IBHA Studies Big History

The International Big History Association (IBHA) exists to promote the unified and interdisciplinary study and teaching of the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.

Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.

Beginning about 13.7 billion years ago, the story of the past is a coherent record that includes a series of great thresholds.  Beginning with the Big Bang, Big History is an account based on testable, falsifiable evidence of emergent complexity, with simpler components combining in new units with new properties and greater energy flows.

Starting with the transition of matter from energy after the Big Bang, quarks established relations due to the gluons of the strong force, forming protons and neutrons.  Subsequently, the electromagnetic force connected these with electrons to form hydrogen and helium.  Slight asymmetries in enormous gas clouds were sculpted by gravity to form galaxies with stars.  The increasing pressure in the increasingly dense balls of hydrogen raised the temperature to the point where protons could be merged into heavier elements (such as oxygen, carbon, and then iron) through nuclear fusion, giving birth to the stars.

When the most massive of these stars ran out of fuel and exploded, the high temperatures formed heavier elements like gold, uranium, and others.  Mixing with pre-existing gas clouds that were now disturbed by the remains of supernovae, gravity formed second generation stars from the mix.  Because first generation stars had created heavy elements, these were available for gravity to form rocky or terrestrial planets.

The formation of our own sun and the earth took place about 4.5 billion years ago.  They are located in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion Arm or Local Spur. We are between 25,000 and 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which consists of about 100 billion stars.  We are traveling around that center at the rate of about 220 kilometers per second, completing one revolution or galactic year every 225–250 million years.   Over the past 4.5 billion years, the earth has continually gone through its own history, with changes in atmosphere, the appearance and continual reformation of land masses through plate tectonics,  and many other forces. 

Elements and molecules on the earth formed various combinations in a process of chemical evolution.  About 4 billion years ago, some of them formed membranes, gained access to additional chemicals and energy that became metabolism, and became able to reproduce.  What is called life then began its own highly uneven process of evolution, sometimes becoming more complex and diversified.  Major transitions led to such features as cell nucleii, photosynthesis, intentional motion, multicellular specialization and cooperation, heads, backbones, four limbs, and many other features. 

The rise of mammals following the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago led to the emergence of hominids. Eventually Homo sapiens emerged 200,00 years ago. Bipedal, largely hairless, large brained, and with opposable thumbs, humans also had developed symbolic and imaginative language, inherited a social nature, and made ethics explicit.

Through our culture, humans shaped some of the natural forces from which we emerged.  We added hunting to scavenging and gathering.  Beginning about 70,000 years ago, we left our African home and migrated throughout the globe, crossing Beringia into the Americas about 20,000 years ago.  We formed bands, kinship groups, villages, chiefdoms, cities, nations, and empires.  Our species crossed another major threshold with the emergence of agricultural states and then another with the burning of fossil fuels.  We have entered an information era. 

We have fought many wars among ourselves and brought about environmental degradation and resource depletion.  These and other problems threaten the quality and even survival of our species.  We face a current crisis and a possible new threshold.  No complex species is likely to survive intact for more than a few million years; we will be lucky if we survive that long.

Does Big History provide a narrative that can help nurture the development of the empathy and cooperation that are part of our social nature? Can humans form a more perfect human community that creates a more complex society than has existed before? Or will our current levels of social complexity face inexorable entropy?

Whichever species may still be surviving some few billion years from now would be well advised to hop a spaceship to another solar system. Those still on earth will face a much hotter sun.  About 5 billion years from now as the sun runs out of fuel, it will grow as a red giant, evaporating the oceans and finally engulfing the earth.  The other galaxies may keep racing away from our own local group, leaving us with a black sky.  Unless they all fall back in on each other as part of an eternal cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches - or unless new multiverses continue to pop into being.