Zooming in On History
From the Big Bang to last month. Across 12 Orders of Magnitude
History should do more than just describe people, places, and things from the past.
History at its most ambitious should seek the truest answer to the question: “How did we get here? But how far back should such a history go for its answers?
You can’t get any earlier than the so-called “Big Bang.” It seems to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. 1.37 times 10 the 10th power
That’s farther away than most scholars of human history would want to look. But recent attempts at “Big History” have attempted to lay out a historical timeline that extends all the way to the “Big Bang” the earliest event in the story that science tells us about the universe.
Of course, no one can be an expert at every one of these levels. But we have to recognize that history operates at different scales. How about we look at 12? What are the 12 biggest events at 12 orders of magnitude from the present?
David Christian’s TED talk on Big History spends most of its 17 minutes describing the first few billion years in the “early history” of the universe. His graphics can give you the important sense that you cannot understand the timeline of Big History simply by tracking year by year along a timeline marking events at evenly spaced intervals.
In fact, Big Historians have developed a tool to produce complex timelines for displaying just these kind of temporal relationships across different scales.
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“Logarithmic Timeline” is the fancy word for this special kind of timeline. A logarithm is just another word for an exponent. So, logarithmic timelines work differently than linear timelines because on a logarithmic timeline, every unit of length does not represent a set length of time. Instead, every unit of length represents a change in the exponent of a base. Each move along the line takes us exponentially closer or farther away. For instance, on a base 10 timeline, every unit moved takes us 10 times farther away (or 10 times closer).
Such Logarithmic timelines of history can definitely cram a lot of events into a small space. However, logarithmic timelines are messy at best. Look at wikipedia’s detailed logarithmic timeline of history, for instance. Or look at the “Logarithmic History” project by anthropologist Doug Jones. An out and out attempt to logarithmically represent, for instance, every geologic age may be too much.
We need anchor points. We need a framework.
To delve into the most essential transformations and crises of 14 billion years of history we need to pare things down.
We need a greatest hits of Logarithmic History.
Start at 10 to the 10th years from the present and then examine each decreasing order of magnitude. We’ll move by factors of 10. And that will take us from the Big Bang through 12 events. Finally, we’ll reach a scale on the order of months from the present (10 to the -1 power).
Across every power of ten in years from the present, what was the biggest crisis that brought our world closer to being what it is today?
Understanding history really means cultivating the ability to “Zoom” in and out from the present moment. To tell history from the Big Bang to the present, we have to shift our perspective by orders of magnitude. This ability to operate a Zoom lens on history is pretty much what “Big History” means.
And yet, no “Big Historian” seems to have yet done for time what an animation like Cary and Michael Huang’s The Scale of the Universe does for space. The Scale of the Universe allows the user to experience the almost incomprehensible shifts required to zoom in from the scale of a human down to the smallest measures of subatomic spacee. Then one can zoom back out all the way up to the scale of the observable universe. It’s very much worth checking out.
The way a lens zooming in and out makes intuitive sense when it comes to space. However, time is a little bit trickier. Thinking about history in terms of a Zoom factor requires a more unconventional outlook. The very idea of “seeing an amount of time” is an abstraction. Naturally, we move through time passively. It cannot be manipulated and measured like material objects in space. In order to zoom in and out on history what is required is to move through time at an exponential rate.
We have to speed up as we move backwards from the present.
Or, we have to move very fast back at the time of the Big Bang and slow down as we approach the present. We can’t think in a linear way. We have to think in an exponential way.
Let’s get a grip on Big History by throwing down a beacon at every power of ten of years from the present.
What transformation really stands out at each of these twelve orders of magnitude? What are the 12 greatest transformative crises that have set the stage and shaped our present into what it is today?
The rest of this post is going to attempt to move you through time by orders of magnitude, to travel through the story of time by powers of 10.
(10¹⁰) — The Big Bang
13,700,000,000 years ago
For the purposes of the greatest hits of Logarithmic History, the Big Bang etc is just the long beginning of the universe as we know it. This was the material universe’s grand transition from some tiny compressed nothing to that massive something which is our everything (as far as we can understand it).
