themselves.
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Weapons so powerful they could obliterate stars.
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But all of that was useless in the end.
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Humanity was attacked by a godlike ancient species called the Q.
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They were galactic nomads who constantly migrated through space,
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and they had a fanatical religious mission to remake the universe using genetic manipulation.
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So when the Q found humans, they didn't see them as people – they were just objects to be changed into whatever shape the Q wanted.
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Within a thousand years, the Q destroyed human civilisation.
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But some human species lived on.
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Cause the Q used their bioengineering technology to reshape humanity into thousands of bizarre subspecies.
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They made humans into tools, into pets, into wild animals.
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They ruled over the human worlds for forty million years,
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and then they fucked off to find their next victims – leaving humanity divided and and differentiated beyond recognition.
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These twisted species were the last remnants of humanity.
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On one world, where the husks of dead cities baked under a scorching sun, lived the worms.
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They were humans, but the Q had modified their hands and feet into tiny feeble appendages, reduced their eyes to pinpricks,
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and removed most of their brain.
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All their lives the worms dug aimlessly through the ground.
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If they found food, they ate it.
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If they found other worms, they sometimes ate them, or reproduced.
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They were wretched, mindless creatures but their humanity would eventually resurface.
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On another world were the Titans, who roamed a vast savannah.
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Their hands were clumsy stumps, but their lower lip was like the trunk of an elephant, and could be used like a hand.
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They were some of the smartest of the new human species, and gradually they achieved sentience.
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They built homes, agriculture, language, literature, nature, made ornate wood carvings.
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In booming voices they told myths and legends of the bygone, half -remembered past.
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With enough time, these titans could have started a new humanity.
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But an Ice Age hit the planet, and these gentle giants disappeared forever.
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On other worlds, humans had been twisted into predators, looking like vampires and werewolves of myth, with sharp claws and killing teeth.
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Their prey were also human, made into herbivores with bird -like feet.
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The prey had the dull minds of animals,
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but the predators on the hunt kept some spark of human intelligence – which would eventually re -emerge.
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The mantelopes were bred to be singers and memory retainers for the queue – so they had fully human minds, they understood the world around them.
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But in the bodies of grazing herd animals, they were powerless to change anything.
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So for centuries, mournful herds roamed the plains, singing songs of desperation and loss.
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They created whole religions and oral traditions around their grief and frustration.
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Until gradually, mercifully, their agony faded.
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Cause evolutionarily, a stupid, simple -minded mantelope survives as well or better than a conscious, sad mantelope.
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So within a hundred thousand years, this melancholy world fell silent.
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Human minds aren't sacred to evolution, and soon, only animals remained.
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The lizard herders were the lucky ones, cause the Q wiped out their intelligence, and stunted their brains so that they could never regain sentience.
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So they didn't suffer like the mantelopes did.
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The lizard herders survived in symbiosis with some herbivorous reptiles.
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And while the lizard herders stayed simple -minded, the reptiles evolved, slowly growing stronger and smarter.
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The Q twisted humanity into a variety of aquatic creatures – there were limbless eel people and whale -like behemoths,
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and horrifying multitudes of brainless wallowers that served as foodstock.
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Most of them went extinct when the queue left, but the swimmers survived, feeding on fish and crustaceans in their world's oceans.
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They didn't look much like humans, but human eyes peered through their blubbery eyelids, and they spoke to each other,
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though underwater, they couldn't hear each other's words.
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The tempters were so fucked up it's a wonder they survived it all.
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The queue made them into bizarre living decorations – two -metre -tall cones of flesh like grotesque carnivorous plants.
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Those were the females.
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The males were mindless little monkey imp creatures who blindly served their queen – controlled by vocal and pheromonal signals.
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They'd gather the food and guard their queen, and occasionally they would mate by descending into this breeding tube like a subway commuter.
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It was weird, but it worked, and the tempter's mound forests spread across their world.
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They could've built some kind of civilisation, but they were obliterated by a stray comet,
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and one of humanity's best and weirdest hopes died out.
