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The history of our world in 18 minutes | David Christian | TED
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First, a video.
Yes, it is a scrambled egg.
But as you look at it,
I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy.
Because you may notice that what's actually happening
is that the egg is unscrambling itself.
And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated.
And now they're going to be poured back into the egg.
And we all know in our heart of hearts
that this is not the way the universe works.
A scrambled egg is mush -- tasty mush -- but it's mush.
An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing
that can create even more sophisticated things,
such as chickens.
And we know in our heart of hearts
that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity.
In fact, this gut instinct
is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics,
the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy.
What that says basically
is that the general tendency of the universe
is to move from order and structure
to lack of order, lack of structure --
in fact, to mush.
And that's why that video feels a bit strange.
And yet, look around us.
What we see around us is staggering complexity.
Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone,
there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded.
That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth.
And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals,
who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet
into a global system of stupendous complexity.
So here's a great puzzle:
in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics,
how is it possible
to generate the sort of complexity I've described,
the sort of complexity represented by you and me
and the convention center?
Well, the answer seems to be,
the universe can create complexity,
but with great difficulty.
In pockets,
there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier,
calls "Goldilocks conditions" --
not too hot, not too cold,
just right for the creation of complexity.
And slightly more complex things appear.
And where you have slightly more complex things,
you can get slightly more complex things.
And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage.
Each stage is magical
because it creates the impression of something utterly new
appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe.
We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments.
And at each threshold, the going gets tougher.
The complex things get more fragile,
more vulnerable;
the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent,
and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now, we, as extremely complex creatures,
desperately need to know this story
of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law,
and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.
And that's the story that we tell in big history.
But to do it, you have do something
that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible.
You have to survey the whole history of the universe.
So let's do it.
(Laughter)
Let's begin by winding the timeline back
13.7 billion years,
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