Lyrics The Greatest Show on Earth - Nightwish

The Greatest Show on Earth

1. 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?»
2. 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 a mother of all
We are one
We are a universe
Forebears of what will be
Scions of the Devonian sea
Aeons path
Writing the tell of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth
Ions 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 a mother of all
We are one
We are a universe
Forebears of what will be
Scions of the Devonian sea
Aeons path
Writing the tell 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
We are one
We are a universe
Forebears of what will be
Scions of the Devonian sea
Aeons path
Writing the tell of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth
3. 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 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
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
4. 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 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