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The Bonecrushers looked like monsters – like giants or ogres, with beaks derived from teeth.
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They only ate putrefying meat, and they communicated by defecating on each other.
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But they were actually pretty successful – they reached a medieval
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level of civilization – until they ran out of rotting meat to eat, and eventually collapsed.
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When the Q attacked, most human worlds were quickly defeated.
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But one world fought back, resisting the Q two times before falling.
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The Q punished and humiliated this world for its resistance – by making them into the Colonials.
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The Colonials were disembodied cultures of skin, connected with a network of basic nerves.
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The Q used them as living filtering devices, living off Q waste products.
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And for no other reason than to make the Colonials suffer, the Q left them with their consciousness and their eyes,
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so that they could fully witness their own wretched fate.
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For forty million years, the Colonials suffered generations of misery, hoping for their own extinction.
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But they were made to be efficient, and so they spread across the planet, in quilt -like fields of human flesh.
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The Q made lots of flying human species – some like bats or pterosaurs, others like angels or demons dancing through the aether,
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or strange ugly creatures that floated on glands full of gas.
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One species, called the Flyers, had a special starfish -shaped heart that processed oxygen so efficiently
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that they had enough energy to support flight as well as human -like brains.
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Other flying species weren't so lucky.
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The hand -flappers had wings that were useless for flying, but also couldn't be used as hands.
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All they could do was flap about to display their sexual availability, and so they ecstatically flashed and danced their way to extinction.
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Some humans tried to escape the Q by hiding underground – the Q found them anyway,
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and made them into subterranean mousy Morlock people called the Blind Folk.
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They used whiskers and long fingers and big ears and banshee -like screams to navigate in the dark.
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They lived off fungi and fish, and avoided predation by bats and crocodilian creatures.
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These albino trogdolites looked fairly human, but where their eyes should have been, there was nothing but haunting smooth skin.
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Eventually, the movement of tectonic plates crushed these underground habitats one by one.
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On a planet with extremely high gravity, the queue made the lopsiders – flat,
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deformed, asymmetrical creatures right out of the fever dreams of Picasso, Dali, or Bosch.
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The lopsiders crawled along the ground on three hands, with another limb used as an antenna.
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One eye stared straight up, while the other eye scanned ahead.
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As wretched as they looked, the lopsiders thrived on their heavy world.
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They domesticated some native creatures, and began the long road to civilisation.
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On a moon with very low gravity, the Q made the Striders – enormously tall,
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thin creatures who walked among huge trees that towered like skyscrapers.
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The Striders were very delicate, so even with low gravity, a fall could shatter their bones.
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The Striders were eventually wiped out by a bunch of chickens who over two million years evolved into deadly predators.
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On another world where the humans temporarily resisted the Q.
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The Q punished the humans by creating an array of parasites, who were also made from humans.
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There were tortoise -sized vampire -like ambulatory parasites, and smaller parasites that lived attached to their hosts.
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There was even one horrific parasite that infested the wombs of its victims.
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Many of these parasite life cycles were so elaborate and baroque that they went extinct as soon as the queue left.
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But some of the parasites survived, and developed a symbiosis that benefited their hosts as well as themselves.
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One human species evolved on a world of great archipelagos – calm, shallow oceans sprinkled with countless islands.
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The fingerfishers evolved to catch fish with their long fingers adapted into fish hooks,
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and ate them with long snouts full of needle -sharp teeth, and their evolution would get even weirder later on.
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The Hedonists were created by the Q to be their pampered pets, living carefree lives of pleasure.
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Their world was a tropical paradise of succulent fruits and lakes of sweet bacterial juice.
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They were the only animals on their planet, and had no predators or competition to deal with.
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Under normal conditions, this might lead to overpopulation,
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but the Q designed the hedonists to only get pregnant after mating an enormous number of times.
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So the population was stable, and the hedonists filled their lives with eating, sleeping, and mind -blowing sex.
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Their minds were blissfully empty, cause who needed to think when they're having such a good time.
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The insectophagi adapted to eat insects.
