Adding to that which RoyBoy has already mentioned;
The "floating pale blue ark", the Earth, is likely a reference to Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" speech, as is the "special speck of dust"- considering the same album contains the track "Sagan", it seems very likely ;)
"Look at yourself in the eyes of aye-aye" is a reference to Douglas Adams' travel book Last Chance to See, in which he describes himself looking, very briefly, into the eyes of an aye-aye before it disappears into the Madagascan jungle, saying "I was a monkey looking at a lemur". To Adams, the contact with the other branch of the primate family was a reminder of the strangeness of evolution, and a reminder of how by geographical happenstance, lemurs survived on Madagascar while their distant cousins the apes came to dominate the rest of the globe.
It should be mentioned that the writer Douglas Adams was a close friend of Richard Dawkins (who reads the introductory text from Darwin), and a fellow atheist. While not a biologist like Dawkins, Adams (who died in 2001) was fascinated with evolution and quantum physics and the awful and yet beautiful randomness of the universe we live in.
By referencing Sagan and Adams, Tuomas Holopainen and Nightwish are aligning themselves with this particular way of thinking, secular scientific belief in a deterministic, evolutionary universe that is macrocosmically and microcosmically overwhelming and reminds us of our own insignificance while teaching us that the Earth, while not chosen or special in a religious sense, is singular (as far as we know so far) in being a haven for life like ours, and that everything biological on it is not different from us, but actually related to us - and this in turn makes our petty squabbles with our fellow men ridiculously pointless by comparison. Nightwish's song and the album itself is therefore a tribute to these humanist, pacifist and scientific secular worldviews, combined with Nightwish's own quasi-pagan, pantheist spirituality (which appears in passages like "greet a blade of grass").
Adding to that which RoyBoy has already mentioned;
The "floating pale blue ark", the Earth, is likely a reference to Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" speech, as is the "special speck of dust"- considering the same album contains the track "Sagan", it seems very likely ;)
"Look at yourself in the eyes of aye-aye" is a reference to Douglas Adams' travel book Last Chance to See, in which he describes himself looking, very briefly, into the eyes of an aye-aye before it disappears into the Madagascan jungle, saying "I was a monkey looking at a lemur". To Adams, the contact with the other branch of the primate family was a reminder of the strangeness of evolution, and a reminder of how by geographical happenstance, lemurs survived on Madagascar while their distant cousins the apes came to dominate the rest of the globe.
It should be mentioned that the writer Douglas Adams was a close friend of Richard Dawkins (who reads the introductory text from Darwin), and a fellow atheist. While not a biologist like Dawkins, Adams (who died in 2001) was fascinated with evolution and quantum physics and the awful and yet beautiful randomness of the universe we live in.
By referencing Sagan and Adams, Tuomas Holopainen and Nightwish are aligning themselves with this particular way of thinking, secular scientific belief in a deterministic, evolutionary universe that is macrocosmically and microcosmically overwhelming and reminds us of our own insignificance while teaching us that the Earth, while not chosen or special in a religious sense, is singular (as far as we know so far) in being a haven for life like ours, and that everything biological on it is not different from us, but actually related to us - and this in turn makes our petty squabbles with our fellow men ridiculously pointless by comparison. Nightwish's song and the album itself is therefore a tribute to these humanist, pacifist and scientific secular worldviews, combined with Nightwish's own quasi-pagan, pantheist spirituality (which appears in passages like "greet a blade of grass").