Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, By David Christian

RATING

3 stars

N/A = good but not on the scale

1 star = perspective supplementing

2 stars = perspective influencing

3 stars = perspective altering

SHORT SUMMARY (272 words or less)

On the surface, this book attempts a big task:  to tell the story of the Universe, and ultimately the biological and social evolution of humans. A story from the Big Bang to the end of the Universe.  Of course, the book is more nuanced than that.  The real idea is to build a unified view, rooted in science, of how everything, including us, originated.  Hopefully, that common understanding will establish a starting platform from which science-based decisions and polices can be made.  Thus, the name for the book and also the underlying Big History Project.

The themes of Origin Story are important.  From the human perspective, if we don’t understand our origin, based on science and facts, then the ignorance that creeps in could ultimately distract and destroy our ability to sustain as a species.  In a larger sense, the origin story told here is humbling too–it give us a very real understanding that our mere existence in space and time is fleeting.

And yet, whether we know this or not, we go through our lives with a remarkable ability to understand our place in all of it. This is incredibly profound.  And we have developed cognitive tricks (like language, knowledge sharing, culture, social customs) to change our evolutionary trajectory faster than our biology ever would allow.

My take away from this book, and others read recently, is that culture matters.  And a culture rooted in science and scientific inquiry may be the only path forward for our sustained existence.

I’ll stop short of saying that this is a must read; however the information contained within it is a must know.

LONG SUMMARY  (Key takeaways–more thoughts)

It’s taking me a long time to write this.  There is a lot that I want to say, but not a lot that I want to summarize.  I’ll try my best.

Origin Story is an attempt to tell a science-based narrative of the origin of the Universe, life on Earth, and ultimately the fate of it all.  The author, David Christian, uses ten cosmic “threshold events” as milestones to mark periods of importance in this timeline. These threshold events are:  (1) The Big Bang; (2) the appearance of the first stars; (3) the appearance of new elements; (4) the formation of the Sun and our solar system; (5) earliest forms of life on Earth; (6) earliest signs of our species; (7) the beginning of farming; (8) use of fossil fuels; (9 – future) a sustainable world order; (10 – future) the end of the Universe.

As I think about summarizing Origin Story, it feels like there are two tracks of thinking going on in my mind.  One is the attempt for objective understanding of the past and future, and the threshold events the author describes. The other is a series of subjective observations–injecting questions of what these explanations mean for me.  For my beliefs.  For the consequences on my family, my life, our society, our species, our planet.  Track one finds meaning within the explanations themselves; track two extrapolates meaning with biases rooted in my human experience.

For example, the explanation of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) as evidence and proof of The Big Bang, is based in chemistry and physics that is absolutely fascinating to learn objectively.  But then, when you look at it subjectively from the human perspective you realize that the human brain, a three pound organ that sits in our skull, is able to figure all of this out. That we have the cognitive capacity to even ask the most fundamental questions of existence, come up with theories, and then verify that the theory is correct by observing the CMBR.

Another example–it’s a fundamental concept from the objective perspective that matter and energy are basically the same thing.  But from my subjective perspective, the simplicity of the Einstein’s most famous equation is downright spiritual.  The formation of the sun, planets, Earth, atmosphere, plate tectonics–all fortuitous in the objective perspective, frighteningly rare in the subjective lens.  The development of life.  The mass extinction events.  The Cambrian life explosion.  Photosynthesis.  Primates.  Bipedalism.  Language, agriculture, energy capture, war, etc.  You get what I’m saying

One takeaway for me is the notion that on the human scale, our existence in the Universe is a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of time and space.  An existence that could have likely just been a physical and chemical accident.  And yet, through some evolutionary breaks, human consciousness broke through.  We developed the cognitive abilities to free ourselves from traveling only the slow paths of biological evolution and chemical change.  We developed Theory of Mind and became self aware, we crossed a linguistic threshold that enabled us to share knowledge and develop culture.  We have been able to stand on the shoulders of our ancestors for millennia.

