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Complexity & the Future

Driving Question: How might complexity increase in the future?

You’ve trekked across the Universe and traveled billions of years into the past. Now, it’s time to look back on what you’ve learned in order to see the future.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Describe how complexity increased from the Big Bang to the present.
  2. Investigate how complexity might increase in the future.

Vocab Terms:

  • AI (artificial intelligence)
  • climate change
  • complexity
  • future
  • technology
STEP 1

Opener: Complexity & the Future

Teaching Tools

To teach this lesson step, refer to page X of the Lesson 7.1 Teaching Guide Locked .

Our Openers and Closers Guide will provide more information about these short, but important, activities at the beginning and end of each lesson.

STEP 2

Our Collective Future

Teaching Tools

To teach this lesson step, refer to page X of the Lesson 7.1 Teaching Guide Locked .

Could AI be the next threshold? This conversation External link in our online teacher community considers AI and the future.

STEP 3

Threshold 9

Teaching Tools

To teach this lesson step, refer to page X of the Lesson 7.1 Teaching Guide Locked .

The blog “Engaging students with video External link ” provides four steps to help your students get the most out of videos in the classroom.

If there is—or there ever was—life on Mars, it doesn’t look like the little green men imagined in science fiction. But life could exist there and elsewhere in the Universe. Peer into the final threshold: the future!

Threshold 9: The Future External link

Big History is not yet finished. How might the lessons of the past eight thresholds inform our expectations for the future?

Key Ideas

As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
STEP 4

Closer: Complexity & the Future

Teaching Tools

To teach this lesson step, refer to page X of the Lesson 7.1 Teaching Guide Locked .

Check out the blog “The power of periodization External link ” to better understand the importance of defining time periods.