Speaker 1: Origins. Stories are immensely powerful. We need them. They help
Speaker 1: us place ourselves in the universe. Welcome to the One
Speaker 1: you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true. And yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Hi friends, if you're looking for a free
Speaker 1: and easy gift, consider sharing this show with someone you know.
Speaker 1: It's a gift to them, and it's a big gift
Speaker 1: to us. Happy Holidays to you from the One you feed.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 1: David Christian, a distinguished professor of History at Macquarie University
Speaker 1: and director of the school's Big History Institute. He co
Speaker 1: founded the Big History Project with Bill Gates. David has
Speaker 1: delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos
Speaker 1: World Economic Forum, and his TED talk has been viewed
Speaker 1: more than seven million times. He's the author of numerous
Speaker 1: books and articles, including the one we discussed on this episode,
Speaker 1: Origin Story, A Big History of Everything. I David, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Hi. Yes, I am very happy to
Speaker 1: have you on. Your book is called Origin Story, A
Speaker 1: Big History of Everything, and it is a wonderful and
Speaker 1: fascinating book and I loved reading it so much, and
Speaker 1: we're going to get into a lot of mind blowing
Speaker 1: details from it here soon. But let's start like we
Speaker 1: always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking
Speaker 1: with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two
Speaker 1: wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One
Speaker 1: is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 1: bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. It's parable, of course I
Speaker 1: agree with it, But I also think, like whenever we
Speaker 1: think in dualities, we actually need to look for a
Speaker 1: balance somewhere, And the bad wolf is not something I
Speaker 1: think that we need to eliminate entirely from our lives.
Speaker 1: There are times we need the bad wolf. So I
Speaker 1: might be inclined to agree that perhaps you should give
Speaker 1: the good wolf a bit more food than the bad wolf.
Speaker 1: He seems remarkably resilient. Yes, and I agree with you.
Speaker 1: I don't think starving the bad wolf is really the idea.
Speaker 1: It's not a very kind thing to do, I think, No, No,
Speaker 1: it's certainly not. So let's talk about your book. It's
Speaker 1: called origin story, a big history of everything. So what
Speaker 1: is an origin story to you? In what way are
Speaker 1: you using that phrase? I'm acutely aware of using the
Speaker 1: phrase in a particular sense, and it's it's like all
Speaker 1: these phrases. It carries baggage, and it carries different baggage
Speaker 1: for different people. But for me, what it means is
Speaker 1: the idea of unifying knowledge, the idea that in all
Speaker 1: human societies we know of And I think this was
Speaker 1: probably true a hundred thousand years ago or forty thousand
Speaker 1: years ago in Late Mungo in Australia, which is where
Speaker 1: I begin the book, people told origin stories. That is
Speaker 1: to say, older people, people who had accumulated some wisdom
Speaker 1: and knowledge, put all of that knowledge together, and they
Speaker 1: put it together in a sort of story like form
Speaker 1: that made it accessible to young people. Now, I remember,
Speaker 1: as a kid, I grew up in Britain in a
Speaker 1: Christian culture. So as a kid I learned the Christian
Speaker 1: origin story in kindergarten, and as I got older, I
Speaker 1: learned to understand it in more and more sophisticated ways.
Speaker 1: And now it's not the only story that I believe
Speaker 1: in at all. In fact, I'm much more committed to
Speaker 1: a sort of scientific story. But my argument is that
Speaker 1: origin stories are immensely powerful. We need them. They help
Speaker 1: us place ourselves in the universe. They tell us what
Speaker 1: we're part of, what thing it is that we belong to,
Speaker 1: and that is a profound way of Biden guidance, telling
Speaker 1: us what we need to do where we are what
Speaker 1: our relationships are, what our networks are, what our places
Speaker 1: and everything. And my argument is that what what basically
Speaker 1: happened is that in the last hundred years, modern societies
Speaker 1: abandoned the project of telling origin stories. We abandoned it
Speaker 1: so decisively we're more or less forgotten. We don't even
Speaker 1: notice that we don't tell origin stories in our schools.
Speaker 1: We teach knowledge in bits and pieces, and in fact,
Speaker 1: nowhere in a school curriculum, and very rarely even in
Speaker 1: a university curriculum do you find courses that try to
Speaker 1: link all forms of knowledge. And many people think that's
Speaker 1: a naive and impossible project. So we've lost all the
Speaker 1: virtues of origin stories because of the way we teach
Speaker 1: and we research and we organized knowledge in modern society. Right.
Speaker 1: I think some of that speaks right to the level
Speaker 1: of specialization. Things get into each of these fields. And
Speaker 1: that's what I find remarkable about this book and about
Speaker 1: the type of science or history you're part of. It's
Speaker 1: called big history, right, which is, like you said, trying
Speaker 1: to sort of put it all into some sort of context.
