Origin Story: A Big History of Everything Paperback – International Edition, July 4, 2019

“Origin Story, A Big History of Everything”, by David Christian, 2018 By any measure the last 75 years, in my lifetime, have seen the largest explosion of knowledge in Human history. For millennia humans have sought the wisdom of the gods; How the universe and humans came to be. I feel very fortunate to have witnessed this epochal achievement. Working as an engineer at the Cape I witnessed the first Pioneer spacecrafts and Apollo moon missions blast off. I sort of realized at the time that we were entering a new age of exploration and technological innovation, but I could have never imagined the discoveries yet to come; Billions of Galaxies discovered by the Hubble Space telescope, Black holes, Gravity waves, Robot vehicles roving on Mars, super computers in phones or the unlocking of the genetic blueprint of life. Almost every field from Astrophysics Physics, Quantum mechanics, Biology, Neurobiology, Genetics, Geology to Paleontology and Paleoanthropology has seen groundbreaking discoveries that have changed our understanding of the universe and our place in it.Now comes an amazing new book that weaves this knowledge into a surprisingly readable 300-page narrative story of the universe for the last 13 billion years. Up till now to attain this updated knowledge you would have to read separate books or take separate courses in each of the above specialties. Christian takes us on an epochal journey from the first milliseconds of the big bang, the formation of atoms and elements to the structural formation of the universe. From there we are taken to the formation of chemical elements to the formation of the earth and the beginning of life in the form of single celled prokaryotes 3 billion years ago. Photosynthesis, Cyanobacteria, plate tectonics all play a role in making our planet unique in our solar system as the only place hospitable for life. Then evolve the Eukaryotes through a combining of more primitive cells to form a new type of oxygen breathing cell, which make all multicellular animals and us possible. With the evolution of large bodied animals comes the evolution of large brains and consciousness. With the appearance of humans comes sharing and generational transmission of information and technologies. This ability proves crucial to the development of globe changing events such as agriculture and the scientific revolution. Along the way to us there were all sorts of blind alleys, near miss encounters and apocalyptic disaster scenarios that didn’t completely play out just by good luck and serendipity. One such occurrence caused by volcanism, happened 70,000 years ago and brought the number of our species to just 10,000 individuals and almost to the brink of extinction. This makes our life and all life on earth as we see it now a miraculous and beautiful occurrence.In a sense this book while conveying the history of the universe and human societies always emphasizes throughout the fact that energy flows, the laws of thermodynamics are the fundamental factors operating in the physical universe, biological systems and human civilizations. We learn “wealth never really consists of things; it consists of control over energy flows that make, move, mine and transform things”. Agrarian societies and empires could never bring wealth to a majority of the population because they could never produce enough surplus energy. They could only concentrate wealth in an elite ruling class of perhaps 10%-15% of the population. The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels in the last 200 years, which are nothing more than reservoirs of ancient sunlight, has engendered a huge explosion in the energy, wealth available to human societies and made possible the almost sevenfold explosion of human population, middle classes and advanced western civilization. However, we learn here that the earth has undergone numerous mass extinctions caused by CO2 induced global warming, the last catastrophic one, over 50 million years ago called the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum that wiped out over 50% of all genera on earth. That event was caused by a huge explosion of volcanism emitted CO2. By burning fossil fuels and emitting huge quantities of CO2 in the same manner, are we at the beginning of just such an event? Christian emphasizes that we have reached a critical point in the evolution of life on earth where one species, us, now control the fate of our entire ecosystem. We can put into play our knowledge of how the universe works that we have assiduously garnered over the last several hundred years or we can ignore what we know, instead let greed and tribalism reign and plunge our planet into an unknown future of chaos and destruction where our very survival will be at risk. This must be one of the great turning points in history like the invention of agriculture or the discovery of fossil fuels where mankind has no choice but to utilize his innovative abilities and technologies to harness the sun’s energies directly. I don’t think I have ever encountered a book with more knowledge condensed into one place in such a readable form. You want wisdom and perspective? Read this! JACK

The book covers the history of the world from the Big Bang through present and beyond. An ambitious undertaking, the book is readable, interesting and thought provoking. A lot of time is spent setting the stage for the advent of humanity, and then the analysis of humanity on the ecosystem. A fun book to read and get you thinking.

I appreciated this update on my understanding of the formation of the universe, planet earth, diverse life forms and their transitions. Yes, it challenges religiously based origin stories and reinforces the wonder of life itself.

By very far the best and most comprehensive book I have read about our world's story.

I was really hoping this book would be more interesting, but my end opinion of it is it was somewhat boring and uneven. I did find parts of it to be very interesting, and I definitely learned many things along the way, thus the 3-star rating, but it just wasn't the page-turner I hoped for it to be.Understandably the author of a big history of "everything" has to be sensitive to which historical topics to include, which to exclude, which to briefly cover, and which to cover in deep detail. That said, I felt like the author often did a poor job of this. A good example is there is almost zero in the book about how human language developed/evolved/splintered, yet there were pages upon pages upon pages of detailed chemistry during the account of how exactly a star is formed. In my opinion that's not the proper ratio. Even within the topic of science there were imbalances, and there seemed to be a general preference towards deep-dive topics (how molecules interact with each other) versus big picture stuff (such as topics that weren't even given a single sentence like the invention/discovery of calculus or the development of the scientific method).I also didn't really care for the author's use of analogy, including his oft-repeated "entropy tax" paradigm which didn't really work for me for whatever reason, although admittedly this is squarely in the nitpick category.Lastly I will say that I came away feeling like the author had two goals when he started writing this book, and then worked backwards to fulfill those goals. His first goal seemed to be to replace religious origin stories with a scientific one (big bang etc.). And his second goal was to put out a stern warning about climate change. By the way I'm not arguing that either of those are bad goals--in fact I think both are reasonable objectives. But what it felt like to me is the author had a thoroughly considered beginning to the book (origin story) and a thoroughly considered ending to the book (warning of climate change), and then had to work backwards to try and fill in the middle of the book with "everything else". But the middle seemed to fall victim to this as it often slogged on as the author didn't seem to be as personally inspired by the topics and by finding the right balance within them. I could be misreading that but that was my take.Anyhow, OK book, I can't say I'd recommend it but if you read it you will definitely learn things and gain a new perspective on historical timelines.

Very educational!