Lecture 48: Big History—Humans in the Cosmos
Despite the limitations of any account of big history, the story is one we
need to know and tell. Telling it backward is a good way of showing how
such stories can help us map ourselves onto the cosmos. We see how the
modern world ¿ ts into the larger story of human history, how human history
¿ ts into the history of life on Earth, and how these stories ¿ t into the largest
story of all—that of the Universe as a whole. Like the different parts of a
Russian matryoshka doll, each story is nested in and helps explain the stories
surrounding it. This sort of “mapping” is closely linked to our sense of
meaning. Scientists are usually reluctant to discuss meanings and prefer to
concentrate on getting the story right. But as symbolic beings, most of us
have to look for meaning in any universal story. So what meanings may be
hidden within big history?The suggestions that follow are personal answers prompted by teaching big
history for almost 20 years. Trying to imagine the long, drawn-out death of our
Universe suggests that we may live in the most exciting era of the Universe’s
history: its springtime, when there existed the perfect balance of energy and
space to make complex things such as ourselves. We have also seen that the
societies we live in today may represent the most complex structures in our
part of the galaxy. Can our Universe create more complex structures? Either
way, our extraordinary complexity makes us rather interesting!We are also the only creatures we know of that are capable of seeking
meaning and purpose in the Universe. In the scienti¿ c view of the Universe,
in which there is no deity or conscious creator, that means that we become
the Universe’s bearers of purpose and meaning. It is, after all, awe-inspiring
to think that blind algorithmic processes might have successfully created an
organism clever enough to ¿ gure out how those blind algorithmic processes
created an entire Universe!And that’s where we’ll end! I hope you have enjoyed this telling of our
modern creation story, and I hope you will want to encourage others to
become acquainted with it. If they are young enough, they may be the ones
who will help construct a new and perhaps better story in the future. Ŷ