Speaker 1: And in order to do that, you obviously have to
Speaker 1: move a few levels up from going as deep as
Speaker 1: a specialist would go. However, what I found really impressive
Speaker 1: about the book is you're still going into more detail
Speaker 1: about how a lot of things happen than most people
Speaker 1: even know. So it's not like we have to sacrifice
Speaker 1: accuracy in order to have an origin story. I'm not
Speaker 1: attacking specialization at all. Specialization has been hugely successful in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. The amount we know about our world
Speaker 1: and our universe and our planet is staggering. What what
Speaker 1: I think is the real problem is that the other
Speaker 1: side of knowledge, which is linking things together, that's what's
Speaker 1: missing from modern education. Um So in tell a modern
Speaker 1: origin story, it's it's it's more of us as if
Speaker 1: I'm asking a question that I think has been asked
Speaker 1: since the Enlightenment. Can we construct an account of how
Speaker 1: everything came to be that is as coherent as the
Speaker 1: accounts we find in traditional religions or traditional indigenous stories,
Speaker 1: But that's based on the knowledge of modern science. That's
Speaker 1: the challenge, and it's it's very difficult, and getting the
Speaker 1: balance right is very very difficult. Indeed, so sometimes in
Speaker 1: origin story, I suspect I've gone a bit too deep
Speaker 1: on some things, but that's the project. Can we tell
Speaker 1: the equivalent of an ancient origin story using the staggering
Speaker 1: information that has been generated by modern science? And I
Speaker 1: like what you say about it being a way to
Speaker 1: construct either meaning or some sense of orientation to where
Speaker 1: we fit within everything, because we know that a lot
Speaker 1: of people are rootless and untethered. Tell me how knowing
Speaker 1: this story makes you feel more a part of the world,
Speaker 1: or how it helps you to have a sense of meaning.
Speaker 1: As a school kid, I lost my faith that Christianity
Speaker 1: would tell me everything I needed to know. And like
Speaker 1: a lot of people, I felt there are other forms
Speaker 1: of knowledge I need to acquire. But but of course
Speaker 1: I got them in bits and pieces. So my world
Speaker 1: it was as if my world got pixelated, you know,
Speaker 1: when I was in my teens and as a scholar,
Speaker 1: and then I realized that this pixelated world of knowledge,
Speaker 1: where you have lots of bits of knowledge, it's it's
Speaker 1: a bit like looking at the world through a broken glass.
Speaker 1: You can't ever see what unifies everything. That I think
Speaker 1: can be dangerous, and it can be dangerous psychologically. The
Speaker 1: great French sociologist and he will do a kind began
Speaker 1: his career writing a book about suicide and his argument
Speaker 1: was that many people commit suicide because of what he
Speaker 1: called anomy, a sense of rootlessness or not knowing what
Speaker 1: it is your part of. They don't know what they're
Speaker 1: connected to, they don't know who they are. And I
Speaker 1: feel this, this modern knowledge doesn't help young people get
Speaker 1: a sense of what is the universe? They are part of,
Speaker 1: what is the planet, they are part of what does
Speaker 1: it mean to be a human being? All of these things.
Speaker 1: And I think it's profoundly important of the psychological as
Speaker 1: well as an intellectual level. And it's a sort of mapping.
Speaker 1: In fact, my first book on big history was called
Speaker 1: Maps of Time. You'll have seen those maps of the
Speaker 1: Milky Way where there's an arrow that says you are here. Well,
Speaker 1: that's map I'm thinking about, you know, the map of
Speaker 1: the universe that says you are here. This is your
Speaker 1: place in space and time. So once you understand that
Speaker 1: place in space and time, then you know who you are,
Speaker 1: you know where you are, and you're beginning to get
Speaker 1: a sense of what are the challenges you face uh
Speaker 1: and and what is your task? Right? I think the
Speaker 1: other thing that for me an origin story or understanding
Speaker 1: where we come from and how we get here is it?
Speaker 1: It brings out the sense of mystery and awe. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote a Jewish mystic, Abraham Joshua Heschel
Speaker 1: about all, because I think it ties this stuff together
Speaker 1: a little bit. He says, all is an intuition for
Speaker 1: the dignity of all things, a realization that things not
Speaker 1: only are what they are, but also stand, however remotely,
Speaker 1: for something supreme. And I love that idea, that it
Speaker 1: gives us an intuition for the dignity of all things. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's a lovely idea, right. I don't know that quote,
Speaker 1: but certainly I think you know all really good scientists
Speaker 1: understand that sense of awe. If you learn about you know,
Speaker 1: how how does single celled organisms operate? Millions of cells?
Speaker 1: How do those cells collaborate? Once you begin to get
Speaker 1: into that, it is absolutely awe inspiring. Or when you
Speaker 1: start trying to imagine how big the universe really is,
Speaker 1: it's impossible to avoid a sense of awe. What does
Speaker 1: the big bang mean? I don't think we really understand.
Speaker 1: We can sort of tell a story, but telling a
Speaker 1: story is not quite the same as really understanding what's
Speaker 1: going on. So the story itself I think is full
Speaker 1: of awe and mystery, and then you can eventually stand that,
Speaker 1: stand back and say, well, so this huge, awe inspiring
Speaker 1: whatever it is, I am part of, and I think
Speaker 1: that is powerful. I agree completely. I think that's the
Speaker 1: next step of it is like I belong here, I
Speaker 1: am part of this, This is my home. That's what
Speaker 1: dor Kin was talking about. He was saying, you know,
Speaker 1: many particularly young people commit suicide because they have no
Speaker 1: sense of a home psychologically speaking, their street people. And
Speaker 1: what an origin story can do is give you a
Speaker 1: sense of your home. Perfect. So one of the things
Speaker 1: you say very early on is it that the heart
Speaker 1: of the modern origin story is the idea of increasing complexity.
