Download UNIT 1 Main Lecture: “What is big history and why should I care?”

UNIT 1 Main Lecture: “What is big history and why should I
care?”
Script: INTRODUCTORY LECTURE
Earth is the place we humans call home. It’s a place of stunning variety, with awe-inspiring landscapes,
beautiful plants from giant red woods to daisies and buttercups, birds and animals as varied as swallows,
spiders and beavers, and of course, almost 7 billion other humans, fellow members of what is possibly the
strangest species of all.
Look above us and we see the sun, the battery of life on earth. It’s one of 100 billion stars that form our
galaxy, the milky way; and the milky way is just one of 100 billion galaxies that form our universe.
How did this all come to be as it is? Why is the Universe the way it is? Why are stars so big? Why do we
find ourselves on this particular planet, buzzing with life? How did humans become so powerful? What
does it mean to be ‘human’?
These are questions that biologists ask. Astronomers too. And historians, chemists, geologists, physicists,
anthropologists, and many more experts with incredible knowledge and creativity. In this course, we’re
going to do our best to ask these questions and gather up the most convincing answers to create one large
story that helps explain how everything got to be the way it is, where we fit in and where this may lead to.
These questions fascinated me even when I was a kid. I found them wondrous, because I felt that I was a
tiny part of all of this.
I remember buying a telescope in a junk shop. I set it up one cold night in England and suddenly I was seeing
double stars everywhere. I thought I’d discovered something brand new and told a friend who asked me
where I got the telescope. Immediately I realized what had gone wrong. The lenses of telescopes have to
be perfectly aligned. If you buy a telescope in a junk shop don’t be surprised if you don’t see the stars
properly! But even with that telescope I managed to see the rings of Saturn, looking like metal washers
around a huge metal ball; a truly beautiful sight.
I learned there are some great answers out there to the very large questions that fascinate me, and that
looking for them can take you on a great journey.
Take a look at this timeline. In a way it shows you my own journey. On it I’ve placed what I consider to be
the most important moments in my life. Some of these represent a sort of threshold where my life suddenly
changed and entirely new things became possible, like traveling to Nigeria at the age of three months. Or
when I learned how to walk or talk. Meeting my wife in Canada, training as a Russian historian, and getting a
job in Australia.
Today, I carry three different passports. And frankly, I’m not even sure what country I’m really from. That
may explain why I was never content just to learn the history of my own country. (Which country?) Or to
teach just the history of one country (Russia, in my case). Instead, I wanted to know about the origins of
humans in general.
That question forced me to ask about how our species evolved from other primates; and how they had
evolved other ancestors and eventually I found myself asking about the origins of the very first living things
on earth. But of course that forced me to ask how the earth and sun were formed and eventually I found
myself asking how the Universe as a whole was created.
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UNIT 1 Main Lecture: “What is big history and why should I
care?”
Somehow, answering these questions seemed important to me if I was to understand who I was and what I
was part of.
I realized that all human societies have asked them. But their answers are very diverse. Some say the
Universe appeared very recently; others that it’s always been there. Some say it was created by God or a
whole group of gods; others say it just appeared out of a sort of cosmic mush.
And each of these stories then goes on to explain the origins of the stars, the sun and moon, the mountains
and seas, the plants, the animals and, of course, the first humans.
Big history is a modern version of these origin stories. It’s based on the best knowledge available today, but
of course it’s not perfect. New information and evidence emerges every day and there are still a lot of
questions that remain unanswered. And, sometimes new evidence or ideas makes us question answers that
what we thought we knew. That’s what makes it so exciting.
Now, you’ve seen my personal timeline. It may seem pretty long to some of you. But let’s take a look at the
universe’s – it’s 13.7 billion years long! Think about that. If you counted one number every second do you
know how long it would take you to count to a million? The answer is… 11.5 days. To count to a billion it
would take you a lot longer. In fact it would take you 32 years. And it would take over 438 years to count to
13.7 billion years.
That’s an incredibly long history and we’re going to do our best to cover that together in a single class.
It’s a huge story with many different sub-plots and fascinating details, and lots of interesting questions. One
large theme we’ll keep coming back to is how over 13.7 billion years, more and more complex things seem
to appear quite suddenly at what we call “thresholds”. We’ll focus on eight major ones and see how each
one builds upon the last, leading up to the world we all live in today – which is probably the most complex
thing we know of.
By the end of this course you’ll know the history of the universe and you’ll know how you fit in. Let’s get
started.
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