corporating elements of both Daoism and Legalism, would become the state philosophy (Fairbank and Goldman 2006).

Modernity as Another Axial Phase Transition

The terms in which Modernity is often described – Latour's (1993: 10) 'new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time', for example, or Samir Amin's (2009: 13) 'claim that human beings, individually and collectively, can and must make their own history' – could also characterize the Axial Age. As a result, it makes sense to examine Modernity (c. 1500 CE to the present) as a phase transition in human history with remarkably similar dynamics.

As with the Axial Age, the ability of an older world story to govern an increasingly complex society was breaking down. For more than a millennium, the bureaucratic empires of Byzantium, the Islamic world, and China had justified themselves with world stories in which religions of the book were integrated with the efforts of the secular kings and bureaucracies that enabled them to govern vast territories. So successful were the post-axial empires that the conquests of the Yuan Dynasty, led by descendants of Genghis Khan, united Eurasia as a world economic system in the thirteenth century (Abu-Lughod 1989). Then, in 1453, the Ottomans took Constantinople, threatening to overwhelm Christian Europe.

Yet, within 200 years, these empires were losing the ability to respond to the social complexity that they had enabled. With a world population that would exceed one-half billion before the end of the sixteenth century (Livi-Bacci 1992: 31), the first system of worldwide trade by the end of the thirteenth century (Abu-Lughod 1989), and acceleration in the rate of technological innovation in Islam and China (e.g., Lindberg 2007; Temple 2007), their old world stories began to falter. As Jack Goldstone (1991) notes, the inability of government to adapt to the needs of growing populations as economic activity evolved caused the mid-seventeenth century revolts in England, China and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans and Chinese fell back into the older behaviors that would enervate them when faced with Western imperialism. The English, in the midst of their phase transition, moved forward.

In addition, the European politics was fragmented, as in early axial China and Greece, with Italian city-states, German principalities, and emerging national states in Spain, Portugal, France and England (e.g., Bondarenko and Korotayev 2011). In fact, writers such as Eric Jones (2003) claim that Europe's political fragmentation in 1500 CE was key to its subsequent rise. Moreover, as the axial transformations were partly driven by innovative applications of writing and iron metallurgy, early
modern Europeans took printing (Eisenstein 2005) and the commer-
cially efficacious machine, both invented in China, ‘to a high pitch’
(Jones 2003: 58), that, together, made a higher level of complexity possi-
ble, and with it the ability to respond to a more complex environment.

Since the fall of Rome, Western Europe had experienced a chaos of
diverse influences – from the rationality of ancient Greece, through the
memory of the Roman Empire, and monotheism, through Christianity, to
the Germanic, Viking and Islamic invasions. By the end of the twelfth
century, the foundational text of the modern period began to emerge, ini-
tially in the stories of the Quest for the Holy Grail (Spengler 1932), com-
bining the restless spirit of multiple invasions with the Christian, theo-
centric tradition of worship and belief, especially as articulated in the
Apocalyptic millennialism of that period (e.g., Noble 1999; Gillespie 2008).
As suggested below, these stories would not express their full power until
some time around 1500, when the breakthrough of the modern phase
transition followed the breakdown of the medieval period.

Even as the grail quest literature was championing the authority of
a social order joining the Catholic Church and the feudal eco-
nomic/political class, events continued to provoke chaos. The loss of
Jerusalem in 1187, followed by the failure of the Third Crusade (1189-
1192) to retake it, undermined the legitimacy of the Papacy's claim to
represent God on Earth. After the Mongol creation of a world economic
system in the thirteenth century, increasing trade and wealth would
build the fortunes that would finance the Renaissance, but also encour-
age the corruption in the Church, especially the Papal indulgences,
which allowed the rich to 'buy' salvation, outraging Martin Luther. Fi-
nally, the Black Death (1347-1350) and the Hundred Years War between
England and France (1327-1453) would devastate the population of
Europe (Gillespie 2008). The medieval world story would then break
down and the modern phase transition would begin.

This phase transition would consist of a series of social explorations
of Kauffman's adjacent possible, each of which led to a social consensus,
the enactment of that consensus, a series of (mostly unexpected) results,
and new explorations. Perhaps the most striking, this evolving modern
world story repeatedly destabilized the institutions and belief systems
created when it was enacted.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, both the Renaissance and
Reformation looked to different paths for governing an increasingly com-
plex society. The printing press introduced by Gutenberg c. 1450 (see
Eisenstein 2005) changed the nature of communication, making increas-
ing amounts of knowledge available to the Renaissance and personal
reading of the Bible to the Reformation, generating a significant acceleration of the collective learning so central to cultural evolution (Christian 2004); the machine, employed in everything from the printing press to the newly improved firearms, intensified politics, warfare and commerce. Building on these innovations, the Renaissance strove to improve human life by employing the increasing store of knowledge; the Reformation used the availability of Bibles in the vernacular to challenge the often-abused spiritual monopoly of the Catholic Church (Gillespie 2008). For Martin Luther, the End of Time was near. As a result, for many in the Reformation, there was no need for the attempts at education and reform championed by Renaissance spokesmen such as Erasmus. The Reformation won out, plunging Europe into 150 years of devastating religious wars, as the Spring-and-Autumn wars had devastated China.

Even before these wars culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and the English Civil War (1642-1651), the tragic/new world story texts would begin appearing in Shakespeare's major political tragedies, *Hamlet*, *King Lear*, and *Macbeth*, in the first few years of the seventeenth century. There, he demonstrates the inadequacy of the medieval model of monarchy, with its dependence on family lineages and the relationship between the king and his knights. As with the Greek tragedians' criticism of Homeric ideals, Shakespeare points us to Reiss' (1980) moment of rupture when a new way of governing a more complex world must emerge. By the end of the religious wars, the new world story was also emerging.

That story had roots in a growing tradition of scientific rationalism. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), for example, called for an experimental science whose priest-like devotees would 'discover the hidden powers by which nature moves in order to gain mastery over it' (Gillespie 2008: 39). In addition, Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo conceived of 'the machine of the universe ... similar to a clock', to use Kepler's words (quoted in Dolnick 2011: 182), and written in the language of mathematics. The explorations of this mechanistic worldview turned on the issue of how best to apply scientific realism to govern a world weary of war's chaos.

For René Descartes (1596-1650), science was the rational search for the Truth that would 'discover the ground for a radical transformation of European society' (Gillespie 2008: 177). Such a science of certainty was possible for two reasons. First, the human being alone was a thinking being with the godlike ability to remake the world. Second, science can be true because mathematics, as the language of the universe, is true, and, Descartes believed, God is not a deceiver. A different version of this rational world story came from Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for whom science was not so much the search for the truth, but for knowl-
edge of how things worked. Because God was omnipotent – and thus capable of deceiving human beings – science must study the dynamics by which God willed motion to occur. Human beings can never know the truth of these dynamics, only that an explanation works, enabling them to manipulate a segment of the world (Ibid.).

Descartes' version, with its emphasis on the ability of science to achieve certainty, would become the central statement of the modern era's world story for the next 300 years. Its emphasis on mathematics, in particular, allowed those enacting the story to dismiss the messiness of life, especially after the century and a half of religious wars, as deviation. Only mathematics, the language in which God revealed His Book of Nature, was real. Such a science would fulfill the growing belief in progress, 'leading toward ever greater perfection of human nature' (Nisbet 1970: 5). The story would be enacted and further articulated in Robert Boyle's experiments in physics, William Harvey's description of the circulation of blood, Isaac Newton's mechanical physics and calculus. In many ways, Descartes and Newton were Modernity's Plato and Aristotle, the two thinkers who finally crystallized the theory and practice of their world story.

Meanwhile, Europe's grail quest knights were exploring the world – first the Spanish and Portuguese, then the Dutch, English and French – trying to do God's work of bringing salvation to the heathens and, incidentally, profits back home. They looted the gold and silver of the Americas, buying themselves ever more tightly into the world economic system and whetting their taste for the fine products of the East (Frank 1998).

The commentary on the new world story would emerge over the next 250 years, exploring how best to apply it. Among the key issues were the transformation of worship and belief from a shared part of the common world story to a private matter (Nongbri 2013) and the intensified application of Modernity's great social experiments – nationalism, the nation state and capitalism – throughout the Enlightenment. Among the mutations of the world story that would contribute to this process are:

* Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) 'obscene', 'profane', and 'blasphemous' (Nadler 2011: 2–3) interpretation of the Bible, his identification of God with Nature, and his insistence that democracy and freedom of expression would enhance the power and stability of the state;

* John Locke's (1632–1704) social contract with which people form government to protect their interests (Pagden 2013), key for the democratic nation-state; and
* Adam Smith's (1723–1790) 'invisible hand', which created a quasi-religious free-market philosophy to replace Christianity's omnipotent God (Israel 2011).

Throughout this period, people would enact this evolving world story, introducing social mutations ranging from a host of scientific discoveries and technologies to more effective industrial organizations, better weapons to more efficient military structures, as well as the imperialistic successes they enabled. As long as society seemed to exhibit the Enlightenment ideal of progress, the rationality so critical to its worldview seemed to promise the perfection of man envisioned by Descartes (Ibid.). However, when French finances began to fail and the monarchy could no longer meet its responsibilities to the people (Goldstone 1991), a wave of destabilization, articulated by *philosophers*, such as Diderot and D'Alembert, in France, and Priestly in England, began to create a 'widespread consciousness in influential circles of the need to abolish privilege and rank' (Israel 2011: 229), as well as a conservative reaction. When the French monarchy failed, however, the result was not government by the ideals of Enlightenment rationality, but a devastating destabilization in an explosion of full-flowered nationalism and revenge, leading to two decades of war, evoking the same emotions religion had during the religious wars.

After Napoleon was finally exiled in 1815, Europe continued following its ideal of progress, with further commentary on the world story and enactment of it. The Industrial Revolution and its critics, from Charles Dickens' novels to Karl Marx's economics, drove the evolution of the new world story into new areas of the adjacent possible. And Bacon's 'priests' of science would continue to destabilize the world story as they enacted it. The geological theories of Charles Lyell and evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin set the stage for driving God out of the modern world story, exciting the same reaction as Spinoza had. More and more, the modern world story was appearing increasingly unstable.

Then, in the twentieth century, it began to collapse. First, scientists, practicing the Newtonian methodology they had learned, discovered that their worldview was, if not wrong, then, at least, askew. Albert Einstein's theories of relativity showed the dead matter of Newtonian physics to be structures of transformed energy. Then quantum mechanics demonstrated that Newtonian distinct 'things' were intimately interconnected, and its determinism open to chance and contingency (Smolin 2013). Second, after three generations of peace in Europe, at a point where Enlightenment progress appeared to be pointing toward human perfection, two world wars erupted, with levels of devastation proving
that rationality could not be the cornerstone of human nature Descartes and those who followed him had believed (e.g., Berman 1992).

In addition, since World War II, the modern confidence in the value of education, free trade, and human equality has destabilized the political order by which Western Europe had dominated the world for more than two centuries. As people in formerly 'backward' nations have taken advantage of scientific education, they have entered into full partnership in a world economy where China is likely to become the leading power. As the Internet has accelerated the process of global interconnection, the nations of the world are becoming increasingly interdependent in trade, financial dealings, and resource allocation, as well as their attempts to control the dangers posed by terrorism, environmental contamination and global warming (Sachs 2008). Here one of the most powerful experiments of the modern world story, national culture, has become one of the chief obstacles to solving all these problems (e.g., Smith 1995). Because different national cultures, based on their unique histories, include different ways of thinking about the world, it has become increasingly common for people from those cultures to experience the world very differently (e.g., Nisbett 2003). For example, Western and Chinese business people have different understandings of the concept of Law (Baskin 2009), leading to significant mutual antagonism over issues of intellectual property.

