Origin Story summary

Looking at the night sky, it’s easy to think of stars as having always existed. But stars only came into being a hundred million years after the Big Bang, when gravity and matter provided the goldilocks conditions for stars to form.

At this point, the universe was a bit like a mist made up of tiny pieces of matter. In some areas – you could think of them as particularly cloudy areas – the volume of matter was denser than elsewhere. Here, gravity pulled atoms together, making them collide and speed up, raising the temperature. Over time, these clouds of matter grew denser and hotter.

We have a lot to thank the sun for: heat, light and energy for a start. We also have it to thank for the earth’s creation.

The formation of planets is a messy by-product of star creation, which takes place in areas of space rich in clouds of chemicals.

What is life? Life is built out of billions of tiny molecular machines working inside protected bubbles, or cells. It can tap into energy, adapt to its environment, reproduce and evolve.

In the right conditions, the molecules from which life is built can emerge spontaneously.

Early life-forms, known as prokaryotes, are single-celled organisms created in chemically rich volcanic vents on the ocean floor.

Prokaryotes are tiny – a punctuation mark could hold a few hundred thousand of them. But they are still able to detect information, such as heat, and respond to it.

With the right conditions, as well as benefiting from the energy boost of photosynthesis and the ability to deal with oxygen, single-celled organisms were able to evolve into much more complex, multi-celled beings.

Plants, fungi and eventually animals developed and spread from the oceans onto land. The emergence of photosynthesizing plants on land – which consumed vast amounts of carbon dioxide and released oxygen – created the high-oxygen atmosphere that is essentially what we live and breath today.

How old are we as a species? By the standards of the universe, we’re extremely young.

In just the last six million years (remembering that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the first large living organisms arrived 600 million years ago), we humans have gone our own way, evolving separately from primates.

We’ve seen that certain huge innovations, such as photosynthesis, have had a major impact on the development of life. Now we get to the next innovation, farming, which evolved in response to population pressures.

Consider the Natufians – communities of humans who lived in villages of a few hundred people on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. They were initially foragers, but population pressures meant they needed more resources. With plenty of neighboring villages around, they couldn’t use a larger area of land. Instead, they had to use whatever techniques they could to increase the productivity of the land they already had.

Today, most of us take for granted that we don’t have to spend our days producing food. But that’s the product of a great change in human society.

As the productivity of farming improved over time, farmers began to generate significant surpluses – more food and goods than they needed for day-to-day survival.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus became one of the first men to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Farming had taken 10,000 years to spread around the planet.

Now, in just a few hundred years, humans had made vast leaps forward as information and ideas traveled over oceans and were exchanged more rapidly than ever before.

For the first time in the history of the universe, one species – humans – had become the dominant force and changed the earth’s environment forever. Without always knowing what we’re doing, we found ourselves in the planetary driving seat.

Since the Second World War, we’ve experienced the greatest burst of economic growth in history, driven mainly by the exploitation of fossil fuels and technological innovation. This is the dawn of the Anthropocene – the era of humans.

What will eventually happen to Earth? Well, in the really long term – many millions of years – Earth will become sterile and eventually be swallowed by the sun. On a more human timeline, the future still remains in our hands.

The story of humans is in large part a story of acceleration. Things are now happening so fast that our actions over the coming decades will have huge consequences for both us and Earth for thousands of years.