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They had claw -like hands to dig, long tongues to scoop up bugs, and leathery faces to protect from bites.
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They lived quiet, unnoticed lives on their obscure world, but little did they know, they would play a key role in the fate of humanity.
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When the Q attacked, not all humans were captured.
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Some of them escaped shaped into space, and built homes inside hollowed out asteroids.
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They adapted to zero gravity by growing long spindly limbs,
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and pressurised digestive systems so they could move around in space by farting from their highly evolved sphincters.
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These spaces changed to the point where they could never return to a planet with gravity.
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But they didn't care.
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They were comfortable in their weightless void worlds, and paid little attention to their human relatives on the planets below.
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So across the galaxy, these twisted post -human species struggled to survive.
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They evolved, diversified, rose and fell, and most of them died out without the universe ever knowing they existed.
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Which is normal – extinction is just as natural as speciation.
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And for each species that died out, new ones evolved to take their place, generating an ever -changing, kaleidoscopic variety of lifeforms.
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And from this endless churn of life and death, some species rose up to achieve new kinds of sentience and civilisation,
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like stars emerging from a dark fog.
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The scorching hot planet of the worms eventually cooled down, and life emerged onto the surface.
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The worms filled new ecological niches, evolving into serpentine grazers, swimmers,
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predators, and eventually people with human -like intelligence.
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The snake people had unique spiral shaped brains that allowed them to observe and understand their world.
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They developed a hand derived from their ancestors' feet, and they built vast cities of tightly intertwined tunnels and homes.
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They enjoyed books, and music played as vibrations in the ground.
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The Snake People may have looked alien, but their daily lives were full of joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams.
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Humanity.
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The Predators evolved into the Killer Folk.
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Their deadly claws became grasping hands, and their sabre teeth receded into organs of social display.
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Killer Folk society was built around hunting and violence, and so their history was filled with war.
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For thousands of years, nomadic warriors with vast herds of once -human livestock battled each other across a chessboard of continents.
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So their world is an archaeologist's dream, rich with the ruins of fallen kingdoms.
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But one faction of killer folk developed factory farming, and rejected their violent past for a more peaceful, unified future.
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Some conservative factions kept to the old way, fanatically devoted to traditional warfare and hunting.
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These two factions came dangerously close to global conflict, but the killer folk managed to reconcile and survive.
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Underwater, the swimmers couldn't make fire, so they made a different kind of technology.
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They learned to breed their tools and machines.
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The tool breeders domesticated and modified other sea creatures, and built entire cities powered by organic life.
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Huge, heart -like creatures pumped nutritious fluids through a network of self -healing conduits, like a living power grid.
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The breeders' homes were made from living shell and bone, with bioluminescent lights.
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They had televisions derived from cephalopod skin, medicinal sea squirts, weapons made from mollusks that fired teeth as ammunition.
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With genetic modification, stem cells, and tissue cultures, the tool breeders mastered the oceans,
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and even the small landmasses of their world.
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But they weren't content with just one planet.
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the tool breeders grew living spaceships and reached for the stars.
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The lizard herders were stunted, and never achieved sentience.
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But the lizards thrived, and eventually built civilizations – using the humans for transport, labour, and food.
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These lizards had no biological connection to humanity.
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But they took on a human -like cultural identity, because they were influenced by the ruins of the star people on their world.
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They realised what the Q had done to the humans, and feared that if the Q returned, they might suffer the same fate.
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For millions of years, the Colonials were helpless fields of flesh, carpeting the shores of their world like algae.
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But they were resilient, and eventually they organised themselves, evolving from a homogenous mass into differentiated colonies.
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Each cell specialised to perform different functions for the colony, and the colonies started competing against each other.
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Some colonies grew taproots to siphon resources from afar, or starfish -like feet to move around,
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or claws and poisons to attack other colonies.
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The winner of this evolutionary arms race was an intelligent colony called the Modular People.
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In their vast industrial megalopolis, the people took a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
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They could combine themselves, or split apart, or exchange parts – all interchangeable cells playing a role in one great organism.
