in which we'll be looking at the history of, like, everything.

I'm talking about 13.8 billion years--

from the Big Bang to now.

I mean, in this series, we are literally going to attempt

to tell you the story of what Douglas Adams famously called:

>> Mr. Green, Mr. Green!

That's not history, that's science.

And science is for nerds.

Oh, me from the past, things would be so much easier

for you if you would just accept that you are,

in fact, a nerd and that's okay.

I mean, look at this picture, dude.

Anyway, academics often describe history

as, like, all the stuff that's happened

since we started writing things down,

but they only start there

because that's where we have the best information.

And, yeah, I think that the advent

of writing was a huge deal, obviously,

but as a start date for history, it's totally arbitrary.

It's just a line we drew in the sand and said,

"Okay, history begins now!"

In Big History, we're going to start history

when it really starts-- at least, we think--

at the creation of the Universe.

And we're going to end that story where it ends.

Please let that be after I die.

Well, I guess it will definitely be after I die,

it's just, I want it to be a while after I die.

So we're even going to terrify traditional historians

by using physics to make some predictions about the future

and we're going to end many trillions and trillions

of years from now when the Universe itself--

spoiler alert-- dies, at least in a manner of speaking.

Hey! I'm not John.

If you're thinking we look a little bit the same,

that's because we're brothers.

I'm Hank.

Anyway, if you want to learn the 13.8-billion-year history

of the Universe in the same amount of time

that we usually cover the 238 years of American history,

you're not going to get the same resolution.

Of course, knowing the names and dates

of American history is important,

but we just can't do that in Big History.

As you zoom out, you see a lot more of the picture.

The details get a little fuzzy, but we quickly realize

that history is everything-- cosmology, geology,

biology, social sciences, literature, physics.

Everything.

You might think that such a scale would be filled

with way too much detail,

but the amount of detail an answer requires depends

on the nature of the question.

Some questions can only be explored by zooming out.

That is what Big History does.

Speaking of zoomed out, this is"Earthrise,"

one of the most famous photographs of all time.

William Anders, an Apollo astronaut,

took it in 1968.

From the surface of another world,

we see our planet as a little ball in space.

No borders, no people, no buildings,

just oceans and clouds and continents

being shined upon by the sun.

That sheer expansion of scale gives me perspective.

It lets me imagine all the complexity of life on Earth,

from the gasoline engine that powered my trip

to the studio, to political instability

in Nepal as part of a thriving, living, teeming mass of life

loading in the emptiness of space.

So what that photograph does for physical space,

Big History aims to do for everything.

I mean, we want to contextualize all of existence.

We want to outline the most powerful

and important breakthroughs, the tremendous scale of existence,

and how we know what we know, and why we're sure we know it.

All right, let's go to the Thought Bubble.

So, the Universe is big-- like, really big--

and it's also old-- like, 13.8 billion years old.

Which is enough years that there is no way

to actually comprehend it, so let's just compress

that age to 13 years--

small enough that our puny brains can handle it.

On that time scale, the Universe would have begun 13 years ago,

in 2001.

George W. Bush had just been sworn in as president.

Most Americans on the Internet were connecting

to it with dial-up modems.

Right, so the first stars and galaxies

would have formed 12 years ago, but seven and a half more years

would pass until the earth formed, about 4.5 years ago.

Move a little bit up to four years ago--

that's when the first single-celled life formed

on Earth.

Then leap forward nearly three and a half more years

before the first multicellular organisms

and the Cambrian explosion...

What I'm trying to explain is that all complex life

on Earth is a fairly recent development.

Like, on this scale, the dinosaurs went extinct

about three weeks ago-- roughly the last time

I changed my Facebook status.

Humans and chimpanzees split

from their last shared ancestor about three days ago.

The first homo sapiens emerged 50 minutes ago,

roughly the last time I checked my email.

We left Africa 26 minutes ago.

The American Indians reached the Americas six minutes ago--

roughly the last time I check my Twitter.

We invented agriculture five minutes ago,

Ancient Egypt three minutes ago, the Black Death 24 seconds ago,

The Industrial Revolution, six seconds,

World War I, two seconds.

The Cold War, the first man on the moon, your birth,

the internet, the Big Mac, all within the last second.

But in many other ways, complex life

and humanityareexceptional.

>> Thanks, Thought Bubble.

Also exceptional, by the way, the Mongols.

Okay, let's begin at the beginning-- the Big Bang.

Hank, wait a second... whoa, whoa, whoa.

