Big History II

So is history pointless, just "on thing after another," or is it going in some direction? Professor David Christian's Big History points out an increasing complexity to the universe and notes that throughout the multi-billion year history of earth complexity has increased here as well. The span of intelligent life on earth is a sort of Camelot moment, however, because entropy wins in the end. One day the dying sun will swell up and burn the earth to a cinder. Later, the universe will get colder and colder and finally even subatomic particles will disintegrate.  As Professor Christian points out its a grand time to be alive in the adolescence of the sun. Make hay while the sun shines, there's only a few billion years left.

In his recent Stonehill lecture Christian also talked a little about the issue of contingency in history. Chance, he said, has played a gigantic role in life on earth. He cited Steven Jay Gould's insight from his study of the Burgess shale that if you ran evolution forward from the emergence of complex lifeforms chance would give you a different result every time. Christian reminds us that if the earth wasn't whacked by an asteroid 65 million years ago, dinosaurs could still rule the earth. Recent studies of human DNA shows we are descended from a few lucky survivors of a drought that struck Africa tens of thousands of years ago On the other hand, dinosaurs or us, both are carbon based lifeforms and the basic chemistry of carbon sets limits on just how different we could become through evolution. One of the cool things about human history is the development of tools that overcome those carbon based limits. Complex carbon based lifeforms can't survive in the vacuum of space, but thanks to our tools we can! If this is a little much for you, Christian has another example of how things work. He believes that many of our individual decisions are uniquely our own. I chose to eat Greek yogurt because it tastes good, you do so for its health benefits, and others for other reasons, all those unique individual choices create a market trend where Greek yogurt expands and non-Greek yogurt contracts. Christian concludes that despite chance and free will there are still trends that historians can study. Thus, patterns can be real and history, while it doesn't have a point or goal, is not simply one thing after another.

As I said in the previous blog, a lot of this stuff is known to any devoted viewer of educational TV, but one thing I missed on TV was something called the anthropocene. This is the geological epoch in earth's history where human activity has had a significant global impact on Earth's ecosystems. This according to Professor Christian is Ta Dah, the FIRST TIME in history, that a species has had an impact on earth's ecosystems apparently forgetting those happy little single celled creatures that invented photosynthesis. Without them there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere. No rust, not to mention that breathing thing. As readers know I would never deny the impact of human activity on the earth, but this is an example of how big picture and Big History guys get tripped up by the details occasionally. You have to judge at what point the smudges in the picture become too much to accord it masterpiece status.
   Still Big History is an exciting idea. Christian suggests it can give us a common story or origin myth about how we got here (certain to flip out the religious right as Christian noted although he promotes his course to them in a you need to know your enemy spirit.) I'll leave you with one potentially scary thought. In his study of increasing complexity Christian notes that what separates us from our primate relatives is the ability to communicate our culture quickly through language. With the advent of the Internet we are getting very close to the point where any one can know anything that any other human knows or knew. Each individual human will soon have at his or her fingertips all the complexity of humanity. In the world of Star Trek we are becoming the Borg. "Resistance is futile."