Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.

Today we looked at the history … of everything! From the big bang, to star formation, planetary development, life on earth and finally the advent of collective intelligence. It’s a broad topic!

We looked at this broad timeline and noticed theshold moments, important places where complexity took a leap forward. After the original expansion of the universe, once atoms formed, we noticed how the rate of threshhold moments seems to increase exponentially! Here I introduced the notion of logarithmic scales to show the accelerating pace of complexity; 10 billion years for the creation of our solar system, 1 Billion years for initial life 100 million for the age of mammals and the world biome approximately as we know it, 2 million for the dawn of hominids (these are approximations). Notice how each next milestone is orders of magnitude different from the last!

Our activity was to transcribe this long stretch of time to a physical medium, a 300ft length of tape! At this scale, assuming a 14.6 billion year old universe, each quarter inch along the tape represented 1 million years!