Big History

I like learning and thinking about the big picture.  I am more likely to read a book about the Byzantines than about a particular emperor, about the 20th century than about 1929 or 1968.  Imagine my wonder upon encountering Big History.

I came to the subject obliquely.  I found and read (in 2014) a book called This Fleeting World:  a short history of humanity.  The book was certainly big picture; it covered all of human history in under 100 pages, separated into three sections:  the era of foragers, the agrarian era, and the modern era.  If you don’t like names and dates, this is the history book for you.  It was a good read, interesting, etc., but its real import (to me) was the introduction to author David Christian.

Christian is credited with coining the term “Big History.”  The concept is simple:  tell the story of the universe within the confines of single course, whether in high school or college.  It’s audacious, fascinating, and (of necessity) multi-disciplinary.

Audacious is describing the history of the universe with four words:  cosmos, earth, life, humanity, as Walter Alvarez does in his book A Most Improbable Journey.  That is the simple progression, each succeeding concept impossible without whatever precedes it.  Obviously, each word expresses much and needs significant explanation.

The typical view of history starts with 99.9% of the universe in the distant rear-view mirror.  Most history starts with writing or artifacts and focuses exclusively on humans.  Big history starts at the very beginning, which requires forays into chemistry and physics.  Starting at the beginning reveals how lucky we are.  We tend to think that what has happened was inevitable.  But almost nothing is inevitable, instead history is contingent — agency and chance influence almost everything that happens.

The Goldilocks principle is alive and well.  Gravity is just right.  Any less or more and the Earth would be a very different planet.  The Earth’s distance from the sun is just right.  Any more or less and Earth would be a very different place.  The moon is just right.  Any bigger or smaller, farther away or closer, and the Earth would be a very different place.

Something I never thought about before, but which Alvarez and other Big History thinkers and writers focus on, is the creation of elements.  Do you know where the elements come from?  When the Big Bang occurred, the universe was approximately 75% hydrogen and 25% helium.  So where did oxygen and iron and carbon come from?

The answer is the stars.  Somewhere along the line, stars formed.  Their heat synthesized new elements and when the stars died, the resulting explosions scattered those new elements about the universe.  That’s when planets and other objects started forming.  The universe remains mostly hydrogen and helium, but planets are whatever they are.  Earth happens to be mostly oxygen, magnesium, silicon, and iron.

Big History uses chemistry and physics to explain what happened billions of years ago, introducing concepts like radiocarbon dating.  It uses biology and geology to explain what has happened on Earth through the rise of (very) modern humans, introducing concepts like genetic analysis and mathematical modeling.

Another important Big History concept is “scale.”  Alvarez conveys how much time has elapsed on Earth by stating that human history starts roughly 5,000 years ago and that Earth history starts roughly 5,000 million years ago.  Much has happened without our intervention.  Alas, our intervention is becoming increasingly decisive.[1]

Another way to think about Big History is to emphasize inflection points, moments of fundamental change.  A source (which I didn’t write down, how embarrassing) separates history into eight inflection points.  We have already (briefly) discussed five of them:  the Big Bang, the formation of stars, the formation of elements, the formation of Earth, and the beginning of life on Earth.  Once life began, it contingently increased in complexity, culminating in us.

The human span comprises the next three inflection points, pretty similar to those espoused by Christian in This Fleeting World.  The transformative human-centered moments are:

1. When we started collective learning,
2. The farming revolution that allowed people to be able to do things other than grow or collect food, and
3. The modern revolution, which includes leveraging our efforts with efficient energy and the quickening pace of knowledge accumulation and transfer.[2]

Books have been and will be written about any one of these topics.  The concept behind Big History is to encapsulate everything that has happened into one book or course so that we appreciate the giant movements and events.  Much of the history studied and written today emphasizes a micro-event or a small niche of something or other.  Big History is partially a reaction to this increasing specialization, but it is also much more.  A branch of Big History (according to Alvarez) is little big history, where a writer focuses on the entire history of a particular feature of the human experience.  For instance, Mark Kurlansky has written Salt and Cod, which concentrate exclusively on those two food items.

There is certainly room for books about specific events or people.  Otherwise, we would be unable to accumulate and build on the knowledge accrued by others.  But there is also great value in a broad big-picture approach to history and the world, and A Most Improbable Journey is a great introduction to Big History.

It won’t spoil anything for me to quote Alvarez’s last paragraph, “Almost 14 billion years of Cosmic history, more than 4.6 billion years of Earth and Life history, a couple of million years of Human history, all of it constrained by the laws of Nature but playing out in an entirely unpredictable way because of countless contingencies – this history has produced the human situation in which we live.  We few, we fortunate few, are the ones who have inherited this world and this situation, and it’s our actions that will influence the next chapter in the unfolding journey of Big History.”

[1] Alvarez gives another (crazy) example of scale.  He explains that the current humans on Earth will directly produce roughly one billion people.  A billion is 10 to the 9th; approximately that many grains can be found in two handfuls of fine sand.  But the current human population is capable of producing 10 to the 25th people — if all available eggs and sperm were used as efficiently as possible.  In terms of sand, it would take ten Grand Canyons full to yield 10 to the 25th grains.  That is a lot sand.  Imagine if there were that many humans.

[2] What might the next inflection point be?  Life on other planets?  The emergence of artificial intelligence that supplants us?  A new ice age?  Any other ideas?