Episode 6: Over a Decade of Big History

In a world that is increasingly globalized, we need courses about the whole of humanity. All human communities have told origin stories. The emergence of a species so powerful that it can shape an entire planet. Planet Earth is becoming conscious. Now, the conscious thinking of 8 billion humans is beginning to shape the evolution of planet Earth. Imagine that we were learning big history not on planet Earth, but on a planet that's orbiting a distant star. >> Big History Project has been asking big questions for more than 10 years. In this episode, we'll chat with David Christian about the past, present, and future of Big History. Big questions, no easy answers. Dive into the mysteries of the universe with Unknowns. From the secrets of the Big Bang to the future of humanity, discover what we still don't know. Tune in and explore the unknown. Hi there. I'm Kim Lochner, a Big History project teacher here in Australia. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with David Christian. Yes, the David Christian. He's a historian, the founder of Big History, and the host of the Unknown's podcast. Big History is the ultimate origin story, spanning 13.8 billion years from the Big Bang to the future. It highlights key moments or thresholds where the right ingredients and Goldilocks conditions come together to create new levels of complexity. It's a fascinating blend of science, history, and philosophy that connects everything from cosmic explosions to human evolution to the world we live in today. David's been at the forefront of making big history accessible to students and curious minds globally. His approach offers a compelling narrative that connects the universe's origins to our own existence. David, let's start with how you came up with the course. What was the origin story of big history? >> I'm a Russian historian. So for for years I taught Russian history at Mcgory University in Sydney, but I was particularly interested in the lives of those people who were less visible, the the peasantry in the 19th century. So I studied the the food and drink, the material life of Russian peasants. That was absolutely fascinating, learning something about the lives that were hidden for most historians. And I began to wonder about earlier lives that were hidden, say the lives of people who lived 20,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago. How did they live? And eventually I began to think that we needed to teach courses not about particular nations like Russia or Australia or or the United States but about the whole of humanity in a world that is increasingly globalized. We need courses about the whole of humanity. So I thought can we teach such a course? Then I began to think ah but if you teach a course like that you have to talk about the evolution of our species. So suddenly you're straying beyond the borders of history and you're talking about biology. And then I thought, yeah, but if we're serious about this, we have to talk not just about the origins of humans, but the origins of life. That takes us back four billion years. And to do that seriously, we have to talk about the origins of planet Earth and back and back and back until eventually I realized that in modern science, this series of questions stops with the big bang. So I asked myself, would it be possible in a university to teach a history course that was literally the whole of history beginning with the big bang and going up to the present day? It sounded like a crazy idea and I think my colleagues thought I was going through some sort of crisis. But I got more and more obsessed with the idea and eventually my colleagues allowed me, God bless them, to to try out this course and that's how it began. And I first began teaching a big history course at McQuary University in 1989. And I invited lecturers from many different departments, astronomers, physicists, biochemists, biologists, anthropologists. And they all gave lectures in the first big history course. >> What are the biggest mysteries in big history that continue to intrigue us and drive that curiosity? When I began teaching it, I know a lot of lot of students loved it precisely because we were talking about mysteries, aspects of the universe that are mysteries. But in the first two or three years, it was hard to see a coherent story. It was hard to see how all these stories fit together. You know, the astronomers told about the big bang. The the biochemists talked about chemical elements and a lot of my students were baffled and I was baffled, too. So this I guess was the first mystery that I faced as a teacher. Is there a coherent story? I I knew there must be a coherent story. I mean all this knowledge we have it surely all fits together somehow but I couldn't see it at first and then over several years gradually a coherent story emerged and that focused on a particular type of mystery and it goes like this. The early universe was incredibly simple. In the first split second after the big bang, there was huge amounts of energy, as much as exists in the entire universe today, but hardly any things. So the universe was very, very simple, incredibly hot, incredibly small, very simple. Now, if you look back over 13.8 billion years to the big bang, now we look at a universe that's full of stuff, interesting stuff, different stuff, stuff of different types. There are stars, there are atoms, there are chemicals, there are there are bacteria, there are black holes, there are human beings. So that became the central mystery. How did a universe that began so simple slowly create more and more interesting things? And that mystery was particularly mysterious because of what physicists call entropy, the second law of ther thermodynamics, which basically says that if you change things randomly, the odds are that they're going to get simpler, not more complicated. So there's a real mystery here. How did complex things appear? And I wouldn't say we have open and shut answers to that question, but we have partial answers to that question. And what we can do first is describe some of those complex things that appeared ending with us. So how did you get from the big bang to us? And that's really how the idea of thresholds of increasing complexity emerged. There were there are lots and lots of thresholds >> and I think one of those crucial parts of that I know my students have always been focused on the next stage the sequel. We've got an entire unit about the future in big history. So I guess it begs the question, what do you think the next threshold might be? You've written quite a bit about this in your book, Future Stories. What do you see as the next threshold? >> Yeah. Well, the A thresholds I tended to focus on in my teaching, you know, begin with the big bang and then the creation of the first stars, of new elements, of planets, of life, and then eventually of humans and then thresholds in the history of humans taking us up to the present moment of the anthroposine when suddenly we humans have become so