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So the Modular People achieved the impossible, – turning their miserable existence into a utopia,
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where billions lived happy lives as part of the unified whole.
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The fliers diversified into many different species, as predators, herbivores, even swimmers.
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One species were like storks who waded through swamps to catch their prey.
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Their versatile feet, which had evolved to catch slippery fish, became articulate hands as they developed intelligence and society.
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Since these Terrasapiens could fly, they had a global mindset.
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Borders and nations made no sense when it was so easy to travel freely.
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People and ideas spread quickly across their planet, and they built an egalitarian society without strict social classes.
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They built cities of perches and fluting towers, harnessed nuclear power, and farmed their relatives on the ground for food.
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Though their civilisation thrived, their bodies struggled to support their highly developed brains and their power of flight,
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so the Terrasapiens usually died by the age of twenty -three.
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Keenly aware of their mortality, they appreciated every moment of their lives.
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Their philosophers pondered the meaning of life with feverish intensity, rapidly filling libraries with their tomes.
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The Terrasapien in this picture poses at a seaside resort –
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this ten day vacation was the only holiday in her short life.
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Despite the crushing gravity of their world, the Lopsiders built an advanced civilisation.
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Their pancake flat buildings spread all over their world, and they developed spaceflight so that they could escape their planet and its oppressive gravity.
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To adapt to life on new worlds, they engineered a subspecies of themselves who could live in low gravity, called the asymmetric people.
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The asymmetric people thrived in the freedom of new worlds, but they had no love for their creators.
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The asymmetric people ruthlessly exterminated the lopsiders on their homeworld, and went on to explore the heavens alone.
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The parasites and their hosts evolved symbiotic relationships – like, some parasites used sharp sensors to warn their hosts of predators,
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or provide weapons like venom for defence.
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In return, the hosts provided their nutritious blood,
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and developed specialised nesting sites on their bodies for the parasite to attach to – rich with blood vessels and protective fur.
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The parasites and hosts became inextricably linked, almost like they were one being.
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At first, the hosts were like horses being steered and influenced by the parasites.
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But eventually, they became no more than puppets, totally controlled by the parasites through tactile and olfactory signals.
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The intelligent parasite civilization eventually developed technology that replaced the need for hosts –
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but they kept the hosts around for tradition and convenience.
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An average symbiote might start the day in a business host, and then change to a comfortable domestic host at home after work.
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The world of the fingerfishers was full of scattered, isolated islands.
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So like the Galapagos or Madagascar on Earth, these islands were a seething evolutionary cauldron that gave rise to wildly diverse species.
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One line of fingerfishers evolved into the Sail People.
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Their long fingers evolved into sails that could drive them effortlessly across oceans.
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They used their tongues to catch prey, and eventually their tongues split and articulated to be used as hands.
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The sail people needed strong memories to navigate the oceans and locate prey, so naturally they soon evolved intelligence.
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It took a long time to develop social
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and political stability – cause their scattered and diverse world gave rise to a huge variety of creatures who fiercely competed.
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For generations, flotillas of tribal warriors and pirate societies battled in epoch -spanning conflicts.
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Until finally, one group of sailpeople became powerful enough to finally unify their world and make peace.
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Blood had stained the oceans for too long.
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The peaceful paradise of the hedonists seemed like it would never end.
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But over millions of years, nothing lasts forever.
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Geologic activity threw up clouds of dust that blocked the sun and killed most of the hedonists.
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Only a small mutant subset survived, by escaping the reproductive limits of their ancestors.
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These satyriacs got their shit together and built an advanced self -sustaining civilisation.
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But there were still traces of their hedonistic past remaining in their genes.
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So their societies retained a delightful streak of pleasure -seeking and promiscuity.
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Festivals, concerts, and ritualised orgies punctuated every working week.
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And now, that pleasure was savoured by sentient, self -aware people.
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The Insectophagi started to look like their prey.
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Their leathery faceplates hardened and became part of their jaw.
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Their hands and feet developed into pincers, and their brains evolved intelligence.
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Like many others, the Bugfaces built a civilisation, but they also faced a unique threat.