Speaker 1: So let's start there with that part of the story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I first began teaching, I'm still not quite sure
Speaker 1: why I did it. I think, really I began teaching
Speaker 1: this because I wanted to get a sense of the
Speaker 1: history of humanity as a whole. In a globalized world,
Speaker 1: seven billion humans are sort of stuck together on a
Speaker 1: raft and we have to see the unity of humanity.
Speaker 1: But as I did that, I found myself pushing back
Speaker 1: and back and back and thinking, well, where did humans
Speaker 1: come from, and that forces you to talk about evolution
Speaker 1: and what is this planet we evolved on. So these
Speaker 1: questions pushed me back and back and back until I
Speaker 1: began to think that to really understand my place in
Speaker 1: the universe, I have to tell a history of the universe.
Speaker 1: So when I began teaching in nine that the truth was,
Speaker 1: I had no idea how to do that, because it's
Speaker 1: it's not a thing that many people do these days.
Speaker 1: Um So what I did is I invited people from
Speaker 1: many different disciplines, from astronomy, from geology, from ancient history,
Speaker 1: from archaeology, and they all gave great lectures. I'm so
Speaker 1: grateful to them, but the story didn't quite hang together.
Speaker 1: So it took me several years to try to see
Speaker 1: the storyline behind all of this. And the storyline of
Speaker 1: increasing complexity really comes from the work, or at least
Speaker 1: I learned it from the work of Eric Chasson, who's
Speaker 1: an astronomer who's taught forms of big history. He calls
Speaker 1: it cosmic evolution at Harvard in Boston for many, many years.
Speaker 1: He was teaching it long before I was, and his
Speaker 1: argument was that the early universe is very, very simple,
Speaker 1: and that as you watch the history of the universe,
Speaker 1: what you see is the appearance of increasingly complex things.
Speaker 1: Now that put like that, it sounds very abstract, but
Speaker 1: the global society we all live in today is staggering
Speaker 1: le complex. So this is really a story about us. How,
Speaker 1: step by step from a universe that began very simple,
Speaker 1: do you build up to the staggering complexity of our
Speaker 1: world today? How do you get that? How does the
Speaker 1: universe create something as complicated as my brain or your
Speaker 1: brain or the internet? That story held everything together, and
Speaker 1: eventually I started focusing on some of those moments when
Speaker 1: something new appears. Now it's a bit arbitrary, but I
Speaker 1: focus on eight in my teaching, which works pretty well
Speaker 1: from a storytelling point of view, And you can show
Speaker 1: step by step how more complex things appeared in the
Speaker 1: universe until eventually you get to today's society. So it's
Speaker 1: a way of placing today's global society in the history
Speaker 1: of the universe. So basically, what you're doing is you're
Speaker 1: describing what you're calling thresholds. We can think of as
Speaker 1: key transition points where the universe seems to have taken
Speaker 1: another leap of complexity, right, and so threshold one is
Speaker 1: the Big Bang thirteen point eight billion years ago or so,
Speaker 1: we think. The other thing that you do in the
Speaker 1: book that I really like is you break thirteen point
Speaker 1: eight billion years ago down to thirteen years eight months ago,
Speaker 1: because it gives a sense of things and it's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting if you say, well, the universe started thirteen
Speaker 1: years eight months ago, Well, we started burning fossil fuels
Speaker 1: six seconds ago, you know, billions of years. It is
Speaker 1: hard to wrap your head around. That's a little bit
Speaker 1: easier to wrap your head around. And I like the
Speaker 1: way you did that. But let's start with the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: because in a sense you alluded to this in the
Speaker 1: earlier part of the conversation. But we have a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea of what happened really shortly after the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: but we don't really understand what on earth happened at
Speaker 1: the Big Bang, or what was there before that, or
Speaker 1: what caused it to happen. Yes, I think that's true, um,
Speaker 1: and I think most cosmologists would probably agree that the
Speaker 1: actual moment of the Big Bang we don't have hard
Speaker 1: evidence about. We have hard evidence for things that were
Speaker 1: happening within a you know, a billionth of a second
Speaker 1: after the Big Bang, and this, this is this is staggering.
Speaker 1: But but astronomers can actually measure um fluctuations in energy
Speaker 1: in the universe just two and eighty thousand years after
Speaker 1: the Big Bang, and in the next decade or two
Speaker 1: they will be able to look at events much closer
Speaker 1: to the Big Bang, probably using gravitational waves, which is
Speaker 1: a new sort of technology. But we don't know what
Speaker 1: happened at the beginning. And one of my arguments is
Speaker 1: that actually this is true of all origin stories. If
Speaker 1: you look flee at them at the very beginning of
Speaker 1: the story, no storyteller knows quite how to begin it.
Speaker 1: Do you begin with nothing? If so, how do you
Speaker 1: get something out of nothing? Do you begin with something
Speaker 1: in which case there was no beginning, something existed forever.
Speaker 1: Is that satisfactory, you know? Or then there's a kind
Speaker 1: of mushy in between position which you find in things
Speaker 1: like that, you know, the great Hindu religious texts, you
Speaker 1: punishers and the vaders, the idea of Earth world which
Speaker 1: wasn't quite in existence, but wasn't quite not in existence.
Speaker 1: It's a sort of sort of mushy world of potential.
Speaker 1: And then something happened so that the potential turned into reality,
Speaker 1: and that, strangely is very close to the sort of
Speaker 1: thinking of modern quantum physics, which often you have to
Speaker 1: heade your bets on whether something exists or not, and
Speaker 1: then there comes a moment when you can say, okay,
Speaker 1: now it exists. Yeah. It's fascinating because along with the
Speaker 1: Hindu origin story. As I'm a I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist,
Speaker 1: and we talk a lot about emptiness, emptiness is form.