When we crossed these barriers, we expanded beyond our biological destiny to exist as mere foragers and used culture to tame the land, organize in large numbers, transform energy, expand through the world and ultimately own the biosphere.  All in a matter of 200,000 years when the human species first appear.  If you put 200,000 years on a relative cosmic timeline (where the Big Bang started 13 years 8 months ago, instead of 13.8 billion years ago), 200,000 years amounts to just 100 minutes ago on the cosmic clock.  What did you do in the last hour and half?

We’ve become masters of the world and everything in it, but we have done so at the expense of the biosphere itself and soon, at the expense of ourselves. Geologists now agree that the Earth is likely entering another mass extinction event, but this one is caused by human activity instead of a meteor or super volcano or natural ice age.   Even when the terrifying Jurassic Park dinosaurs were around, they weren’t able to eradicate life in the biosphere in the capacity and magnitude which we are now able.

Our development of human culture got us to where we are, all the good and bad, but it also empowers us to change our destiny.  We have the tools to understand our past and can project our future, and we have the potential to organize ourselves in a way to sustain that future.  This unique ability to develop culture may ultimately save us.

I know that all sounds flowery and too head-in-the-clouds, but the amazing thing about it is, scientifically speaking, it’s actually true.  And that’s an amazing thing to realize.  For example, our brains likely grew bigger because our ancestors figured out how to use fire and cook our food.  So when we stopped eating raw meat, we could dedicate more energy to developing our brains.  Thus, in our minds we developed larger cortex regions relative to other animals, which carries out most of our language processing functions.  Language development lead to shared knowledge, and abstract thinking, which lead to social organization, farming, agrarian and industrial societies.  In another example, about 7 million years ago, a hominid ancestor decided to stand on two legs, probably to run faster on the African savanna.  That bipedal trait was naturally selected to pass through generations, ultimately to us.  Human bodies went through physiological changes when they stood upright, including longer spines and narrower hips.  So when it came time for kids to be born, the babies had to be smaller to pass through a narrower birth canal.  Thus, babies have to develop for quite some time after birth, and those that were more apt to survive were those that belonged to social structures that supported nurturing of that offspring long after birth.

On the larger scale, the origin story told in Origin Story is almost mystical.  Yet is rooted in scientific verification.  To me, there’s something magical about the four forces of gravity, electromagneticism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, emerging as the Universe’s operating system after The Big Bang.  And there’s something even more magical and elegant about some of laws of physics.  That matter and energy really are the same thing, and their relationship can be explained by an equation capable of being done by a fifth grader.  Maxwell’s equations have a similar elegance uniting electricity and magnetism.  The duality of charged particles, electrons and protons, matter and antimatter.  Even moving away from large scale physics, the DNA structure and capabilities, and how it codes for genetic information and self replicates.  Photosynthesis and the Great Oxygen Revolution, the ability for life to figure out how to convert energy from the sunlight into food, and work. Humans to learn things, pass them down their progeny, and take over the world faster than any species ever could.

As the book discusses the growth and development of human societies, the author makes one point clear. Just like energy and matter are the same thing, in different forms, human wealth (and power) and energy are also the same thing, in different forms.  The idea is that when our species first started farming, we were able to utilize more of the photonic energy present on the Earth (example:  when we were just foragers, we wouldn’t eat grass, but when we domesticated cows, we would have them eat the grass, and then we would utilize them for work and for food).

As agrarian society learned out to cultivate these resources, they grew and developed.  As agrarian societies and leaders learned how to control these resources, they became powerful.  The societies grew to empires, which often used their power to expand (physically and economically) into areas with less power.  As the fossil fuel revolution was born, societies  and countries that were once relatively powerless became quite powerful, including many countries in Western Europe.  The fossil fuel revolution transitioned societies from agrarian powers to industrial powers, and these powers eventually fought one another, in the World Wars of the early 20th century.