I don't understand how we know that the Big Bang

is really the beginning.

Like, what happened before the Big Bang?

Well, okay, theoretical physicists say

that space and time are not two different things.

They are two expressions of one thing: spacetime.

And spacetime was created by the Big Bang,

thus, time didn't exist before the Big Bang,

so it doesn't make much sense to ask what happened before it.

There was no "then" then.

Of course, this, like many ideas in cosmology,

doesn't really make any sense to our puny human brains.

It's largely beyond our comprehension

rather like explaining color to a blind person.

We know that it's true because the math works

and it explains our observations so elegantly,

but it's so far outside of how we directly perceive the world

that I don't think it's something

even the most genius physicists are able to imagine.

But, yeah, if you're going to do a chronological study

of the Universe, the creation of time

is probably a pretty good place to start the story.

So the Big Bang wasn't something that happened

inside the Universe, nor did it expand into some kind of void.

It was literally the moment when both time

and space were created.

The thing that was banging was the Universe itself.

It was expanding from an unimaginably tiny point

to an unimaginably large Universe unimaginably quickly.

"Unimaginable" is basically the subtitle to the story

of the Big Bang, but then again, it's also kind of the subtitle

to everything else in Big History.

I mean, I can only do this occasionally,

but sometimes you look outside and you're like,

"Oh, my goodness, this is nuts!

How did we get trees?"

Needless to say, we will be talking about that.

Anyway, the Universe is a hard worker

and it got most of the heavy lifting done

in those first few seconds.

For comparison, it takes me about 20 minutes

after I wake up for me to even get myself

into a standing position.

But the Universe is somewhat more efficient.

In the barest fraction of the first second,

the Universe inflated

from something many, many, many times smaller than an atom

to about the size of a grapefruit.

Like, think of it this way.

In much less than a blink of an eye,

if it had originally been the size of a tennis ball,

it would have inflated to over 90 billion light-years across.

This inflation theory has been well backed up

by mathematics for a long time now,

but it has recently received some staggering new support

from the BICEP Project of the South Pole

which sadly has nothing to do with my guns.

Ten seconds after the Big Bang, the Universe had expanded enough

that the normal rules of the Universe

with atomic forces and gravity and electromagnetism

that we know and love today were already in charge.

All of the antimatter created in the Big Bang had combined

with matter and annihilated itself leaving

behind only one-billionth of the matter created in the Big Bang.

And that billionth is everything.

And I mean everything-- every grain of sand,

every blueberry you will ever eat,

every star that you will ever see.

Everything.

We're already tried to understand how big a billion is,

but just pause to think about that.

Everything--everything-- is one-billionth of the matter

created in the Big Bang.

(imitates explosion)

The First Law of Thermodynamics is that

matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Everything we have now, we had then.

The matter that makes up your body right now has been around

since those moments 13.8 billion years ago.

It's simply changed form.

After just three minutes, the Universe was cool enough

that the nuclei of atoms started forming--

just hydrogen and helium back then, the two simplest elements.

Keep those two in mind, however, because it turns out

if you take a bunch of hydrogen and you wait, like,

several billion years, you might just grow yourself some humans.

Let's remember, at this time,

the Universe was still very, very hot.

I don't want to use the world "unimaginable" too often.

But it was unimaginably hot.

The Universe remained, like, an uber hot sea dominated

by radiation, but then luckily it simmered down

to a balmy 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit

about 380,000 years after the Big Bang,

allowing matter and radiation to separate.

And remember:

I mean, you are a somewhat firm bag of energy.

In my case, I'm not that firm.

So anyway, at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit,

radiation was finally able to move freely

through the Universe, and we see that radiation today

as the end of the dark ages that followed the Big Bang

and the beginning of a brilliant flash that we call:

Which is a great name for a band.

Physicists call it "The fingerprint of the Universe"

and it's one of the most important pieces

of historical evidence we have for the Big Bang

because CBR is everywhere.

Tune your radio to a frequency that doesn't have a station,

a portion of the static you hear is actually

that cosmic background radiation being picked up by your radio.

So you can literally hear the Universe in its infancy.

Sometimes it can be tricky to know what's true,

especially when we're talking about stuff

that happened so far in the distant past.

That is why we created science:

So just using your limited human senses, you might come

to the same conclusion as 19th century scientists--

that the Universe is static, eternal, and infinite.

Then, using our minds, if the Universe is infinite--

it contains infinite stars and it has always existed--