powerful that we're changing planet Earth. And in fact, planet Earth, there's a new driver driving change on planet Earth. And my own feeling, and everyone will have different ideas about the next threshold. Over recent years, I've increasingly begun to think that the next threshold is precisely the emergence of a species so powerful that it can shape an entire planet. And if you think about it, what that means, and it's happening right now before our eyes, and we're part of this. And if you think about it, what that means is that planet Earth is becoming conscious. Now, I don't want that to sound mystical. What I mean is conscious in the sense that our human bodies are conscious. Most of the things that our human bodies do are not under the control of our conscious minds. They're complex biological and biochemical processes that that control our bodies. But some of the big decisions like should I go bungee jumping today or should I throw myself out of a plane with a parachute strapped to me? Some of the big decisions and the the lifechanging decisions are taken after conscious thinking. Now, it's not clear whether we're totally in control of those conscious decisions, but conscious thinking leads to decisions. Now, the conscious thinking of 8 billion humans is beginning to shape the evolution of planet Earth. Will climates get hotter and hotter and hotter, faster and faster and faster? Will we humans be foolish enough to use the nuclear weapons that we developed in my lifetime? If we do either of those things, we will change the future of planet earth. So conscious decisions are now shaping the future of planet earth. And that's the sense in which I think we can say a planet, an entire planet is becoming conscious. It's as if it's being run by a sort of super organism consisting of 8 billion humans who share ideas, who've shared knowledge for thousands of years through collective learning. And the emergence of that super organism that creates a conscious planet, I think, might be the next threshold. And the strange thing is that if I'm right about this, then this is a new super organism that will be able to reproduce itself because some parts of this super oranism may split off and colonize other planets in our solar system. And wait 2,000 years and they may even be colonizing planets around other star systems. Just think for a moment how much change, technological change has occurred in the last 200 years. Now, multiply that by five or 10 times to get some idea of what we'll be doing if we're still around in in in 2,000 years time. This superorganism may start multiplying and spreading through our galaxy in the way that the first organisms on Earth began to multiply and spread through the different environments of the planet. >> So, are there any misconceptions about the Big History program? I think there are a lot of big misconceptions and that the main one that teaching a story on this scale can't be done. When I began I think many people thought this is a completely crazy idea and I'm not the only person to have done this by the way but the way knowledge is taught in today's world and the way knowledge is organized we break it up into disciplines and we have this idea of expertise which is that you know huge amounts about your particular discipline and you're not foolish enough to try to learn too much about other disciplines. And if you really take that idea of knowledge seriously, then a story like the big history story is impossible. And what that means strangely is that in a world that has so much knowledge, what we're saying is that it's impossible to get an overview of all of that knowledge. Now, I think that's wrong. It's completely wrong. That really good knowledge in all societies we know of has consisted of knowledge that goes deep in some areas but also of another type of knowledge that goes wide that brings together some of the basic insights from many different disciplines. I think of this as going to the top of the mountain. Going from the top of the mountain you can see the whole landscape. You can see maybe the ocean. You can see rivers. You can see lakes. You can see forests. You can't see the details, of course. So, you can't call yourself an expert. If you're a big history teacher, you can't call yourself an expert. But what you can call yourself is a lifelong learner because you're trying to learn some of the most important things about area after area after area, and you're trying to do one more thing. You're trying to put those all together into a coherent origin story. And we know that all human communities have told origin stories, you find them embedded in all the great world religions, for example, all indigenous traditions. So it's kind of bizarre that in today's world that has so much knowledge, all the experts or most of the experts tell you it's impossible to see the whole thing. >> Big history talks a lot about zooming in and zooming out. >> Yes. >> And it's that zooming out that I think we need. >> That's right. It's the zooming out with the skill of zooming out that we've lo maybe AI can help us. But one of the tragic things is that even the benefits of compartmentalization, we lose some of them if we don't take the knowledge in those different silos and we compare knowledge from different silos because the knowledge from different disciplines can inform knowledge in other disciplines. And there's a fantastic synergy that I've seen in my big history teaching where students suddenly start realizing there are connections between geology and climate change and chemistry and literature. Um, and we lose that if we lose sight of the importance of trying to look across disciplines as well as go deep in particular disciplines. >> What tips and tricks do you have for big history teachers? As a teacher, it's very tempting to think that you know everything and your students know nothing and that your job is to tell them all of that amazing information you have and then they become experts and they know everything. Well, I don't I'm not sure that's the best way of thinking about teaching. I think another way of thinking about teaching is as people who model good learning. And good learning consists of trying to get to base one in lots of errors. I mean quantum physics for example, I will never be an expert in quantum physics because I am a sort of mathematical idiot. I can't I can't cope with the math. But there are some very basic ideas in quantum physics that I think I can grasp. Not only that, I think it's my duty to try to grasp them to understand my world. So, thinking of yourself as a learner, can I turn that question back to you because you've been teaching big history for 10 years now? >> Yes. >> And I'd love to know how you would answer that question. >> I think the the universal across every classroom is that kids are curious, but you can stifle that curiosity if you don't create a safe classroom for discussion and debate. and what I loved about big history because when I started I was a bit daunted by the science side. I