Then, energy and particles quickly began assembling into stars and planets.
The laws of physics as we know them, begin to take hold. Physicists go into great and fascinating depth into all of this stuff. David Christian’s TED talk and other Big Historians who specialize in cosmological physics have more to say about it than I. Their explanations of how they analyze light from different parts of the universe to determine the relative speed of gigantic objects and thereby to date the beginnings of motion and energy in the cosmos is fascinating. In fact, it was a cosmologist who won the recent Tate Medal in Physics. Cosmology is fascinating stuff but it is time to zoom in by a factor of 10.
(10⁹) — The Living Earth
4,600,000,000 — 3,000,000,000 Years Ago
At around ⅓ from the temporal distance from present to the Big Bang, the water and space dust that makes up the Earth coalesced into our planet’s orbit around the sun. That was just around 4.6 billion years ago. The earth remained barren of life for just a relatively short time because the planet was set in a stable orbit at just the right distance from the sun so that surface temperature range would keep water at a liquid state for long periods of time. Within another two billion years, photosynthetic cells, respiration, RNA, and replicating DNA were all set in place. The processes that would become the building blocks of a web of life were active. And the evolutionary processes that would bring life to what we are today were underway.
What are the odds? Might the same developments have happened anywhere else? It is interesting to puzzle over. Of course, what matters most to us is the very fact that it did happen here… and that when we zoom in by a factor of 10, we evolution of multi-cellular life has begun.
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(10⁸) — Multi-cellular Organization
700,000,000 Years Ago (Approximately)
Zoom in by an order of magnitude once more. Up until about 700 million years ago (2.3 Billion years after the Earth came to life) the Living Earth seems to have been populated mainly by single celled algae. Multi-cellular plants and animals would diverge some time after 700 million years ago. This was a big change and it would be still longer before the Earth would see fish come to dominate the sea. Even longer for reptiles roam the land.
Not every detail is known. But it all began with the emergence and evolutionary stabilization of multi-cellular life with organisms that had cells differentiated into systems of specialized organs across hundreds of millions of years at the order of 10 to the 8th. Dinosaurs came along late in this order of magnitude, some time before 200 million years ago. They had a good run of it, but they failed to thrive very far into the next order of magnitude.
(10⁷) — The Rise of Mammals and Grasses
65,000,000 Years Ago
Zoom in again by a factor of 10 and mammals finally show up on the scene. Vascular plants had been around for 300 million years and dinosaurs had been around for 150 million years before mammals and grasses gained a serious foothold in the earth’s ecosystem. The rise and proliferation of both mammals and grasses probably had something to do with the mass extinction about 65 million years ago which eliminated most land-dwelling reptiles.
That great extinction event which was a tragedy for the dinosaurs and such a boon for mammals is usually thought to be the collision of a meteor with the Earth. And in fact, there seem to be no fossils of mammals or grasses that date prior to this extinction event. It is the analysis of fossil genomes which tell scientists that animals with mammary glands gave birth to live young as early as 100 million years ago. Nonetheless, all of today’s mammals and grasses probably evolved from just a few common ancestor species who managed to survive the event that ended the final “Cretaceous” epoch of the dinosaurs at around 65 million years ago. Several tiny ratlike insect eaters managed to survive the meteor. And all surviving mammals today owe our existence today to them — most importantly hominids.
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(10⁶) — Hominid Toolmakers
4,000,000 — 1,700,000 Years Ago
Zoom in again by another factor of 10. Some time around 4 million years ago, close relatives of our hominid ancestors in Africa picked up some revolutionary behaviors. First, they start to use fire to burn forests and even to cook food. A million and a half years later, there is evidence of the production and use of simple stone tools — basically sharpened pebbles.
Then by 1.7 million years ago, humans are flaking stone to make the kind of egg-shaped biface handaxes that some forest-dwelling tribes still use today to work wood and fiber and to process game.
