JOSHUA P.

LIGUTAN 7/1/20
G11-LUX 1 (TRUSTWORTHY) SCIENCE
MAIN POINTS OF CHRISTIANS TALK
(CONCEPTS)
I watched this talk on the suggestion of my friend
Rebecca, and as it is the first day of a new year I felt a
little reminder of how we all arrived here would be
appropriate!
David Christian is by trade a Russian historian who
currently lectures on Modern History at Macquarie
University, Sydney. Supported by Bill Gates, he is
working on a free online high school syllabus in big
history, due for release in 2013.
Macquarie University describes it as an attempt to
understand, in a unified and interdisciplinary way, the
history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity. In this
talk, Christian takes us on a journey from the Big Bang
3.7 billion years ago to where we are today.
By the time he reaches our creation, it’s clear we
humans are lucky to be around. Being ruled by the second
law of thermodynamics, the universe struggles to create
complexity.
Christian uses the metaphor of the ‘goldilocks
moment’ frequently; conditions must be just right. He
touches on each stage of the earth’s development,
explaining how at each threshold structures became more
and more sophisticated. When life on earth was created at
the fifth threshold, the ‘goldilocks conditions’ were
becoming more and more stringent and these increasingly
complex creations were accompanied by a level of
fragility.