The author indicates that we are now at a threshold point of existence in the biosphere, with a status that no other species has obtained:  complete control over the Earth and it’s resources, and an ability to control our future.  The author raises facts about climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, water shortages, all that point to an inflection point coming to the human species in the next century and a half.  The book concludes with a choice:  two paths for humans to take–one is the law of the fish.  Where our blind pursuit of growth and unchecked and irresponsible consumption ultimately hits a crisis point, and we devolve away from the potential to collectively control our fate.  The second path is a collective decision to build a sustainable world order, where we can work to create conditions to ensure the long term survival of our species.  The author believes that what happens in the next 150 years or so will have long term implications for our species, thousands of years later.

So, why am I going on and on about this stuff?  Well, after reading this book, to me, a starting point for us to collectively solve our problems–both man made and natural–must come from some common understandings of where we come from, what our limits are, and where the danger thresholds exist.  That can only come from an origin story that is rooted in science and a society that cares about science literacy.

This book, and The Big History Project, is an attempt to do just that.

Three stars.

SCRIBBLES  (Notes as I read along)

I started listening to this book after reading Bill Gates’ 2018 summer reading recommendation.  Apparently Bill Gates and the author, David Christian, started something known as The Big History Project  , which according to Wikipedia is an attempt to generate a unified understanding of “Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.”  Sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out when I finish this book.

I’ve listened to about 2 hours of the book so far.  My initial impression is very positive.  It’s a lot like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, but so far, in my opinion, the explanations are a bit deeper.  Also, the thesis is a bit different with this book.  Here, the author’s purpose is to try to explain a universal origin story that captures the development of the “cosmos, earth, life and humanity” (as described above for The Big History Project).  In this pursuit, the author focuses on ten critical origin story thresholds–from the Big Bang to the end of the Universe.  He puts these thresholds on a relative timeline so that human minds can understand it.  Basically, he takes a timeline and divides it by 1 billion.  You’ll see this below:

Threshold 1:  The Big Bang

Absolute date 13.8 billion years ago

Relative date:  13 years 8 months ago

Threshold 2:  First stars

Absolute date:  13.2 billion years ago

Relative date:  13 years 2 months ago

Threshold 3:  New elements formed

Absolute date:  Continuously from threshold 2 to today

Relative date:  same

Threshold 4:  Formation of sun and solar system

Absolute date:  4.5 billion years ago

Relative date:  4 years 6 months ago

Threshold 5:  Earliest life on Earth

Absolute date:  3.8 billion years ago

Relative date:  3 years 9 months ago

Threshold 6:  First evidence of our species

Absolute date:  200,000 years ago

Relative date:  100 minutes ago

Threshold 7:  End of the last ice age; earliest signs of farming

Absolute date:  10,000 years ago

Relative date:  5 minutes ago

Threshold 8:  Fossil fuel revolution

Absolute date:  200 years ago

Relative date:  6 seconds ago

Threshold 9 (?):  Sustainable world order

Absolute date:  100 years in the future (?)

Relative date:  3 seconds to go (?)

Threshold 10:  The universe ends in entropy chaos

Absolute date:  Billions and Billions of years in the future

Relative date:  Billions and billions of years in the future

There are other major events not captured in these thresholds but described in the book–e.g., asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, first cities; man landing on the moon; death of the sun, etc.

-So, there’s a caveat to this summary.  There’s way too much in this book to try to summarize.  It’s packed with a lot of information, most of which I find to be very interesting, but to rewrite a summary would mean that the summary would be twice as long as the book.  So I’m going to capture the main things that jump out at me.

-The four forces.  Shortly after the big bang, physics provided the “operating system” of the universe.  This came in the form of the four fundamental sources–gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.  It’s sort of unclear why these four rules came forth–they just did.  To me, this is one of the more interesting pieces–that the fundamental rules of physics just kind of came about.  Maybe in another Universe or in another set of circumstances, different physical forces exist and/or exist in different relative intensities.  The four forces dictated the specific energy pathways which could exist in the Universe.

