Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

This is an awesome book, presenting a human origin story of epic proportions, invoking current knowledge from a multitude of disciplines, including cosmology, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, and economics. Covering such a staggering scope—all of space and time—in a relatively short volume, Christian manages to avoid shallow renderings of these subjects by constructing a compelling narrative on the solid themes of thresholds of complexity, energy, and entropy. At each turn in our origin story, Christian explores how the physical laws exploit energy gradients to organize matter into increasingly complex structures, all the while “paying an entropy tax” in return. This line of thinking gets really interesting when discussing life, which at the cellular level maintains itself with electrical charge gradients, and does so at a precisely calibrated rate, and further when comparing the entire biosphere of Earth to such a cell. And now, as we begin the Anthropocene, when humans are beginning have a significant impact on the biosphere, it is critical that we calibrate our energy flows for sustainability. I found this perspective, the entire Earth as an organism, to be fascinating, a mental shift well worth ruminating.