"Where do I come from and where do I go?"

In the process of surviving in nature, human beings will encounter disasters, diseases and loneliness from time to time, and simultaneously, they are eagerly seeking a sense of belonging in the soul. Gradually, human beings develop consciousness, and gradually realize that they are an independent existence in nature, and they begin to think about the above-mentioned questions.

At the very beginning, human beings placed their own knowledge on faith based on their awe of nature and the world, and formed an ideological system for cognizing themselves and the world. Thousands of years ago, this kind of faith thinking promoted the birth of religion. Because religion answered the origin and existence of mankind, it has almost become the only spiritual sustenance of people for a long time. With the improvement of human cognition level, human beings gradually became dissatisfied with the consolation of religion from 800 to 200 BC. In this era, the Mohism of the ancient China and Aristotle of the ancient Greek respectively created far-reaching logics, which marks that human society has entered the era of rational thinking. The ideological system, which understood human beings and the world and evolved from this rational thinking, included science.

The germination of science originated from the exploration of the universe by human beings. With Copernicus’s "Heliocentric Theory", Galileo proved that the earth is not the center of the universe. Kepler’s laws, Newton’s three laws of motion, Faraday’s electromagnetic induction, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, and other studies greatly enriched mankind’s understanding of the world laws, and gradually built the foundation of modern physics. However, human beings still failed to answer the question of "Where do I come from and where do I go?".

Can science give mankind satisfactory answers? How does science today explain the birth of the earth and the origin of mankind? Next, Academician Pan Jianwei from the USTC Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies leads us to interpret this through the report "Motivation of Exploration".

Please click this link to watch: Motivation of Exploration (Part I)  Seeing the Origin of Mankind from a Scientific Point of View