Our Common Story: What?

Our Common Story is the narrative account of our 13.7 billion year history of the universe, the 4.5 billion year evolution of our planet, the 200,000 year rise of our species, and the 10,000 year accelerating drama of human civilization.  Some call this increasingly factual story of science and history “the New Cosmology” or “the Epic of Evolution.”  Others call it “the History of Nature,” or simply “Big History.”  Others call it “the Great Story.” We are calling it Our Common Story, because for the first time humans have an origin “myth” that transcends all of our regional, religious, and tribal differences.  Every time we log on to the Internet or pump two hundred million year old fossil fuels into our cars, we affirm this story in deed, if not in thought or understanding.

The grand scientific metanarrative is quite new and still evolving, so much so that we do not really have an adequate interpretative tradition surrounding it. This history, like all histories, is open to many plausible interpretations, so long as we are faithful to the text, in this case new “Book of Nature” as discovered through multiple scientific disciplines over the last century.

In brief outline, this omnicentric universe began some thirteen billion years ago as something like infinite heat, infinite density, and total symmetry. The universe expanded and evolved into more differentiated and complex structures—forces, quarks, hydrogen, helium, galaxies, stars, heavier elements, complex chemistry, planetary systems. Some 3.5 billion years ago, in a small second- or third-generation solar system, the intricate processes called life began on at least one small planet. Animate matter-energy on earth presented itself as a marvelous new intensification of the creative dynamic at work in the universe. Then some two million years ago, as if yesterday in the enormous timescales of the universe, protohumans emerged on the savanna of Africa with their enormously heightened capacities for conscious self-reflection, language, and tool making. Ten thousand years ago agriculture begins and with it growing populations of humans living in ever larger and more complex societies.  And this unfolding leads us all the way to today, almost seven billion of us collectively transforming the planet and ourselves. 

The wonder of it all is that each of us is a collection of transient atoms, recycled stardust become conscious beings, engaged in this global conversation, brought to you by ephemeral electrons cascading through the Internet and bouncing off of satellites. It is tragic that we do not teach this epic narrative of science to our children and ourselves in all of its glorious grandeur and fascinating details.  That we do not discuss and debate the meaning of this new cosmology, seeking to integrate it with our different religious and cultural traditions, helps fan the flames of unnecessary conflicts.  That we do not seek to apply these insights to solving the great economic and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century may be our species’ downfall.