In order for our societies to adapt to all these changes, still another world story is emerging. Nobel Laureate in Physics Robert Laughlin (2005) calls its worldview 'emergent', David Boje and I (Boje and Baskin 2010) 'post-Newtonian', Smolin (2013) 'relational'. In this paper, I have used Smolin's relational, a term used similarly in Taylor (2007), because it implies that the 'things' we experience as distinct behave *both* as agents *and* as members of networks interconnected to other agents, in the moment and historically. Such a worldview, I believe, stands at the heart of Big History, and has also been incorporated in other social sciences - Latour's (2005) sociology of actor networks, for example, or the philosophy of Karen Barad (2007) as well as much of Michel Foucault's (1994) 'anthropology'. It is, after all, the relational interconnection of agents, often on many scales, in both space and time, that makes a relational conception of evolution so thick.

## Conclusion

Despite the unavoidable oversimplification, I hope that I have demonstrated that the basic dynamics of the Axial Age and Modernity seem similar, from the social breakdown and political fragmentation through
the intense social, political and technological innovation, from the terror roused by periods of intense warfare through the evolution of new world stories. Clearly, the Axial Age and Modernity also have significant differences. The axial transformation occurred in four very different cultures, which remained only tenuously connected. On the other hand, the modern transformation began in one area and spread across a globe that became increasingly interconnected. Yet, both periods seem unmistakably to confront the need to adapt to a significantly higher level of social complexity.

I believe that further examination will show relational evolution can be valuable to the study of Big History. A relational perspective, after all, offers tools to explore how national cultures evolved as parts of their societies' world stories, under deep historical pressures. This analysis is essential because it is the world story that contains any culture's definition of identity – our group vs. the other. As Ed Hall (1976) points out, most people still believe that anyone who does not behave according to their own culture is a barbarian, uncouth at best and insane at worst. Yet, with all the problems the world faced that can only be solved by international cooperation, the human community needs to redefine this issue of identity. Such a redefinition has been part of past cultural phase transitions. During the Agrarian Revolution, group identity was expanded from membership in a small band to membership in a state. During the Axial Age, it was again from the state to the empire. Unfortunately, we humans seem to need to define the world as 'us' and 'other'. Yet, without an invasion from space, we have run out of others.

The alternative is, not to expand, but to thoroughly redefine what we mean by us and other. As Big History demonstrates, the human race comes from a single origin. The differences between us are a matter of adaptations to different circumstances, and the question becomes whether human beings can let go of the implication of enemy that has been built into the other. Can we see the other as someone like us, who merely found a different story? Without such a redefinition, it seems unlikely that people from different cultures can come together to discuss issues of mutual interest – from economic integration to nuclear proliferation and ecological degradation – without the distortions of cultural difference and enmity.

At first, this seems an impossible goal. When the United Nations cannot address the chaos in Syria, the European Union is increasingly troubled, and some of the most industrialized nations refuse to agree with treaties on global warming, the combination of power politics and cultural difference seems insuperable. Yet, who, living in a hunter-gatherer band 1,500 years ago could have imagined identifying as
a member of a city of 80,000, such as Ur in 2800 BCE (Modelski 2003: 28), or a nation of a billion, such as China and India today? We, human beings, are capable of learning to live and think very differently, especially when our survival depends upon it. For me, Big History has the potential to contribute to this effort of relearning what it means to be a human being in a fully globalized world, rather than one largely segregated by culture, as the world was even 500 years ago. And I invited the reader to consider the analysis in this essay, as sketchy and oversimplified as it is, as a set of tools in the further development of Big History.

**Acknowledgement**

This paper is largely the result of three years of writing and discussion with Dr. Dmitri Bondarenko. While his expertise in areas with which I was not familiar was invaluable, the give and take within our explorations and discussions is the one factor that most enabled me to make this argument.

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Abel A. Alves

**Abstract**

Big History allows us to ask whether human behavior merely reflects patterns already exhibited in the natural world by other social animals. While animal behavior can be interpreted through a prism that stresses 'the struggle for existence', territories and ranks in social animals require cooperative behaviors, with the 'in-group' often reserving its most aggressive competitive behaviors for other species and rival groups of the same species. In human history territoriality, hierarchy and cooperation combine in the institutions of the empire. The Spanish Empire, therefore, can be used to test the hypothesis proposed by David Christian, and elaborated by Russell Genet, that we are 'the chimpanzees who would be ants'.

**Keywords:** Big History, Spanish Empire, chimpanzees, cooperation, human ethology.

Big History is not merely a cultural construction fabricated by some contemporary historians and scientists. There is a real empirical precedent for a Big Historical approach that reflects upon the human story in the context of natural history. Like other animals, we have evolved our own species-specific arrangement of Earth's DNA, but we still share with all other terrestrial life forms the same nucleobases that define life on this planet. Big History allows us to ask whether human behavior merely reflects patterns already set in the natural world and exhibited phenotypically by other social animals. By exploring our accounts of interaction with other animals, and comparing human efforts to subordinate them and our fellow human beings, broad evolutionary patterns that impinge upon our behavior come to be detected in other time periods and cultures. From the days of the Roman Empire, with its slaugh-

<footnote>* This essay is based on my presentation at the International Big History Association Inaugural Conference (Grand Rapids, MI: August 4, 2012) and draws on material previously published in Alves 2011. An earlier form has appeared as 'The Spanish Empire: Adaptive Animals in the Natural World' (Alves 2012).</footnote>
ter of people and nonhuman animals alike in the arena, to the British
Empire's exploitation of its colonies, including the trophy-hunting of
wildlife, historical documents portray human efforts at dominance over
people and nature reduced to resources (Kalof 2007: 27–34; Ritvo 1987:
243–288). On occasion, the documents even demonstrate some ambiva-
lence. Plutarch (AD 45–120) was concerned that the killing of animals
for food has made it easier to murder our conspecifics in war and peace,
and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was critical of some British im-
perial practices and personally lamented his shooting an orangutan
mother and leaving her infant an orphan whom he unsuccessfully at-
tempted to raise (Plutarch 1958: 573; Wallace 2002: 136–138; Slotten
2004: 219–222). As noted by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson in
*Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior*, we are
a complex enough species that we do not exhibit uniform behaviors
across human communities and even within communities, but that is
true of other species as well (Sober and Wilson 1998: 228–229, 301).
Chimpanzees, who last shared a common ancestor with us some six to
seven million years ago, have been observed to kill each other in territo-
rial and hierarchical disputes, while also sharing ‘incidental, extra food’
to bind their ranked communities. Primatologist Frans de Waal ob-
served that the alpha males Yeroen and Luit in his Arnhem Zoo study
were loser supporters in internal conflicts. Apes like Yeroen and Luit
proved to be defenders and sustainers of the weak, while Goblin,
‘a very tempestuous alpha male’ at Jane Goodall’s Gombe site in Tanza-
nia, was overthrown in a particularly violent way that nearly claimed
his life (de Waal 1998: 117–118, 145–146, 197–199; Goodall 1992: 139,
141). Our primate cultures display dominance and react against it at the
same time, while individual societies caught in the web of time may
exaggerate brutality or benevolence through custom and inculcation.
Social animals balance the competitive with the cooperative in their ef-
forts to survive. However, to demonstrate the existence of such a natu-
ral, cross-species template, Big History needs a collection of detailed
case studies. Isolated anecdotal references to ancient Rome and the
modern British Empire may be enough to develop a working hypothe-
sis, but that hypothesis requires testing through the accumulation of
data found through the examination of examples in some detail.

The case study with which I am most familiar is that of the early
modern Spanish Empire. Those involved in the construction of that im-
perial project were animals like ants or chimpanzees, only differentiated
from other animals in a capacity for more elaborate reflection on their
actions – reflection which sometimes led to the evolving critique of imperial abuse so central to the writings of the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas (c. 1484–1566). Of las Casas, Rolena Adorno has written, ‘His concerns evolved from his initial attempts in 1516 to protect the Indians while ensuring the economic prosperity of the crown, to his ultimate recommendation, made forty-eight years later, that Spain abandon altogether its rule of the Indies’ (Adorno 2011: 28–29). He also changed his position on the enslavement of Africans, initially wishing to eliminate abusive tributary demands made of Amerindians in the Caribbean islands by importing African slaves, and then regretting that he had ever made such a suggestion when he finally recognized the horrible abuses that Africans faced as slaves on Spanish estates (Clayton 2011: 79–81, 137–138, 146). Today, the moral reflections of Bartolomé de las Casas survive as part of our collective memory found in written records, and, as noted by David Christian in *Maps of Time*, this capacity for collective learning through symbolic language and abstraction may be exactly that which has enhanced our species’ ability to form the most elaborate and solid of communal bonds, generating our planetary dominance (Christian 2004: 146–148). Through fragile and complex social entities that balance competition and cooperation we have come to dominate and shape the biosphere, and that process clearly was accelerated by sixteenth-century Iberian expansion into the western hemisphere, with the Columbian Exchange in biota like wheat, maize, the smallpox virus, tobacco and horses, among other things (Crosby 1973: 52–58, 64–81, 170–171).

When alien conquerors from the Iberian Peninsula invaded the western hemisphere in 1492, they were accompanied by subjugated humans and animals. In the very act of using African slaves as tools of transformation, boundaries between humans and beasts of burden were invidiously blurred. Both the slave and the mule became ‘objects’ providing labor, but the sheer inappropriateness of reducing people in particular and sentient, conscious beings in general to the status of mere things was consistently contested by humans from Africa and animals from the eastern and western hemispheres. Slaves, cows and pigs all escaped at times, becoming *cimarrones*, ‘wild’ and ‘renegade’ in the eyes of the Spaniards (Real Academia Española 1963-1964, 1: 350). By escaping from Spanish *‘império’* – defined as ‘dominion’, ‘authority’ and ‘teritory’ in the Spanish Royal Academy’s eighteenth-century *Diccionario de Autoridades*, originally published from 1726 to 1739 (Real Academia Española 1963-1964, 2: 224) – these *cimarrones* proved their agency. They
were fully animate beings and not insensible things. Empire, ‘império’, is
an embodied confusion of categories that would reduce independent
beings to nothing more than means to an end, rather than appreciating
their status as actors who choose, compromise and are compelled. Span-
iards were guilty of this confusion in their imperialism, but like the Af-
ricans and Amerindians whom they tried to control, Spaniards were
both highly adaptive human beings and creatures like the ants that herd
aphids and ‘milk’ them for their honeydew (Wilson 2000: 356; Hölldo-
bler and Wilson 1994: 147, 149).

The reduction of another animal to a mere resource is not only a hu-
man behavior after all, and honey ants of the genus *Myrmecocystus* will
raid neighboring colonies of their conspecifics to bring back larvae, pu-
pae and honeypot ants who store food to be used by their sisters. The
conquered and captured, often called ‘slaves’ by entomologists, go
about enhancing the resources of their new anthill, with larvae and pu-
pae raised to be coworkers with their conquerors (Kronauer, Miller, and
Hölldobler 2003). The quest for domination and control of resources in
nature has a long evolutionary history, and among our chimpanzee
cousins, as shown in the 2012 film *Chimpanzee*, fruit- and nut-bearing
trees can be warred over by two different communities (Linfield,
Fothergill, and Hahn 2012). Chimpanzees will kill each other over the
questions of territory and resources, with the first detailed study of a
chimpanzee war being that between the Kasakela and Kahama commu-
nities of Tanzania in the 1970s (Goodall 1986: 503–514). By the end of
1977, Kasakela had completely eliminated its rival, even as the Roman
republic razed Carthage to the ground in 146 BCE. With their woolbear-
ing sheep, human slaves and imperial wars, the Spaniards replicated
behavioral patterns already found in the rest of the natural world, but
acts of violent domination do not themselves dominate nature. Coop-
eration between ascribed estates, mutual aid within hierarchy, helped to
maintain the Spanish imperial project, even as the anthill and the bee-
hive survive as cooperative superorganisms (Sober and Wilson 1998:
96–98, 147–149).

Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson define ‘superorganism’ as:

A society, such as a eusocial insect colony, that possesses fea-
tures of organization analogous to the physiological properties of
single organisms. The eusocial colony, for example, is divided into
reproductive castes (analogous to gonads) and worker castes
(analogous to somatic tissue); its members may, for example, ex-
change nutrients and pheromones by trophallaxis and grooming (analogous to the circulatory system) (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009: 513).

As suggested by David Christian and elaborated by Russell Genet, we well may be ‘the chimpanzees who would be ants’ (Christian 2004: 250–252; Genet 2007: 51–53, 86, 93), but this already was recognized by early modern Europeans who referred to their hierarchical and cooperative societies as social organisms: ‘the body politic’ (Sober and Wilson 1998: 132–133; Alves 1989). They were aware of their place in nature, with the influential Jesuit professor Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) arguing that ‘... “humanity” is really a certain sensitive nature and has in this fact some agreement and similarity with the nature of “horse” and of “lion”, taken in the abstract; for all are the integral principle of “being sentient”...’ According to Suárez, there is ‘a certain analogy of proportionality’ whereby ‘animal’ can be applied equivocally to humans and horses in that both integrate sentience and sensitivity into their very natures. They are alike in genus, though essentially different in species. As with Aristotle, humanity is ‘rational animality’, and Spanish political thinkers like the diplomat Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584–1648) readily drew on his culture’s perceptions of the behavior of everything from lions to bees in the advice he offered princes (Suarez 1964: 117, 101; Aristotle 1992: 60; Berns 1976; Saavedra Fajardo 1947: 113–114, 171–173).

In the Iberian Peninsula itself, Spaniards were shaped by their economic domination of nonhuman animals like sheep, goats and cows – and by the ranked human society that cooperatively maintained the Spanish economy. To Miguel Caja de Leruela (also Caxa de Leruela), a seventeenth-century official of Castile’s sheepherding guild, the Mesta, a Spain without livestock would be an impoverished land since nonhuman animals plowed the fields and provided their hides and fleece for clothing. Spain without herds would be a place where rural children would be abandoned by poor parents because they were no longer needed to tend livestock (Caja de Leruela 1975: 17–25, 177–178). Paternalistically demonstrating concern, Caja de Leruela worried about the poor who owned a few animals being denied pasturage because of the enclosure of grazing lands by wealthier individuals (Ibid.: 88–90; Vassberg 1984: 172). Likewise, he argued against the killing of valuable oxen and cows before their time. He recommended that Spain adopt prohibitions on slaughtering fertile cows and oxen still capable of pulling plows and carts, saying that some ten years of life seemed reason-
able for these animals (Caja de Leruela 1975: 109; Vassberg 1984: 160, 162). Before being punished for damaging crops, livestock were also to be judged, with substantial evidence necessary to convict any culprit (Caja de Leruela 1975: 130–131). Harmony in Caja de Leruela’s Spain required a certain level of unequal reciprocity between human elites and the humans and other animals who labored for them. This was reflected in actual eighteenth-century Mesta laws that protected shepherd-ing dogs from abuse and provided payment to human employees of the Mesta according to rank. Thus, fines as onerous as five sheep or more could be exacted from anyone who injured one of the Mesta’s sheepdogs, and each Mesta shepherd received two pounds of bread a day and an-other two pounds for his dog, with assistant shepherds in the eighteenth century earning anywhere from 6 to 18 ducats a year and the *rabadán*, or shepherd in command of subordinate herders, dogs and a *rebaño* of 1,000 to 1,500 sheep receiving 20 ducats a year in addition to the food allot-ment, which also included oil and tallow for all the shepherds (Klein 1920: 25; Phillips and Phillips 1997: 103–105).

From the level of the peasant village with its communal pasture
lands, or *dehesas*, to that of the aristocratically dominated Mesta, with its
individual flocks numbering in the thousands, Spaniards associated
with livestock. But not all shepherds throughout the empire were val-
ued equally. According to a 1748 report by the scholarly naval officers
Jorge Juan (1713–1773) and Antonio de Ulloa (1716–1795), a flock of
500 sheep in Andalusia was tended by one shepherd and an assistant.
The shepherd earned 24 pesos a year, and his helper 16 pesos. Bread,
oil, vinegar, salt, donkeys and food for sheepdogs were also provided,
with an overseer hired to supervise three flocks. For the care of 800 to
1,000 sheep, an eighteenth-century Amerindian shepherd in Peru
earned 18 pesos annually. The document also says that goods were cost-
lier in Peru than Spain, and that no food or paid assistant were provided
to the Amerindian shepherd, with 8 of the 18 pesos going to annual
tributary payments (Juan and Ulloa 1826: 273–275; 1978: 132–134). In-
digenous American shepherds prejudicially were ascribed less remu-
neration than European shepherds for comparable amounts of labor.
Veritable castes existed in the Spanish imperial superorganism, with
different individuals and subgroups playing out their particular roles
toward common societal goals, just as they do among the ants.

However, even as Andean shepherds adapted their methods of
tending alpacas and vicuñas to sheep, Amerindians in general were able
to express dominion over nonhuman animals, thereby finding a trun-
denskiöld 1922: 9–12). Like other humans, Amerindians both used and loved nonhuman animals in a hierarchy of beings that jointly recognized human dominance and mutualistic symbiotic relationships with other animate, sentient beings in nature. As ‘chimpanzees who would be ants’, our species reflects on its interactions with other animals in ways that the ant who herds aphids probably cannot. However, primatologists like Frans de Waal do make note of how apes can empathize with the needs of other species. When a starling hit the glass of her enclosure and was stunned, the bonobo Kuni went out of her way to help the bird to fly again, while, in a 1996 video shown around the world and still easily available on YouTube today, the Brookfield Zoo gorilla Binti Jua, carefully took a boy who had fallen into her enclosure to the access point where humans could enter her cage, guarding the boy from harm until she could hand him over (de Waal 2005: 2–3; NBC Chicago 1996). Like our ape cousins, and to the benefit of our societies, we are capable of intra- and interspecies care and concern, but that is certainly not the entire story where our complex ‘anthills’ are concerned.

Indeed, a conflicted relationship with nonhuman animals, and with other humans, characterized the Spanish Empire, as it characterizes us today. The Africans forcibly brought from their homeland across the Atlantic were tallied according to their ability to work. On slave ships, a *pieza de India* measured the labor done by a young, healthy male adult. Children, women and the old were horrifically counted up as fractions of one *pieza* (Curtin 1969: 22). Literally a ‘piece’ or material article, the ‘*pieza*’ also referred to game animals and, on occasion, Amerindian captives (Weber 2005: 235). In turn, when either a slave or a non-human animal like a cow or pig escaped Spanish subjugation, they were called ‘*cimarrón*’, wild and renegade (Real Academia Española 1963–1964, vol. 1: 350; Jiménez de la Espada 1965b: 296). Likewise, the Spaniards were concerned about the ‘*casta*’, or lineage, of both livestock and humans. Prejudicial concerns about racial mixtures arose along these lines, even as breeders of merino sheep judged the wool of newly born lambs to determine whether they were to be culled or not (Phillips and Phillips 1997: 116). The sad truth is that Spaniards, in ascribing value to sentient beings, leveled the difference between humans and other animals in ways we, appropriately, are not comfortable with today. Africans could be *cimarrones* like livestock, and children of mixed ethnicity might be judged by their lineage or *casta*. However, it is interesting to note that *casta* was also used to discuss the noble lineage of knights (Real Academia Española 1963–1964, vol. 1: 219–220). Many Spaniards
admitted their animality, but they usually insisted on a superior, more
rational grade of being for those Spaniards, especially males, in posi-
tions of authority. Spanish dominion, *império*, involved its verbal domi-
nance displays and outright brutal acts, even as dominance is put on dis-
play by other highly ranked individuals in the animal kingdom. How-
ever, just as an alpha male chimpanzee will alternatively food-share with
an appropriately subordinate ape and pummel a rival, the Spanish im-
pério balanced compassion with competition in its pursuit of power. Dif-
ferent individuals play their roles, even as different roles exist among
the eusocial insects.

The testimony taken at the 1660 process of beatification for Martín de Porres (1579–1639; canonized 1962) is consistent in identifying him as a man who tended to the sick and hungry regardless of rank, race or species. Multiple witnesses said he cared for Blacks, Spaniards and Amerindians, and that animals came to him to be cured ‘as though they had reason’ (*Proceso de beatificación* 1960: 100, 105, 125–129, 139, 194–195, 201, 206, 228, 245, 249, 252, 275, 291–293, 310–311, 318). The witnesses also said that he disciplined his body in the approved manner of the day, sleeping without a real bed, refusing to eat meat, and whipping himself (*Proceso de beatificación* 1960: 98, 136, 193, 299).

To some Fray Martín's actions and his very being might have been
transgressive, but to those around him, who later testified on his behalf
at his 1660 beatification process, he was admired and saintly because of
his behavior, with his humility always being raised in this context. Ac-
cording to one witness, he focused on his own *casta* status – his own
biracial and boundary-challenging status as a ‘*mulato*’ – while praying
and whipping himself, referring to himself as a *mulato* dog – ‘*un perrom-
ulato*’ (*Proceso de beatificación* 1960: 193).<fnref n="1" /> Whether the ‘*perromulato*’ inci-
dent occurred or not, de Porres' charitable acts, testified to by many
witnesses, illustrate a man who shared food, medicine and love regard-
less of how the prejudicial in his society judged the so-called purity of
one's blood, or *limpieza de sangre*.

