I am always fascinated about science and I read more related topics. “Origin Story,” thankfully, is more than a science book. It is a remarkably cogent and compelling history of everything. Christian, a professor at Australia’s Macquarie University, is a pioneer in “big history,” a big idea that aims to construct a meta-narrative from disciplines as disparate as astrophysics and anthropology.
Origin stories are not new, of course. Nearly all cultures and religions tell them. Fantastical tales of how the cosmos emerged from chaos or amorphousness, these creation myths seek to explain where we came from and why we’re here. They supply meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe, even if they fall short on facts.
Christian has written an origin story in the language of science. He begins with the big bang, when the entire universe was so dense it could be contained in a dot smaller than the one at the end of this sentence. From there, he moves at a brisk, at times dizzying, pace through some 13 billion years.
A journey this ambitious requires mile markers. Christian’s answer is threshold events: spurts in complexity that mark transitions from old orders to new. Like any good yarn, this one features memorable characters. It strives to create order out of chaos. It is pitted against entropy, which works to tear down what complexity builds.
“Origin Story” contains plenty of mystery on a cosmic scale. Why does the universe contain any structure at all and “not just a random flux of energy”? Why did the agrarian revolution erupt almost simultaneously in places separated by thousands of miles?
The storyline occasionally gets lost in a blur of eons and protons, but for the most part Christian’s hand is steady and sure, his grasp of the science impressive. He makes it all accessible, too, as when he likens the universe to “a vast spring that has been uncoiling for more than thirteen billion years” or atomic particles to nervous children “constantly jiggling about with energy.”
Reading “Origin Story” makes you feel extremely fortunate to be here at all. Life requires “goldilocks conditions.” Not too hot, not too cold. Not too little oxygen, not too much. The unstated conclusion: Life is a miracle.
It took 3 billion years for life to evolve from single to multicellular organisms. During that time “so much could have gone wrong,” writes Christian. An exploding supernova in a neighbouring star system, a collision with another planet. And yet it didn’t. And we’re here.
A history this big is also bound to make you feel small. Life on Earth doesn’t appear until Page 75, early civilizations not until Page 210, a good two-thirds into the book. This is by design. Big history is all about perspective. Life is a latecomer to the universe, and we humans arrived mere seconds ago.
“Origin Story” may not be a deep dive, but it is very wide. Christian stitches his tale using: astrobiology and archaeology, molecular biology and behavioural economics, among other disciplines. What’s most remarkable is how he manages to link these disparate fields to another. Densely populated villages resemble “the contracting clumps of matter from which the first stars formed.” The nobility of Mesopotamia pumped wealth into towns and cities “like the proton pumps that maintain an energy gradient across cell membranes.”
In big history’s worldview, humans share the same stage as amoebas. Describing how two German scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, figured out how to draw nitrogen from the air to make artificial fertilizer, Christian notes that single-celled organisms called prokaryotes mastered this billions of years ago, but “Haber and Bosch were the first multicellular organisms to successfully fix atmospheric nitrogen.”
Christian pushes hard against now-ism, the notion that we are living in an unprecedented age of innovation. The agrarian revolution was a true “mega-innovation,” he writes. It changed the way humans interact and learn.
For Christian, the story of the universe is the story of energy and how it is produced, stored, traded, manipulated and consumed. Life, too, is in the energy business. It might be the energy of sunlight that plants tap into via photosynthesis or the huge amount of energy gobbled up by our big primate brains.
This systems perspective of the universe is fascinating but at the same time feels oddly detached and lifeless. Mankind’s accomplishments are explained in strictly utilitarian terms. Written language, for instance, was invented to help track flows of wealth and energy. Innovation is a product not of courageous individuals but of “the machinery of collective learning.” The advent of farming reflects not human ingenuity but, rather, “an energy and resource grab by a single, very resourceful species.”
Where “Origin Story” falls short is precisely where more traditional creation myths excel: meaning. Christian offers none. “The universe really is indifferent to our fate,” he writes in the final chapter. “It’s a vast ocean of energy for which individual wavelets such as us are ephemeral, passing phenomena.”
With stunning insights into the origin of the universe, the beginning of life, the emergence of humans, and what the future might bring, Origin Story boldly reframes our place in the cosmos. Christian makes the point, as others have in the last few years, that we now have, in essence, the controls for our only habitable planet. We decide what species live and which ones die, and we are playing with the climate controls. If we understand and master those controls in time, we have the potential to give our species the best and most comfortable lives we have ever had.
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