I finished Maps of Time and I think it’s one of the most interesting and impressive books I’ve ever read. It belonged to my grandmother, who was a genius, and I picked it up from her house after she passed, and I’m extremely glad that I did. It is an introduction to “big history,” which means that it starts at the Big Bang, describes the creation of the universe, galaxies, solar systems, and our Earth. Then it continues to narrow scope to the development of life, the development of humans, and the construction of modern human society. Reading history on this time scale is incredible because of the perspective it gives you, the biggest being that humans are an incredibly significant genus and Homo Sapiens are an incredible form of matter and energy and life. We are really speeding along. I will be quoting heavily from the book. Here are a few fun facts before I get into the analysis.
In the Milky Way, ten new stars are formed every year
Black holes are so dense that if you formed one from the Earth, it would be a ball with a diameter of 0.7 inches
The Crab Nebula contains a neutron star that spins 30 times per second and is the result of a supernova explosion that Chinese astronomers detected in 1054 CE.
A jumbo jet cruising at 550 mph would take 20 years to reach the Sun and 5 million years to the next star (double the history of the genus Homo)
In the past 500 million years there have been 5 different times where over 75% of living species have died off- we are living in the sixth one right now.
The Mediterranean was formed 6 million years ago and trapped 6 percent of the salt of the world’s oceans, enabling the oceans to become colder and form ice on the poles and enter the “ice ages”
Neanderthals left archaeological evidence from 130,000 to 25,000 years ago and diverged from modern humans 700 to 500 thousand years ago
Modern humans were more nomadic than Neanderthals and could adapt more when they were contemporaries, allowing more contact between groups
Dogs, goats, and sheep were domesticated in Southwest Asia about 12-11 thousand years ago and 13-12 thousand years ago in the Americas
PART 1. THE INANIMATE UNIVERSE
This section covered the second longest amount of time in the book, from the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago to the beginnings of life on Earth, Earth having been formed 4.5 billion years ago, with life emerging about 4.1 billion years ago. This section detailed the creation of stars, which are clouds of gas brought together by gravity. The immense pressure of gravity causes them to ignite helium and other basic elements and burn them. By continuing to burn, they create more elements, like the ones we find on Earth today.
I’ll just focus on one thing. A theory mentioned is that black holes are themselves forms of “big bangs” that are creating new universes. If this is true, that would mean there is a sort of evolution of universes, where only the universes that create black holes will “reproduce” and that our universe is sort of a mother to many other universes, that may or may not have their own black holes and so on.
Also, if you blew up an apple to be the size of Earth, each atom would be about the size of the original apple. Woah!
PART 2. LIFE ON EARTH
The development of life is a process without any end. It follows naturally from the mixing of elements in “the wild” to the creation of DNA and RNA and continues basically forever, if unimpeded. Therefore, complex is not better. Humans are more complex than single-celled organisms, but it’s not like the stopped existing when more complex forms came around. Many creatures are nearly perfectly adapted and will continue in their current state for millions of years if not more.
Also, oxygen in the air is not that old on Earth. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, but only accounted for 3 percent of Earth’s gases 2 billion years ago, though today it makes up 21 percent. Why did this happen? During the Age of Bacteria, small bacteria spread and spread, producing oxygen as a waste product. By doing this, they terraformed their own planet and made it habitable by plants. Plants began in the sea, as land has always been harsher, and the first dry land colonizers were similar to modern liverworts and ferns.
The first seed-bearing trees appeared 410-360 million years ago (really recently!), shortly after arthropods, like modern lobsters, who first walked on land 440 to 410 million years ago. These guys had shells, but not spines. The earliest vertebrates (animals with spines) evolved in the oceans 510-440 million years ago, and included early forms of fish and sharks. The first animals on land were amphibians, like frogs, but the problem with being an amphibian is that you have to lay your eggs in the water. This was the innovation of reptiles. Reptiles are basically amphibians that are full-time land livers, and their big “discovery” was developing hard shells, that could survive harsh, out-of-water environments. Reptiles thrived greatly after the “Great Dying,” when, 250 million years ago, massive numbers of species went extinct. This led to the age of the dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, it led to the age of the mammals, which have ruled the world ever since. In the most recent few years, we have entered the Anthropocene, during which we face even more massive extinctions, this time not due to the arrival of an asteroid, but a supremely evolved mammal, the Homo sapiens, which today extracts 25% of all the energy generated by photosynthesis on Earth, leaving little room for other creatures.
Some perspective: for the first 3 billion years of life on Earth, there were only single-celled organisms. Humans have only existed for less than 1/1000 of that time, and have only had civilization for 1/1,000,000 of that time.
PART 3. EARLY HUMAN HISTORY: MANY WORLDS
The genus Homo emerged 2.5 million years ago with the species Homo habilis and it has been a disaster for everyone else living here, but quite good for us. If alien paleontologists in one billion years’ time studied our planet, they would find a massive extinction event much like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs to be occurring in our time.
The book focuses on the development of language as a key motivator in human success. There are obviously many traits that came together to contribute to the development of language and then other traits that also had influence like language, but this book identifies language as the big one. This is because human power comes not from the knowledge stored in a brain, but the collective knowledge stored in all of our brains, passed along to each other, and down through the generations.