<footnote n="1">¹ During Martín de Porres' own lifetime, the *castas* – racial lineages and mixtures that derived from Amerindians, Africans and Europeans – came to be an increasingly significant challenge to a Spanish American empire that initially saw itself as divided into a *república de los indios* and a *república de los españoles* (Elliott 2006: 170–171; Earle 2012: 179–186). The *Diccionario de autoridades* explicitly says that early modern Spaniards derogatorily compared the generation of ‘*mulato*’ to the generation of a *mulo* or mule (Real Academia Española 1963–1964, vol. 2: 628).</footnote>
Indeed, by being a food-sharer and healer, Martín de Porres helped to illustrate and maintain one of the Spanish Empire's justifications for its very existence: that it provided aid and comfort to those in need, and that though there were ranks, there was sharing according to rank, with charity trying to minimize suffering (Alves 1989; 1996: 148–149, 157). In the Dominican priest Bernardo de Medina's seventeenth-century biography of Martín de Porres, the Dominicans' slaves at the hacienda of Límatambo are included among those he cured, and it can be argued that de Porres thereby protected his order's economic interests while also performing a charitable act (Medina 1964: 88). A sort of reciprocal sharing among the ranks was maintained, with fundamental physical needs taken into account. Likewise, in sixteenth-century New Spain, while Amerindian production of wheat was tithed, the production of maize was not, and the old Mexican staple was consistently sold at lower prices than wheat, both establishing wheat as an elite Spanish grain and providing Amerindians with their culturally preferred grain at a charitably lower cost (Alves 1996: 154; Gibson 1964: 322–323). The Spanish imperial vision of a well-functioning body politic called for charitable donations of food to be dispensed from hospitals, and even Cortés, the conqueror of New Spain, provided a legacy for the hospital he founded, the Hospital de la Limpia y Pura Concepción de Nuestra Señora y Jesús Nazareno, in his last will and testament (Paso y Troncoso 1905, vol. 3: 23; Muriel 1956–1960, vol. 1: 40–43; Alves 1996: 183–211). In the Christian context, charity could become a display of power and worth, and by living Christian humility and service, Martín de Porres enhanced his own status, gaining respect and the liberty for an occasional criticism of what he perceived as heartless domination. Medina wrote that de Porres rebuked the Dominican in charge of his convent's food for having his smelly, old kitchen dog killed after years of loyal service. Challenging the man's lack of charity toward his loyal dog, Fray Martín still addressed him respectfully as 'padre'. After a night in San Martín's cell, the dog was restored to life and cured of his ill health and odor according to Medina. His new protector, Martín de Porres, then told the dog to avoid his ungrateful former master's pantry, which the dog did for the rest of his life (Medina 1964: 106–107). Far from being San Martín's only companion, this resurrected animal joined the future saint's multi-racial and multi-species community. When a dog and cat gave birth in a cellar of the convent, de Porres began to feed them, telling them, 'Eat and remain calm and don't fight'. And so... they appeared to be of one species in their conformity' (Proceso de beatificación 1960: 158; Medina 1964: 98).
This scene of a dog and cat eating together (and they would eventually be joined by a mouse as well) meant much to Spaniards as a metaphor of harmonious interaction regardless of race or rank (Cussen 1996: 141, 150-151, 172, 246; García-Rivera 1995: 4-5). However, it also presented a quiet challenge to the hierarchical boundaries between species.

San Martín's example resonated with his fellow Dominicans, who bore laudatory witness on his behalf after his death. Today's ethology presents cases of other-oriented behavior in our close relative the chimpanzee, including the adoption of the orphan Oscar by the alpha male Freddy in the movie *Chimpanzee* and the aunt-like care given a succession of infants by the infertile dominant female Gigi at Goodall's Gombe site (Linfield, Fothergill, and Hahn 2012; Boesch et al. 2010; Goodall 1990: 154-160; Warneken et al. 2007). Even primates less closely related to us, capuchin monkeys, have demonstrated a conception of justice and reciprocity in experiments. If one capuchin is generous with a piece of cucumber, Frans de Waal has found that a second capuchin is more likely to share a piece of apple (de Waal 2005: 205). In his book entitled *Good Natured*, de Waal reminds us that social animals do cooperate as well as compete, and nature is not only 'red in tooth and claw' (de Waal 1996: 148). David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson argue that, from bacteria to humans, group selection can operate in such a way that an individual in a given community will sacrifice individual genetic fitness so that the community competes more successfully with other groups of conspecifics (Wilson D. and Wilson E. 2008; Wilson 2002: 9-25, 35-37, 138-140). Soldiers on the battlefield do sacrifice themselves for their fellows, and nuns fail to have children while often educating and tending to the offspring of others. Already in the early seventeenth century, Martín de Porres was demonstrating to his world a pattern of behavior that might earn respect without focusing on the aggressive pursuit of power. He also demonstrated that community might be built thereby, and that his community could include other animals as well as humans of different ranks. He was not able to discuss this or demonstrate this using the evidence of evolutionary biology, where species are far from hermetically sealed, but he lived in a world that had its own ways of discussing these principles. A number of the Dominicans around him would have been well aware of Biblical passages envisioning perfect peace through the wolf's dwelling with the lamb (*Isaiah* 11: 6) and calls for communal harmony through all humans playing their roles to the common good in the mystical body of Christ (1 *Corinthians* 12) and feeding and clothing the least of Christ's brethren (*Matthew* 25: 35-40). Ag-
gression and violence, dominance and brutality, were really not the only things imperial Spaniards embraced.

Social animals cannot live by dominance alone. The Spanish Empire was more than the sum total of its most brutal displays. It sometimes was the peaceful interaction of people, and other animals too – a play with acts full of communication, community and compassion, as well as atrocity and violence. It is time for us to recognize, as Miguel de Cervantes already did, that in the midst of their virtual reality Don Quixote and Sancho Panza always, ‘returned to their beasts and the life of beasts that they led’ ('Volvieron a susbestias, y a serbestias...' Cervantes 1949: 703; 1998: 639). The pursuit of *império* is testimony enough of the basic animality we share across the centuries, but so too is the compassion of San Martín de Porres. In *Mothers and Others*, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy presents a strong case for the elaborate, complicated and convoluted achievements of human cultures being rooted in our ability to read each other's needs, and that this is developed through human (and, perhaps, hominin) levels of allo-parenting not as pronounced in the other extant hominids: orangutans, bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas. According to her, at some point (i.e., perhaps starting with *Homo ergaster*, or early *Homo erectus*, some 1.8 million years ago), hominin infants were selected to read the intentions of multiple caregivers, including grandmothers, siblings, fathers and the completely unrelated. In the much studied foraging cultures of the twentieth century, this led to a nexus of cooperative behaviors that restrained extreme hierarchical construction and competition (Hrdy 2009: 4–5, 17, 76–78, 133–134, 179–180, 273–275, 278–286; Wood 2005: 23, 84–87). While variations obviously exist, our human cultural superorganisms are more complex elaborations on a natural hominid propensity for cooperation and group selection which struggles with our more competitive tendencies. We may not communicate chemically like ants, but communicate we do, constructing a highly adaptive collective consciousness of sorts (Christian 2004: 146–148; Hölldobler and Wilson 2009: 178–183; Grassie 2010: 89–90). Equality before the law, democratic institutions, universal human rights, the United Nations and the question of animal rights have become some of our twenty-first-century efforts at combating the competitive lust to dominate each other and what we term natural resources. Our twenty-first-century challenge is whether we will learn to emphasize our cooperative and self-effacing behaviors, or whether we only will use our cooperative capacity to form armies and compete violently over ever dwindling ‘resources’ in a natural world reduced to objects to be used
and used up. By reviewing historical case studies like the Spanish
Empire in all its complexity, Big History accumulates data on both
variations and flexible templates appearing in animal life and human
history. Can group selection embrace Gaia and her multiplicity of eco-
systems and life-forms, or will it continue to be community- and spe-
cies-specific? Can reflection and learning in our highly adaptive spe-
cies trump the competitive tendencies found in warring chimpanzees
and anthills? Without being overly reductionist, it must be asked
whether the twenty-first century will belong to San Martín de Porres
or Caesar.

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## Abstract

The Silk Roads are the quintessential example of the interconnectedness of civi-lizations during the Era of Agrarian Civilizations, and the exchanges that oc-curred along them resulted in the most significant collective learning so far experienced by the human species. The primary function of the Silk Roads was to facilitate trade, but the intellectual, social, and artistic exchanges that re-sulted had an even greater impact on collective learning. The Silk Roads also illustrate another key theme in Big History – evolving complexity at all scales. Just as the early universe was simple until contingent circumstances made it possible for more complex entities to appear, and that the relatively simple sin-gle-cell organisms of early life on the planet were able to evolve into an extraor-dinary, complex biodiversity, so human communities and the connections be-tween them followed similar trajectories. The comingling of so many goods, ideas, and diseases around a geographical hub located deep in central Eurasia was the catalyst for an extraordinary increase in the complexity of human rela-tionships and collective learning, a complexity that helped drive our species inexorably along a path towards the modern revolution.

**Keywords:** Silk Roads, Collective Learning, Agrarian Civilizations, Afro-Eurasia, trade.

## Introduction

During the Era of Agrarian Civilizations (c. 3000 BCE – 1750 CE) human communities did not exist in isolation. As confederations of pastoralists, states and large-scale agrarian civilizations expanded and stretched their boundaries, they joined together to form larger systems. Sometimes they joined up simply because their borders met and merged, but more often they joined in a looser sense as people from one region traded with, or traveled to, or borrowed ideas from, or fought with people from other regions within and beyond agrarian civilization. Because of this regular commingling the very idea of distinct agrarian civi-

<footnote>* Some of the material presented at the first IBHA Conference in this paper was later in-corporated into *Big History. Between Nothing and Everything*, by David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown and Craig Benjamin.</footnote>
lizations with rigid borders is misleading. Borders that we identify on maps are, for the most part, modern inventions. The borders of agrarian civilizations were more often vague regions within which the control of rulers fluctuated or was contested by the claims of neighbors or local rulers.

Despite the complexity and fluidity of these processes, the slow linking up of different agrarian civilizations was immensely important because it facilitated a dramatic expansion in the size and diversity of collective learning, which can be described as the human capacity to share ideas so efficiently that they accumulate in the collective human memory from generation to generation. From the very beginning of human history the exchange of information and ideas between diverse peoples and cultures has been a prime mover in promoting change through this process of collective learning. As the smaller exchanges of the Early Agrarian Era began to expand, the enhanced collective learning that followed led to more and more significant changes in the material, artistic, social, and spiritual domains of human history. Eventually within the Afro-Eurasian world zone in particular, every human community was connected together within a vibrant web. This was true within each of the individual world zones, although not between them. Significant linkages developed during the era in the Americas, Australasia, and the Pacific, but the four zones were so isolated from each other that human populations in each remained utterly ignorant of events in the others.

The most influential of the intensified Afro-Eurasian exchange networks emerged around a trading hub located deep in Central Asia, along the Silk Roads. The trans-civilizational contacts that occurred through this exchange resulted in the most significant collective learning so far experienced by the human species. The first important period of the Silk Roads was between roughly 50 BCE and 250 CE, when material and intellectual exchange took place between the Chinese, Indian, Kushan, Iranian, steppe-nomadic and Mediterranean worlds. The demise of the Western Roman, Parthian, Kushan and Han Chinese empires resulted in several centuries of less regular contact, but the second 'Silk Roads Era' subsequently operated for several centuries between c. 600 and 1000 CE, connecting China, India, Southeast Asia, the Dar al-Islam, and the Byzantines into another vast web based on overland and maritime trade. The primary function of the Silk Roads during both periods was to facilitate trade. Not only material goods were carried along the Silk Roads, however, but intellectual, social, and artistic ideas as well, which together had an even greater impact on collective learning (Christian et al. 2013: 174–175).
An early example of intellectual exchange, which took place before
the Silk Roads had started to operate with real intensity, was the spread
of Greek and Hellenistic culture from the Eastern Mediterranean to Cen-
tral Asia and India. This happened because Greek merchants and colo-
nists followed in the footsteps of Alexander and spread Greek language,
art, religion, philosophy, and law throughout much of the region. Per-
haps, the most important spiritual consequence of material exchange
was the spread of religions across Afro-Eurasia, particularly Mahayana
Buddhism, which moved from India through Central Asia to China and
East Asia. An example of cultural exchange that led to enhanced collec-
tive learning was the spread of artistic ideas and techniques, particu-
larly the diffusion eastwards of syncretistic sculptural styles that devel-
oped in the second century CE in the workshops of Gandhara (in Paki-
stan) and Mathura (in India), where the first ever representation of the
Buddha was conceived (Ibid.: 176).

The major biological consequence of Silk Roads trade was the
spread of diseases and plague. Not only did the passing of disease bac-
teria along the Silk Roads by traders play a significant role in the de-
population and subsequent decline of both the Han and Roman Em-
pires, but the exposure of millions of humans to these pathogens meant
that antibodies spread extensively throughout the Afro-Eurasian world
zone, and important immunities were built up within populations.
These immunities proved of great significance in the pre-modern age,
when Muslim, Chinese, and particularly European traders and explor-
ers carried Afro-Eurasian diseases to the other world zones, with disas-
trous consequences for native populations (McNeil 1998). These four
brief examples all support the claim that the Silk Roads profoundly af-
fected the subsequent shape and direction of all human history.

