The Big History Project

Big picture ecology has been raising its head in the past few months. The Atlantic devoted nine or ten pages of its September issue to Charles Mann's article, "How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen". The article contains reviews of recent books on climate change and global warming. Its general theme seems in line with the attention-grabbing cover description of the article: "How Climate Hysterics Hurt Their Own Cause." One of the books not mentioned in Mann's article is Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction - about the unprecedented rapid extinction of species that has occurred since humans came on the scene. 

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to stumble across a 2011 TED talk on Big History. Professor David Christian's "The History of Our World in 18 Minutes" is an introduction to the Big History way of looking at the universe. It's more like Big Science but who's to quibble with what the proponents of this interesting theory want to call it.

Big History takes the long view...the really long view - it starts with the Big Bang. The first question "Big Historians" ask is: "In a universe whose physical laws drive it toward simplicity and disorder, how does all the complexity we see arise?" They answer the question by pointing to increasing thresholds of complexity that are brought about by ideal conditions, what David Christian dubs "the Goldilocks conditions." As each threshold is exceeded, complexity increases. Each threshold holds the key and energy to bring us to the next threshold of complexity. Complexity comes with a price - the "fragility" of the system, which wants to drive towards simplicity and disorder and would do so were the "Goldilocks conditions" disrupted.

In his TED talk, Christian introduces us to 8 thresholds of increasing complexity: the Big Bang, the formation of stars, the formation of new chemical elements in the death of stars, the formation of solar systems and rocky planets, life on Earth, collective learning made possible by human intelligence, the development of agriculture, and the modern revolution - humans linking up globally starting 500 years ago with improvements in transportation and communication. This modern revolution was then accelerated further by the discovery of fossil fuels 200 years ago. The irony lies in the potential humans have to change the "Goldilocks conditions" that made this threshold of complexity possible. We so far have escaped the nuclear winter - the destruction of the biosphere that would result from a nuclear exchange - and now we face another world altering scenario with global warming. As Christian notes: "Collective learning is a very, very powerful force and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it."

ChronoZoom Timeline (Source: Wikipedia)

The Big History Project website presents more details in a series of short lectures on each of the thresholds. Perhaps by knowing how we got here, the next generations will understand the challenges facing us and the power of collective thinking to meet those challenges. Pointing out that humans dominate the Earth and have the power to significantly alter the life systems here, Big History sees both negative and positive trends and asks some pertinent questions: "At present, we can see both dangerous trends, such as global warming and the continued existence of nuclear weapons, as well as positive trends, such as increased collaboration in dealing with climate change, a slowing in population growth, and an acceleration in our knowledge about the biosphere. Can we imagine a future largely free of conflict, disease, and degradation, one in which some humans may even begin to migrate to other worlds as our Paleolithic ancestors migrated to other continents? Or are we in danger of undermining the foundations of today's world with vicious conflict over scarce resources? The answers will depend on decisions made by the generations of humans that are alive today." (From The Big History Project website)

(The Sixth Extinction will be discussed in a future post.)