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They were attacked by an alien race.
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Little is known about these aliens, cause not much survived in the historical record.
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But it took an intense series of wars on the ground and in orbit before the invaders were defeated.
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And this traumatic conflict gave the bugfaces a pathological, xenophobic fear of all other species.
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So when the human species on other worlds started to reach out to each other, the bugfaces stayed silent and withdrew from the galaxy.
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The Spacers became even more alien in the void of space.
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Their fingers extended and split bit into tiny grasping limbs, their legs atrophied, relying on their farts to move instead.
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And in the weightless void of space,
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their brains expanded, till their every thought was far more vast and complex than anything that other humans could conceive.
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These Asteromorphs spread to every star system in the galaxy, but they didn't interfere with other species.
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The Asteromorphs had no need for planets – those ugly balls of dirt and ice and gravity.
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They stayed in the outer rims of star systems, silently watching over the galaxy like strange alien gods.
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The advanced post -human species started making contact with each other.
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The killer folk talked with the satyriacs.
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The tool breeders reached out from their ocean depths.
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– the Modular People and the Terrasapiens joined in, followed by the Asymmetric People, Sorosapiens, and others.
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They didn't visit each other in person, cause the interstellar distances were too large,
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but they cooperated by sharing knowledge and technology – and by keeping watch for alien invasions.
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They all had found the ruins of the Star People and the Q, and they didn't want to be attacked and changed again.
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This alliance of posthumans lasted for almost 80 million years, with each species expanding to new worlds and prospering together.
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The bugfaces never joined them, cause they were afraid and xenophobic, but there was one other advanced species that didn't join,
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and from them would come the downfall of the Alliance.
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The Ruin Haunters were much like other species twisted by the Q.
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But on their world, the cities of the Star People hadn't been completely destroyed, so the Ruin Haunters had access to remnants of the Star People's technology,
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which allowed them to advance at a dangerous pace.
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Their technology developed so fast that their social and political structures didn't keep up, and they almost destroyed themselves in a series of worldwide nuclear wars.
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This baptism by fire hardened the Ruinhaunters, and kind of drove them crazy.
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They convinced themselves that they alone were the true descendants and heirs of the Star People,
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and that only they deserved to reclaim the legacy of the Golden Age of their ancestors.
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So when the other human species formed their alliance, the Ruinhaunters refused to participate.
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But the Ruinhaunters' sun was rapidly expanding, and threatened to burn and destroy their worlds.
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So the Ruinhaunters used their super -advanced technology to abandon their organic bodies and replace them with machines.
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They became the Gravitals – floating metal spheres that could mould the environment around them with gravity fields.
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They were entirely mechanical, but they still had human minds, coded into quantum computers.
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So they still had human ambitions, and human delusions.
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Twisted with neurotic, narcissistic hubris, the Gravitals started to exterminate all other life.
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And the other human species were unable to stop them.
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The Gravitals would come to a human world and block out their sun behind a vast black sail.
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If the choked, dying world managed to resist, they were finished off with an asteroid.
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The Gravitals didn't hate other species – they just didn't see them as people.
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And so they wiped them out like one might swat a fly.
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All the snake people, the tool breeders, Terrasapiens, and the others, who had worked so hard to survive,
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were snuffed out one by one.
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The only survivors of these genocides were the shy and xenophobic Bugfaces.
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For reasons unknown, they alone were kept alive, and the Gravitals used them as subjects for biological experimentation.
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The Gravitals twisted them into new forms so strange that they made the work of the Q look tame.
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As well as servants and labourers, they made the subjects into bizarre art pieces,
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like creatures that existed only to play the tune of one particular pop song on its modified throat and fingers.
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They made whole elaborate artificial ecologies of doomed human flesh, purely for entertainment and curiosity.
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The Gravitals recycled and repurposed organic life, the same way someone might tinker with computer parts, or recycle trash.
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And for millions of years that was how organic life existed in the machine empire.
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But not all Gravitals saw life the same way.
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Some religious and philosophical sects argued
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that all forms of life had rights – they secretly created human species who could live and think freely.
