The Idea Behind Big History

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i have a hunch that this process of future cones, we imagine multiple futures, and we could not guarantee that those futures don't exist in some philosophical sense. When we meet the present, all but one of them vanish. Once you start thinking about is going on, it is seriously crazyand saint augustine is wonderful on all the paradoxes of this. We're talking about time here and d in in the radioactive revolution in te 19 50. I think this is very much like what contum physic physicists call the the collapse of the a. Help me here. Michael whats o, wa ras and wave the coland o, that you know, the troled vision probable

The future is uncertain, a bit spooky, possibly dangerous, maybe wonderful. We cope with this never-ending uncertainty by telling stories about the future: future stories. How do we construct those stories? Where is the future, the place where we set those stories? Can we trust our future stories? And what sort of futures do they show us? David Christian is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. In this conversation, he reveals what he thinks the future holds for our species.

Shermer and Christian discuss: past patterns projected into the future • What is time and when do the past and future begin? • How long is the present “now”? • A-Series Time and B-Series Time • time as the 4th dimension • chaos theory and predicting the future • entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the direction of time • general relativity and time • how we experience time psychologically and anthropologically • likelihood of outcomes and Bayesian probabilities • how organisms manage the future • how human organisms manage the future • how futurists think about the future • how people in the past thought about the future • the next 100, 1,000, and 10,000 years • the next million years, and the end of time.

David Christian is a Professor Emeritus at Macquarie University, where he was formerly a Distinguished Professor of History and the director of the Big History Institute. He cofounded the Big History Project with Bill Gates, his Coursera MOOCs are popular around the world, and he is cocreator of the Macquarie University Big History School. He has delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos World Economic Forum, and his TED Talk has been viewed more than 12 million times. He is the author of numerous books and articles, as well as the New York Times bestseller Origin Story.