Tracey Rissik

Over dinner a few months ago, my friend Marcy told me she was struggling with what she calls “the great questions.”

Who am I? Where am I going? What’s it all about?

She was visiting a new church and had picked up a few books on philosophy, religion, and science, but felt a bit overwhelmed.

“There’s an awful lot to cover here,” she said. “Where do you suggest I start?”

I told her it depended on where her interests lay and that she would probably end up following her own path. But I did recommend a good trailhead: Big History.

You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Big History provides the answer, using not just the knowledge and insights of historians, but of archaeologists, cosmologists, geologist, and biologists, too. The result is a grand synthesis – based on the latest discoveries – that explains our place in creation.

Why is this important?

As Dr. Joel Primack, a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, explains, “Without a meaningful, believable story that explains the world we actually live in, people have no idea how to think about the big picture. And without a big picture, we are very small people.”

Yet this portrait is anything but easy to find…

Professors Bob Bain and Lauren McArthur Harris of the University of Michigan recently asked over 75 world history teachers at a workshop to quickly compile a five-minute history of the United States.

Most had no problem, using a thread that included Native Americans, European settlement and colonization, the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, expansion and industrialization, two World Wars, the Depression and New Deal, the Cold War, civil rights and so on.

Next they asked them to craft a five-minute history of Western Civilization. Again, the teachers had little difficulty finding common markers: the River Valley civilizations, classical Mediterranean civilization, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of nation-states, exploration, democratic revolutions and more.

But when they asked the same group to create a five-minute account of world history, they were stymied. They couldn’t decide what to include, got bogged down with details and lacked sufficient knowledge to form a coherent narrative. And these were world history teachers!

Their experience underscores the trouble most of us have gaining a genuine sense of the past. The subject is so broad and diverse that it is easy to get overwhelmed by a blizzard of facts that lacks any meaningful interpretation.

Big History provides one. It is a story that weaves the past – including both human history and pre-history – into a single tapestry.

Unlike traditional history, which focuses on political movements and key personalities, Big History deals with evolutionary changes and patterns that link us to a common background.

You already know that you share a national history with millions of others and a personal history with a much smaller subset. But consider the history you share with the rest of humanity, the natural world, and even the stars and planets.

At this grand scale, it is not possible to cover the actions and accomplishments of great individuals, men and women we should know and strive to emulate. The goal here is to understand our interconnections and, ultimately, our place in the world.

For example, paleontologists estimate that Homo sapiens emerged from East Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. Since then, we’ve climbed from savages to scientists. A few notable developments along the way include:

1. Speech. The development of articulate expression took us from warning cries and mating calls all the way to philosophy and poetry. Without language, reason could never have gotten off the ground.
2. Fire. This discovery made us less dependant on climate, less fearful of the night, and offered a thousand things for dinner that were inedible before. (For an interesting take on this era, I recommend Quest for Fire, perhaps the funniest movie without dialogue ever made.)
3. The Conquest of the Animals. Today most of us think of animals as either pets or food. But before we took dominion of the earth, leaving a cave or your hut was a potentially life-threatening risk.
4. Agriculture. Without the development of crops and livestock, our ancestors could not have made the transition from hunting and gathering to civilization. Yet 98% of human history is pre-agricultural.
5. Social Organization. There was no security and prosperity until we learned that disputes could be settled without picking up a rock or club. Cooperation and compromise led to progress, knowledge and wealth.
6. Morality. There can be no lasting peace without justice or conscience. More than two thousand years ago, Buddha said, “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.” Confucius said, “What you do not yourself desire, do not put before others.” Hindu scripture counseled, “Treat others as you would be treated.” Jesus of Nazareth said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Societies that adopted this ethos survived. The others did not. It’s that simple.
7. Tools. Without machines – like the wheel, the hammer and the knife – there was little we could build or achieve. New and ever-improving tools eased our burdens and vastly improved the quality of life.
8. Education. Each generation passes along its discoveries and accumulated wisdom to the next. We are born savages. Education makes us human.
9. Writing and Print. Writing made permanent the achievements of the mind. Printing carried them to the corners of the earth.
10. Mathematics and Science. Society could not have advanced without the enlightenment of the mind. From the electron microscope to the Hubble Space Telescope, science has revealed a universe vastly larger and more splendid than the ancients could possibly have imagined.

Yet five thousand years of recorded history relates only a millionth of the lifetime of the earth. We seldom of think of it, but the planet has a history, too. So does the solar system. And so does the Universe as a whole. Yet – thanks to the discoveries of science – it is only relatively recently that we have pieced our earliest chapters together.

