As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
How did the acceleration you learned about in Unit 9 affect the Earth?
How can collective learning help us solve our current climate crises as well as future problems that might arise?
How can you contribute to collective learning?
: “Welcome to Unit 10.
: What a fun ride it’s been. I’m sure you can endorse. This wonderful, wonderful…”
: Class? Learning product?
: [Time Travel Rachel] Course! The rhyme is course.
: [Present Rachel] Well if it isn’t me from the future.
: [Time Travel Rachel] Do you know it takes you six years to come up with that rhyme?
: [Present Rachel] Well, not anymore. Thanks for altering the space-time continuum.
: [Time Travel Rachel] Move over, you promised I’d get to do this one.
: Hello twenty-first century youth.
: I wore my retro outfit from the 2020’s so my futuristic clothing would not shock you.
: Hi, I’m time-traveler Rachel Hansen, and this is Unit 10: The Future.
: I’ve leapt hundreds, thousands, and billions of years ahead.
: But according to the rules of time-travel I’m not allowed to tell you anything about the future that I’ve seen.
: But that doesn’t mean I can’t nudge you in a few interesting directions.
: And after nine units of Big History, you certainly have the tools to prepare you for what lies ahead.
: We’ve made it to the end of this course, but your work isn’t done.
: You have a lot of preparation to do for the future!
: We’ve covered so much history—13.8 billion years of it!
: Now, we travel into the future!
: So, go ahead add a few more billion years to the Big History timeline.
: As you know from the early units, it’s really, really hard for humans to comprehend time at the scale of billions of years.
: Our entire species has only been around for less than 0.002 percent of time since the Big Bang.
: And on top of the challenges of so much time, there’s also the vast, infinite expanse of space to grapple with.
: Our brains are capable of a lot of things, but envisioning a Universe of infinite space and time really strains the old neurons!
: Now, in this last overview video, we’ll do what my old self had us do in each previous unit.
: We’ll review what we learned in Unit 9 and then get to the future.
: As we venture into the distant and unknown time ahead of us, keep asking yourself the big questions:
: What do you think humanity will accomplish in the future?
: Will we ever find alien life forms on other planets?
: Will we create artificial intelligence that ends up making humans into pets?
: Will we solve the climate crisis and switch from burning fossil fuels to producing clean, zero-emission energy sources?
: And those are just a few of the questions you’ll explore in this unit!
: In Unit 9, life moved pretty fast.
: Collective learning and the pace of innovation accelerated as the human population climbed.
: Fossil fuels powered new machines that allow us to travel across the world in hours
: and communicate with others around the globe in seconds.
: But using these fossil fuels also polluted our planet.
: Carbon dioxide levels continue to rise as does the temperature of our oceans and our sea levels.
: So, while the Modern Revolution brought many positive effects, like
: antibiotics, robot vacuums, and epic fail soccer videos, it’s also caused plenty of bad stuff.
: But we can counteract many of these negative effects by changing the ways we use energy and innovating to find solutions.
: There are over 7 billion possible innovators on this planet.
: Combine all that brain power with all the knowledge we have from centuries of collective learning, and we can find these solutions.
: And that’s part of what Unit 10 is all about—making evidence-based predictions and finding solutions for the future.
: But it’s also about reviewing the 13.8 billion years of history that’s behind us.
: Armed with all this history, thinking skills, and information about how we know what we know,
: you are now ready to challenge the Big History narrative.
: I know; what?
: Look, we’re not picking a fight, but you don’t become a historian by just agreeing with what the last historian said.
: So test our claims!
: For example, we built this whole course around eight thresholds of increasing complexity,
: but now you get to evaluate those thresholds and decide if you could do better than us!
: Are thresholds the best way to organize this course?
: Is this course missing any thresholds?
: Remember in Unit 8? No threshold there, right?
: Do you think there’s an argument to be made that we should add one?
: Well, that’s one of your tasks in this unit:
: evaluate and challenge the narratives we’ve presented to you and offer new ways to do things better.
: That’s yet another way you can contribute to collective learning.
: Next, you’ll investigate how the acceleration of the past 250 years has impacted the biosphere.
: You’ll weigh the positive and negative effects of acceleration to decide what your vision of the future will be.
: Of the many issues we face as a species living on Earth, what’s the most important to you?
: Your job is to evaluate that issue and how it will affect the biosphere in 25 years and 100 years’ time.
: You might remember doing this in the first unit of the course.
: This is a great time to see how your thinking has changed now that you have evidence to back up your claims.
: Finally, you’ll learn what the near future and distant future might hold for humanity, Earth, and the Universe.
: And no, you won’t be using a crystal ball or tea leaves to make these predictions,
: you’ll have to use the evidence you’ve learned from the authorities you’ve met along the way.
: And don’t forget your own logic and intuition.
: Good luck, my ancient ancestors. I must return to the future.
: Wait, don’t go yet! I still have a ton of questions about what’s coming.
: Will dark energy continue to accelerate the expansion of the Universe?
: What does that mean for complexity—will the Universe just keep getting simpler as the space between galaxies grows?
: What will happen to our Sun?
: Will humans make the right decisions when it comes to energy use?
: Will we all be eating plant-based burgers in the year 2050?
: What am I going to have for dinner?
: [Time Travel Rachel] Hey, this isn’t about you, or me.
: It’s about your students.
: Kids, in Unit 10, you’ll try to answer all these questions and more…
: Except for the one about her dinner.
: I think we all know where that’s going.
: [Present Rachel] Oh wow, is that a plant- based burger from the future?
: [Time Travel Rachel] I somehow knew you wanted one.
: [Present Rachel] Mmmm. The future tastes better than I thought it would…