Speaker 1: Form is emptiness, right, and it's that idea that what
Speaker 1: is emptiness? You know, what is nothing? Well, one of
Speaker 1: the ways that someone in Zen might describe it is
Speaker 1: full of pregnant possibility, is what it is. It's really crazy.
Speaker 1: But it's what's so insane is that everything we see
Speaker 1: and can see or will see was all there in
Speaker 1: this tiny beginning that was so infinitesimally small. That's where
Speaker 1: everything came from. And you make a great point you
Speaker 1: say that it was a point smaller than an atom,
Speaker 1: and an atom is so small you could fit a
Speaker 1: million of them into the period at the end of
Speaker 1: this sentence. So something a million times smaller than a
Speaker 1: period at the end of a sentence contained everything that
Speaker 1: is or will be at least as far as we
Speaker 1: know now, and that's staggering if you're looking for all
Speaker 1: there's a good place to stop. The thing is that,
Speaker 1: as weird as that sounds if you're unfamiliar with it,
Speaker 1: the amount of evidence that points towards that conclusion is
Speaker 1: now colossal. And the main piece of evidence is just
Speaker 1: the realization. Well actually astronomers began to realize it in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, but they didn't take it seriously really
Speaker 1: until the nineteen sixties. Was the idea that our universe
Speaker 1: is expanding. Um, it seems to be expanding in four dimensions.
Speaker 1: It's getting bigger. And if it's getting bigger, then you know,
Speaker 1: in our in our minds, we can wind it backwards.
Speaker 1: In the past it must have been smaller, and if
Speaker 1: we keep going, it must have been infinitesimally small. So
Speaker 1: the logic behind that is very powerful, but it's very
Speaker 1: hard to get your minds around it. We've got a
Speaker 1: lot of complexity to go through. But this is the threshold.
Speaker 1: One the universe appears right, and then the next threshold
Speaker 1: is we get stars. So maybe give us a couple
Speaker 1: of minutes on how we get from a universe that
Speaker 1: is initially just pure energy two stars. Let me go
Speaker 1: back a bit and talk about thresholds, because there are
Speaker 1: certain things that seem to happen at all thresholds, and
Speaker 1: I think the best way of describing a threshold is
Speaker 1: to say that it's not something that happens to the
Speaker 1: whole universe. Most of the universe is incredibly simple today.
Speaker 1: It happens in special goldilocks environments in the universe. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: in a particular part of the universe, you find that
Speaker 1: things that already exist recombine in new ways, and suddenly
Speaker 1: they combine in ways that have new qualities. And that's
Speaker 1: what we see over and over again in emergence. Is
Speaker 1: the word. It's not magical, because the components of the
Speaker 1: new thing we're already there. It's just that they're arranged
Speaker 1: in new ways. And that's true of course, you and
Speaker 1: me as well, all the atoms in our body have
Speaker 1: been around for a long time. It's just they're arranged
Speaker 1: in a very particular configuration. So there are sort of
Speaker 1: rules about thresholds. And the second rule that Derik Chason
Speaker 1: pointed out is that whenever you get these new structures emerging,
Speaker 1: you're probably going to find that there's a lot of
Speaker 1: energy maintaining those structures and flowing through them. So to
Speaker 1: understand the structures, you can look at the flows of
Speaker 1: energy today. We can look at the flows of fossil
Speaker 1: fuels to understand modern society, for example. So back to
Speaker 1: what the Big Bang gave us threshold one. It gave
Speaker 1: us time, it gave us an expanding space, It gave
Speaker 1: us energy, all the energy in today's universe because the
Speaker 1: amount of energy doesn't change, and it gave us something else,
Speaker 1: which is a number of rules. So this this energy
Speaker 1: was not completely random. There were a number of rules.
Speaker 1: The rules said things like one of the forms that
Speaker 1: energy will take his gravity, and gravity is a force
Speaker 1: that pulls everything together. So there were rules at the beginning,
Speaker 1: and they explain why the universe was not complete random.
Speaker 1: There was always a bit of structure. So that's all
Speaker 1: about thresholds in general, the second threshold, and it's a
Speaker 1: really good threshold to understand to get a sense of
Speaker 1: how thresholds work, and I can tell the story sort
Speaker 1: of very very quickly. Actually, there's a lot of technicalities there,
Speaker 1: most of which I don't understand. About two hundred or
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe
Speaker 1: is cooling down. It begins incredibly hot, but as it expands,
Speaker 1: it cools, and there comes a point where atoms can form,
Speaker 1: electrons can blong onto protons and form atoms. And we
Speaker 1: know quite a lot about the universe at that point,
Speaker 1: and the main thing we know is that it consisted
Speaker 1: of hydrogen and helium, tiny smattering of one or two
Speaker 1: other chemicals, but basically just those two elements, and it
Speaker 1: was incredibly smooth. So you can think of the universe,
Speaker 1: the early universe, as a sort of thin mist of
Speaker 1: hydrogen and helium atoms, and the whole thing was almost
Speaker 1: exactly the same temperature. So this is very, very simple.
Speaker 1: This is what I mean by saying the early universe
Speaker 1: was simple. There's nothing complex here, So how do you
Speaker 1: get something more complex? Well, gravity is the crucial actor
Speaker 1: of this threshold. What gravity does is it clumps matter together.