Commercial and cultural exchange on this scale became possible only
after the small river valley states of the early era had been consolidated
into substantial agrarian civilizations, a process that was largely the result
of warfare. Continuing expansion by the major civilizations meant that,
by the first Silk Roads Era, just four imperial dynasties – those of the Ro-
man, Parthian, Kushan, and Han Empires – controlled much of the Eura-
sian landmass, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The consolidation of these
states established order and stability over a vast and previously frag-
mented geopolitical environment. Extensive internal road networks were
constructed, great advances were made in metallurgy and transport tech-
nology, agricultural production was intensified, and coinage appeared for
the first time. By the middle of the last century BCE, conditions in Afro-
Eurasia were ripe for levels of material and cultural exchange – and col-
lective learning – hitherto unknown (Benjamin 2009: 30–32).
Also critical in facilitating these exchanges were the pastoral nomads, who formed communities that live primarily from the exploitation of domestic animals such as cattle, sheep, camels, or horses. The exact chronology of the origins and spread of pastoralism remains obscure, but certainly by the middle to late fourth millennium BCE the appearance of burial mounds across the steppes of Inner Asia indicates that some communities that were dependent upon herds or flocks of domestic animals had become semi-nomadic. There were varying degrees of nomadism, ranging from groups that had no permanent settlements at all to communities like the Andronovo that were largely sedentary and lived in permanent settlements. The highly mobile, militarized pastoralism of Inner Asia, associated with the riding of horses by the Saka/Scythians and other groups, probably did not emerge until early in the first millennium BCE (Christian et al. 2013: 177-178).

In Afro-Eurasia, by the time the first cities and states appeared, the technologies of the secondary products revolution had generated more productive ways of exploiting livestock, some of them so productive that they allowed entire communities to depend almost exclusively on their herds of animals (Sherratt 1981: 261-305). The more they did this, however, the more nomadic they had to be, so that they could graze their animals over large areas. The result was that there developed, over several millennia, entire lifeways based mainly on pastoralism, capable of exploiting the arid lands that ran in a long horizontal belt from north-west Africa through Southwest Asia and Central Asia to Mongolia.

By the middle of the first millennium BCE, a number of large pastoral nomadic communities had emerged with the military skills and technologies, and the endurance and mobility, to dominate their sedentary agrarian neighbors. Some of them, including the Saka, Xiongnu, Yuezhi, and Wusun, established powerful state-like confederations that formed in the steppe lands between the agrarian civilizations. These confederations demonstrated the ability of pastoral nomads to prosper in the harsh interior of Afro-Eurasia. Once such communities emerged, they facilitated the linking up of all the different lifeways and communities. Prior to the success of pastoralists in these more marginal zones, agrarian civilizations were considerably more isolated from each other. Ultimately it was the role of pastoralists as facilitators and protectors of trade and exchange that allowed the Silk Roads and other networks to flourish (Christian et al. 2013: 177-178).

**First Silk Roads Era (c. 50 BCE - c. 250 CE)**

With these preconditions in place, it was the decision by the Han Chinese to begin to interact with their western neighbors and engage in long-distance commerce that turned small-scale regional trading activ-
ity into a great trans-Afro-Eurasian commercial network. The Han be-
came involved in the late-second century BCE after Emperor Wudi dis-
patched envoy Zhang Qian on a diplomatic and exploratory mission
into Central Asia. When Zhang Qian returned after an epic journey of
twelve years, he convinced the emperor that friendly relations could be
established with many of the states of the 'Western Regions' because
they were 'hungry for Han goods' (Benjamin 2007b: 3-30). Those that
were not eager to trade could be subdued by force and compelled to
join the Han trade and tributary network. Within a decade the Han had
established a tributary relationship with dozens of city-states of Central
Asia, and mercantile traffic began to flow out of China along the ancient
migration routes into Central Asia. Half a century after the Han began
to engage with their western neighbors, Augustus came to power in
Rome following a century of civil war. This restored peace and stability
to much of Western Afro-Eurasia, leading to a sharp increase in the de-
mand for luxury goods in Rome, particularly for spices and exotic tex-
tiles like silk (Benjamin 2009: 30-32).

The major Chinese export commodity in demand in Rome was silk, an elegant, translucent, sensual material that soon came to be regarded as the last word in fashion by wealthy patrician women. The Chinese, realizing the commercial value of their monopoly on silk, carefully guarded the secret of silk production, and border guards in Dunhuang searched merchants to make sure they were not carrying any actual silk worms out of the country. The Han iron was prized in Rome for its exceptional hardness. Fine spices were imported into the Roman Empire from Arabia and India, notably nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, and pepper, prized as condiments, but also as aphrodisiacs, anesthetics, and perfumes. Trade with China and Central Asia for such high-value goods cost the Romans a fortune. In 65 CE, Roman Senator Pliny the Elder wrote that trade with Asia was draining the treasury of some 100 million sestercii every year (Ibid.: 30-32). Even though Pliny's figure is undoubtedly exaggerated, it provides evidence of the incredible scale of Silk Roads commercial exchanges. In return for their high value-exports, the Chinese imported a range of agricultural products (including grapes), Roman glassware, art objects from India and Egypt, and horses from the steppes.

The major Silk Roads land routes stretched from the Han capital, Chang'an, deep into Central Asia by way of the Gansu Corridor and Tarim Basin. The animal that made Silk Roads trade possible in the eastern and central regions of Afro-Eurasia was the Bactrian camel. Native to the steppes of Central Asia, the two-humped Bactrian camel is a supreme example of superb evolutionary adaptation. To survive the
harsh winters, the camel grows a long, shaggy coat, which it sheds ex-
tremely rapidly as the season warms up. The two humps on its back are
composed of sustaining fat and its long eyelashes and sealable nostrils help
to keep out dust in the frequent sandstorms. The two broad toes on each
of its feet have undivided soles and are able to spread widely as an adap-
tation to walking on sand. The bulk of overland Silk Roads trade was lit-
erally carried on the backs of these extraordinary animals (Christian et al.
2013: 178).

In western Eurasia, the major land route departed from the great trading cities of Roman Syria, crossed the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, then climbed across the Iranian Plateau toward Afghanistan (then known as Bactria). Significant information on the geography of the western part of the Silk Roads has come to us from a document produced early in the first century CE – *Parthian Stations* – written by a Parthian Greek merchant Isodorus of Charax (Benjamin 2009: 30–32). Around the time *Parthian Stations* was being composed, the amount of trans-Afro-Eurasian trade taking place by sea was also increasing, particularly between Roman Egypt and the coast of India. The survival of the first century CE seaman’s handbook, the *Periplus of the Erythrian Sea*, has provided historians with a detailed account of maritime commerce at that time (Ibid.: 30–32). The *Periplus* demonstrates that sailors had discovered the secrets of the monsoon ‘trade’ winds. The winds blow reliably from the southwest in summer, allowing heavily laden trade ships to sail across the Indian Ocean from the coast of Africa to India. In winter the winds reverse, and the same ships carrying new cargo would make the return journey to the Red Sea. Whether by land or by sea, however, no traders we are aware of ever made their way along the entire length of the Silk Roads during the first era of its operation. Instead, merchants from the major eastern and western civilizations took their goods so far, then passed them on to a series of middlemen, including traders who were operating deep within the Kushan Empire.

At the heart of the Silk Roads network, straddling and influencing both
the land and maritime routes, was the Kushan Empire (c. 45-225 CE),
one of the most important yet least known agrarian civilizations in
world history (Benjamin 1998, 2009). By maintaining relatively cordial
relations with Romans, Parthians, Chinese, Indians, and the steppe no-
mads, the Kushans were able to play a crucial role in facilitating the ex-
traordinary levels of cross-cultural exchange that characterize this first
Silk Roads Era. The Kushan monarchs were not only effective political
and military rulers; they also demonstrated a remarkable appreciation
of art and were patrons of innovative sculpture workshops within their
empire. The output from these workshops reflects the sort of synthesis
typical of the intensity of collective learning during the Era of Agrarian Civilizations.

The sculpture produced in the workshops of Gandhara and Mathura during the first two centuries of the Common Era was created by the combined talents of Central Asian, Indian, and probably Hellenistic Greek artists who placed themselves at the service of a resurgent Buddhist spirituality and created a whole new set of images for worship. Until this moment the Buddha had never been depicted in human form, but had instead been represented by symbols including an umbrella or footprints in the sand. The first ever representation of the Buddha, which appeared in Gandhara (in modern-day Pakistan), was influenced by depictions of Greco-Roman deities. This physical representation then spread along the Silk Roads, penetrating south to Sri Lanka and east to China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia (Benjamin 1998, 2009).

An equally striking example of this cross-fertilization of ideas and traditions is the spread of Buddhist ideology along the great trade routes. Buddhism first emerged in northern India in the sixth century BCE. Eight hundred years later, according to ancient Chinese Buddhist documents, the Kushan king, Kanishka the Great (c. 129–152 CE?) convened an important meeting in Kashmir at which the decision was taken to rewrite the Buddhist scriptures in a more popular and accessible language. This helped facilitate the emergence and spread of Mahayana (or Great Vehicle) Buddhism, partly because the scriptures were now written in a language the common people could understand, and not one that could be read only by religious elites (Benjamin 2013).

The well-traveled trade routes from India through the Kushan realm and into China facilitated the spread of Buddhist ideas which, because they offered the hope of salvation to all regardless of caste or status, was already popular with India's merchants and businessmen. The Chinese merchants active in the silk trade became attracted to the faith, too, and returned home to spread the Buddhist message. Chinese edicts of 65–70 CE specifically mention the spread of Buddhism and opposition to it from imperial scholars devoted to Confucianism. By 166 CE, the Han emperor himself was sacrificing to the Buddha, and the Sutra on the 'Perfection of the Gnosis' was translated into Chinese by 179 CE. By the late fourth century, during a period of disunity in China, much of the population of northern China had adopted Buddhism, and by the sixth century much of southern China as well. The religion also later found ready acceptance in Korea, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, and Southeast Asia (Benjamin 1998, 2009).
The Silk Roads also facilitated the spread of Christianity, Manichaeism and, later, Islam. Christian missionaries made good use of the superb Roman road and sea transportation networks. The Christian missionary, Paul of Tarsus, may have traveled as many as 8,000 miles along the roads and sea-lanes of the eastern Roman Empire preaching to small Christian communities. Christianity eventually spread further to the east along the Silk Roads, through Mesopotamia and Iran, into India, and eventually into China. One branch of Christianity, Nestorianism, became particularly strong throughout the central and eastern Silk Roads. The Central Asian religion of Manichaeism also benefitted from the silk routes after it emerged in Mesopotamia in the third century CE. Its founder, Mani (216-272 CE) was a fervent missionary who traveled extensively throughout the region and also dispatched disciples. Like Buddhism, Manichaeism was particularly attractive to merchants, and eventually most of the major Silk Roads trading cities contained Manichaean communities (Christian et al. 2013: 180).

During the third century of the Common Era, the Silk Roads fell gradually into decline as both China and the Roman Empire withdrew from the trans-Afro-Eurasian web. Ironically, Silk Roads trade itself was at least partly responsible for this disengagement, because it contributed to the spread of disastrous epidemic diseases. Smallpox, measles, and bubonic plagues devastated the populations at either end of the routes, where people had less resistance. Population estimates from the ancient world are always difficult, but the population of the Roman Empire may have fallen from 60 million to 45 million between the mid-first and mid-second centuries CE. As smallpox devastated the Mediterranean world late in the second century, populations declined again, to perhaps 40 million by 400 CE. In China, populations fell from perhaps 60 million in 200 CE to 45 million by 600 CE (Bentley and Zeigler 2010: 282).