Hypothetically, these hominids — among them our ancestors — would have been using materials less durable than stone by around this time as well. After all, one can only do so much fire management with one’s hands. Sticks would probably have come in handy. So many of the details are simply not preserved. However, the initial developments of longstanding patterns of toolmaking — the so-called “Paleolithic Era” — date to this order of magnitude.
Fire and tools represented a massive step in what would make humans who we are. These cultural abilities biologically reshaped the species that would humanity. Most immediately, stone tools and fire changed the way we accessed and processed food. And scientists speculate that they unleashed new capacities to harness nutrition. This new ability to obtain nutrition led to a rapid increase in brain size.. Fire and tools represented a massive step in what would make humans who we are. Scientists speculate that the new capacities to harness nutrition entailed by heating food and processing food with stone tools (especially bone marrow) led to a rapid increase in brain size.
(10⁵) — Language
200,000 years ago (Approximately)
It is hard to tell at what point our hominid ancestors really begin to use speech. However, when scientists look at fossil specimens, and try to figure out if an individual specimen had speech or not, of course they don’t have access to the soft tissue which could demonstrate definitively that an earlier hominid could make the articulate sounds required for language.
Lips, tongues, larynx, and lungs are not part of the fossil record. However, one feature that paleontologists are able to look at in fossils is the shape of hominid breathing cavities.
Around two hundred years ago, hominid fossil specimens show developments in the shape that would have permitted the necessary fine control of the breath that is allows a spearker to quickly delimit one word from another. In other words, around 200,000 years ago or so, some species of hominids were becoming able to use their voice to do very speech-like stuff. Included among them must have been the ancestor species of modern humans.
And it is probably not a coincidence that around this time, there is an explosion of lasting innovations in tools. Soil strata dating to the last 100,000 years or so reveal much more intricate technical shaping of stone into arrows and other mounted projectiles, no longer just eggshaped handaxes and haphazard flaked “bladelets” of the preceding two million years. Language facilitated the development and spread of technology.
(10⁴) — Agriculturalization
20,000–7,000 Years Ago
If language transformed humans into an unprecedentedly social mammal, agriculture was the step whereby the social impulse became totally dominate in the human lifeway.
By 20,000 years ago, humans were the last remaining species of the speaking toolmaking hominid on earth. It is hard to say for sure. We may have been alone among the advanced hominids for almost a hundred thousand years. But at 20,000 years ago, the first stable sedentary settlements appear in the middle east. And it is at around 12,000 years ago that humans take the fundamental step towards civilization and become the species that we know today. They start farming.
Thanks to the productive capacities of agriculture, by 7,000 years ago, these settlements had grown from the earlier maximum of 2 or 3 hundred individuals to city-states with populations in the hundreds of thousands.
What was this turn to agriculture all about?
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Beginning in the Fertile Crescent, at 12,000 years ago, humans started domesticating and selectively breeding the seeds of cereal grasses. These cereals would eventually become modern day wheat, barley, rye, kamut, and emmer. In China and India, they start breeding rice and millet a few thousand years later. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it was mainly millet. Somewhat later in the New World, corn and quinoa would be the major staples. Vegetables and domesticated animals would be willfully engineered into the efficient dependent breeds we know today.
In a sense, the way that early agriculturalists aggressively siezed control of the beneficial relationships we have with other species and massively reconstructing local ecosystems is on a continuum with things that earlier hominids had been doing for some time. Using fire to open forest territory, hunting and managing wild herds, forging a cooperative symbiosis with canine scavengers, and perhaps even selective seed spreading. Earlier humans had advanced in all these respects, at least. But it was at this point, about a dozen millennia or so ago, that intensive cultivation of highly improved crops — crops that were increasingly dependent on human protection and irrigation — started to make the rise of large civilizations possible. Before this time, hominid communities had probably never grown larger than a few hundred. Afterwards, cities of hundreds of thousands and even millions began to increase exponentially.
With this “Neolithic” turn, humans were no longer merely social toolmakers, they became agriculturalized. That is to say, they were dependent upon long-standing class-based social organization and upon labor-intensive and highly intrusive forms of ecological management. In short, agriculture civilized us. And it set in motion a transformation that would drastically alter every ecosystem on earth. For some time, this process of civilization’s expansion grew without restraint. But people began to question the acquisitive social hierarchies upon which agricultural civilization was based.