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Some Gravitals even fell in love with their human creations.
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So Gravital society became divided between the tolerant Gravitals who respected human in life,
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and the hardline conservative pan -mechanical Gravitals.
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This division threatened to tear the machine empire apart, so the Gravitals looked for a common enemy to unify against.
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For millions of years, the Gravitals
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and the Asteromorphs had watched each other nervously – the Gravitals on the planets and the Asteromorphs in space.
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They both were massively powerful, and feared that a war could destroy them both.
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But in an attempt to unite their divided society, the Gravitals started a war with the Asteromorphs.
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The resulting conflict raged for millions of years, and scarred uncounted stars.
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But in the end, the Asteromorphs triumphed, and defeated the Gravitals, toppling their machine empire fire.
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And the Asteromorphs decided to clean up the mess that the machines had made.
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They took the surviving humans who the Gravitals had twisted, and created habitable worlds for them to live in.
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The Asteromorphs played God, seeding life across the galaxy and the human species rose reborn as inheritors of the war -torn worlds.
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under the watchful eye of the Asteromorphs.
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The Asteromorphs wanted to ensure that no genocidal arseholes would ever conquer the galaxy again, so they created a smaller,
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simpler version of themselves called the Terrestrials, to live on the human worlds.
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The Terrestrials played the role of kings, prophets, and caretakers, guiding their worlds along a wise and peaceful path.
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It didn't always work out too well.
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Sometimes worlds rebelled, so the Asteromorphs destroyed them.
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Sometimes the terrestrials were corrupt and exploited their subjects.
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But one way or another, the human worlds spread, and formed a prosperous galactic empire.
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The Gravitals weren't completely destroyed by the Asteromorphs.
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It turned out that it was pretty useful to have super -advanced machines around.
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So the Asteromorphs just Disabled their gravity weapons and numbed their minds a bit to discourage rebellion.
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And they used the Gravitals as labourers to work in dangerous environments.
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These new machines were given nanotechnological bodies that could transform into any shape.
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They eventually became citizens of the Empire, but were often discriminated against.
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Machines were never fully trusted, after the atrocities of the Gravitals.
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Eventually, the human Asteromorph Empire made contact with life from other galaxies,
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including the Amphocephali – these weird snakes that had snakes inside their snakes.
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Apparently, these creatures had had an evolutionary history just as long and complex as humanity had.
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And after all that they'd both been through, the life forms of each galaxy were finally old enough and mature enough to meet peacefully, without conflict.
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This video won't describe all intergalactic history – the stories are endless.
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How the United Galaxies re -encountered and defeated the Q, how they cradled their sons in artificial shells,
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and crossed space through wormholes.
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But one moment worth relating is the rediscovery of Earth.
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A lone researcher located the birthplace of humanity, where all the esteromorphs and machines and post -humans could trace their origins.
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Earth had gone stagnant and feral by then, an obscure and empty world.
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But after half a billion years of absence, humans returned to their homeworld, though both had changed beyond recognition.
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I have to end with a confession.
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Humans, astereomorphs, machines, and all their descendants are now extinct.
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They've been dead for a billion years.
350
This video is just our best approximation of their history, based on the available archaeological evidence.
351
We don't know what killed off the humans.
352
Maybe some unimaginably destructive war.
353
Maybe their empire broke up, and each world suffered its own slow, private death.
354
Some claim that humanity migrated into some higher plane of existence.
355
We don't know what happened, and ultimately, it doesn't matter.
356
The story of humanity was never about its end – not about its ultimate domination of galaxies, or its transcendence from reality.
357
Being human was always about the daily lives of people – from the love songs of the carefree hedonists,
358
to the pontifications of the Terrasapiens, to the families of the sail -people sharing a meal.
359
Grander narratives and absolute ideals are always what led to humanity's worst atrocities – the Gravitals massacred to reclaim the past,
360
the queue conquered for some fanatical, idealised future.
361
Living for some abstract ultimate goal so often leads to destruction.
362
So when you look on the remains of the long -gone human species, remember that it's the present that matters, not the past or future.
