Big History: David Christian Covers 13.7 Billion Years of History in 18 Minutes

Per­haps you noticed? Dur­ing the past two years, the TED brand has mor­phed into some­thing new. Once known for stag­ing a cou­ple of high-priced annu­al con­fer­ences, TED has recent­ly launched a series of new prod­ucts: TEDx con­fer­ences for the mass­es, TED Books, TED Radio, TED ED and Ads Worth Spread­ing. In the wake of all of this, some have ques­tioned whether TED has grown too quick­ly, or to put it more col­lo­qui­al­ly, “jumped the shark.” There are days when TED feels like a vic­tim of its own suc­cess. But there are oth­er days — espe­cial­ly when it returns to its roots — where the orga­ni­za­tion can still be a vital force. That hap­pens when­ev­er TED wraps up its big annu­al con­fer­ence, as it did two weeks ago, and puts some note­wor­thy talks online. (See, for exam­ple, Stew­art Brand describ­ing how sci­en­tists will bring extinct species back from the dead.) Or it hap­pens when TED brings old­er talks from its archive to YouTube.

Which brings us to the talk above. Here we have David Chris­t­ian, a pro­fes­sor at Aus­trali­a’s Mac­quar­ie Uni­ver­si­ty, explain­ing the his­to­ry of the world in less than 18 min­utes, start­ing with the Big Bang and then cov­er­ing anoth­er 13.7 bil­lion years. For­mal­ly trained as a Russ­ian his­to­ri­an, Chris­t­ian began work­ing on Big His­to­ry in the 1980s, a meta dis­ci­pline that “exam­ines long time frames using a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary approach based on com­bin­ing numer­ous dis­ci­plines from sci­ence and the human­i­ties.” Chris­t­ian then pop­u­lar­ized his new­fan­gled way of telling his­to­ry when he pro­duced for the Teach­ing Com­pa­ny: Big His­to­ry: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Human­i­ty. It did­n’t hurt that Bill Gates stum­bled upon the lec­tures and gave back­ing to The Big His­to­ry Project, an online ini­tia­tive that exper­i­ments with bring­ing Big His­to­ry to high school stu­dents. The Big His­to­ry Project got its start at the 2011 TED con­fer­ence, with the talk pre­sent­ed above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the World (and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty) in 100 Objects

The Pod­cast His­to­ry of Our World Will Take You From Cre­ation Myths to (Even­tu­al­ly) the Present Day