From space it seems and abstraction, a magician's trick on a darkened stage. And from this distance one might never imagine that it is alive.
It first appeared in the sea almost four billions years ago, in the form of single-called life.
In an explosion of life spanning millions of years, nature's first multi-cellular organisms began to multiply. And then it stopped.
440 millions years ago a great mass extinction would kill off nearly every species on the planet, leaving the vast oceans decimated and empty.
Slowly plants began to evolve. Then insects. Only to be wiped out in the second great mass extinction upon the Earth.
The cycle repeated again and again. Reptiles emerging independent of the sea, only to be killed off.
Then dinosaurs struggling to life, along with the first birds, fish and flowering plants.
Their decimations:
Earth's fourth and fifth great extinctions.
Only a 100,000 years ago Homo Sapiens appear. Man. From cave paintings to the Bible, to Columbus and Apollo 11, we have been a tireless force upon the Earth and off, cataloging the natural world as it unfolds to us. Rising to a world population of over five billion people, all descended from that original single cell. That first spark of life.
But, for all our knowledge, what no one can say for certain is what or who ignited that original spark.
Is there a plan, a purpose, or a reason to our existence?
Will we pass, as those before us, into oblivion?
Into the sixth extinction that scientists warn is already in progress?

Or will the mystery be revealed through a sign? A symbol?
A revelation?