In this course, you’ve studied the 13.8 billion years of history that got us from the beginning of the Universe to the present. In this unit, you’ll think about the future. Some of the material from Units 1 through 9 will be fresher than others, so this exercise is designed to help remind you of what you’ve learned over the course of the year.

View the Timeline Infographic, which presents the eight thresholds of Big History as well as a sampling of key events related to each threshold. You have three minutes to review the timeline and write down what you believe are the four most important events that are not thresholds. Write a sentence or two to justify your choices. Be prepared to share your answers with the class.

After studying thresholds and scale in great detail throughout the course, do you think that your ideas about what is most important in the history of the Universe have changed since the start of the year?

The rapid acceleration you learned about in Unit 9 produced a lot of changes. We can communicate instantaneously and travel around the world in hours. Some tourists are even heading to space! But all the fossil fuels that we burn to power our devices, produce our food, and travel are impacting our environment. Can we use the knowledge gained through collective learning to solve the climate crisis? This video is all about the future. Of course, we don’t know what will happen hundreds, millions, or billions of years in the future, but we can use evidence to make some predictions.

This unit is all about the future, which is both exciting and a little scary. It also means that we have lots of questions about what might happen in the future. For example, what’s the next threshold? We don’t have a crystal ball, but we can use the knowledge we’ve gained from previous units to make some evidence-based predictions. This video will help prepare you to make those predictions.

Preview

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. How did the acceleration you learned about in Unit 9 affect the Earth?
2. How can collective learning help us solve our current climate crises as well as future problems that might arise?
3. How can you contribute to collective learning?

Thinking Conceptually

1. Future Rachel asks you to evaluate the thresholds of increasing complexity and decide if this is the best way to organize the course. Think about the eight thresholds of increasing complexity you’ve learned about in this course. Is there a better way to organize our 13.8-billion-year history? If so, what is it? If you agree that the thresholds are a good way to organize Big History, then what do you think the next threshold will be and what will be the ingredients and Goldilocks Conditions that lead to that future threshold?

Understanding vocabulary helps students access course content and become better readers, writers, and communicators. This word wall activity will help students begin to learn some of the key vocabulary from the unit.

In this activity, the class will work together to create a word wall.

As always, before diving into any unit vocab activities, we suggest that you review the words provided in the Unit Vocab Guide. They might not work well for your class, and you might need to focus on different words. It’s up to you. The most important thing is that you are constantly attending to vocabulary throughout the course.

Tell students that they are going to be creating a word wall. Assign a vocab word to each student in the class and have them look up the word in the vocab guide. They can also find additional information about the word online. Then, have students add their words to the wall. It’s best to add only a few words at a time, every few days. You can do this by having them argue for why their word makes the most sense; or you can place all the related words on the wall together; or you can add words alphabetically, thematically, or any other option you like.

If you want, let students know that any time a word from the wall is mentioned in class, they have permission to call it out. You can have them do that in whatever way works best for your class: they can stand up, shout the word, or even do a little dance. This can be a fun game where you have a word of the week or word of the day, depending upon how you decide to add words to your wall.

Try to have all the words on the wall before you reach the end of the unit.

Big History presents the history of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present. In this video, David Christian will provide you with a concise review of the Big History narrative and the major themes of the course. This should help you as you get ready to complete the final activities in the course.

Preview

Big History presents the history of the Universe. The Universe as a whole contains a lot of matter, but it is so incredibly big that this matter is very spread out. The Universe, as a result, is very simple. Most of it is dark, cold, and empty. Parts of the Universe, though, are very complex. Stars, planets, and living things can be found in certain areas of the Universe. Big History tells the story of the Universe by focusing on the increase in complexity in the Universe over time. Each of the eight threshold moments of Big History is significant because it represents the appearance of something new and more complex than anything that existed before.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. Why does Christian say that humans are unsettled by the image of a scrambled egg unscrambling itself and returning to its shell?
2. David Christian argues that despite a tendency toward simplicity, the Universe is able to create complexity. He calls the appearance of new forms of complexity threshold moments. How does he describe these moments? Given your work over the course of the year, do you think the eight threshold moments he chooses make sense?
3. Why does Christian argue that humans need to think about issues of simplicity and complexity?
4. Why is language so important and what is collective learning? Bearing in mind what you’ve learned about humans in the course, do you agree with David Christian about the importance of this idea?
5. What are some of the challenges humans face by the end of the Big History story?
6. What does David Christian say is the value of studying Big History? You’re just about finished with the course—do you agree?

Thinking Conceptually

Does hearing about the entire Big History narrative in such a short time provide you with any new insights? Are your ideas about the future different from those of Christian’s?

The driving question in Unit 10 is a little different from the ones you’ve looked at before. Rather than asking you about the past, the driving question in this unit asks you about the future, which gives you an opportunity to think about how the course has influenced what you can reasonably say about what’s to come.

Think about this question: What’s the next threshold?

This activity reinforces how important scale is to understanding the Big History story, and really all history stories. This is the final activity in which you will deliberately consider scales of both place and time in relation to the Big History narrative.

Scale
As you dive into this activity, think across scale in terms of both time and distance. This helps frame the past at the level of the personal, local, regional, national, and global scales. Keep this in mind as you consider activities and resources that don’t seem to be explicitly about scale.

Think about the resources and activities that have focused on scale throughout the course. Working alone, pick out the three resources or activities that you think have had the most powerful impact on your thinking about scale. There are two twists:

1. You can’t choose any activity that has “scale” in its title.
2. Not all of your choices can come from the same unit.

Once you’ve picked them out, write down an explanation of why each of your choices had such a powerful impact on you (use the Scale Worksheet). Be prepared to share your ideas with the class.

This closing activity will deepen your understanding of the different disciplines and reinforce the importance of thinking in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Your teacher will assign an event or object that you’ll think about when filling out the worksheet. Your group’s job is to think about how you would assemble a research team to best understand the event. Once you’ve completed the worksheet, be prepared to share your answers with the class. Then, think about why understanding this event as an interdisciplinary team is better than doing it from an individual perspective.