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The pregnancy of the theme of water hardly finds a parallel in the cultural history of human civilisation. Thales, the an- cient thinker of Miletus often regarded as the first philosopher in the venerable Greek tradition, believed that water is the substance from which all things came into being. Modern biologists believe that water is a precondition of all lifeforms. Space scientists exploring signs of life in extraterrestrial domains look for traces of water in the first instance. The very phenomenon of civilisation is as inseparable from water as life itself: rivers like the Yangtze, the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Ganges gave birth to great continental civilisations; the Mediterranean engendered Graeco-Roman antiquity; the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans were the stage on which clashes of civlisations in the process of modern globalisa- tion was enacted. Water signifies life and development. It is a sine qua non for human flourishing.

Whatever the waters of a torrential flood can destroy would sooner or later be consumed by the ravages of time, with or without the flood; those things capable of surviving the flood, in contrast, would only grow more resilient and better able to withstand its onslaught, even before the flood had arrived. For the former, the flood signifies righteous judgment; for the latter, it symbolizes loving redemption. The flood draws out the inherent qualities of all things so that they tend either toward the eternal or toward the ephemeral. The floodwaters thus compel all temporal things to align themselves with eternity or transience. As the most extreme manifestation of water, the flood highlights or annihilates the difference and identity among all things. Everything is tried by the same threatening possibility of extinction, while the flood leaves a trail of different states of existence in its wake.

From the Ark of Noah and his family of eight in times of old, to the present lifework of Elon Musk's SpaceX: the ark as imagery quickly brings to mind an arc of redemption and rescue. Yet one must be reminded that it is not without state-of-the-art technology and scientific knowledge, coupled with the sensibilities of a prophetic order, that provides the vision otherwise none ordinary would perceive.