363
What you do today shapes tomorrow, not the other way round.
364
So love today, and seize all tomorrows.
365
All Tomorrows is a story written and illustrated by C .M.
366
Kozeman.
367
Kozeman is an artist, writer, and researcher who does heaps of fascinating work around paleontology,
368
history, surreal art, and all sorts of stuff.
369
So go check out his website and his YouTube videos, and consider supporting him on Patreon.
370
Also since this video will probably be demonetised, consider supporting Alt Shift X on Patreon as well.
371
We've got more Song of Ice and Fire videos coming soon, and episode one of the Alt Shift X podcast is out now, with an interview with the authors of The Expanse,
372
so go check it out.
373
Thanks for watching, and thanks to the Patrons, including Sonja Balan, Wild Words, Alexandra Lamoureux, Varun Pramanik, Najib Harshi,
374
Ashley Daniel, Colt Foster, Irish Steff, and Sams 2006.
375
Cheers.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “All Tomorrows: the future of humanity?”. This video has 47 sentences and 5314 words to shadow. The speech runs for 40:21. The speaker talks at a steady 132 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 72% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| humanity noun | /hjuˈmænɪti/ | Humankind; human beings as a group. |
| evolve verb | /ɪˈvɑlv/ | To move (something) in regular procession through a system. |
| galaxy noun | /ˈɡæl.ək.si/ | Any of the collections of many millions or billions of stars, galactic dust, black holes, etc. existing as independent and coherent systems, of which there are… |
| gravity noun | /ˈɡɹævɪti/ | Of an activity such as a ceremony, a person's conduct, etc.: the quality of being deeply serious and solemn, especially in a dignified manner; seriousness… |
| colony noun | /ˈkɔl.ə.ni/ | A geographical area under the remote control of a country; especially to extract resources or exploit labor from that area. |
| twist verb | /twɪst/ | To turn the ends of something, usually thread, rope etc., in opposite directions, often using force. |
| predator noun | /ˈpɹɛd.ə.tɚ/ | Any animal or other organism that hunts and kills other nonplant organisms (their prey), primarily for food. |
| vast adjective | /væst/ | Very large or wide (literally or figuratively). |
| sail noun | /seɪl/ | A piece of fabric attached to a boat and arranged such that it causes the wind to drive the boat along. The sail may be attached to the boat via a combination… |
| prey noun | /pɹeɪ/ | That which is or may be seized by animals to be devoured. |
| extinct adjective | /ɪkˈstɪŋkt/ | Of feelings, a person's spirit, a state of affairs, etc.: put out, as if like a fire; quenched, suppressed. |
| bone noun | /boʊn/ | A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates. |
| expand verb | /ɪkˈspænd/ | To change (something) from a smaller form or size to a larger one; to spread out or lay open. |
| modify verb | /ˈmɑ.dɪˌfaɪ/ | To change part of. |
| worm noun | /wɝm/ | A generally tubular invertebrate of the annelid phylum; an earthworm. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| die out verb | To become extinct. | |
| live off verb | To depend on financially. | |
| wipe out verb | To destroy (especially, a large number or complete set of people or things); to obliterate. | |
| break up verb | To break or separate into pieces. | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| clean up verb | To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy. | |
| cool down verb | /kuːl ˈdaʊn/ | To become cooler; to be reduced in temperature. |
| fight back verb | /faɪt bæk/ | To defend oneself by fighting. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 34 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, couldn't, weren't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thrive /θɹajv/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, thin /ˈθɪn/, smooth /smuːð/, leathery /ˈlɛðəɹi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: flesh /flɛʃ/, sharp /ʃɑɹp/, evolutionary /ˌiː.vəˈluː.ʃən.ɛɹ.i/, extinction /ɪkˈstɪŋkʃən/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/
- Long words — get the stress right: humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, intelligent /ɪnˈtɛlɪd͡ʒənt/, evolutionary /ˌiː.vəˈluː.ʃən.ɛɹ.i/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like humanity, evolve, galaxy.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.