David Baker - The Shortest History of the World

Foreword

JOHN GREEN

HUMANS LIKE A GOOD STORY and, since we are as a species somewhat narcissistic, were especially fond of the story of ourselves how we came to be here and why. These days, we call that story history, but for too long weve had a narrow definition of history, one that dramatically distorts reality.

As a high school student, I was taught that recorded history began about 5000 years ago, with the invention of writing. However, that definition leaves out almost all of the human story at least 95 per cent of it. Of course, we cannot know the humans of 100,000 years ago as intimately as we know Genghis Khan or Cleopatra but omitting them from the story makes the human story seem much newer than it actually is. When you imagine that our story begins with the emergence of agriculture, or writing, or any particular innovation, the human story seems to look like an ascending line: lives get longer. People grow less hungry, and less poor, and more educated. Technological improvements are shared more widely, and innovations pile upon innovations to ensure that life inevitably improves.

For most of human history, that wasnt really the story. Important innovations were made, as small communities passed down knowledge from one generation to the next, but human lives have not always grown consistently healthier or more productive. As you will learn in this book, we nearly went extinct long before we figured out how to develop agriculture or steam engines or antibiotics. We have been the dominant species on this planet for the briefest flicker of our history, and until we understand that, we cant reckon meaningfully with the dramatic and sudden changes were making to our planet and its biosphere.

Narrow views of history also too often create a false dichotomy between the hard sciences chemistry, physics, biology and the soft humanities history and literature and anthropology. Human stories cannot be viewed in isolation we cant understand fourteenth-century Europe without learning about the biology of Yersina pestis and the rats that carried it. And we cant understand how life came to be on Earth without glimpsing how time began in the first place, and how each of us is made from stars.

In The Shortest History of the World, David Baker introduces us not only to the history of our species and our planet but also to the history of our vast universe. We are not the end of that story, nor its beginning instead, we have emerged in the middle of a tale that will continue long after we are gone. Glimpsing the breadth of the universes history can make a person, or a species, feel very small indeed. And yet it is also a reminder of how wondrous life is, and how astonishing. As Baker writes, when we look into the night sky, we are not looking at the Universe, we are the Universe looking at itself.

Introduction

THIS BOOK FOLLOWS THE CONTINUUM of historical change of all the stuff in the cosmos, from the Big Bang to the evolution of life to human history, as simple clumps of hydrogen gas are transformed into complex human societies. History allows us to live many lives instead of just one, and this particular story instils in us the combined experience of billions of years. Much confusion over human identity, our philosophies and our future could be resolved if only the average person knew the key beats of the story of everything at least as well as they knew the key moments of their national histories.

Zooming out to take a birds eye view of 13.8 billion years allows us to see beyond the chaos of human affairs to the overall shape and trajectory of history. The thread that runs through the entire grand narrative is the rise of complexity in the cosmos, from the first atoms to the first life to humans and the things we have made. It allows us to traverse eons without drowning in detail because the amount of detail an answer requires depends on the nature of the question. In this book, we ask simply: where did we come from and where are we going?

Regarding the future, I am speaking in terms of the next hundred years, the next thousand, the next million, the next billion and even the next trillion, to quadrillion, to the potential end of the Universe. The Shortest History of the World explores all that too.

For the science-phobic, rest assured there will be no maths equations, and foreign cosmic phenomena will be boiled down to plain speech. For the history buff, humans may occupy only what a colleague called the thinnest chip of paint at the top of the Eiffel Tower of 13.8 billion years, but for very real, objective reasons humans occupy a very important role in the story. As far as we know, human societies and technologies are thus far the most complex structures in the entire Universe. We are a tightly woven web of 8 billion whirring brains, each with more nodes and connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. The next rise of complexity is likely to come from us or at least something like us that evolved elsewhere in the cosmos.

French historian Fernand Braudel once likened the political events of recent history to bubbles and swirling foam atop an ocean of deep time. Here today, gone tomorrow. To truly understand where we are and where we are going, we must look below to the deeper currents and tides. The tendency of complexity to increase in the Universe moves the entire historical ocean. This trend towards rising complexity created us and continues to change us. Astoundingly, a self-aware humanity currently has the power to control where complexity goes next.

Our past can be divided into three phases.

The Inanimate Phase: 13.8 billion to 3.8 billion years ago

The Animate Phase: 3.8 billion to 315,000 years ago

The Cultural Phase: 315,000 years ago to the present

Each phase corresponds to a major increase in complexity. The Inanimate Phase covers the non-living cosmos from the Big Bang to the formation of the Earth. The Animate Phase starts with the first microscopic life at the bottom of Earths oceans and sees the evolution of billions of complex species and ecosystems. The Cultural Phase begins with the ability of humans to accumulate more knowledge and develop tools and technologies over a short period of time, drastically changing how we behave and live despite the fact our biology has not changed much. In each phase, complexity drastically increases: from the grinding crash and thunder of the cosmos, to generations of evolution by natural selection, to cultural evolution or collective learning. The pace of historical change also accelerates rapidly: cosmic changes can take billions of years and evolutionary changes millions of years, whereas cultural changes are measured in millennia, centuries, years even days.

Every shift in complexity, each major event of the past, every newly emerged form of evolution builds on what came before it.

Our story also has a fourth phase the Unknown, in which complexity will leap forward yet again and set off an entirely new stage of cosmic evolution and historical change. Perhaps humans will give way to the accelerated creation and innovation powers of self-aware AI (artificial intelligence). Perhaps humans will upload their consciousness to computers and travel across the galaxy. Perhaps quantum physics will allow unprecedented manipulation of the building blocks and fundamental laws of the Universe. All we know for certain is that unless complexity is outright destroyed, some sort of increase of complexity is only a matter of time. And in the human realm, the changes keep coming faster and faster.