Speaker 1: So if there's an area where the hydrogen and helium
Speaker 1: atoms are slightly closer together than that means the gravitational
Speaker 1: pull between them is slightly greater. So gravity breaks this
Speaker 1: homogeneous universe into billions and billions and billions of clumps,
Speaker 1: sort of clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and as
Speaker 1: they get clumpy, gravity gets more powerful and pulls them together.
Speaker 1: And inside these clumps you find atoms banging into each
Speaker 1: other more and more and more as they get denser,
Speaker 1: until eventually the clouds of matter start heating up again
Speaker 1: while the rest of the universe is cooling. So now
Speaker 1: you can imagine these clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms
Speaker 1: getting denser and denser and denser. Eventually the atoms break
Speaker 1: up and then at a certain point, protons start fusing together,
Speaker 1: and that's what happens in an h BOD. So when
Speaker 1: that happens, when you reach that temperature at the center
Speaker 1: of each cloud, you suddenly have a huge release of
Speaker 1: energy as some batter is turned back into energy because
Speaker 1: matter is really a sort of congealed form of energy.
Speaker 1: So now at the center of each clump, you've got
Speaker 1: a huge furnace pushing back against gravity. So these two
Speaker 1: forces sort of stabilize, and you have a star. And
Speaker 1: if you think about it, universe with stars trillions and
Speaker 1: trillions and trillions of them is very different from that
Speaker 1: simple early universe. You now have huge differences in temperature.
Speaker 1: You've got these these hot spots and stars while most
Speaker 1: of the universe is cold. You've got areas where matter
Speaker 1: is very concentrated, very dense, and areas where it's very empty.
Speaker 1: You've got flows of energy now from the stars out
Speaker 1: into empty space. So this is a much more interesting
Speaker 1: universe than the early universe, and the flows of energy
Speaker 1: that are now created create the possibility of new and
Speaker 1: more interesting developments. It's totally fascinating the way we go from,
Speaker 1: like you said, this thin mist two stars, and the
Speaker 1: next thing that happens is we go from largely hydrogen
Speaker 1: and helium to lots of other elements, and we're going
Speaker 1: to go through this threshold very quickly, because essentially that
Speaker 1: happens as a star dies and explodes at an even
Speaker 1: harder level. That's right, because in dying stars, what you
Speaker 1: need to create higher elements is colossal temperatures so that
Speaker 1: protons can bang together and come together in groups of ten, six,
Speaker 1: sixteen or ninety protons to form new new elements. And
Speaker 1: that happens in dying stars. And what you see is
Speaker 1: that each threshold creates the preconditions for the next threshold,
Speaker 1: and so our next threshold, which happened about four point
Speaker 1: five billion years ago. So going back to our analogy
Speaker 1: of the universe being thirteen years eight months ago, well
Speaker 1: four years six months ago, we got something that's pretty
Speaker 1: important to us, which is our son and our solar system. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean actually that threshold happened much earlier in some
Speaker 1: parts of the universe. We now know there are billions
Speaker 1: and billions and billions of sort of solar system. Just
Speaker 1: that our solar system appeared four and a half billion
Speaker 1: years ago, about four years and eight months on at
Speaker 1: that sort of shorter timeline um, and from that point
Speaker 1: on we have to focus on our planet and our
Speaker 1: solar system because we know very little about other solar systems.
Speaker 1: But planets were created in a universe that was now
Speaker 1: chemically complex because dying stars had created new elements, all
Speaker 1: the elements of the periodic table, and they scattered them
Speaker 1: through space. So you now have a universe in which
Speaker 1: you can create new kinds of stuff like water and
Speaker 1: ice or dust particles, and that's the stuff that makes
Speaker 1: our planets. So planets are particularly rocky. Planets like Earth
Speaker 1: are chemically much more complex than stars. Jupiter is much
Speaker 1: more like a star. Jupiter and Satin are basically gassy
Speaker 1: and they're mostly hydrogen and helium. But rocky planets like
Speaker 1: the Earth or Mars or Venus are chemically incredibly complex
Speaker 1: and interesting and so then relatively quickly, given the time frames,
Speaker 1: we're talking about three point eight billion years ago or
Speaker 1: three years nine months ago, so we're about seven tenths
Speaker 1: of a billion years seven million years, which is which
Speaker 1: is a long time, but in the times we've been
Speaker 1: talking about is pretty short, something remarkable happens, and that
Speaker 1: is we get something that we call life. Yes, at
Speaker 1: this point in telling the story, I always have to
Speaker 1: remind my students that, you know, the thresholds we're focusing on.
Speaker 1: I think they're pretty important, but there could be other thresholds.
Speaker 1: But this is one of the most important of all,
Speaker 1: the emergence of life, and I think most astrobiologists today
Speaker 1: would say there's a very good chance that life has
Speaker 1: popped up all over the universe, but as yet we
Speaker 1: can only study it on our own planet. Maybe in
Speaker 1: the next decade or two we'll get good evidence that
Speaker 1: life exists elsewhere, but so from now on we really
Speaker 1: have to focus on planet Earth and what we know
Speaker 1: about planet Earth, but we know that on this planet,
Speaker 1: as you say, life popped up pretty quickly, pretty soon
Speaker 1: after the planet was created. So it's as if this
Speaker 1: planet created the ideal Goldilocks conditions for extraordinarily rich chemistry.
