Quotes from David Christian

the basic rules of serious futurology are (a) look for the large trends and analyze how they work, (b) construct models to suggest how different trends may interact, and (c) be alert for countertrends or other factors that might falsify or cut across the predictions suggested by long trends and simple modeling.

1. Death is inevitable. 2. Our life span is decreasing continuously. 3. Death will come, whether or not we are prepared for it. 4. Human life expectancy is uncertain. 5. There are many causes of death. 6. The human body is fragile and vulnerable.20

the conquests of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic dynasties encouraged commercial and intellectual exchanges reaching from central Asia to India to the western Mediterranean. In the East, the expansion under the Han and Tang dynasties had similar catalytic impacts within China. The intellectual residue left by these exchanges shaped the cultural traditions of the Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Mediterranean worlds.

As the previous chapter showed, mobile communities of foragers have good reasons to limit population growth. But if they settle down, those limits to population growth can be relaxed. Babies do not need to be carried so much; grain-based diets (particularly if foods are cooked) make it possible to wean children earlier; birth intervals will shorten; and females will reach puberty earlier.

It was possible to borrow British technology, and increasingly governments began to promote development. By the end of the nineteenth century, governments and large banks were actively managing industrial change.

most of human history (chronologically speaking) has taken place in communities quite innocent of state power.

an eleventh-century CE Muslim prince from Tabaristan wrote in a book for his son, "Make it your constant endeavor to improve cultivation and to govern well; for understand this truth: the kingdom can be held by the army, and the army by gold; and gold is acquired through agricultural development and agricultural development through justice and equity. Therefore be just and equitable.

I remember very vividly, as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they're still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.

I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.

Big History studies the history of everything, offering a way of making sense of our world and our role within it.

I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

If, in schools, we keep teaching that history is divided into American history and Chinese history and Russian history and Australian history, we're teaching kids that they are divided into tribes. And we're failing to teach them that we also, as human beings, share problems that we need to work together with.

Learning to domesticate the horse was a sort of energy revolution.

Big History's not going to replace existing educational courses. It's not an attack on specialisation. It is simply the argument that specialisation needs to be complemented with an overview, which I think is scientific commonsense.

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are.

Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.

If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.

I have this fantasy that in future negotiations over climate change - instead of going into that room and saying, 'I'm defending Chinese interests,' or 'I'm defending Australian interests' - there will also be an identity inside of each of the negotiators thinking, 'I'm also defending human interests.'

Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

What we normally define as history doesn't interest me. It's a constraint.