thought I'm a history teacher. I'm certainly not an astrophysicist and yet that really intrigues me. So to shift my focus from being the expert at the front to sitting alongside my students as the lead learner, it created a really safe classroom environment where we could learn together. learning together creates this lovely collaborative classroom where you enjoy it as much as your students and I still have students contact me years later tapping into did you see we've deextincted a direwolf and that's right fantastic >> things like that and so that sews the seeds of lifelong learning and that's the beauty of the big history course that I love >> so you can take turns at being teachers in your classroom >> absolutely and you don't feel the pressure to be the expert at the front. What you're doing is you're modeling how to learn and how to learn for life, but also how to critically engage with information. I'm not just going to embrace the thing I see on TikTok. I'm going to look at reliable evidence. These are the sites that I go to that I know are trustworthy. Those sort of parameters for engaging with facts because we have so much information at the drop of the push of a a button. David, we currently have our eight thresholds, but things are always evolving. What are our new thresholds? Where do you see that going? >> Well, those eight thresholds, there's nothing fixed or cut and dried about them. Scientists and historians may argue endlessly about whether I've got the right thresholds. Or some people have said that having three thresholds in human history is very exaggerated. Well, that's because we're interested in human history. There's something a bit subjective about those eight thresholds and there are many others that we could imagine. For example, you know, biologists say to me, the emergence of bacteria on Earth is one thing, but the emergence of multi-ellular life, in other words, organisms like us that consists of of trillions of souls, that's a completely different process. It ought to be a threshold. or or ancient historians have said to me, "Yes, but the emergence of cities and states ought to be a threshold." And I I agree it could. Um my my choice of eight was just that seemed to work for me as a as a teacher. And I think those eight work pretty well, but they're not the only ones. And and and the idea of which thresholds you should talk about raises for me another fascinating question. Imagine that we were learning big history not on planet Earth but on a planet that's orbiting a distant star say the star Betalers or Sirius or something like that would we come up with the same eight thresholds I doubt it I think our sense of thresholds might be very different we shouldn't take the idea get too locked into the idea of eight thresholds >> I and I love the evolution of the program I think that's where we can go going into the future but if even if you look at structure of how it's been taught. You started teaching it in a university setting. Then it became an online course for high school students and in July we're launching a new package to focus on younger students. How do you feel about this new evolution of big history? >> Look, I think that's absolutely wonderful. I'm I'm I'm so delighted to hear this. In fact, I've I've already worked uh myself on one or two programs for primary school children. And I think it's absolutely in the logic of big history. Big history is not about passing on difficult technical information. It's about important stories about the world we live in that can give us guidance. Now, as every religious tradition knows, the big stories that they teach can be taught at multiple levels. >> David, that's brilliant. And what I love is that it sews that seed of curiosity. And I think that's what we need to keep students engaged with learning about the planet because I loved that quote in your book that the future doesn't leave evidence. So, we've got to look at the evidence of the past to map the potential futures. Can I add what you you you said that the only way we can prepare for the future is by studying the past. If that's true, then why not study the whole of the past, whether you're in primary school or high school or doing a post-graduate degree? >> So, you've looked at everything from the big bang through to now and the future and across that slightly small 13.8 billion years, you've observed patterns and we have a way of repeating patterns. So what pattern do you see repeating into the future if we're predicting this unknown? >> Let me let me say that as a historian you look for patterns. Uh but as a historian you also probably know that different historians will find different patterns and that applies here. So, so this idea of thresholds of increasing complexity is the pattern that stands out most clearly for me and it's the pattern that I guess I've explored in my own big history teaching and it's it's it's got built into the big big history syllabus and it is this idea that that one of the beautiful things about our universe is it is it has this creative potential. It can create things like human beings. I mean, think about it. That is staggering. And so, that in turn raises wonderful deep philosophical questions about the nature of this universe that we've all been parachuted into. Will this creativity go on? Will there be in 20 billion years time? Will will courses in big history be about hundreds hundreds of thresholds? or as I suspect will this process of increasing complexity slowly slow down. We already know that star formation is slowing in the universe and the laws of entropy. Our understanding of cosmology makes it look as if the energy available in the universe will will not be able to keep creating new things. That's the universe gets bigger and bigger and bigger and that energy is scattered over a larger and larger universe. So that eventually this process of increasing complexity will slow down and the universe will get more and more boring. And we're talking about so far in the future that that it's it our minds can't even begin to get around that. It's not going to affect our lives. But that is the overall shape of the history of the cosmos that is suggested if you take this pattern of increasing complexity seriously. And and it it it suggests one final idea that I think is absolutely wonderful, which is that we live in the springtime of this universe. We live at a time when it still has abundant energies and abundant potential for creating new things. >> David, thank you for sharing your knowledge and reflections with us. We can't wait to discuss the future impact of Big History Project 10 years from now. I think that the next generation of scientists and historians will be able to solve many of the mysteries we've explored in Unknowns. Check out the other episodes of Unknowns where we explore mysteries and questions about our origins and our future. Interested in learning more about Big History? Check out the Big History Project free online course for middle school and junior high students. [Music]