Speaker 1: Because life really is molecules forming in more and more
Speaker 1: complex ways and into reacting in more and more complex ways.
Speaker 1: But you go on to talk about life, you say
Speaker 1: something I think is really important, and we're going to
Speaker 1: skip over how we define life because you know there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of debate there, but your book has
Speaker 1: some great stuff on it. But I just want to
Speaker 1: read something you say about life because I think this
Speaker 1: is really, to me pretty fundamental. And you say, the
Speaker 1: spooky thing about life is that whole cells give the
Speaker 1: impression of acting with purpose. Something inside each cell seems
Speaker 1: to drive it as if it was working its way
Speaker 1: through a to do list. The to do list is simple,
Speaker 1: one stay alive despite entropy and unpredictable surroundings, and to
Speaker 1: make copies of itself that can do the same thing.
Speaker 1: But all of a sudden, we have this new thing.
Speaker 1: And you say, here in the seeking out of some
Speaker 1: outcomes and the avoidance of others, are the origins of desire, caring, purpose, ethics,
Speaker 1: even love, perhaps even the beginnings of meaning. If that
Speaker 1: means the ability to discriminate between the significance of different
Speaker 1: events and signs. Organisms are different, because it's as if
Speaker 1: they prefer some futures to others, and the future they
Speaker 1: prefer is one in which they survive long enough to reproduce. Again,
Speaker 1: that sounds kind of mechanical, but we know that must
Speaker 1: be true because you and I are the heirs. We
Speaker 1: belong to a lineage that goes back four billion years.
Speaker 1: Every single one of our ancestors survived long enough to reproduce,
Speaker 1: Otherwise you and I wouldn't be here. So what that
Speaker 1: means is that we are the heirs of organisms that
Speaker 1: were good at surviving and eventually good at reproducing. Right,
Speaker 1: And this is another one of those thresholds to me
Speaker 1: that seems to contain a certain amount of mystery despite
Speaker 1: the explanations of it. This seems to hold a little
Speaker 1: bit of mystery in that we go from strictly chemical
Speaker 1: reactions increasingly complex chemical reactions to like you said, something
Speaker 1: that actually cares about something. There are several points in
Speaker 1: this story where we have to be honest and say
Speaker 1: we don't have a good grip on this. One is
Speaker 1: the Big Bang. The second is the origin of life.
Speaker 1: Origin of life. Biologists know a huge amount now about
Speaker 1: the chemistry of the early Earth, but we still can't
Speaker 1: quite explain how you get from purposeless chemicals to something
Speaker 1: that acts with what looks like of us. And of course,
Speaker 1: the third great mystery is consciousness, which we don't know
Speaker 1: how to explain how to deal with it. So there
Speaker 1: are really, I think three great areas of mystery where
Speaker 1: we're really uncertain. There are many more, of course, but
Speaker 1: one is the Big Bang. The second is the actual
Speaker 1: origin of life. I think biologists are very close to
Speaker 1: cracking this one. But the third great mystery is consciousness.
Speaker 1: You know, the fact that I experience things, I'm aware
Speaker 1: of things. We don't know how to explain that. Um
Speaker 1: As I said, that doesn't mean we won't eventually come
Speaker 1: up with an explanation. We've managed to explain many things
Speaker 1: we couldn't explain in the past. But at the moment
Speaker 1: these are areas of mystery in the precise sense that
Speaker 1: we don't really understand them. I want to read something
Speaker 1: you wrote about early life because we we tend to say,
Speaker 1: all right, single celled organisms were around a long time
Speaker 1: before anything else happened, and we might go, well, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: that's kind of pretty simple a single cell organism, but
Speaker 1: a cell itself is pretty amazing. And you say this,
Speaker 1: you're describing a cell. Billions of molecules swim through a
Speaker 1: thick chemical slurry, being nudged and pulled by other molecules
Speaker 1: thousands of times each second. Rather like a tourist in
Speaker 1: a crowded market full of traders, touts and pickpockets. If
Speaker 1: you were injected into one of these molecules, you would
Speaker 1: find this a terrifying world. Enzymes will try and glom
Speaker 1: onto you and change you, perhaps hook you up with
Speaker 1: other molecules to form a new team that can cruise
Speaker 1: the markets looking for new opportunities. Imagine millions of these
Speaker 1: interactions going on inside every cell every second, and you
Speaker 1: have some idea of the frenetic activity that powers even
Speaker 1: the simplest of cells in the early biosphere. Yes, as
Speaker 1: I was writing the book, I should confess I went
Speaker 1: deeper into molecular biology than I have ever before. And well,
Speaker 1: you began this interview Eric by talking about all and
Speaker 1: my sense of awe for what happens inside single cell
Speaker 1: bacteria increased massively. This messy, murky environment inside the cells,
Speaker 1: with molecules sort of jostling into each other and bumping
Speaker 1: into each other and vibrating somehow or other. From all
Speaker 1: of those relationships between complex molecules, you get cells that
Speaker 1: act with a sense of purpose. It's as if, for
Speaker 1: all what's going on in this complicated world is sort
Speaker 1: of compute tational. It is computing something. And in fact,
Speaker 1: recently I've been reading about how e Coli bacteria in
Speaker 1: our stomachs are full of them. They're single celled organisms.
Speaker 1: How do they predict the future? Because in effect they do.
