10
THE
FUTURE
WHAT’S THE NEXT THRESHOLD?
UNIT 10
THE FUTURE
CONTENTS
UNIT 10 BASICS
3 Unit 10 Overview
4 Unit 10 Learning Outcomes
5 Unit 10 Lessons
6 Unit 10 Key Concepts
LOOKING BACK
8 Looking Back: What Happened in Unit 9?
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 10 / THE FUTURE
KEY CONTENT
10 The History of Everything
11 Globalization II: Good or Bad
12 The Atmosphere and Climate
13 A Big History of Everything
14 Complexity and the Future
15 Visions of the Future: Bill Gates
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UNIT 10
OVERVIEW
Key disciplines:
Chemistry, conservation science, economics, medicine
Timespan:
The future
Driving Question:
What’s the next threshold?
Threshold for this Unit:
There is no new threshold for this unit
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 10 / THE FUTURE
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UNIT 10
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of Unit 10, students should be able to:
1.
Explain the Big History story and its defining features and patterns.
2.
Identify important human end environmental issues that affect the future of our species and the
biosphere.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 10 / THE FUTURE
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UNIT 10
LESSONS
10.0 Looking Back
Big History is an unfinished story. But before we think about where we go from here, let’s take a
quick look at where our 13.8-billion year adventure has taken us.
10.1 The Biosphere
What does the future hold for the biosphere? Can humans find a way to balance the need for
innovation to provide the food and resources needed to support the human population with the
need to protect the biosphere?
10.2 Looking Forward
The study of Big History inevitably leads to the future. So what’s next? Join some of the world’s
great thinkers to try to predict the next threshold.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 10 / THE FUTURE
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UNIT 10
KEY CONCEPTS
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atom
Big Bang
Big History
black hole
chemistry
climate change
collective learning
complexity
democracy
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)
Earth
energy
entropy (the law of)
fossil fuel
globalization
global warming
• Goldilocks Conditions
• HISTORY
gravity
BIG
PROJECT / UNIT 10 / THE FUTURE
• greenhouse effect
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Homo sapiens
individualism
life
Milankovitch cycles
Solar System
star
supernova
thresholds of increasing complexity
Universe
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LOOKING BACK
WHAT HAPPENED
IN UNIT 9?
Unit 9 focused on the modern world. We learned:
• How the pace of innovation and change has accelerated in the last 250 years.
• How increasing speeds of communication and transportation, as well as greater connection
between world zones, has led to a tremendous appetite for energy.
• About the effects our species has had on the biosphere in the time since the Industrial
Revolution.
• Some of the ways that commerce, labor, and the global economy have changed in recent years
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 2 / THE BIG BANG
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KEY CONTENT
THE HISTORY
OF EVERYTHING
Video / David Christian
• In a live talk at the TED conference in March 2011, David Christian describes the history of the
Universe in just 18 minutes.
• By scrambling an egg, Christian suggests how the Universe grows more complex through
unlikely circumstances he calls Goldilocks Conditions.
• He leads an audience of scholars, business leaders, and entertainers through the entire history
of the Universe focusing on eight thresholds of increasing complexity – moments when
Goldilocks Conditions unlocked transformations that weren’t possible beforehand.
• These thresholds are the Big Bang, the formation of stars, chemical elements emerging from
stars, Earth and our Solar System, life, humans, agriculture, and our modern world.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 1 / WHAT IS BIG HISTORY?
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GLOBALIZATION II—GOOD
OR BAD?
Video
• Globalization has created a service economy in some societies—an economy where most
people do not work in agriculture or manufacturing but in service industries like healthcare, retail,
education, entertainment, and information technology. The U.S. and Europe have economies
dominated by service. Traditional beliefs and practices have been scaled back or reformed to
allow individuals to do more of what they want.
• Globalization has also impacted the biosphere through human impact on the land and in
resource use.
• Democracy seems to be trending in the global age, particularly in places like Brazil, India, and
South Africa, but the connection between economic growth and democracy has been uneven in
places like Latin America and Africa.
• Our perspective on globalization will be influenced by how the story plays out in the near future.
A global pandemic, human-induced climate change, or asteroid impact could occur and wipe out
humans, or life as we know it. The benefits of globalization have also been distributed unequally.
None of these things is destined to happen, so the near future could very well see continued
innovation and improvement in the quality of life.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 8 / EXPANSION & INTERCONNECTION
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THE ATMOSPHERE AND
CLIMATE
Video
• There are may types of evidence that give us insight into what the Earth’s climate was like in the
past:
• Pollen grains from bogs and lake beds show which plants flourished in the past.
• Tree rings provide information about temperature and precipitation levels.
• Ice cores contain air bubbles that hold samples of ancient air.
• The chemicals in ocean sediments contain evidence about water temperatures in the past.
• The evidence shows that Earth’s climate didn’t change much during the agrarian era. However,
the modern era has seen more variation.
• Average temperatures began to rise in the early twentieth century.
• Global temperatures are expected to rise several degrees during this century.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 9 / ACCELERATION
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A BIG HISTORY OF
EVERYTHING
Video
PLEASE INSERT H2
IMAGE HERE 
• Big History identifies eight thresholds of increasing complexity in the history of the Universe: the
Big Bang, the stars light up, new chemical elements, Earth and the Solar System, life, collective
learning, agriculture, and the Modern Revolution. What will the next threshold be?
• To be considered a threshold, an event has to alter things fundamentally, irreversibly changing
our modern world.
• Some of the possibilities for the future include: the discovery of life on Mars; our own
technology overtakes us; the discovery of intelligent creatures from other planets (or the
discovery of us by them); a massive catastrophe or natural disaster.
• Human future is much more predictable on an astronomical scale (over billions of years). Billions
of years from now the Sun will expand and sterilize the Earth. The seas will boil away, and the
Sun will contract and turn into a black dwarf. Ninety percent of the energy from stars has already
been used up, and the Universe will start to reverse its process and become simple and unable
to create more complex things.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 9 / ACCELERATION
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COMPLEXITY &
THE FUTURE
Article / David Christian
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The Universe is getting larger and it’s likely to become simpler over the next hundreds of billions
of years.
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Changes on Earth will happen more quickly, partially as a result of the massive effect of
humans on the biosphere.
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Collective learning has had positive and negative effects on the Earth in modern times.
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The Anthropocene could be a new geologic epoch.
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A lot rests on choices that your generation and your children’s generation, will make in the next
100 years.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 10 / THE FUTURE
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VISIONS OF THE FUTURE
Video Talk / Bill Gates
• Bill Gates considers the near and distant futures.
• Gates sees positive trends in the present that bode well for the near future: slowing population
growth rates, a decline in violence, and a valuing of work by people in other countries.
• Gates sees a number of challenges that will need to be addressed as people transition into the
near future. These challenges include finding new sources of energy and making sure the poor
share in the improvements being made.
• Finally, Gates has questions about the role robots will play in our day-to-day lives in the future
and how a fulfilling life will be defined as people live longer and longer lives.
BIG HISTORY PROJECT / UNIT 10 / THE FUTURE
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