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Zusammenfassung von Origin Story

Name: Origin Story
Rating: 4.3 (129 reviews)
Author: David Christian

David Christian

A Big History of Everything

4.3 (129 Bewertungen)

31 Min.

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Origin Story
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What’s in it for me? Learn the epic story of our universe and humanity’s place in it.

Throughout history, humans have tried to make sense of our world and our place in it. People from different ages, races and religions have told stories to explain, with grandeur and awe, the origins and existence of humans, animals, Earth, the stars and the universe.

Globalization and our intensely dynamic modern knowledge economy have eroded faith in traditional origin stories. But the reality is that current scientific knowledge means humans have never been better placed to explain our origins and development.

These blinks tell the grandest story possible. How, from nothing, our universe, stars and planets emerged. How the right conditions came together to enable the formation of life. How life-forms harnessed the energy of the sun to make great leaps forward, and how millions of years later humans harnessed energy from farming and fossil fuels to leap forward again.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how stars are born and why their deaths helped enable our existence today;
why walking on two legs made humans more sociable; and
why human’s dominance of Earth is now threatening its, and our, stability.

The Big Bang created the Universe 13.8 billion years ago, the first of a series of key events in our history.

The tale of our origins is told through thresholds – key transition points when more complex things appeared. These moments happen under what’s known as goldilocks conditions – when things are not too hot or too cold, but just right.

For most of the thresholds in our story, we can explain what those goldilocks conditions were, and why the threshold was reached. But what about the Big Bang?

We simply don’t know the conditions that allowed our universe to emerge. Perhaps the best way to explain what happened is to use the words of science fiction author Terry Pratchett: “In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”

What we do know is that the Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago – the first of a series of key events in our history. And we know what happened next, a fraction of a billionth of a second after that moment.

At this point, the universe was smaller than an atom. It’s hard for human brains to comprehend the size of things like atoms, but you could comfortably fit a million of them into the dot of this “i.”

To begin with, we only had energy, which quickly split into different forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism. Within a second, simple matter emerged and was followed by more complex structures, while protons and neutrons – extremely tiny particles – teamed up to become nuclei. All this happened within minutes, but as the universe cooled things slowed down a bit. 380,000 years later, electrons became trapped in orbit around protons, pulled together by electromagnetic forces, and the first atoms of helium and hydrogen were formed.

The universe began as something unimaginably small, with all the energy and matter present in the universe today packed into it, and it’s been growing ever since.

The appearance of stars 12 billion years ago – and the way they die – were important steps forward for the universe.

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.

The earth was formed by the accumulation of debris about 4.5 billion years ago.

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.

Earth had the right conditions to allow life to flourish.

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.

Photosynthesis was an energy bonanza for early, single-celled life that helped spark a biological revolution.

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.

Evolution and the extinction of dinosaurs helped the big forms of life develop that would eventually lead to humanity.

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.

Humans evolved from primates and made a major breakthrough with the development of language.

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.

Farming was a transformative innovation for human life.

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.

As farming improved, it generated surpluses which enabled the development of more complex agrarian societies.

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.

The exchange of ideas and discovery of fossil fuels accelerated the advance of human progress.

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.

The earth has entered a new age: the era of humans.

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.

The future is ours to make.

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.

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Worum geht es in Origin Story?

Origin Story (2018) tells the story of our universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. It traces how the right conditions have allowed the development of forms, organisms and ultimately societies of incredible complexity. From the emergence of single-celled organisms to the development of agriculture, it tells the epic story of our origins.

Wer Origin Story lesen sollte

Anyone interested in the history of natural and human innovation
Anyone with an interest in popular science
Those seeking to understand our place in the universe

Über den Autor

David Christian is a professor of history at Macquarie University, Australia, and cocreator of the university’s Big History School. He also cofounded the Big History Project with Bill Gates, which provides schools with resources to teach the history of the universe. His 2011 TED Talk, The history of our world in 18 minutes, has been viewed more than eight million times.

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