Speaker 1: All living organisms have to kind of relate themselves to
Speaker 1: their environment in such a way as to avoid bad
Speaker 1: things happening and increase the chances of good things happening.
Speaker 1: So it means they all have to think about the future.
Speaker 1: They all have to make bets on the future. It's
Speaker 1: as if they're all at the horse races, and most
Speaker 1: of the time they bet well. So how do they
Speaker 1: do it? And we sort of know some of the
Speaker 1: mechanisms involved, but they work very very well. Because these
Speaker 1: things survive and they navigate. So an e coliself, for example.
Speaker 1: It has these kind of flagella. It can wave around,
Speaker 1: and it has two types of movement. It can move forward.
Speaker 1: So if things look good, you keep moving forward. If
Speaker 1: things start looking bad, you there are proteins in your
Speaker 1: membrane that detects something bad. Then what you do is
Speaker 1: you go to plan B, and plan B is to tumble.
Speaker 1: You just spin around randomly and head off in another direction.
Speaker 1: That is future thinking. It's staggering, it really is. It's funny.
Speaker 1: My Buddhist background, right, we talk a lot about how
Speaker 1: part of the human condition and one of the things
Speaker 1: that becomes a problem is when we are trying too
Speaker 1: hard to get more of what we want and trying
Speaker 1: to get away from what we don't want. And I
Speaker 1: agree with that as a truism. I also often say
Speaker 1: to people like, take it easy on yourself, because that
Speaker 1: mechanism is embedded in every cell in your body. It's
Speaker 1: inherent to life. It's wired in. It is it is,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't guarantee selfishness in the crudest sense. It
Speaker 1: does mean that all of us live in this world
Speaker 1: from a particular point of view. You know, I'm in Australia,
Speaker 1: You're in Columbus, so so you know what I'm going
Speaker 1: to do in the next hour or two. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be very different from what you do. So we all
Speaker 1: have our personal perspective. But there are so many environments
Speaker 1: in which collaboration is the successful strategy that to say
Speaker 1: this is not to say that every living organism is
Speaker 1: selfish in the narrowest possible sense, and their collaboration is
Speaker 1: about what's to take us to our next threshold here
Speaker 1: and so earliest life on Earth three point eight billion
Speaker 1: years ago and then about three point two billion years
Speaker 1: go by until you don't mark this as a threshold.
Speaker 1: But it's another big event, which is we get our
Speaker 1: first large organisms on Earth about six hundred million years ago.
Speaker 1: We probably got large multi cell organisms earlier than that,
Speaker 1: but they really take off about six hundred million years ago.
Speaker 1: And this is, by the way, a very good reminder
Speaker 1: of of of the fact that the idea of thresholds
Speaker 1: is not a kind of rigid scientific concept. It's more
Speaker 1: like chapter headings. Because I think many biologists would say
Speaker 1: that that the creation of multi celled organisms ought to
Speaker 1: be a threshold. It's a profound change in the nature
Speaker 1: of life. But what it means is it's it's all
Speaker 1: the it's lots of cells collaborating and specializing. Um they
Speaker 1: they certain types of cells you Carryotic cells learned to
Speaker 1: switch on and off the genes in their DNA so
Speaker 1: that they could become specialists. So some could become muscle cells,
Speaker 1: some could become nerve cells, and so on and so
Speaker 1: on and so on. In multi celled organisms, a lot
Speaker 1: of the work of the cell is not devoted just
Speaker 1: to surviving. It's devoted to maintaining relationships with other cells
Speaker 1: and with the rest of the organism you're a part of.
Speaker 1: I can't help but think that this is the situation
Speaker 1: we live in today's world. I could not survive as
Speaker 1: as a single person without fitting myself into colossal networks
Speaker 1: of other people. I think in today's world we're slowly
Speaker 1: turning into sort of a complex, global, seven billion person,
Speaker 1: large multi cellulttle organism. I agree. I think it's a
Speaker 1: really useful analogy that I do think holds true to
Speaker 1: a certain degree. So we've got big organisms, and now
Speaker 1: the next big threshold is done to done us two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years ago or in our story that started
Speaker 1: thirteen years eight months ago, about a hundred minutes ago,
Speaker 1: so a little over an hour and a half ago
Speaker 1: we showed up. Yeah, the thresholds are great touristics. There
Speaker 1: are a great sort of ways of raising questions. So
Speaker 1: the big question around this one is, say the appearance
Speaker 1: of human's counts as a threshold in this story. Is
Speaker 1: that simply a sort of species bragging. Isn't just because
Speaker 1: I'm human that I think humans are so great? Or
Speaker 1: is there in an objective sense in which the appear
Speaker 1: of humans is a transformative event, at least on planet Earth.
Speaker 1: And I increasingly take the second view. I think our
Speaker 1: appearance was transformative for the history of planet Earth and
Speaker 1: is proving to be transformative for the history of planet
Speaker 1: Earth because we humans do something that no other organisms
Speaker 1: did in the four billion years that preceded us, which
Speaker 1: is we share information about our environment. So we do
Speaker 1: it so precisely and in such massive volume that over
Speaker 1: time groups of humans acquire more and more information, not
Speaker 1: just as individuals but as groups. So were the first
Speaker 1: species in four billion years in which information accumulates across generations,
Speaker 1: and if you add that for a living organism, information
Speaker 1: is crucial. Knowing what's happening in your environment is absolutely crucial,
Speaker 1: and the more you know about the environment, the better
Speaker 1: your chances of surviving and controlling that environment. So if
Speaker 1: you have a species in which knowledge of your surroundings
Speaker 1: is growing from generation to generation, then you have a
Speaker 1: species that's going to get more and more and more powerful,
Speaker 1: faster and faster. And today we live at the culmination
Speaker 1: of that story where we as a species dominate change
Speaker 1: on planet Earth. What we do in the next fifty
Speaker 1: years will determine the future of millions of other species.
