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

Page 21

We can picture the lift-off because we’re still at the human scale. Almost 6 miles up we see Baikonur as if from an international jet. That’s a view familiar to many of us. Gagarin reached 188 miles, close to the orbit of the International Space Station (220 miles). From here you can see large, clearly geographical features—seas and mountains—and also the Earth’s curvature. But you can no longer see Baikonur. From 6,000 miles up we can see the Earth as a ball drifting in space. The ¿rst pictures of Earth from space had a powerful impact because they reminded people of the Earth’s fragility and isolation. What does the Earth look like from the Moon? Neil Armstrong landed on the Neil Armstrong became the ¿rst Moon at 10:56 pm (EDT) on July 20, man on the moon. 1969, becoming the ¿rst human to step onto another world. As he stepped on the Moon his interest was focused (naturally) on whether he was stepping into quicksand; yet he was also aware of the momentousness of the occasion. He was thinking at multiple scales. So far, no human has traveled further—though two human-made objects, the Voyager satellites, have now passed the outer planets of our solar system. To appreciate the scale of the solar system, imagine Àying in a modern passenger jet at roughly 550 mph. To cross the continental U.S., it takes about 5 hours. To reach the Moon, it would take 18 days. To reach the Sun, it would take 20 years; to reach Jupiter, about 82 years; and about 750 years to reach Pluto, at the edge of our solar system. These are distances our minds can no longer grasp. 11

Courtesy NASA.

To get a sense of spatial scales, let’s go on a journey through the solar system. We begin with the human scale, then widen the lens. On April 12, 1961, at 9:07 am Kazakhstan local time, Yuri Gagarin blasts off aboard a Vostok 1 rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to become the ¿rst human being to enter space.


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Glossary

31min
pages 250-272

Bibliography

23min
pages 273-288

Big History—Humans in the Cosmos

7min
pages 233-237

Permissions Acknowledgments

1min
pages 289-290

The Next Millennium and the Remote Future

6min
pages 229-232

The Next 100 Years

6min
pages 224-228

Human History and the Biosphere

6min
pages 219-223

The World That the Modern Revolution Made

6min
pages 214-218

The 20th Century

6min
pages 209-213

The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–1700

5min
pages 195-198

Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution

7min
pages 185-189

The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–1350

6min
pages 190-194

Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900

6min
pages 204-208

Breakthrough—The Industrial Revolution

7min
pages 199-203

The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era

7min
pages 180-184

The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made

6min
pages 156-159

Long Trends—Rates of Innovation

6min
pages 165-169

Comparing the World Zones

7min
pages 175-179

Long Trends—Expansion and State Power

7min
pages 160-164

Long Trends—Disease and Malthusian Cycles

7min
pages 170-174

Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions

6min
pages 152-155

Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization

7min
pages 147-151

From Villages to Cities

6min
pages 142-146

Homo sapiens—The First Humans

6min
pages 104-108

The First Agrarian Societies

6min
pages 128-132

Early Power Structures

6min
pages 137-141

Power and Its Origins

5min
pages 133-136

The Origins of Agriculture

7min
pages 123-127

Threshold 7—Agriculture

6min
pages 118-122

Change in the Paleolithic Era

7min
pages 113-117

Paleolithic Lifeways

6min
pages 109-112

Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms

5min
pages 82-85

Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms

6min
pages 86-90

Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different?

7min
pages 99-103

Hominines

5min
pages 91-94

Evidence on Hominine Evolution

6min
pages 95-98

The Origins of Life

7min
pages 77-81

The Evidence for Natural Selection

6min
pages 73-76

Darwin and Natural Selection

6min
pages 69-72

Threshold 5—Life

6min
pages 64-68

Plate Tectonics and the Earth’s Geography

6min
pages 59-63

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