(10³) — The Great Rebellion
4,000 — 1.3 Years Ago
Most people don’t think of religion as being rebellious. And yet, at their points of origin somewhere between 4 and 1.3 millennia ago, the major religions know on earth today all emerged out of a rebellion against the social hierarchies that were born with agriculturalization. The term “Axial Religion” is sort of a specialist term for the most powerful religions of the last few millennia. It is not even used by all scholars of religion. But as a general rule if you or anyone alive today is practicing it, it is an Axial Religion. Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Islam all date their official formation to right around the final millenium BCE. All of the great movements in the ancient worlds gave rise to these religions in the context of theocratic agricultural societies in their region falling into crisis or collapse.
Not much of the old religions of the city states that preceded these Axial Age religions survived — at least not explicitly. Hinduism — in terms of its explicit endorsement of caste structure and polytheism — might be considered the one remaining holdout in so far as it explicitly endorses the structures of a theocracy ruled by the Brahmin caste. In the meantime, much of the radicalism of these great rebellions became institutionalized, administered, and for the most part deradicalized into religious worship.We are still living out the consequences of these great social rebellions today but we do not really see the legacy of the historical events from 1500 BCE to the 7th century CE carried through by religious institutions. Conversely, we usually fail to see how many of our most serious political, economic, and social debates actually date to these great ancient moments of philosophical rebellion.
(10²) — Global Industrialization
Beginning 500 Years Ago(1492)
The great transition at this order of magnitude spans from Columbus’s arrival in America through European colonization of the New World, Africa and much of Asia.Then it continues through what is often called the industrial revolution up through the first automobile factories.
I think the end point is somewhat more arbitrary than the beginning, but the proposition entailed in thinking about the great event at the scale of 102 years ago in this way is that you cannot break apart globalization and industrialization.
You cannot separate the economic exploitation of resource flows on a global scale from the development of massive new machine apparatuses powered primarily by hydroacarbons (aka fossil fuels).
By the end of the 19th century, a global market for resources and labor extended to the ends of the earth. Furthermore, hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) were used to manufacture and transport even those machines and industries which still made use of human, animal, and water power. And by the end of the 19th century cities around the world were being wired for electric power and for telephonic communications allowing humans to maximize the expanse and efficiency of energy harnessed from hydrocarbons.
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(10¹) — Ubiquitous Screen Media
The last 120 years
So electricity supplied by hydrocarbon powered generators is really what makes possible the rise of media. Now note that the first cinema cameras and projectors were cranked by hand. The first moving images were created by machines firmly within the old world of cranks and levers and the chemical alchemy of photography. The first cameras were patented in 1892.
Within a half century, the cathode ray came along and changed all that. Across the second half of the twentieth century, television, computer imaging, and magnetic tape storage would give way to the HD video and silicon graphics processors of today. With the best displays available today, the color scheme of the pixel has now been tailored to an exact fit with the biology of the human eye.
This is to say that in just a century — with the most relevant technological developments occurring since World War II — images have come a long way from the flickering shadows of the first “photoplays.” Along the way, moreover, moving image machines subsumed the calculator, the printing press, the telephone, and telegraph, and hooked up with just about every other electrical machine. And in this way, the Mobile Social Computing Regime we know today was formed. In 2007, the arrival of the iPhone marked the apotheosis of the transition to a world of ubiquitous screens.
Over the course of the last 100 years, screen media have become ubiquitous, integrated and at one with the rest of our mechanical and social architectures. Arguably, screens and data constitute a greater part of the individual’s world now than does direct contact with material objects.
(10⁰) — Crisis of Economic Data Management
2008-Present
The consequences within our economic systems of ubiquitous display and transmission of information have led to our current crisis of human economic organization. Can the value of a stock even have a concrete meaning anymore in this environment of near-instant communication?
Can prices have any connection to supply and demand — to real human needs — when the most powerful factor in the success of a trade is being the fastest to perceive and manipulate its effects?
