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Big history and the cosmic perspective

A&G • October 2018 • Vol. 59 • aandg.org 5.33 Astrobiology and “big history” are two relatively new intellectual disciplines, the former focused on searching for life elsewhere in the universe and the latter on integrating human history into the wider history of the cosmos (e.g. Christian 2004, 2018, Spier 2010). Despite some differences in emphasis, these two disciplines have much in common, not least their interdisciplinarity and the cosmic and evolutionary perspectives that they both engender. In order to explore these relationships, and to investigate their wider societal implications, a one-day meeting on the theme of “Expanding Worldviews: Astrobiology, Big History, and the Social and Intellectual Benefits of the Cosmic Perspective” was held on 19 July 2018 under the auspices of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (ANU). David Christian (Macquarie University, Australia) got the meeting underway with his talk on “The challenges of extreme interdisciplinarity: building a modern origin story”. He is one of the founders of big history and was the first to coin the term in the early 1990s. Taking his cue from Erwin Schrödinger, who famously left his own comfort zone of theoretical physics to make highly productive speculations on the origin of life (Schrödinger 1944), Christian stressed the many intellectual benefits of interdisciplinary research and the unifying perspectives that can result. In particular, he noted that all human societies have felt the need of “origin stories” to orientate themselves in time and space. Summarizing the argument developed in his recent book (Christian 2018), he showed that it is now possible to provide a scientifically accurate origin story for the 21st century by integrating results from astronomy, geology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, anthropology, history and other academic disciplines traditionally considered to be separate. It is the aim of big history to provide just such a unified view of cosmic and human history. The resulting unified perspective would help unite disparate scientific disciplines and thereby stimulate new scientific insights; it may also help heal the rift between the sciences and humanities identified by the scientist and novelist C P Snow (1959). Moreover, Christian argued that such a perspective may be necessary if humanity is to find unified responses to urgent global challenges, not least those associated with human dominance of the Earth’s environment in the Anthropocene epoch. Realizing these benefits, however, will require specialists in different fields to follow Schrödinger’s example and be prepared to work across disciplines. As he put it during his talk: “It’s worth taking the risk of interdisciplinary research because the payoff could be colossal.” During the ensuing discussion, Christian also drew attention to the deleterious consequences of teaching narrow national histories in schools, serving to reinforce nationalism, and argued that teaching world history, and indeed big history, could help counter nationalistic trends.