Welcome and congratulations.
You’re one of the most unique and complex beings in the known universe. The atoms of your body are ancient, having been made in an ancient star.
The form of your body was inherited from countless ancestors who survived in the most extreme conditions; and passed their genes on to you.
You also live in a time where humans have become basically superhuman; with the ability to travel around the world, communicate with anyone, or read just about any work ever written.
Maybe you’ve had moments when you’ve wondered: “Wait, what is all this?”
These moments are no less than a jewel of the cosmos becoming an eye, one small part of the cosmos becoming aware, and turning to look at itself.
It's only because of humankind’s incredible abilities of science that we have an answer backed with evidence, and we are one of the first generations to hear it.
This is the story of us, which is also the story of the universe. It’s a story about emerging complexity, which we can categorise into thresholds:
8. Modernity
7. Agriculture
6. Humans
5. Life
4. Planets
3. Elements
2. Stars and Galaxies
1. The Big Bang
Imagine we can look across the universe and see thresholds being reached.
3x4
Zooming into our own part of the universe,
Timeline
The timeline give some fundamental dates for the modern origin story, using both approximate absolute dates, and recalculated dates, as if the universe had been created 13.8 years ago, instead of 13.8 billion years ago. This second approach makes it easier to get a sense of the chronological shape of the story. After all, natural selection did not design our minds to cope with millions or billions of years, so this shorter chronology should be easier to grasp.
- David Christian, Origin Story
Reference Origin Stories for the graph
There is not yet clear criteria on how to define a threshold, and we don’t have data on any life or civilisation existing outside of Earth, despite its potential to exist.
1. The Earth is the only planet we know of with life, and humanity is the only species we know of with an advanced civilisation. As we discover more about the Universe, our understanding of Big History will grow with it.
Sometimes complexity declines and disappears
https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2723/2584