-The four forces are a result of energy itself undergoing a phase change very early in the Universe.  A billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the four forces emerged.

-Gravity is weak but reaches across vast distances.

-Electromagnetic energy comes in positive and negative forms, so it often cancels each other out.  Gravity works on large scales, electromagnetism on small scales, chemistry and biology.

-The strong and weak nuclear forces reach over small distances, so they matter on a subatomic scale.  On the human scale, we don’t experience them directly.  But they determine what happens inside atoms.

-There may be other types of energy and mass–antigravity and dark energy.  It may account for why the Universe is expanding, but contemporary science doesn’t explain this.

-The author explains the big bang kind of originating from this tension of nothing-ness and something-ness.  That is, the big bang just kind of bootstrapped itself, and out of a nothingness, the primordial singularity kind of came to being and then exploded.  This is where the mystical meets the science.  The author references some ancient Vedic texts that mention the before the Universe existed both nothing and something.

-The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is the proof that the big bang existed.  Basically, the CMBR consists of photos that leaked out of an early plasma state in the universe.  I don’t know if I can fully explain it, but it goes something like, before the electromagnetic force attracted early protons and electrons together, all of these subatomic particles, including photos, existed in a sort of energy plasma.  When the Universe cooled and the electrons and protons paired up, the photos leaked out of the plasma into a charge-less universe, as basically we can measure trace elements of that leakage in the CMBR.  That’s how we know that the big bang happened.

-After the big bang, there was a phase of super expansion of the Universe where things were flung across the Universe so fast that we probably will never see them.  Then the super expansion slowed, and things cooled.  Average temperature of the Universe is 2.76 degrees above Absolute Zero.

-As temperatures dropped, the possibilities of potential matter narrowed.

-E=mc^2.  Energy and mass are the same thing.  A small amount of matter can be converted to a huge amount of energy.  Think the atomic bomb.  Matter is just a compressed form of energy.

-One thing to note about the formula.  To me, it’s incredibly profound of simple that formula is to explain an exact relationship between two fundamental concepts of the Universe.  Think about that.  Matter and energy are translated through a very simple equation–is there something even more simple going on beyond what we can understand?

-Formation of life.  Complex adaptive systems must survive the customs of local environment, and thus all forms of life must develop mechanisms to understand local information.  All of life is information-vores.  They all consume information.  Perhaps what makes human’s unique is language that allows us to pass vast amounts of information to each other.

-A brief discussion of entropy.  Entropy is the idea that over time, matter and energy will descend to a state of randomness or chaos.  So in order to have ordered systems as time moves on, there’s a certain tax to be paid to entropy.  An entropy “energy tax”–that is, it costs energy to make systems more orderly.  Entropy likes this, because ultimately, the energy tax will cause resulting systems to decay into chaos much faster.

-More complexity means more information – and the entropy tax requires energy to be expended for the complexity.  Some say that because life requires organized systems of information and matter, and because such organized systems pay a high entropy tax, entropy may actually encourage life to exist throughout the Universe because life degrades free energy to entropy very efficiently.

-Defining life:  how to distinguish life from nonlife?  Most modern definitions include the following five features for life:

1.  Most living organisms consist of cells with semi permeable membranes
2. Life has metabolism that can tap free energy from its surrounds to rearrange molecules and atoms efficiently with complexity.
3. Life can adjust to changing environments through homeostasis.
4. Life can reproduce using genetic information to make copies of themselves
5. Over generations the copies slowly change to changing environments.

-Interesting factoid:  Human beings consume about 120 Joules of energy per second, or 120 watts.  Similar to a light bulb.

-Tiny genetic changes give life it’s resilience.  Random changes create different templates that are randomly changing.  This is the heart of natural selection.  Natural selection means that tiny random changes will lead to more favorable changes relative to local environments to be propagated through generations.  Natural selection links necessity and chance.