We now know, for instance, that the present universe sprang into existence 13.7 billion years ago. The solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. The first signs of microscopic life arrived 3.7 billion years ago. And the largest-ever mass extinction occurred 252 million years ago. How we know these things are true is one of the most fascinating aspects of studying Big History.

If you are interested in learning more, there are a number of excellent books available. A few favorites are What On Earth Happened by Christopher Lloyd, Big History by Cynthia Stokes Brown and This Fleeting World by David Christian.

Christian, an Oxford-educated scholar and Professor of History at San Diego State University, is one of the founding figures of the Big History movement. He has taught the subject since 1989 and even coined the term – whimsically – in a 1991 article.

Christian realized that the story of our beginnings crosses various branches of knowledge and is generally scattered across academic disciplines. Worse, it is almost never presented chronologically. That makes it tough to grasp the big picture. Students and seekers – like Marcy – often find themselves lost, confused or tied up in knots.

One solution is “Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity,” a 48-lecture course taught by David Christian and available through The Teaching Company on DVD, Audio CD or Audio Download. (For more information, click here.)

The course is in easy-to-digest 30-minute lectures that are short on glossy production but long on distilled wisdom. Christian doesn’t just relate the big picture. He puts in into context and makes it accessible to the layman.

In an early episode, for instance, he tries to convey the immensity of our solar system and points out that a modern passenger jet flying at roughly 550 miles per hour takes about five hours to cross the continental U.S. Traveling at the same speed, you would need 18 days to reach the moon, 20 years to reach the sun, 82 years to reach Jupiter, and 750 years to reach Pluto, my favorite ex-planet.

How long would it take to reach the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri, 25 trillion miles away? The answer is five million years. Yet, cosmologically, this is right next door.

There are roughly 100 billions stars in the Milky Way and most are separated by a plane flight of five million years or more. The Hubble has revealed more than 100 billion other galaxies out there, each stuffed with billions of stars. Astronomers estimate that there are more stars in the known universe than grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts on earth.

The universe isn’t just bigger than you imagine. It’s bigger than you can imagine.

The only way Big History won’t make your head swim is if you aren’t paying attention. (Which may explain why we missed most of this in college.) However, it’s only within the last few decades that scientists have had the specialized instruments and dating techniques to know where we came from and how we got here.

Big History is a crash course in your connection to everything: other people, the natural world, the rest of the cosmos. What is the benefit of this larger perspective?

Our world has never been more interconnected. Yet we define ourselves in the ways that divide us: national boundaries, culture, language, religion. The truth is we are all united in the most profound ways, not just as a global community but as a cosmic one. (This sounds a little Kumbaya, I know, but that doesn’t make it any less true.) Understanding the past allows us to think more clearly about the future.

Your story transcends the history of particular nations, ethnic groups, individual species, even organic matter. It reveals your deep spiritual connection to the rest of humanity… and to everything else.

As cell biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas observed, “I go back, and so do you, like it or not, to a single Ur-ancestor, whose remains are on display in rocks dated approximately 3.5 thousand million years ago, born a billion or so years after the earth itself took shape and began cooling down… I cannot get that out of my head. It has become the most important thing I know, the obligatory beginning of any memoir, the long-buried source of language. We derive from a lineage of bacteria, and a very long line at that. Never mind our embarrassed indignation when we were first told that we came from a family of apes and had chimps as near-cousins. That was relatively easy to accommodate, having at least the distant look of a set of relatives. But this new connection, already fixed by recent science beyond any hope of disowning the parentage, is something else ag ain… We are all in the same family – grasses, seagulls, fishes, fleas and voting citizens of the republic… Humble origins indeed.”

The journey is a fantastic one because it is grounded in what geologists call deep time, eons going back beyond our ability to comprehend.

Yet there is grandeur here. Reverend Michael Dowd, an author and educator, calls our modern understanding “The Great Story,” the sacred history of everyone and everything, from our cosmic genesis, to the formation of galaxies and the origin of life, to the development of consciousness and culture, to the emergence of ever widening circles of care and concern. He defines Big History as a glorious revelation – a public one, available to anyone with an open heart and an inquiring mind.

Like my friend Marcy, you may be uncertain where you’re going or what it’s all about. After all, men and women have pondered these questions for thousands of years.

Big History can help. It offers a vital perspective, a map of your place in space and time.

And while we should never stop asking who we are or where we’re headed… it’s pretty mind-blowing to discover where we’ve been.

Carpe Diem,

Alex

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