David Christian (1) (1946–)

One of the official definitions of Big History is: "an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present" (copied from Wikipedia in this case). The main idea is that the history of humanity or even of Earth is part of something bigger and not an isolated story - so looking at it on its own misses some of the long trends. The lecturer, David Christian, invented the term "Big History" while teaching one of the first such courses at Macquarie University (and he talks about it in these lectures as well) so there is probably no better lecturers for this topic. The biggest issue of the course is its length - it is just too short for its broad theme (even if that is part of the point of the whole discipline) so quite often I want to hear more than is in these lectured - more about the history, more about the people, more anecdotes from the first time he taught the class or from his other research - as weird as this may be for a 24+ hours set of lectures. Of course, as most of the courses in this series, it has a very long bibliography so one can go and explore - and I suspect I will - and here I was planning on these courses helping to reduce some of my TBR.

So what is the course about? It starts with a Big Bang and then slowly start moving from there. On its path to humanity, all sciences get born (you do not have chemistry before the first elements for example; botany until the first vegetation shows up and so on). That's part of what the whole point is - history is not an isolated science, it steps on the shoulders of earlier disciplines and cannot exist without them and the usual separation of the sciences while useful for some things (due to the difference in how you look at them and study them) hides the big picture.

Humans don't show up until lecture 21 (of 48); the first literate civilization (Sumer) shows up at lecture 30; the Industrial Revolution does not show up until lecture 41. That trend continues in the 2 lectures about the future as well - human history may be the important one in the short term but in the long term, things look different (and even in the short one, there is a lot more than humanity to consider).

The lectures can get very technical in places - it is an overview but if one does not understand most of the basic science, it can be a steep learning curve in some places, especially before humanity shows up (after which there isn't much left besides our history).

The recordings are from 2008 so some of its science is not exactly current - 13 years is a long time in some disciplines. At the time when they were recorded the Large Hadron Collider was just being finished so you get a warning to watch out for it because it has the ability to teach us a lot about the universe (and that turned out to be correct of course). But despite that, it is worth listening to - catching up with what is new once you have the base is not that hard after all.

If you rather read a book instead of listening (or in addition to the audio), "Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History" covers the same ground (and each audio lecture is tied to a specific chapter in the book as essential reading (sometimes combined with other books).

The lectures list:
1. What Is Big History?
2. Moving Across Multiple Scales
3. Simplicity and Complexity
4. Evidence and the Nature of Science
5. Threshold 1: Origins of Big Bang Cosmology
6. How Did Everything Begin?
7. Threshold 2: The First Stars and Galaxies
8. Threshold 3: Making Chemical Elements
9. Threshold 4: The Earth and the Solar System
10. The Early Earth: A Short History
11. Plate Tectonics and the Earth’s Geography
12. Threshold 5: Life
13. Darwin and Natural Selection
14. The Evidence for Natural Selection
15. The Origins of Life
16. Life on Earth: Single-celled Organisms
17. Life on Earth: Multi-celled Organisms
18. Hominines
19. Evidence on Hominine Evolution
20. Threshold 6: What Makes Humans Different?
21. Homo sapiens: The First Humans
22. Paleolithic Lifeways
23. Change in the Paleolithic Era
24. Threshold 7: Agriculture
25. The Origins of Agriculture
26. The First Agrarian Societies
27. Power and Its Origins
28. Early Power Structures
29. From Villages to Cities
30. Sumer: The First Agrarian Civilization
31. Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions
32. The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made
33. Long Trends: Expansion and State Power
34. Long Trends: Rates of Innovation
35. Long Trends: Disease and Malthusian Cycles
36. Comparing the World Zones
37. The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era
38. Threshold 8: The Modern Revolution
39. The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–1350
40. The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–1700
41. Breakthrough: The Industrial Revolution
42. Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900
43. The 20th Century
44. The World That the Modern Revolution Made
45. Human History and the Biosphere
46. The Next 100 Years
47. The Next Millennium and the Remote Future
48. Big History: Humans in the Cosmos… (mehr)