Big History
David Christian first made the case for what he called ‘Big History’ in an article in the Journal of World History in 1991.
We cannot fully understand the past few millennia without understanding the far longer period of time in which all members of our own species lived as gatherers and hunters … Palaeolithic society, in its turn, cannot be fully understood without some idea of the evolution of our own species over several million years … Such arguments may seem to lead us to an endless regress, but it is now clear that they do not. According to modern Big Bang cosmology, the Universe itself has a history … We can say nothing of what happened before this time; indeed time itself was created in the Big Bang. So this time scale is different from others … If the past can be studied whole, this is the scale within which to do it.
Suppose you draw a Grand Timeline and add stuff to it as you learn?
Roughly like this:
- 14,700,000,000 ya (years ago): Big Bang happens
- 14,699,621,000 ya (379,000 since Big Bang): temperature 3000 Kelvin, hydrogen atoms form, starts the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation still seen today
- 4,500,000,000 ya: Earth forms
- 3,700,000,000 ya: Life joins the game
- 1,500,000,000 ya: Eukaryotes
- 560,000,000 ya: Cambrian radiation & start of a good fossil record
- 252,000,000 ya: The Earth farts, everyone dies
- 65,000,000 ya: Rocks fall, everyone dies
- 1,000,000 ya: Hominids like you
- 100,000 ya: Hominids like me
- 70,000 ya: First clothes
- 12,000 ya: First city
- 2,070 ya: Brutus brutalizes Caesar
- At this point, switch to familiar CE dating: this year is 47 BCE.
- 1310: Great Famine kills 30-60% of Europe
- 1346: Black Death kills 30-60% of Europe (again)
- 1400: "Hey guys it seems the Romans did other things than crucify our Lord Jesus, let's check it out" (Renaissance starts)
- 1500: European population back to what it was in 1300
- 1543: Copernicus and Vesalius make big year for science
- 1800: Industrial revolution
- 1900: Some male humans suspect that female humans are not so different from them
- 1945: "I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" –Oppenheimer on the first nuclear bomb test
- 1969: we moon now
- 1991: World Wide Web born, myself born, Soviet Union cancelled
- 2010: Smartphones
- 2017: "Factfulness" published, predicting a pandemic
- 2020: COVID-19
OK, more detail at Timeline of events.