These huge demographic losses, which happened at the same time as the decline of previously stable agrarian civilizations (the Han Dynasty disintegrated in 220 CE, the Kushan and Parthian Empires collapsed under pressure from Sasanian invaders a decade or so later, and the Roman Empire experienced a series of crises throughout the first half of the third century) meant that, for the next several centuries, the prevailing political situation in many parts of Afro-Eurasia was not conducive to large-scale commercial exchange. However, with the creation of the Dar al-Islam in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, and the establishment of the Tang Dynasty in China at the same time, significant Silk Roads exchanges along both land and maritime routes revived.
Second Silk Roads Era c. 600 – c. 1000 CE

Both the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) and its successor, the Song Dyn-
nasty (960–1279 CE), presided over a vibrant market economy in China,
in which agricultural and manufacturing specialization, population
growth, urbanization, and infrastructure development led to high levels
of internal and external trade. New financial instruments (including
printed paper money) were devised to facilitate large-scale mercantile
activity. At the same time, Arab merchants, benefiting from the stable
and prosperous Abbasid administration in Baghdad, began to engage
with Chinese merchants in lucrative commercial enterprises. Large
numbers of Muslim merchants actually moved to China where they
joined communities of Byzantine, Indian, and Southeast Asian migrants
in the great Chinese trading cities. As maritime trade gradually eclipsed
overland trade in volume, merchants and sailors from all over Afro-
Eurasia flocked to the great southern port cities of Guangzhou and
Quanzhou (Christian et al. 2013: 180–181).

The recent discovery of a sunken ninth-century CE Arab ship – the so-
called Belitung Wreck – in the waters of Indonesia has provided histori-
ans with tangible evidence of both the intensely commercial nature of
Chinese-Muslim trade and the significance of maritime routes in facili-
tating it (Worrall 2003: 112ff.). The dhow was filled with tens of thou-
sands of carefully packaged Tang ceramic plates and bowls, along with
many gold and silver objects. The Tang bowls were functional and in-
tended for the ninth-century equivalent of a ‘mass market’. Their almost
factory-like manufacture demonstrates the existence of a well-organized
commercial infrastructure. The bowls required the use of cobalt for blue
coloring, which was imported by the Chinese manufacturers in signifi-
cant quantities from Iran. The firing date of the bowls was carefully
noted in the ship’s manifest. The cargo also included large quantities of
standardized inkpots, spice jars, and jugs, clearly export goods manu-
factured for specific markets. Decorative patterns painted or glazed on
the various items – including Buddhist, Iranian, and Islamic motifs –
show the specific market the goods were intended for. China and the
Dar al-Islam were clearly engaged in intense commercial exchanges
during this second Silk Roads Era, and Arab mariners undertaking
lengthy seagoing voyages were maintaining this vibrant trans-Afro-
Eurasian web late in the first millennium of the Common Era.

As with the first Silk Roads Era, although the material exchanges
were important and impressive, the cultural exchanges seem in retro-
spect of even greater significance. As noted above, long before the Tang
came to power, many foreign religions had made their way into East
Asia. With the advent of Islam in the seventh century and the estab-
lishment of substantial Muslim merchant communities in the centuries that followed, mosques also began to appear in many Chinese cities. Yet of all the foreign beliefs that were accepted in China, only Buddhism made substantial inroads against Confucianism. Between 600–1000 CE, thousands of Buddhist stupas and temples were constructed in China. With its promise of salvation, Buddhism seriously challenged Daoism and Confucianism for the hearts and minds of many Chinese, and in the end the syncretic faith of Chan Buddhism (Zen Buddhism in Japan) emerged as a popular compromise (Christian et al. 2013: 181).

## Conclusion

The Silk Roads, both the land and maritime variants, are the quintessential example of the interconnectedness of civilizations during the Era of Agrarian Civilizations. Along these difficult routes through some of the harshest geography on earth traveled merchants and adventurers, diplomats and missionaries, each carrying their commodities and ideas enormous distances across the Afro-Eurasian world zone. Each category of exchange was important, but perhaps the most significant consequence was the spread of religion, particularly Buddhism, which became one of the key ideological and spiritual beliefs of South and East Asia during the Era. To this day Buddhism remains one of the great cultural bonds shared by millions of Asian people, one of the many legacies that the modern world owes to the Silk Roads. As a result of this interaction, despite the diversity of participants, the history of Afro-Eurasia has preserved a certain underlying unity, expressed in common technologies, artistic styles, cultures and religions, even disease and immunity patterns, a unity that was to have profound implications for subsequent world history.

Silk Roads exchanges play an even more significant role in the big history narrative. The physical contexts that made the Silk Roads possible were the product of billions of years of geological change and biological evolution. Geography made it possible for the first agrarian civilizations of western Eurasia and northeastern Africa to form cultural and commercial connections, but geography also prevented Chinese civilization from joining these developing networks in any substantive way. Only with the biological evolution and then human domestication of the silk worm and the Bactrian camel did the Chinese have an export commodity valuable enough, and a transport mechanism hardy enough, to justify and facilitate the expensive and complex expeditions necessary to allow the Chinese merchants to join the pre-existing Afro-Eurasian exchange network. This joining together of previously separated human communities led to a steep increase in levels of collective learning and complexity that had regional and global ramifications.
The development of the Silk Roads is also an example of another key theme in Big History – evolving complexity at all scales. In the same way that the early universe was simple until contingent circumstances made it possible for more complex entities to appear, and that the relatively simple single-cell organisms of early life on the planet were able to evolve into an extraordinary, complex biodiversity, so human communities and the connections between them followed similar trajectories. The commingling of so many goods, ideas, and diseases around a geographical hub located deep in central Eurasia was the catalyst for an extraordinary increase in the complexity of human relationships and collective learning, a complexity that drove our species inexorably along a path towards the modern revolution.

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**Benjamin C. 1998.** An Introduction to Kushan Research. *Worlds of the Silk Roads: Ancient and Modern* / Ed. by D. Christian and C. Benjamin, pp. 31–50. Silk Roads Studies Series. Vol. II. Turnhout: Brepols.

**Benjamin C. 2007a.** *The Yuezhi. Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria*. Silk Roads Studies Series. Vol. XIV. Turnhout: Brepols.

**Benjamin C. 2007b.** Hungry for Han Goods? Zhang Qian and the Origins of the Silk Roads. *Toronto Studies in Central and Inner Asia* / Ed. by M. Gervers, and G. Long. Vol. VIII. pp. 3–30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

**Benjamin C. 2009.** The Kushans in World History. Vol. XXV. *World History Bulletin* 1: 30–32.

**Benjamin C. 2013.** The Great Deliverer, the Righteous, the Just, the Autocrat, the God, Worthy of Worship. Kanishka I, Kushan Dynastic Religion, and Buddhism *Toronto Studies in Central and Inner Asia* / Ed. by M. Gervers, and G. Long. Vol. IX. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.

**Bentley J., and Zeigler H. 2010.** *Traditions and Encounters*. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

**Christian D., Brown C. S., and Benjamin C. 2013.** *Big History: Between Nothing and Everything*. New York: McGraw-Hill.

**McNeil W. H. 1998.** *Plagues and People*. New York: Anchor.

**Sherratt A. 1981.** Plough and Pastoralism. Aspects of the Secondary Products Revolution. *Pattern of the Past: Studies in Honor of David Clarke* / Ed. by I. Hodder, G. Isaac, and N. Hammond, pp. 261–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

**Worrall S. 2003.** 'Made in China'. *National Geographic Magazine* (June 2009): 112–123.
13

Retrofitting the Future

Barry Rodrigue

Abstract

This paper considers the subspecialty of adaptive technology. It looks at tech-
nology development in the light of our rapidly changing world and in the con-
text of Big History. The author makes a case for past technologies serving as mod-
els from which new technologies may be developed. In this way, he sees a collec-
tive knowledge of the past, as well as considerations of the present and future,
conferring survival benefits on civilization. In this way, Big History holds
great pragmatic promise for humanity.

**Keywords:** adaptive technology, Big History, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), future studies, indigenous heritage.

Big History is involved in a great project of expanding the view of hu-
manity's place in the universe. Its studies are leading to new connec-
tions between previously separated entities, from cities and minerals to
shipping lanes and thermoclines. But as scientists and scholars develop
new insights of cosmic history, they should also think back to their an-
cestors – to our forefathers and foremothers who took their living from
the land, sea, rivers and hillsides of the ancient world. They should also
think about today's indigenous peoples who are custodians of a middle
tradition between the old and the new ways. Such reflection on the past
should not be a focus of just antiquarian interest but it should also re-
flect a present-day concern for sustainable adaptation to life on our rap-
idly changing planet.

Classically minded scholars tend to designate the small agrarian cit-
ies of 5000 years ago as the ‘start of civilization’ but, in fact, the individ-
ual components that collectively constitute ‘civilization’ existed long
before Mesopotamia became its so-called cradle. The first understand-
ings of the universe began with our Paleolithic ancestors, not with Neo-
lithic rulers and priests. These understandings developed in continual
and collective processes, beginning with the evolution of our genus
more than two million years ago.

This is borne out with the discovery that many of the traditional
hallmarks used to identify ‘civilization’ began before the adoption of agri-
culture. Take, for example, permanent residency in single locations and
the development of ceramics. Hunters and gatherers lived in permanent
communities in places like Palestine and Japan over 10,000 years ago, while pottery has been pushed back 20,000 years with its recent discovery in southern China (Wu *et al.* 2012). Indeed, it was hunters and gatherers who developed strategies that led to the development of agriculture. While hardly news to most scholars, it is a fact that needs to be better articulated with a public that tends to focus on technological and social aspects of Neolithic society.

The hunting and gathering peoples of the world knew their landscapes and waterscapes better than the farmers who had to micro-manage their crops on small plots of lands. Agriculture might have allowed the division of labor so that a few specialists could spend their time studying the stars, but, in the older tradition, a majority of hunters and gatherers acquired such knowledge of nature. This, indeed, is a point made by social scholar James Tierney: 'The tendency is to lump all our ancient ancestors into the category of hunter-gather. This implies to the lay person, as well as many scholars, that these were small bands forever on the move, with little or no behaviors that we might describe as "advanced culture"' (Tierney 2011: 290).

## Examples

On low alpine peaks along the coast of Maine are small cuts in the granite ledges. These elongated holes were quarries dug a hundred years ago to extract mica. Maine was one of the world's large mica producers back then. Mica is an igneous form of silicon whose name can be translated from Latin as 'a glittering crumb'. Indeed, as you walk up the tote roads on these hills, the earth glitters with fragments that fell off horse-drawn carts a century ago. Mica is inert, flexible, lightweight, non-conducting, and opaque. In earlier days, it was used as windows in boilers (isinglass), in lanterns to shield lampshade fabric from a wick's flame, as well as insulation for electrical plugs and toasters. Today, mica is used in atomic force microscopy, which produces high resolution, three-dimensional imaging.

This is an example of how older uses of technology can be migrated into more modern uses. There is nothing unusual about this process. People have adapted older technologies into newer ones for millennia – this paradigm of transferrable technology is a backbone of material sciences. Pigments that our ancestors developed for use on the walls of caves, like Lascaux and Duogate and Blombos, have been developed for use on the walls of the international space station and are even enroute to Mars (NASA 2012).

