How we got to here

Most history books focus on recent events, military campaigns, kings and queens or political events. They also tend to focus only on events in the last 10,000 years or so. And most focus on events much more recently than that. What I loved about this book is that it starts with the moment the whole universe could be contained in a size less than the dot that finishes this sentence that began with all the light to the energy we needed to form a universe. The moment we now call the Big Bang occurred over 13 billion years ago. It uses this moment as the first threshold to explain the history of the origin of earth and moves through nine more thresholds to tell the story of how we got to here, right now. From this moment, it explains 4 forces including gravity, electromagnetic energy, and quantum mechanics that explain how everything comes together through simple laws of nature. But then explains how atoms work which then come together to form planets. And then 4 1/2 billion years ago, in a swirling dust cloud that formed our sun, shortly after all the planets of our solar system were born and we had the planet Earth. Then from planets and rocks, it then moves through life and mass extinctions (we’ve had at least 5 we know of - the last being the one to wipe out most of the dinosaurs [we still have some relatives of dinosaurs such as birds and chickens]). When it gets to Homo sapiens there is an Interesting moment when the human population was down to just a few ten thousand humans (enough to fill a moderate sized sports stadium) about 70,000 years ago. Our species came close to extinction, possible due to catastrophe that may have been triggered by a massive volcanic eruption on Mount Toba in Indonesia that pumped clouds of soot into the atmosphere, blocking photosynthesis for months or years and endangering many species. We survived and we now have 7.7billion people on the planet. However, all other species of upright ape have also become extinct. The threshold including timelines from billions of years and transformed into a 13 year time frame line to help us get an idea of the deep time is as follows (I always love using my arm to explain to people how much I would need to delete to wipe out the entire existence of humans who ever existed on this planet – it’s literally one swipe at a nail file across the nail of a finger of an outstretched arm or the removal of one layer of paint off the top of the Eiffel Tower): THRESHOLD 1: Big bang: origin of our universe 13.8 billion years ago - 13 years, 8 months ago THRESHOLD 2: The first stars begin to glow 13.2 (?) billion years ago - 13 years, 2 months ago THRESHOLD 3: New elements forged in dying large stars Continuously from threshold 2 to the present day THRESHOLD 4: Our sun and solar system form 4.5 billion years ago - 4 years, 6 months ago THRESHOLD 5: Earliest life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago - 3 years, 9 months ago The first large organisms on Earth 600 million years ago - 7 months ago An asteroid wipes oiit the dinosaurs 65 million years ago - 24 days ago The hominin lineage splits from the chimp lineage 7 million years ago - 2.5 days ago Homo erectus 2 million years ago - 17 hours ago THRESHOLD 6; First evidence of our species, Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago - 100 minutes ago THRESHOLD 7: End of last ice age, beginning of Holoceine, earliest signs of farming 10,000 years ago - 5 minutes ago First evidence of cities, states, agrarian civilizations 5,000 years ago - 2.5 minutes ago Roman and Han Empires flourish 2,000 years ago - 1 minute ago World zones begin to be linked together 500 years ago - 15 seconds ago THRESHOLD 8: Fossilfuels revoliition begins 200 years ago - 6 seconds ago The Great Acceleration; humans land on the moon 50 years ago - 1.5 seconds ago THRESHOLD 9 (?): The Future A sustainable world order? 100 years in the future? - 3 seconds to go The sun dies 4.5 billion years in the future - 4 years, 6 months to go When it moves to the future, understanding the laws of nature to say what will happen to our planet and sun are easy to foretell. The mystery however, regarding the future, is it in the complexity and mystery of the nature of man. That is a much more difficult future to foretell. This is a wonderful book, and I look forward to thinking about this book a lot.