-Goldilocks conditions for life:

1. Our sun is located in the right location in the Milky Way.  Not too close to the chaotic center of the galaxy
2. Chemistry works well in lower temperatures–rich chemistry occurs in habitable  zones in areas close to stars but not too close.  Earth is located in the right zone relative to the Sun.  But some other planets and moons may have internal furnaces (e.g. geothermal source) to make it acceptable for life.
3. Presence of liquids–atoms and molecules can mix together.  Planets that lie between 0 to 100 degrees Celsius allow for water to exist in all states.
4. Chemical diversity–lots of chemical atoms to mix together.  Chemistry needs rare environments where other elements are found.

-There’s a lot of discussion on the formation of life.  I might have to go back and listen, because it was really well explained, and I’d like to get it a second or third time.  Some things I remember are below.

-LUCA – stands for last universal common ancenstor.  It’s a scientific abstract to understand when the formation of life happened on earth and what differentiation points existed between molecules and molecular life.

-ATP – uses proton energy from food to create an electrical potential in the cell and thus do work (or something like that).

-DNA and RNA–the C-G, A-T (U in RNA) nucelotides pairs allow for genetic information to be passed through replication, almost like a code.  A certain nucelotide sequence represents specific genetic sequence.

-Plate techtonics – internal thermostate; Wagner’s theories discounted

-Photosyntehsis – takes photon energy and converts it to useful work to sustain plantlife. Human’s in turn gain this energy through food.

-Oxygen revolution – atmosphere changed 2.5 billion years ago when prokaryotic and eukaryotic life released oxygen from photosynthesis.  This created a shit ton of oxygen in the atmosphere and allowed for greater biodiversification (read the Wikipedia article on the Great Oxygenation Event if you’re so inclined). At high levels, oxygen is toxic, but at the levels we currently have, system of respiration allows us to combine carbon from carbohydrates and oxygen to do work, and expel carbon dioxide as a biproduct.

-Plate technoics + biosphere enables an internal thermostate + homeostasis for Earth.  Other planets in the goldilocks zone of our solar system have not been able to sustain life without similar mechanisms.  Venus–no way for it to cool down the runaway greenhouse gas temperatures; Mars–no way for it to heat up.

-Lot of discussion of early life, which is super interesting, but too detailed to recount here.

-The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs created such catastrophic change in a matter of hours and ultimately a few years of no sun killed most life on Earth.  That’s incredibly humbling–life then was around for millions of years, and within hours, it was wiped out.

-Primates and humans.  The human brain evolved with a larger neocortex relative to other animals’ and size. The development of a “brain” in animals is actually counterintuitive.  Our brain and many other animal brains consume a ton of energy, way more than their size relative to the entire body.  So similar to the “entropy tax” we kind of pay a “brain tax”–we have an organ that is an energy sink, but that helps us synthesize complex information.

-Humans and chimps descended from a common ancestor about 8 million years ago.  We know this by looking at DNA and genes across us and chimps and see a divergence in the code that would line up with being about 8 M years ago.

-Lot of interesting things here–how the use of fire may have caused us to need a smaller stomach, and thus more energy could be dedicated to developing the brain.

Also, interesting fact, for some reason, our genus homo started standing up about 7 million years ago.  No one knows why–one theory is that it helps us hunt faster in the savannah.  Well, because our evolutionary ancestors, and us, stood upright and became bipedal, that lead to a series of anatomical changes over generations and across species.  Homo sapiens elongated their spines, and this caused other anatomical changes, such as narrower hips. Narrower hips meant that human offspring are born when they are not fully developed mentally and physically.  Thus, humans need to stay with their offspring for many years, and this encouraged and evolutionarily rewarded good socialization–humanoids that could work together well had a better chance that their offspring would survive.  This may have encouraged humans to get together in communities and to have fathers stay present with their offspring.  Accordingly, to survive and have our offspring survive, our brains may have developed to hone these socialization and problem solving skills.  Really interesting to think, that all of society and culture may be resulting from the fact that somewhere, 7 million years ago, a primate decided to stand up in an African savanna.

