The ‘Big History’ Of The Universe: How We Fit In As A Species In The Cosmic Timeline
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” — John Muir
Life is such a complex manifestation. To truly know and understand how we’ve got here, we have to look back on our history, not just the history of mankind but the history of the universe, the history of the cosmos, the history our solar system and then the history of our planet and subsequently our lives here on Earth.
As a race and a species, we’ve reached unheard of progress in the past 200 years itself. But what did it take for us to get here? What are the key ingredients required to usher in progress and the intricate complexity we see around us today?
According to the second law of thermodynamics in physics, called the ‘law of entropy‘ it states that the tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order and lack of structure.
‘Entropy‘ is defined as — a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system. And the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of any isolated system always increases.
This can be applied to the grandest isolated system — our universe. More simply put: the entropy of the universe (the ultimate isolated system) only increases and never decreases.
So, in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity we see around us today?
Well, the answer is that the universe can create complexity, but it happens with great difficulty. It occurs in pockets, known as “Goldilocks conditions” — conditions favourable to achieve success– just perfect enough for the creation of complexity.
If you apply the law to all the technological advancements we see around us in this day and age, you get a rough idea that they too emerged in ‘pockets‘ and after ‘great difficulty‘, with their own ‘Goldilocks conditions‘, just like our universe.
However, as philosophical as that analogy might be, life as we know it has come about from millions of years of progression, over more than 13 billion years, to give rise to life on Earth only because of their favourable ‘Goldilocks conditions‘.
After the Big Bang, it took millions of years for stars, planets and the subsequent galaxies in our universe to form.
However, human beings appeared only 200,000 years ago, as a result of such ‘Goldilocks conditions‘, part of which was because of DNA and its chemical composition that makes it learn & adapt; although that happens very slowly.
“The universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls “Goldilocks conditions” — not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage.
Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it’s more difficult to create complexity.”
“We human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid(that killed the dinosaurs).”
“Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story.
Let me explain why. We’ve seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them.
“Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we’ve learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that’s why, as a species, we’re so creative and so powerful, and that’s why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.”
“I call this ability collective learning. It’s what makes us different.”
“Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals.
And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. We’ve stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us,” says historian David Christian
In his TED Talk, David Christian reflects on the aforementioned conditions and the narrow path that led to life as we know it as he narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a short span of 18 minutes as part of his “Big History” project, which is an enlightening, multi-faceted and a wide-angled micro and macro view of complexity, life and humanity, and how we as a species fit in to our slim share of the cosmic timeline.
