Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

I Love my “Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth”the Complete Great Learning Compact Disc Set. Neatly packed and Quickly shipped. I’m a very Happy customer who’s always willing to spend a bit more for a complete and accurate description of the product sold:) Again, very Happy with my buy!

Plan on listening to it throughout the winter months. We're looking forward to it. The set was in perfect condition. .

Wonderful lectures.

Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth and the Rise of HumanityBy Professor David Christian"To understand ourselves," says Professor Christian, "we need to know the very large story, the largest story of all."48 lectures | 30 minutes each1 What Is Big History?2 Moving across Multiple Scales3 Simplicity and Complexity4 Evidence and the Nature of Science5 Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology6 How Did Everything Begin?7 Threshold 2—The First Stars and Galaxies8 Threshold 3—Making Chemical Elements9 Threshold 4—The Earth and the Solar System10 The Early Earth—A Short History11 Plate Tectonics and the Earth's Geography12 Threshold 5—Life13 Darwin and Natural Selection14 The Evidence for Natural Selection15 The Origins of Life16 Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms17 Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms18 Hominines19 Evidence on Hominine Evolution20 Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different?21 Homo sapiens—The First Humans22 Paleolithic Lifeways23 Change in the Paleolithic Era24 Threshold 7—Agriculture25 The Origins of Agriculture26 The First Agrarian Societies27 Power and Its Origins28 Early Power Structures29 From Villages to Cities30 Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization31 Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions32 The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made33 Long Trends—Expansion and State Power34 Long Trends—Rates of Innovation35 Long Trends—Disease and Malthusian Cycles36 Comparing the World Zones37 The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era38 Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution39 The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–135040 The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–170041 Breakthrough—The Industrial Revolution42 Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 190043 The 20th Century44 The World That the Modern Revolution Made45 Human History and the Biosphere46 The Next 100 Years47 The Next Millennium and the Remote Future48 Big History—Humans in the CosmosThis was such an all compassing history of the world combining history, science, physics, biology and statistics into a huge epic of how we got to where we are now and where are we going from here.Professor Christian taught at San Diego State University and now in Sydney, Australia. He is clear and concise on his explanations and there is so much to cover in this course that I know I will have to listen to it repeatedly.I thoroughly enjoyed the big picture of the science of the creation of the universe and the beginnings of man in such a short time. There were many questions that were answered and many questions that we need to study more. We have so much more to learn about where we came from and where we are going.I highly recommend this lecture series, I certainly learned from it.

I wish we give this subject "big history" a different moniker and make it compulsory for any undergrads of any discipline.Dr Christian's approach to understanding where, how and why we are today is comprehensive, thorough and unique. Most studies on various aspects of our astronomical, physical, chemical, biological, archeological, sociological, geographic or political/economic life tend to miss the big philosophical and historical perspective by being too narrow in their subject focus. The author traverses 13.7bn years of the universal existence until today from the humanity's viewpoint. It is a journey through all the above subject matters in a continuous fashion without ever losing the big existential thread. Effectively, the author builds the causal/historic chain of things/principles/historic developments that otherwise we would learn in different fields without a holistic connection or relevance to where we are now.What is ventured is highly ambitious and the execution is simply superb. Over the next few decades, this subject will likely evolve rapidly. As Dr Christian himself points out, what will be told in Big History will change not only with new facts and studies but also due to the differing interpretations of its exponents. For example, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a course on Coursera on the same subject without calling it Big History. His history of mankind is far lighter on the Big Bang up to the solar system evolution and focuses more on the last 250million years. His reading of the big trends are vastly different from the ones in this book. However, each such course or book - when presented well and with good insights - should prove as one of the best learning experiences for any reader.The only real surprise is why the Big History lectures are far bigger success than they are. The lectures are amazingly lucid and told in a highly engaging manner. The style is like that of a popular non-fiction book than academic. The tales are relevant and interesting. And there is enough humour. The author never drags. Perhaps the packaging is too non-commercial and this is an injustice to anyone who misses out on such an important book as a result.

I liked this course very much as it traced the 'Big Picture' of our universe though 8 major "Threshold" transitions. Dr Christian is a good lecturer, informed and enthusiastic about the subject and able to synthesize an awful lot of information (and disparate disciplines) into a coherent whole.I felt he did an especially good job of presenting the pre-human stages (basic physics, chemistry, geology, and biology) of life in the first half of the course, but when he got to more recent human history he started repeating himself with fairly conventional ideas (really no different than what I learned in high school decades ago). This is a shame since just as the hard sciences have rapidly evolved their scope of understanding and theories, so too have the social sciences come to see different perspectives of the bigger picture. Inclusion of these kinds of insights would have made for a much more relevant and interesting course.Overall though I felt Dr. Christian did a good job of presenting the big picture which includes our past and the challenges awaiting us (on the way to the eventual cooling/dissipation of our known universe). It's a great story, no matter how it ends...