My professional training lies in the disciplines of geography and archeology. The research that I entered focuses on the movement of hu-
mans into the northern Appalachian Highlands – the frontier region between Canada and the United States. While this research has been about past events, I soon discovered a specialty of adaptive technology that can be called ‘futures archeology’. This specialty became apparent one day in 1994, when I discovered the remains of a half-dozen deserted farms, which lay on a hillside, in the woods, many kilometers from any presently existing habitation.<fnref n="1" />

After a long day of work, when I got back to my tent that night, I discovered that I had neglected to measure the downhill dimensions of a causeway. So I got up at 05:00 the next morning. It was raining. I had breakfast – as the rain got worse. I crossed the river, parked my car at the end of a dirt road, and began hiking through the forest. The rain came down even harder. However, it turned out that this torrential downpour was a very fortunate experience, since I got to see the causeway in action.

A causeway is a stone bridge that allows humans and livestock to cross over a stream but allows water to pass beneath it in such a way to minimize erosion. In this case, the causeway worked brilliantly, 150 years after its construction and abandonment.<fnref n="2" /> The water pooled upstream and drained through the stonework, leaving the stone crossing dry and the streambed intact.

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Causeway plan. Barry Rodrigue, Causeway No.1, Concord, Maine, ME 534-014, for the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine (USA)</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="1">¹ Barry Rodrigue, Maine Historic Preservation Commission, ME 534-016.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Barry Rodrigue, Maine Historic Preservation Commission, ME 534-014.</footnote>
I took the measurements that I needed and hiked back out of the forest. Back at my field camp, I mentioned the experience to the owner of a hunting lodge. She said this design would solve one of their problems, as their stone causeways washed out every year. This began my thinking about old methods being used to solve modern problems. Conversations with archeologists and other professionals revealed similar examples of adaptive technology.

However, simple adoption of old techniques can be problematic. One infamous example is that of the sailing vessel, *John F. Leavitt*. In the wake of the oil crisis of 1973–1974, people began to search for alternatives to petroleum power. A well-designed adaptation of a traditional coastal schooner was developed in Waldoboro, Maine (USA) – it was 30-meters long and had two masts rigged with fore and aft sails. In the winter of 1979, it set sail down the eastern seaboard of the United States with a cargo of lumber, bound for Haiti. However, it foundered in moderate seas off Long Island, New York. After much study of the incident, the problem was identified as the crew not having sufficient knowledge of commercial deep-water sailing, which had been lost in the century since the era of ‘wind, water and wood’ (Koltz 1980: 40–42).<fnref n="3" /> In other words, knowledge needs to go with technology.

## Bridges to the Present

The examples of this more complete development of technology and its use abound. Two examples may be seen in Alaska. Archeologists, biologists and indigenous peoples in Southeast Alaska have begun collaborating to deal with declines in the region's basic fisheries economy. Traditional halibut hooks fashioned by the indigenous Tlingit were designed in such a way so as to avoid capture of immature fish and large breeding females, while their intertidal salmon weirs allowed for capture of fish only at certain times of an ebb tide. This was a technology-based method of conservation (Ratner and Holen 2007: 45–46, 48). Likewise, architectural studies of earth-fast, traditional housing among the indigenous peoples of Alaska led to construction of new housing forms in Anuktuvuk Pass, a Nunamiut Eskimo community in the Brooks Mountain Range in the Alaskan arctic. By merging traditional design and with high-tech design, the result was a cut in the cost of house construction and a reduction in the annual heating fuel use by a factor of ten. This kind of merger of traditional and modern skills is referred to as ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ or TEK (Ratner and Holen 2007: 45–46, 48).

Russian anthropologist Anatoly Alekseyevich Shtyrbul, who teaches in Western Siberia, at the Omsk State Pedagogical University, has

<footnote n="3">³ I would like to thank Nathan Lipfert of the Maine Maritime Museum for his background information of this incident and others.</footnote>
carried this view further by stating that the so-called 'primitive' tradi-
tional societies possess many of the skills that we will need to adapt to
the future.<fnref n="4" /> Shtyrbul is echoed by American archeologist, Stephen
Scharoun, who specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farm
technology and systems of farm management. His career was not chosen
because of an atavistic appreciation for the past. His view is that with the
decline of cheap fossil fuel, we should know such techniques, so that we
can adapt them to soon-to-be changing forms of food production.

This is by no means a unique view, as many journals, societies,
books, individuals and organizations advocate it. In the United States,
*Foxfire* magazine was begun in 1966, the *Whole Earth Catalog* in 1968, and
the *Small Farmer's Journal* in 1976. These are the kinds of technological
compilation begun by encyclopediasts in fifteenth-century China and
eighteenth-century France. The designer, Victor Papanek, devoted his
life to such applied uses, as in his 1971 book, *Design for the Real World*.

Since the 1980s, agricultural scientist Anil Gupta of the Indian Insti-
tute of Management in Ahmedabad has researched grassroots innova-
tion by common people throughout South Asia.<fnref n="5" /> Alexander Petroff has
successfully established a self-sustaining program of agricultural recol-
onization based on oxen power in eastern Congo, an area lacking petro-
leum access. Petroff envisions his organization, Working Villages Inter-
national, to be applicable to other regions of the world.<fnref n="6" />

But what is new about these efforts is that the present and future cir-
cumstances of life on Earth have so dramatically changed, and that a new,
degraded world is in sight – one with little cheap energy, one that is
polluted, overpopulated, and trying to adapt to collapsing infrastruc-
tures. Such adaptations as articulated by Shtyrbul and others are per-
haps more important than ever. So, what does this kind of adaptive
technology mean for Big History?

Big History and Adaptive Technology

In a way, adaptive technology could be seen as an extension of *Little Big Histories*, where a complete historical profile is given on a subject. In this respect, Esther Quaedackers has analyzed Tiananmen Square as an expression of building styles, making connections between human and other animals' construction techniques, while Craig Benjamin has ana-

<footnote n="4">⁴ This discourse was part of Shtyrbul's presentation at the Fifth International Conference on Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations (Shtyrbul 2009).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Gupta's organization, the Honey Bee Network (http://www.sristi.org/hbnew/), promotes grassroots innovation.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ See the website for Working Villages International at http://workingvillages.org/.</footnote>
lyzed the deep history of Jericho as the world's oldest and continually
inhabited city (Quaedackers 2011; Benjamin 2011).

However, adaptive technology moves the concept of *Little Big Histories* a few steps further into the realm of filtering them for pragmatic lessons, for application to life. It thus could become prescriptive as well as descriptive. We, Big Historians, have done well in describing the past and beginning the assemblage of deep historical contexts. I propose that a next step might be more in the direction of applications.

In his study of the Little Big History of Jericho, Craig Benjamin has out-
lined the factors that gave Jericho such an advantage, such as reliable fresh
water source, protected valley, closeness to a major trading route, fertile
soil, etc. If we were to convert such a predictive model to a prescriptive
model, it might point us in directions to plan our lives for more stable and
equitable existence – for example, on site locations for cities like Camargue,
France (below sea level) or San Francisco, USA (on an earthquake fault).

Our indigenous societies are repositories of knowledge and ways of
learning that the modern world will increasingly come to need as our ac-
cess to cheap fuel dwindles and the damage from industrial waste in-
creases. This is not to advocate for the celebration of primitiveness or eth-
nic identity, but an acknowledgement that we need to establish a ‘world
heritage commons’ where the best ideas, both technology and process,
are assembled and adapted.<fnref n="7" />

References

**Alaska Conservation Voters.** 2012. 'Anaktuvuk Pass test home'. 28 July 2012. URL: http://www.acvoters.org/clean-energy-spotlight/anaktuvuk-pass-test-home-arctic-living-build-it-and-live-in-it-for-less.

**Benjamin C. 2011.** The Big History of Jericho. Paper presented at the World History Association, 20th Anniversary Conference, Beijing, People's Republic of China, July 8, 2011.

**Koltz B.** 1980. *The Reintroduction of Sail for Maritime Commerce: And the Consequent Effects upon Small Port Economy and Trade Routing*. M. A. Thesis. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University.

**NASA.** 2012. *Protective Paint Tested on Space Station Makes for 'Curious' Ride to Mars*. URL: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/curiosity_coating.html).

<footnote n="7">⁷ Occoquan Paleotechnics (http://www.occpaleo.com/about.html) is an example of an effort that focuses on the study and reproduction of primitive technology.</footnote>
**Papanek V. 1971.** *Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change.*
New York: Pantheon Books.

**Quaedackers E. 2011.** 'The Big History of a Big Square: New Perspective on the Architecture of Tiananmen Square. Paper presented at the World History Association, 20th Anniversary Conference, Beijing, People's Republic of China, July 8, 2011.

**Ratner N., and Holen D. 2007.** Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Applying Principles of Sustainability to Wilderness Resource Management. *Forest Service Proceedings*. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, RMRS-P-49.

**Shtyrbul A. 2009.** Anarcho-Polity: The Evolution and Transformation from Theory to Practice, Fifth International Conference: *Hierarchy & Power in the History of Civilizations*, Moscow, 25 June 2009. Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences.

**Tierney J. 2011.** Two Themes Inherent in Big History. *Evolution: A Big History Perspective* / Ed. by L. Grinin, A. Korotayev, and B. Rodrigue, pp. 287–293. Volgograd: Uchitel Publishing.

**Wu X., Chi Zhang, Goldberg P., Cohen D., Yan Pan, Arpin T., and Bar-Yosef O. 2012.** Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China. *Science* 336 (6089): 1696–1700.
# Galactic-Scale Macro-engineering:
Looking for Signs of Other Intelligent Species,
as an Exercise in Hope for Our Own

Joseph Voros

## Abstract

If we consider Big History as simply 'our' example of the process of cosmic evolution playing out, then we can seek to broaden our view of our possible fate as a species by asking questions about what paths or trajectories other species' own versions of Big History might take or have taken. This paper explores the broad outlines of possible scenarios for the evolution of long-lived intelligent engineering species – scenarios which might have been part of another species' own Big History story, or which may yet lie ahead in our own distant future. A sufficiently long-lived engineering-oriented species may decide to undertake a program of macro-engineering projects that might eventually lead to a re-engineered galaxy so altered that its artificiality may be detectable from Earth. We consider activities that lead ultimately to a galactic structure consisting of a central inner core surrounded by a more distant ring of stars separated by a relatively sparser 'gap', where star systems and stellar materials may have been removed, 'lifted' or turned into Dyson Spheres. When looking to the sky, one finds that such galaxies do indeed exist – including the beautiful ringed galaxy known as 'Hoag's Object' (PGC 54559) in the constellation Serpens. This leads us to pose the question: Is Hoag's Object an example of galaxy-scale macro-engineering? And this suggests a program of possible observational activities and theoretical explorations, several of which are presented here, that could be carried out in order to begin to investigate this beguiling question.

**Keywords:** galactic astrophysics, macro-engineering, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), Threshold 9, thinking on cosmological time-scales.

## Introduction – Big History in Context

Big History is a powerful conceptual framework for making sense of the place of humankind in the Universe – a narrative leading from the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago to our present information-based technological civilization (e.g., Brown 2008; Christian 2004, 2008; Spier 1996). It synthesizes many different knowledge domains and scholarly disciplines and, in the words of the International Big History Association (IBHA) ‘seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos,
Earth, Life, and Humanity, using the best available evidence and schol-
arly methods' (International Big History Association 2012).