-The book goes through the idea of cultural evolution vs. biological evolution.  He uses an analogy–what if an alien civilization was observing our planet for the last several million years.  For most of it, they would observe life on Earth but probably not find anything particularly remarkable.  But as humans come on board, within a span of 200,000 years, they basically have taken over the Earth and have the capacity to alter the biosphere and environment.  The author makes a point of cultural evolution–it’s the ability for humans to gather knowledge and cultivate/domesticate it, and then to pass ideas along across generations that makes us unique.

-Language–one of the biggest differentiating factor for humans than any other animal that ever lived is our ability to communicate with abstract language.  We are not the only life form that has language, but we are the only ones that can speak abstractly about things that are not in front of us.  Chimps can communicate an learn words, but they cannot communicate ideas like “the lions might come here tomorrow.”  They can only say things like “look over there at the lion.”

-The ability to communicate abstractly allows us to communicate to each other very complex information efficiently.  I like the analogy the author uses.  Language enables humans to communicate a complex spaghetti of information in easily transformed mechanisms of speech and text, and the recipient of the language can unfurl the tangled spaghetti to understand the deeper an complex ideas contained therein.  Somewhere at sometime, humans crossed what’s called the “linguistic threshold” that enabled our species to use language as the mechanism to capture and record abstract information and share it across generations and amongst each other.

-Humans have been farming for only 10,000 years.  But the start of human farming was tantamount to a revolution, much like photosynthesis was.  Human farming enabled humans to capture more of the photosynthetic energy present in the biosphere than foraging did.  And thus, it allowed them to live in more complex ways.  For example, humans don’t eat grass, but they could capitalize on the photosynthetic energy of grass by allowing horses and cattle to graze there, and then get those animals to do work or kill them and eat their meat.  In initial farming societies, probably everyone had to learn how to do it, but as farming techniques became more efficient and were passed down from generation to generation, humans were able to create surpluses, and thus everyone did not need to learn how to farm.  The question then, what happens to the surplus and who gets to own that?

Remember, cultural evolution happens rapidly, biological evolution slowly.  So with surpluses came people grabbing power and forming class systems.  Agrarian societies also “produced” more humans than were needed to sustain themselves, so the excess people were often forced to work in other ways.  It seems like humans domestication and control of the biosphere gave the human race as a whole the best chance for survival and propagation, but with that came other challenges on how societies organized themselves.  The human psychology, it’s thought, evolved to handle really only 150 close connections.  Agrarian societies grew larger than that, so new cultural adaptations, for better and for worse, arose to all humans to compensate against biological limits.

Earth, water, sun,

-The last portion of the book is a brief exposition on development of human society.  From the small agrarian states that developed ~10,000 years ago, to the current human ecological domination of the biosphere.

-The author poses an interesting theme:  all wealth is sunlight.  That is, all wealth through the course of human history is somehow tied to control or consumption (direct or indirect) of energy.  And almost all useful energy on the planet originates from sunlight.  So, maybe we all are sun worshipers in one sense or another.

-The author discusses the European “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus as a major event in human history.  It enabled European powers to gain strength and ultimately overtake older civilizations in strength and control.

-Author suggest that the countries and civilizations that have controlled modern power were able to capitalize on the use of fossil fuel technology.  E.g., England defeating China in the Opium Wars.

-There’s a lot more in this part that is really interesting.  I don’t remember it all because I listened to it for three hours straight while on a run, but the author’s main point here is that human progress and the march of civilizations have been tied to our ability to use energy and set up surrounding social systems, for better or worse.  And now, the author believes that we are heading into a critical time in human history–the next hundred years will determine how humans will live for many years afterwards.  This is mainly due to the effects of climate change– and the rate at which CO2 and Methane are being pumped back into our atmosphere.  Author suggests that we are on two paths:  one where we emphasize economic growth over everything, at the risk of the climate and the biosphere, and once our damage there is done, we revert back to the “law of the fish”; the other, where we collectively come together to build a sustainable world order, in which systems are set up to enable long term human social survival.