By Kamran Nayeri, March 8, 2013
Our Place in the World was initiated on the premise that the solution to the combined social and natural crisis requires an ecological socialist transformation of Our Way of Life. Both the theoretical conceptualization of ecological socialism and the radical transformation of human culture requires a synthesis of several fields of knowledge. I include Big History as well as Darwinian evolutionary theory, Deep Ecology and Marxian theory among them.
In the past few weeks, I have posted a number of contributions dealing with Big History. In this post I like to draw your attention to the International Big History Association (IBHA) and urge readers to consider becoming a member. Big History is a new field of study and the IBHA is small. Yet, both can contribute greatly to any radical reconsideration of Our Way of Life and its transformation so that humanity can live in peace with itself and in harmony with the rest of nature. I urge the reader to visit the IBHA website and explore it. You will find very helpful information like current literature on Big History, ongoing discussion among its members, or upcoming conference. By the way, don't forget to introduced Big History to the younger generation (see the Big History Project).
Below I reprint the introductory note from the IBHA Home page.
* * *
Beginning about 13.7 billion years ago, the story of the past is a
coherent record that includes a series of great thresholds. Beginning with the
Big Bang, Big History is an evidence-based account of emergent complexity, with
simpler components combining into new units with new properties and greater
energy flows.
In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe is thought to
have been so hot and dense that matter could only exist in the form of a soup
of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded and cooled, matter could take on
new forms, including the first protons and neutrons, followed much later by
neutral atoms. Though the early universe was almost perfectly uniform, slight
non-uniformities existed from the beginning, and over cosmic time gravity has
enhanced those non-uniformities, pulling matter from less dense regions into
more dense regions. This has produced the large-scale structure of the universe
that we see today, including galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters.
Within galaxies, gravity causes the collapse of gas clouds to form
stars, which combine atomic nuclei to produce heavier elements through nuclear
fusion. Before the first stars formed, the universe contained only hydrogen,
helium, and small amounts of lithium (created in the first minutes after the
Big Bang, when the universe as a whole was still hot enough to sustain fusion).
But massive stars create carbon, oxygen, and all manner of heavier elements
through fusion all the way up to iron. When these stars run out of fuel and
explode as supernovae, the huge amounts of energy released often allow for the
formation of even heavier elements like gold, uranium, and others. The
heavy-element-enriched gas propelled outward by a supernova mixes with
pre-existing gas and dust clouds, which may then collapse under gravitys
influence to form second-generation stars. Because first-generation stars had
created heavy elements, these were available for gravity to form rocky or
terrestrial planets.
The formation of our own Sun and Earth took place about 4.6 billion
years ago. The Solar System is located in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral
arms, known as the Orion Arm or Local Spur. We are between 25,000 and 28,000
light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which consists of a few
hundred billion stars. We are traveling around that center at a rate of about
220 kilometers per second, completing one revolution every 225- 250 million
years. Over the past 4.6 billion years, the Earth has seen many chapters in its
own history, with changes in atmosphere, the appearance and continual
reformation of land masses through plate tectonics, and many other
transformations.
Elements and molecules on the Earth formed various combinations in a
process of chemical evolution. About 4 billion years ago, some of them formed
membranes, gained access to additional chemicals and energy that became
metabolism, and became able to reproduce with variation. What is called life
then began its own highly uneven process of evolution, sometimes becoming more
complex and diversified. Major transitions led to such features as cell
nucleii, photosynthesis, intentional motion, multicellular specialization and
cooperation, heads, backbones, four limbs, and many other features.
The rise of mammals following the extinction of dinosaurs some 65
million years ago led to the emergence of hominids. Eventually Homo sapiens
emerged 200,000 years ago. Bipedal, largely hairless, large- brained, and with
opposable thumbs, humans developed symbolic and imaginative language, inherited
a social nature, and made ethics explicit.
Through our culture, humans shaped some of the natural forces from
which we emerged. We added hunting to scavenging and gathering. Beginning about
70,000 years ago, we left our African home and migrated throughout the globe,
crossing Beringia into the Americas some 20,000 years ago (though the precise
date is still heavily debated). We formed bands, kinship groups, villages,
chiefdoms, cities, nations, and empires. Our species crossed other major
thresholds with the emergence of agricultural states, the burning of fossil fuels,
and the recent entrance into an information-rich, digital era.
We have fought many wars among ourselves and brought about
environmental degradation and resource depletion. These and other problems
threaten the quality and even survival of our species. We face a current crisis
and a possible loss of complexity. Over 99% of the species that have ever
existed are now extinct. No complex species is likely to survive intact for
more than a few million years; we will be lucky if we survive that long.
Does Big History provide a narrative that can help nurture the
development of the empathy and cooperation that are part of our social nature?
Can humans form a more perfect human community as we continue to create a more
complex society than has existed before? Or will our current levels of social
complexity face inexorable demise?
Whatever the
answers to these questions, any species still surviving on Earth a few billion
years from now would be well-advised to hop a spaceship to another solar
system. Those still on Earth will face a much hotter sun. About 5 billion years
from now, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and will grow into
a red giant, evaporating the oceans and possibly engulfing the Earth. The Sun
will eventually eject its outer layers, leaving behind its core, a white dwarf
that will cool and fade over trillions of years. Meanwhile, other galaxies may
keep racing away from our own Local Group of galaxies, perhaps leaving us with
a sky devoid of the images of distant galaxies that have contributed so much to
our understanding of the universe and the cosmic context of the Earth.
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