It is worth pointing out that really every single major transition pointed out at the orders of magnitude above have been a crisis. It merely appears to us that the changes they entailed are permanent. We are still living through the crisis that forced to unicellular life forms to aggregate into multi-cellular organisms, the crisis which ended the Cretaceous and empowered mammallian organisms and grassland biomes, and the crisis that drove the evolution of language and that tied us to social interaction with other humans — perhaps like no other species has been tied together before.
None of these crises above have been resolved yet. We live within them. Even the universe created by the Big Bang will, it is thought, either collapse in on itself or disperse at some point tens of billions of years in the future. The physical world is going through an unfolding transformative crisis that begins with the Big Bang.
By contrast, though, the crisis of economic data management that we are living through right now — the remnants of the 2008 financial crisis — is a crisis at the scale of a human lifetime. Is it over? Hard to say.
The capability of powerful people to use technology to manipulate monetary systems and governents to their advantage seems on the verge of becoming unlimited. We have to understand, however, that with Ubiquitous Screen Media, the rapid envelopment of the human animal within dynamic text and artificial images had catastrophic effects upon the material organization of society. The depth of information technology’s power to distract from and to hide relevant information within a flood of data has thrown a wrench into debates about how to think about economic order. Granted, technology’s impact on economics did not hit first in 2008, but that was the moment of global awakening that everthing was liable to change. How the crisis of Economic Data will play out depends on what is going on right now.
(10-¹) — The Triangle of Privacy Crisis
Since December 2015
What is the most significant and transformative crisis that we are within right now? What is the biggest crisis within the last year?
I think the most immediate transformative crisis that we are passing through is a crisis of privacy that we are undergoing at the level of both self and community. Sure, privacy in technology has been the center of a big debate since the Patriot Act up through the Snowden-Wikileaks affair. Then there has constantly been the issue of corporate surveillance for marketing purposes. But my point is that it is only in recent months that the triangle of forces between individuals, corporations, and the force of the state has really crystallized.
The signal event in the formation of the Great Privacy Triangle was the FBI court order to Apple Computers to break the encryption on the phone of the San Bernardino mass shooter, S.R. Farook. In all this, a fundamental issue in the very relation of self to community, a foundational and yet deeply complicated facet of the human organism’s organization into societies is at stake. A community’s secrets — what they keep secrets from other communities — is what makes them a community. And a community’s privacy from other communities is in many ways what allows them to have privates and even secrets from one another. This was easy enough when the human body, perhaps architecture or written media formed the main spaces and avenues where arrangements of privacy had to be negotiated. But the major transformations that have occurred over the last two or three powers of ten have drastically changed the “Terms and Conditions” of what it means to be private. The issue of how far a government can extend its sovereignty into an individual’s data held by a corporation took a public form. This is different from the collusion between corporations and governments that had gone on using the Patriot Act legislation.
It is true that there has been talk of privacy issues for some time with regard to new technologies, this case is different. The confrontation between Apple and the FBI was just the first confrontation of many to come that will bring into relation problems not merely between an inividual and a company, or between a state and an individual, nor just between a state and a company. Instead, these three levels of interaction which characterize this crisis of privacy are now interacting to determine their place in the fundamental structure of society: Individuals, Private Entities, and States.
Who is going to own what data? Who is liable for security breaches? Does the state have any eminent domain, so to speak, over data?
Such questions involve the individual and multiple tiers of community organization. We are being forced to reevaluate what institutions of privacy are even capable of creating and maintaining a link between individual and communitiy forms of privacy that had perhaps been the determining factor of human civilizations up to this point.
What does it all add up to?
If you are interested in thinking more about this:
Check out my follow up posts: “Future Iterations of Logarithmic History?” and “Implications of the 12 Powers of Ten.”
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Or please, go and check out my other posts.
On the ancient origins of modern economic thought.
On a new way of explaining the Gender Wage Gap.
On why schools should be teacher-owned but are not.
Reflections on what schools are and what they are supposed to be.
On the failures of new media to inform like old newspapers used to do.
Or, on the problem of why someone like me is publishing these long pieces on a format like medium.
