How Plants Turned Air Into Civilization ｜The Calvin Cycle

Support the channel by joining our newsletter: https://bit.ly/watchclockwork The Calvin Cycle is how we transform carbon dioxide into--well--everything. By making carbon biologically useful, our biosphere has managed to transform CO2, Sunlight and water into basically the entire world around you. Does that sound hyperbolic? Watch to find out just how much of an understatement that really is. This channel is created with the support of all our patrons on Patreon:   / clockworkshow   Support the channel directly with a one time donation: https://www.paypal.me/clockworkshow This channel is dedicated to sparking your curiosity about biochemistry, not to being a definitive resource. To help you continue you biochem journey, I'm really excited to partner with Biocord , a Discord server dedicated to bringing together biologists from around the globe! Join the conversation with over a thousand life sciences professionals and enthusiasts here:-   / discord   All music is by Jeremy Blake(   / redmeansrecording  , released on the Youtube Audio Library. Intro music: Let's Go Home (https://bit.ly/rmrlgh) Outro music: Lost and Found (https://bit.ly/rmrlnf) The style of this video was largely developed based on tutorials by Ben Marriot: (https://bit.ly/posterizethis) The Calvin Cycle is the molecular process that built our world. This final step of photosynthesis evolved 3.8 billion years ago and has been changing everything for our biosphere ever since. Photosynthesis is how energy enters our biosphere--but the Calvin Cycle is how our world stores that energy. Energy is pretty useless unless you can store it. You'll see in this video how that principle also unlocks the key to building civilization. Sure, humans did pretty great as hunter-gatherers--but as soon as we figured out how to store excess food and build surpluses--that was the edge we needed to build civilization. And then--the hydrocarbons that helped power that civilization to it's current heights (and that are putting it on the brink of disaster) were made across eons through this exact same process. Our whole world comes down to this molecular cycle. No fixed carbon. No Us. No civilization.