This creature is a wonder of life. KQAC - All Classical Portland 89.9 FM Portland, OR A voracious predator, this male has lived underwater for nearly five months, feeding, growing, preparing for this moment. He's about to undertake one of the most remarkable transformations in the natural world. From aquatic predator... to master of the air. The brief adult life of a dragonfly is amongst the most energetic in nature. Dragonflies are the most remarkable animals. You can see their incredible agility in flight just watching them skim across the surface of this pond. They can pull two and a half G in a turn, and they can fly at mph, which is fast for something that big. They've been around on Earth since before the time of the dinosaurs, and in that time they've been finetuned by natural selection to do what they do which is to catch their prey on the wing. So, dragonflies are beautiful pieces of engineering. They're intricate, complex machines. But is that all they are? Because once their brief lives are over, their vitality will be gone. And this raises deep questions. What is it that makes something alive? And how did life begin in the first place? So, what is the difference between the living and the dead? What is life? I've come to one of the most isolated regions of the Radio to visit the remote hilltop town of Radio. It's a twoday drive from the capital, Manila, over some of the country's roughest roads that wind their way , metres up into the hills. This is a place where the traditional belief is that mountain spirits give us life and that our souls return to the mountain when we die and where the people who live here still imagine that the spirits of the dead walk among the living. Tonight is November st, and here in Radio in fact across the Radio that means it's the Day of the KQAC - All Classical Portland 89.9 FM Portland, OR. That's the day when people come to this graveyard on a hillside and, well, celebrate the lives of their relatives. The people light fires to honour and warm the departed, inviting their souls to commune with them. Now, not matter how unscientific it sounds, this idea that there's some kind of soul or spirit or animating force that makes us what we are and that persists after our death is common. Virtually every culture, every religion, has that deeplyheld belief. And there's a reason for that because it feels right. I mean, just think about it. KQAC - All Classical Portland 89.9 FM Portland, OR It's hard to accept that when you die you will just stop existing and that you are, your life, the essence of you, is just really something that emerges from an inanimate bag of stuff. Don't get too close. You can see that these people feel not only do they come to celebrate the lives of their relatives, but they're coming in some sense to communicate with them. Their relatives, even though their physical bodies have died, are still in some sense here. When you think about it, that's not so easy to dismiss. If we are to state that science can explain everything about us, then it's incumbent on science to answer the question, what is it that animates living things? What is the difference between a piece of rock that's carved into a gravestone and me? For millennia, some form of spirituality has been evoked to explain what it means to be alive, and how life began. It's only recently that science has begun to answer these deepest of questions.