By this point, humans were already having a major impact on the environment. For example, in Australia, indigenous peoples were setting fire to massive areas to plant other crops, which game rise to fire-loving plants like the Eucalyptus.
PART 4. THE HOLOCENE: FEW WORLDS
The Holocene begins 11,500 years ago, when the last Ice Age ended. It was by this time that humans had already domesticated dogs and goats, and during this period that modern humans would invent agriculture, organized religion, writing, the state, the electrical grid, the nuclear bomb, and the internet. Though far more human history came before these recent 11,500 years, the majority of humans, and the majority of human progress, has come during these years.
Settling down from a nomadic lifestyle was not an obvious choice. There were benefits, but also major problems that came with settlement. The benefits included females reaching puberty earlier, enhanced knowledge about their local surroundings and crops, surpluses of food, and an increased ability to mold their surroundings, as they would live in them all year round. Mainly, it would lead to the development of powerful states. On the other hand, it meant that they would lose valuable skills that came from nomadism, it would create greater hierarchy and destroy the egalitarianism of the nomadic tribe, and that they would press the limits of regions that were abundant when they first settled. Up until very recently (the 1600s or so), nomadic groups (the Huns, the Mongols, Scythia) were just as powerful as settled groups (Persia, Greek City States, German States, the Roman Empire). They were periodically able to overthrow the settled agriculturalists, just as the settled peoples were able fend them off sometimes. In the last 300 years or so, this conflict has tilted significantly towards the agriculturalists.
Settled agriculture resulted in agricultural surpluses, which created the first “societies,” where there were hierarchies, class, and some people did not have to dedicate themselves to growing crops. People were able to specialize more, and this meant that some would specialize in war, using their arms to extract tribute from others. These people were called pharaohs, kings, chiefs, and shahs. In a way, they are parasites that contribute little to society, but suck out its nutrients, only keeping it alive to suck out more in the future.
The first cities appeared in Mesopotamia and around 3500 to 3200 BC, Sumer (modern day southern Iraq) became the most densely populated region in the world. From this point through the Afro-Eurasian contact with the Americas and the development of worldwide trade networks, the Earth operated as many human worlds, interacting mostly within themselves and rarely with each other. The last to meet would be the Americas with the Afro-Eurasian world, briefly in the 1000s CE in Newfoundland, but more permanently after 1492.
PART 5. THE MODERN ERA: ONE WORLD
By even a recent year, like 1000, we can group the world into four major economic-societal groups. They are independent farmers, pastoralists, foragers, and agrarian civilizations. At this point, agrarian civilizations only controlled 15 percent of the land that modern states rule. The largest empire ever was a pastoral empire, that of Genghis Khan, who ruled from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, a feat never before or since accomplished.
Even by this time, Europe was not yet dominant, In 1776, Adam Smith remarked that “China is much richer than any part of Europe.” Two things could be said to be responsible for the rise of European states. The first is geography. Formerly on the periphery of the Afro-Eurasian world, Europe’s discovery of the Americas put it in the middle. Second, Europe (especially the north) was not civilized after the Roman empire until the middle ages, and the political environment was good for pushing progress. Small, commercial states competed in trade and war and only the most efficient could survive. These states would ride from 1492 onward and dominate the world from the mid-19th century until 1945, when the United States, a new country formerly settled by Europeans, moved world power to North America. The era of European dominance was incredibly short, and much shorter than is taught to those in “The West” today.
The truly significant thing about Europe and “The West” is the speed of these countries’ rise. In 1750, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy accounted for about 11 percent of global industrial production. By 1880, they accounted for over 40 percent! Today’s “developed world” went from 27 percent in 1750 to 63 percent in 1860 and 94 percent in 1953! At no point in any history that we know have has any group of people advanced so quickly to the top, though China’s last 50 years or so may show us another example. Today, as Europe recedes further and further, it is worth remembering that European power is not a law of nature, but an anomaly in human development.
PART 6. PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE
This chapter covers the largest amount of time by far- the future- stretching thousands of billions of years (and farther) into the inconceivable darkness of what has not yet come. I can’t really do it justice, so I’ll quote the author, who is describing the distant, distant future that will take place after the death of our sun and all stars:
“From the standpoint of an inconceivably distant future, when the universe contains no more than a depressingly thin sprinkling of photons and subatomic particles, the 13 billion years covered in this book will seem like a brief, exuberant springtime.”
MORE FACTS:
Between 10,000 and 5500 BC, increased humidity made what is now the Sahara Desert a kush region of lakes and woodlands. When it dried, its nomadic peoples settled in the Nile Valley.
Narmer unites Egypt: 2950 BC and Hammurabi writes legal code: 1792 BC. These events would have been ancient history to the people we study in ancient history.
There was nearly an industrial revolution in Song Dynasty China in the 1200’s CE but it didn’t take hold.
Populations of people in the Americas fell by as much as 50-70 percent because of the spread of disease upon the arrival of Europeans.
The 20th century term third world would have made no sense in 1750, when the “third world” accounted for 75% of global economic output. By the late 20th century it was less than 15%
Economic growth in the three years from 1995 to 1998 is estimated to be greater than the 10,000 years before 1900
90% of the material from which stars are manufactured has already been used, so the era of new stars is coming to a close
The universe is currently almost 14 billion years old but will survive for way longer. A few thousands of billions of years from now, it will become completely dark as all the stars will have died.
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