draft/notes thing?

For starters, I recommend everybody watch bill wurtz’ history of the entire world, i guess for a nice overview. The video is a little under 20 minutes long. We don’t get to people until about 20% of the way in.

There’s people → agriculture → metal → better farming in mesopotamia → more food, specialization and trade → business, money, writing, laws, power → society!! Horse being tamed. Bronze, made with tin.

Indo-European empires, chariots, mycenean “beta version” greeks, indo-iranians? hymns and mantras… birth of Hinduism… Iron age disrupting the Bronze age? Persian empire. Buddha gets enlightened. Alexander’s conquest. Chandragupta conquers most of India. Tamil kings are merchants probably. They’ve got spices. Arab merchants buying spices. Horse nomads would like to ransack your city. Roman empire eats the entire mediterranean for breakfast. Jesus. Silk via the Silk road from China. New trade routes, accidentally spreading Hinduism and Buddhism.

Sahara desert – i have a thread

is loving jesus legal yet. Constantine moving capital over to Constantinople (now istanbul).

Barbarians invade Rome. Byzantine empire. Mayans have figured out the storts. Southeast Asia trading kingdoms. Baghdad house of wisdom, islamic golden age. Srivijaya. Charlamagne. Holy Roman Empire (its actually germany but don’t worry about it). The crusades. Italians got some sweet trade deals. China invented bombs and typing. Mongols invaded everywhere. Delhi sultanate. Mansa Musa is so rich he goes on tour. Black death kills a third of Europe. Renaissance. Gutenberg Printing Press. Christopher Columbus sails across the ocean. Mughal empire. Martin Luther’s protestant revolution. Suleiman. Portuguese empire. Spain. Question 2, steal the spice trade. That’s not a question but the dutch did it anyway. America declares independence. French Revolution. Haitan revolution. Napoleon. Latin American wars of independence. Britain turns steam into power, first industrial revolution. Trains. Opium war. First telegram. Technology goes crazy. US civil war. African colonization. Panama Canal. Oil in the middle east, makes cars go fast, WW1. They blame germany. Communism in the soviet union. Sykes-Picot carving up the Ottoman empire. 1920s, cars, jazz, movies… great depression. Hitler. Manhattan project, Oppenheimer. Gandhi, Salt march, Indian Independence. Korean war. Cold War. Sputnik. Decolonization. MLK Jr. World population gets huge. Transistors. Cars. Soviet Union falls apart. Fall of the Berlin Wall.

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David Christian’s history (TED, youtube)

• universe does not travel from mush to complexity? second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy. general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to mush. and yet look around us: what we see is staggering complexity. In NYC alone in 2011 there were estimated 10,000,000,000 SKUs being traded. At the time, almost 7 billion people – now over 8 billion. Stupendous complexity. How does the universe make complexity?
• Goldilocks conditions allow for slightly more complex things to appear, complexity builds stage by stage. each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly appearing almost out of nowhere. threshold moments. at each threshold the going gets tougher. the complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable, and the goldilocks conditions get more stringent
• 13.7 billion years ago, nothing. Then bang, universe appears. tiny, hot, busting, expanding at incredible speed, within the first second, energy shatters into electromagnetism and gravity, congeals to form matter, quarks, that create protons, leptons that create electrons. 380,000 years later, hydrogen and helium atoms. twice as long as humans have been around. Gravity is more powerful when there’s more stuff. A billion clouds, threshold temperature of 10m degrees, protons fuse, first stars, 200,000,000 years after bang.
• very large stars die, new chemicals created. gold was forged in a supernova explosions. universe now chemically more complex. you can make more things. around young suns, young stars, elements swirl around, particles, snowflakes, dustmotes, rocks, asteroids, planets and moons – solar system, 4.5B years ago
• DNA, double-helix, each rung contains information about how to make living organisms. it copies itself and scatters the template through the ocean. information has become part of the story. once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error.
• human language- system of communication, powerful and precise, allows us to share what we’ve learned and accumulate in collective memory. we seem to be the only species that allow us to learn collectively. humans migrated from the savannah into deserts, jungles, ice age environments, learning new ways of exploiting the environment, dealing
• 10,000 years ago, end of last ice age. farming was an energy bonanza. human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected
• 500 years ago, linked up globally, through shipping, trade, telegraph, internet, seem to form a single global brain
• 200 years, another energy bonana, fossil fuels
• cuban missile crisis. if we avoid that trap… others are waiting for us. fossil fuel burning may undermine goldilocks conditions.

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also relevant: Sebastian Junger’s Tribe, Graeber’s Debt, Crash Course World History, my Roam page