Big Bang, Stars, Chemical Elements and Planets

 Big Bang, Stars, Chemical Elements and Planets

Thesis – The most important recurring theme in 13.8 billion years of history is that of rapidly increasing complexity in each phase, and the evolution of harnessing energy flows to sustain this increase.

Threshold One Through Four: Big Bang, Stars, Chemical Elements and Planets – The Big Bang unleashed the creation of simple elements, which formed stars. Celestial bodies floated through the cosmos, picking up energy flows through coincidence rather than searching, and stars survived for only as long as the fuel within them held out. Once this energy was depleted, the star died out.  However, the death of a star meant the release of new chemical elements capable of creating more complex structure.[1] The disintegration of stars meant there was a great deal of debris and some of this began to coalesce together through gravity in a process called accretion[2], out of which the eight planets of the Solar System emerged. Even though objects in this inanimate phase were less complex in themselves, and required less energy, they held the potential to create higher complexity and higher energy flows in what was to come.[3]

Threshold Five: Origin of Life – Earth had accreted from this cosmic debris and took many millions of years to become habitable and viable for any sort of life. Eventually conditions were ideal to spark the first microscopic living cells, which as small as they were, still required four hundred and fifty times the energy density of the Sun, due to the complexity of their structure.  Every living thing that has existed or will exist developed ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acids, that are present within every single cell and due to this, everything is interrelated to a certain degree.[4] These cells, known as prokaryotic cells converted energy directly from the Sun in a process of photosynthesis.[5] The first eukaryotic cells evolved from the prokaryotes, and the spontaneous advent of sexual reproduction by these eukaryotes meant evolution from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular, energy-dense complex life, which was more likely to survive an extinction event. Organisms developed nervous systems, spines and primal brains, and the Cambrian Explosion 540 million years ago saw the emergence of the most diverse forms of life up to that point.[6] From here, complexity accelerated rapidly to evolve sentient species with massive brains capable of self-awareness, and the potential to create complexity grew exponentially along with more intricate and elaborate structures, as did the need for ever denser energy flows.[7]

Threshold Six: Collective Learning – Cells evolved new ways of self-replication, becoming more and more complex until the advent of Genus Homo 2.8 million years ago, which were then the most complex beings on the planet, each requiring upwards of forty thousand times the energy density of the Sun merely to power their individual brains and bodies. Diets moved from vegetarianism to maintain a primate-sized brain, to harnessing the power of fire to cook and eat meat, providing even higher energy flows and sustenance for an entire human body[8]. Foragers not only had biological connections but made social connections, where each human provided a service to the complexity of their tribe – the advent of collective learning. A small population meant that the rate of innovation was low, and the transmission of ideas and information was a slow process[9]. As the population grew, the means of transmitting ideas became easier with less chance of ideas being forgotten and disappearing. Since the first vertebrate developed a nervous system merely as a response to stimuli, the brain has evolved over five hundred million years to become the most complex biological structure in the universe[10], with one human brain capable of thousands of ideas in one lifetime.

Threshold Seven: Agriculture –At the height of the hunter-gatherer era, the entire surface of the Earth could support no more than six to eight million people.[11] Forager brains were highly complex, and the results of that brain power were equally intricate. It was the foragers that harnessed fire – Australian fire stick farmers would set entire forests on fire to clear land, which would pre-cook any animals that had been living in the forest, helping the foragers achieve even greater energy flows with less effort. Foragers found themselves staying longer at each region as the resources never seemed to wane. Family groups became larger and life became less nomadic. Generations passed and eventually the once abundant supply did start to fall away. More and more people were living in smaller areas and moving on to a new region was no longer viable. This led to people staying in one region and, rather than let the land naturally replenish, manipulated the environment to provide the energy flows they needed to create, sustain and improve their rising complexity. This was the establishment of agriculture, possibly the most momentous change in the history of the human species.[12]

The onset of the Early Agrarian Era saw humans transition from foragers to farmers. Instead of hunting food from the land, they made the land more efficient at producing food. They cut down trees to make room for fields, plowed those fields and tilled the soil which allowed crops to grow into plants for food. They domesticated the animals they usually hunted in the wild, penned them and used them for milk and meat.[13] Farmhouses were built to provide shelter which was now a necessity due to the sedentary lifestyle they found themselves leading. As they were now able to get more food out of a smaller area, more people could successfully survive in a smaller area. This was good for collective learning, because having more potential innovators living closer together meant a faster pace of exchange and improvement of ideas. This could only continue to raise human complexity.

Baker, David. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Big History. Seattle: Diabolical Press, 2019

Dr Baker’s textbook is the Bible for this course and is very helpful in understanding and phrasing key concepts.

Baker, ‘Connections: From the Inanimate to the Animate Universe.’ Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZf407uD_g&feature=youtu.be

Baker, ‘Connections: Nature’s Energy Flows.’ Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmtO9e3kB6c&feature=youtu.be

Baker, ‘Concepts: Paleolithic lifeways.’ Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpV8n5eLP54&feature=youtu.be

Baker, ‘Connections: Human Forager Complexity.’ Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yehqCXJgriQ&feature=youtu.be

Baker. ‘Connections: The Complexity of Early Agriculture.’ Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEVjlhtOePk&feature=youtu.be

Lectures and notes from Dr Baker to further explore concepts and gain some extra depth to the ideas in the Big History text.

Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin. Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014

The alternate text for this course, useful sections on the historical thresholds. More scientific and in-depth resource covering the same material from a different viewpoint.

Christian, David. ‘Collective Learning.’ In Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, ed. Ray C. Anderson. Great Barrington: Berkshire Publishing Group, 2016. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780190622664.001.0001/acref-9780190622664-e-874.

Excellent chapter in this encyclopedia, concentrates on one particular threshold of history with lots of extra information.

Ehrenberg, Margaret R. Women in Prehistory. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

A resource that concentrates not only on human life in history, but specifically on the gender roles within the history of homo sapiens. Excellent for talking about the foraging era.

Hazen, Robert, and James Trefil. Science matters: achieving scientific literacy. New York: Random House, 2009

Used to help understand the very beginning of cellular life on earth, dealing the scientific aspect of life rather than the purely historical bent.

[1] David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014), 26

[2] Christian et al, 39

[3] David Baker, ‘Connections: From the Inanimate to the Animate Universe’, (Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZf407uD_g&feature=youtu.be

[4] Baker, ‘Connections: From the Inanimate to the Animate Universe.’

[5] Robert Hazen and James Trefil, Science matters: achieving scientific literacy (New York: Random House, 2009), 251-272

[6] Richard Southwood, The Story of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7-13

[7] David Baker, ‘Connections: Nature’s Energy Flows.’, (Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmtO9e3kB6c&feature=youtu.be

[8] David Baker, ‘Connections: Human Forager Complexity.’, (Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yehqCXJgriQ&feature=youtu.be

[9] David Christian, ‘Collective Learning,’ in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, ed. Ray C. Anderson (Great Barrington: Berkshire Publishing Group, 2016), https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780190622664.001.0001/acref-9780190622664-e-874.

[10] David Baker, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Big History (Seattle: Diabolical Press, 2019), 3011 of 7731

[11] David Baker, ‘Concepts: Paleolithic lifeways.’, (Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpV8n5eLP54&feature=youtu.be

[12] Margaret R Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 77

[13] David Baker, ‘Connections: The Complexity of Early Agriculture.’, (Lecture recorded for Macquarie University, 1 June 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEVjlhtOePk&feature=youtu.be