By Uma Hiremath
INE TED Columnist
BOSTON–In an absolutely riveting presentation, David Christian spans 13.8 billion years of cosmic existence in “The History of our World in 18 Minutes.”
Using an ultra-wide angle lens that spins out of the Big Bang, Christian adds the clarifying constructs of eight threshold moments experiencing just the right “Goldilocks conditions” to attain higher degrees of complexity.
This rapid romp through billions of years is bolstered by brilliant illustrations to help capture some of the immensities.
To watch the “The History of our World in 18 Minutes” by Christian, please click here, or on the image below.
Our own hominid emergence as “huge complexes of chemistry” begin with the fifth discernible threshold and have carried us up to the eighth one in which a “single global brain learning at warp speed” is providing great opportunities inextricably married to great fragilities.
This 18-minute taste of big history is exhilarating, frightening, hopeful; an apt way to notch yet another new year in the timeline of human history.
