David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes

                            

TED 2011

David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes (transcript)

Summary

Big History is an emerging academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present.

The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution.

The speaker is the first person who teaches courses on "Big History".

Our world seems to be created by complexity build stage by stage in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics.  Its moment is called threshold moment.  At each threshold,  the complex things get more fragile, vulnerable, the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent and it's more difficult to create complexity. the Goldilocks conditions mean the just right conditions for the creation of complexity, for example, it's not too hot, not too cold and it's not too much, not too little.

The Big History starts 13.7 billion years ago, the place where there is nothing, suddenly　something like an explosion occurs and a universe appears. It has crossed the first threshold. I think that this seems to be energy beginning.

Simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium and from about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe.

4.5 billion years ago, after a fourth threshold, the current solar system was formed. It means to be formed planets, moons and our Earth. Living organisms are created by chemistry, then. Our early Earth was almost perfect, it was just the right distance from the sun, and contain huge oceans of liquid water. Fantastic chemistry began to happen and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.

Life introduced an entirely new thing that's DNA.

DNA contains information, copies itself to make living organisms, learns, and builds greater diversity and complexity. It's continued over 40 billion years from DNA was born.

About 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms, fungi, fish, plants, amphibia, reptiles, and dinosaurs appear.

65million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth, dinosaurs were extinct and mammals started to flourish.

20,000 years ago, finally humans appeared. DNA generated a faster way of learning and had produced the first organisms with the brain which has the ability to speak and to memorize.
10,000 years ago, humans learned to farm.

So we human being can have the great ability called collective learning and we can have the great lives that are completely different before.  

However, we've stumbled on another energy that is a fossil. Burning it too much leads to the staggering complexity.  Its speed leads to the destruction of the entire biosphere.

The Big History tells us that the Goldilocks conditions made us flourish and should be continued from now. On the beautiful planet, human beings were just born in the Big History.

Words in this story threshold / the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested. Big bang / the rapid expansion of matter from a state of extremely high density and temperature that according to current cosmological theories marked the origin of the universe. the Goldilocks principle / to show that neither too hot nor too cold, but has just the right temperature. memorize /verb/ commit to memory, remember, memory /noun/