50 years ago, I couldn't have told you with any precision when the universe appeared or when life appeared on Earth. It's been made possible by the rapid evolution of scholarship in many different fields, and in particular, of dating systems in the last 50 years. Big history is a new field for teaching and research. The global society we live in today, connected electronically through the Web, and mechanically by ships, cars, and planes, is in fact one of the most complex phenomena we know of in the entire universe. But then slowly, less simple things appeared, from stars to planets to living organisms, bacteria at first, and then eventually to humans and to modern human societies. Now, the early universe was fairly simple. The big history story tells how, in the 13.8 billion years since the universe appeared in the Big Bang, more and more complex things have appeared. Its approach is historical, that's why we call it big history, and that means it tells a story. So it links many, many different disciplines. So this course tells the story of the universe, of stars, of planets, and of living organisms, and of us humans as well. So what is big history? Well, courses in big history tell the history of everything, literally everything in our universe, from the moment almost 14 billion years ago when our universe first appeared in the Big Bang. The big question for this segment is what is big history? This is a course in big history.
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