Speaker 1: It will determine the future of the Earth's climate, of
Speaker 1: its oceans for millions of years. We have become a
Speaker 1: planet changing species. So in a sense, our appearance really
Speaker 1: is a turning point for planet Earth. Certainly is for
Speaker 1: better and worse, you know, for better and worse. And
Speaker 1: what staggering is when you talk about the next fifty
Speaker 1: years is going to side a whole lot of things
Speaker 1: related to climate. It's amazing that again, if you take
Speaker 1: this entire story and you go, okay, about thirteen years
Speaker 1: eight months ago, this whole thing the universe started, and
Speaker 1: now we're fouling up Planet Earth, right we're messing with
Speaker 1: some pretty big forces, right, and that started in essence
Speaker 1: about six seconds ago. We need to keep balance on
Speaker 1: this because, yeah, what's happening is very sudden. Indeed, when
Speaker 1: we talked about thresholds, we saw that there are energy
Speaker 1: flows associated with each of these thresholds. So when humans
Speaker 1: first appear, because they share information, they get better and
Speaker 1: better at controlling energy. So about ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: humans are controlling flows of energy and resources all around
Speaker 1: the earth. Then they learn agriculture that gives them more energy,
Speaker 1: more control over the energy flowing through the environment. And
Speaker 1: what what makes today's world so different is we're tapping
Speaker 1: into fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are stores of energy
Speaker 1: that was laid down over three hundred million years, mostly
Speaker 1: in the form of carbon. So as we use that
Speaker 1: staggering store of energy, it allows us to build the
Speaker 1: very complex societies of today. It allows us to build
Speaker 1: societies in which most people are much wealthier than they
Speaker 1: they've ever been before, so most of us enjoy quite
Speaker 1: high living standards. But the other thing is with throwing
Speaker 1: back into the atmosphere carbon dioxide that was buried over
Speaker 1: three hundred million years and we're doing so at a
Speaker 1: faster rate than you've seen for millions of years. So
Speaker 1: we're changing the climate because the crucial factor that determines
Speaker 1: how hot the Earth is is the mix of greenhouse gases,
Speaker 1: and what we're doing is we're pouring greenhouse gases back
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere, and that is dangerous, right, And you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's the hope of people who are wanting
Speaker 1: to see a change here. And I think is that work,
Speaker 1: like the type of work you're doing, will give us
Speaker 1: a greater appreciation for what we're doing and how quickly
Speaker 1: we're doing it and how sudden this is. I very
Speaker 1: much hope so. And this is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why I'm passionate about big history. I think young people
Speaker 1: today need this wide division. I mean, let me just
Speaker 1: give you one quicker illustration of what I mean. To
Speaker 1: understand climate change, basically, you need to understand how climates
Speaker 1: have evolved over four billion years. And the crucial point
Speaker 1: is Carl's Sagan pointed this out forty years ago. The
Speaker 1: Sun has been emitting more and more energy over four
Speaker 1: billion years, and yet the surface of the Earth has
Speaker 1: remained at a temperature between roughly nought and a hundred
Speaker 1: degrees the temperature of which you can have liquid water.
Speaker 1: How is that possible, Well, the answer is that the
Speaker 1: Earth's atmosphere has slowly changed over four billion years. The
Speaker 1: amount of carbon dioxide, the amount of greenhouse asses, which
Speaker 1: was very high when the Earth was cooler, and that
Speaker 1: was a good thing because it kept the Earth warm,
Speaker 1: has slowly diminished as the Sun has become more powerful.
Speaker 1: To some beautiful thermostatic mechanisms have functioned, and we know
Speaker 1: quite a lot about them. The dangerous thing is that
Speaker 1: we humans, we're messing with the thermostats. And what those
Speaker 1: thermostats did was keep planet Earth life friendly for four
Speaker 1: billion years, and that's not an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1: Mars lost life, Venus lost life, our neighbors lost life.
Speaker 1: So this is a really tricky thing. We are messing
Speaker 1: with those thermostats, and the first thing we'll do is
Speaker 1: just make life more and more uncomfortable for human beings.
Speaker 1: The cockroaches will survived fine, um, But but what we're
Speaker 1: really damaging is the future for our children and grandchildren
Speaker 1: and great grandchildren. And that is the great problem that
Speaker 1: we face. I think in the next fifty years can
Speaker 1: we avoid degrading the future of our children and grandchildren.
Speaker 1: I could not agree more and I think that is
Speaker 1: a good place for us to wrap up. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much. I did love the book. It was such
Speaker 1: an enjoyable read, and I just feel like my appreciation
Speaker 1: for the big story or big history is so greatly enhanced.
Speaker 1: So thank you so much for the book and the
Speaker 1: work that you're doing. Well. Thank you so much. I'm
Speaker 1: delighted that you enjoyed the board. All right, take care, okay, bye,
Speaker 1: and thank you very much. Indeed, thank you. If what
Speaker 1: you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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