Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 9

At the beginning of time as we know it, around 14 billion years ago, energy and matter were born in a moment of unfathomable brilliance. Those core building blocks combined into atoms, followed by even more complex assemblies (molecules) just a few hundred thousand years later.

Billions of years later, after countless stars were born and died out, our solar system was formed from the remnants of furnaces of those long-dead stars. Physicists and chemists study the big bang's fundamental elements and their interactions in part to explain what things are made of and how they behave.

Some of those complex configurations coalesced into what we call life. We study life and how it evolved from its most primitive state to discover where we come from and to help us thrive within our given universe, not fighting mother nature.

The human life that eventually emerged from among this plethora of creatures eventually formed complex rules and societies that evolved in a broad set of stages or ages. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens cited them as follows:

 The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BCE, when Homo sapiens evolved imagination)

 The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE, the development of agriculture)

 The unification of humankind (the gradual consolidation of human political organizations toward one global empire)

 The Scientific Revolution (c. 1500 CE, the emergence of objective science)

In each of these ages, humans made relatively large leaps forward in understanding their environment and, at times, directly shaping it.