Nonetheless, Big History is ultimately concerned with the history of just *one* planet – ours – among the trillion or so that are now thought to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy, not to mention the billions of trillions that can thereby be inferred to exist in the wider observable universe. Thus, it can be considered a single case in the even larger context of the unfolding of the broad scenario of Cosmic Evolution, as that scenario has played out on this particular planet (Chaisson 2001, 2007, 2008; Delsemme 1998; Jantsch 1980). It is easy to imagine other planets where life, and perhaps even intelligence, has arisen, as the Cosmic Evolutionary scenario has unfolded there, possibly giving rise to their own unique variant of Big History. A natural sub-set of the study of Cosmic Evolution is the discipline of Astrobiology (Chyba and Hand 2005; Mix et al. 2006), the study of life in the universe, which also includes its own associated sub-set of SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Ekers et al. 2002; Harrison 2009; Morrison, Billingham, and Wolfe 1979; Sagan and Shklovskii 1966; Shostak 1995; Tarter 2001). So, one can imagine an expanding set of nested fields of study, beginning with Big History (the history of our own small 'pale blue dot' [Sagan 1995]) enfolded by Astrobiology/SETI (the study of how life may arise in the universe and the search for intelligent forms of it) and encompassed by Cosmic Evolution (the study of how our universe as a whole has changed over the course of deep cosmic time). Whether there is a further enfoldment of our own universe within an even larger 'multiverse' of other universes is a fascinating open question currently receiving some attention among cosmologists.

Our focus here will be on using the step beyond Big History, spe-
cifically SETI as a framework for thinking about some of the broad con-
tours that might characterize the unfolding future for intelligent techno-
logical civilizations, including possibly our own. Searching for signs of
long-lived intelligent extra-terrestrial species, like those that will be
sketched here, could provide a way for us to shift our collective think-
ing to become much more far-reaching and much longer-term – some-
thing that increasingly appears to be vitally necessary for the future of
our civilization and planet. And if we can actually begin making this
collective worldview change – albeit perhaps only minutely at first –
then even this small shift of our current mindset could become a ra-
tional basis for some measure of hope in our ability to determine both
wisely and well what the next stages will be in the long-term Big His-
tory view of the potential ‘future histories’ of our species.
## Approaches to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

The modern search for extra-terrestrial intelligence has a history of just over half a century (Dick 2006). It has mainly involved searching for electromagnetic signals, usually at radio frequencies, although, more recently, it has also been undertaken in the optical spectrum (Shostak 2003). Just after the original proposal by Cocconi and Morrison (1959) to search for radio transmissions, Freeman Dyson (1960) suggested looking not for electromagnetic signals but instead for artificial signs of technology, an idea elaborated in further detail a few years later (Dyson 1966). Thus, some recent SETI researchers (Bradbury, Ćirković, and Dvorsky 2011; Ćirković 2006) consider there to be two main approaches to SETI: the 'orthodox' approach, based on the detection of electromagnetic signals, whether they were deliberately signaled or are simply unintentional 'leakage' from the civilization; and the 'Dysonian' approach, based on looking for signs of extra-terrestrial technology, without any presumption of deliberate signaling or attention-seeking at all.

The idea of searching for signs of extra-terrestrial technology or artefacts (e.g., Freitas 1983) is an example of an approach that has more recently been called 'interstellar archaeology' (Carrigan 2010, 2012). Such a form of archaeology is hampered, of course, by the enormous distances to other stars, making the more usual pick-axe and soft-brush approach impractical (to say the least!), so any examples of technologies or artefacts we would be able to discover in this way would probably need to be executed on a stupendous scale. Some researchers have suggested, however, that we might possibly find artefacts in our own solar system (Kecskes 1998; Papagiannis 1983). Unfortunately such an enticing 'field trip' is currently beyond our technical ability, although there have been some ideas proposed for the exploration and use of near-Earth objects, including asteroids, in this next half-century (Huntress et al. 2006). Along similar lines, Davies and Wagner (2013) have recently suggested taking a closer look at the Moon for any possible traces of extra-terrestrial technology.

The emerging field of 'macro-engineering' is explicitly concerned with thinking about engineering on large scales, so it may be helpful as a framework for informing our thinking in the search for insights regarding examples of extra-terrestrial technology (Badescu, Cathcart, and Schuiling 2006; Cathcart, Badescu, and Friedlander 2012). Macro-engineering can be conceived of at a variety of scales, ranging from subregional to planetary, stellar, and galactic in scope (Badescu et al. 2006). In what follows below we consider the last of these – galaxy-scale macro-engineering – and how we might go about imagining what forms
such almost unimaginable feats of engineering might take, in order to think about how we might detect such artificial activities across intergalactic distances. But first let us examine more closely why this type of approach to SETI may be even more relevant today than it has conventionally been considered to be.

## The Drake Equation

One of the pioneers of SETI, Frank Drake, developed an equation which has since become widely used as a conceptual framework for discussion and debate about the various terms which are included in it (Drake 1961). The Drake Equation can be written as:

$$N = R_{*} \times f_{p} \times n_{e} \times f_{l} \times f_{i} \times f_{c} \times L,$$

where N is the number of currently-existing communicating technological civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy; $R_{*}$ is the average rate of formation of suitable stars per year in the Galaxy; $f_{p}$ is the fraction of these stars which have planets; $n_{e}$ is the average number of planets in each of these star systems with conditions favourable to life; $f_{l}$ is the fraction of these planets which go on to actually develop life; $f_{i}$ is the fraction of these inhabited planets which go on to develop intelligent life; $f_{c}$ is the fraction of planets with intelligent life that develop technological civilizations which are capable of releasing signals into space; and L is the average communicative lifetime of such a civilization. There are several variants to this equation, and there have been many modifications made to it over the ensuing decades as well (Bracewell 1979; Ćirković 2004; Hetesi and Regály 2006; Maccone 2010; Walters, Hoover, and Kotra 1980).

With regard to the parameter L, initially this was often taken to mean the actual lifetime of the civilization. Some early estimates of this parameter tended to be rather gloomy, therefore, given our own case of the unwelcome possibility of hair-trigger nuclear annihilation under which humanity has lived since the mid-twentieth century CE. It was often thought, based on our own example, that many nascent technological civilizations might, therefore, destroy themselves not long after achieving the ability to send signals into space. More recently, as suggested by the above, the meaning of L has shifted subtly from the 'lifetime of the civilization' to the 'length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space', a shift which changes the character of the term rather significantly. This newer meaning for L has again arisen through reasoning from our own example. The Earth's radio 'signature' has changed over the decades from very high-energy analogue broadcasts from ground-based transmitters aimed towards the horizon (where the suburbs and home viewers are) and which have thereby con-
tinued on further out into space, to very low-energy narrow digital
beams from orbiting satellites that are targeted at particular regions of
the Earth's surface, and therefore do not propagate to any great degree
beyond the Earth. This shift from high-power analogue broadcasts to
low-power digital 'narrowcasts' (so to speak) has meant that over time
the Earth is becoming less and less visible due to 'leakage' from our
own terrestrial use of radio waves (Drake 2010).

SETI commentators sometimes use the US TV show *I Love Lucy* as the archetypal example of the sort of broadcast material that is expanding outwards in a 'bubble' from the Earth at the speed of light as a 'cultural leakage' signal from our civilization. One might be moved to observe that, if *those* are the signals that form the basis of an assessment by extra-terrestrials as to whether there is intelligent life on Earth, then perhaps it is *no wonder* that extra-terrestrials have not sought to make contact! Whatever one's opinion about the value of the content it carries, however, over time this leaked electromagnetic energy will die down to a faint whisper, due to the changing pattern of electromagnetic radiation use on Earth. Eventually, once the initial several decades' worth of high-energy broadcasting has passed, the longer-term low-power digital signal emanating from Earth will likely become almost impossible to detect by chance above the normal background radio noise of space. Only some navigational beacons and radar are likely to remain detectable after this time.

This gradual disappearance over time of the Earth as a strong radio
source has implications for the wider consideration of the value of L in
the Drake Equation. It is possible to imagine that other civilizations
might also make a similar transition, so that a civilization might indeed
be very long-lived, even while having a value of L remaining relatively
short (Drake 2010). This implies a need to re-think some of the conven-
tional approaches to SETI, or at least some of the assumptions upon
which orthodox SETI has been based for so long, if not to expand the
thinking beyond conventionality altogether. Indeed, Frank Drake him-
self has commented that:

Searching for extra-terrestrial signals is one of the most challenging
tasks ever taken on by mankind. ...We are challenged to use logic
to predict what another civilization, probably much older and more
advanced than us, might adopt as a technology we might detect.
...To reach an answer, *we have to become futurists, reaching far be-
yond our usual comfortable world of telescope technology to arrive at pos-
sible scenarios for the distant future*. This becomes an exercise
of intellect reaching far beyond the usual bounds of science the-
ory (Foreword to Shostak 2009; emphases added).
Then, this is the challenge, as posed by one of the founding pioneers of SETI: to imagine how an advanced civilization might develop over the course of perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, and attempt to conceive of what sort of technology such a civilization might invent or use. We are challenged, in other words, to think on a truly 'cosmological' scale, thinking which will very likely need to include both temporal and spatial dimensions – vast distances and immense timeframes. In order to approach and meet this challenge, we will need some sort of organizing principle for doing so.

## 'Dysonian' Thinking

Fortunately, Dyson explicitly set out the three 'rules' for his 'game' of thinking about extra-terrestrial technology (Dyson 1966). With very little modification, it is possible to use them from the point of view of our current understanding of technology, and with a view to incorporating ideas coming from the above-mentioned field of macro-engineering. Dyson's three rules can be given as follows (Ibid.: 643–644):

1. Think of the biggest possible artificial activities, within limits set only by the laws of physics, and look for those;

2. All engineering projects are carried out with technology which the human species of the *current epoch* can understand; and

3. Ignore questions of economic cost;

and where, in Rule 2, the italicized term 'current epoch' replaces Dyson's original use of 'year 1965 AD'. The given modification allows the rule to be applied at any stage of human history, which will thereby yield different answers depending upon the state of our knowledge in any given epoch. In particular, Dyson stressed with respect to Rule 1 that he was not interested in what an 'average' technological civilization might look like, only in what the most conspicuous of perhaps one in a million might look like, as these would be the easiest to detect over great distances; hence the focus on the 'biggest possible artificial activities' (Ibid.: 643–644).

Dyson went on to outline how it would be possible to disassemble planets, build rigid structures in space, and also revisited some of the ideas in his earlier paper (1960) which suggested that attempts to harvest increasing amounts of stellar radiation from the civilization's home star would lead, in the asymptotic limit, to all visible radiation being intercepted by a vast 'swarm' or 'shell' of orbiting collectors completely enveloping the star. While no longer radiating in the visible spectrum, such an object would nonetheless remain visible in the infra-red, owing
to the black-body radiation law, whence Dyson's proposal in the initial
paper's title to search for artificial sources of infra-red radiation. There
have been several searches undertaken since the original proposal in
1960, although at the time of this writing none have been confirmed
(see, e.g., Bradbury 2001a; Tilgner and Heinrichsen 1998; Timofeev,
Kardashev and Promyslov 2000). The idea of a 'Dyson shell', or 'Dyson
sphere', was subsequently taken up and expanded upon by the astro-
physicist Nikolai Kardashev (1964), who conceived of technological civi-
lizations as being characterizable on a three-level scale with regard to
their ability to use and control energy.

The Kardashev Scale

Kardashev's initial schema has frequently been revised and refined by
many others in the five decades since it was first proposed. In brief, it is
as follows (Sagan 1973: 233–234):

*   **Type I: planetary.** A Type I civilization is the one which makes use of all of the available energy of its planet, estimated to be on the order of $10^{16}$ watts (i.e. $10,000,000,000,000,000$ W), or $10 \times 10^{15}$ W = 10 PW (petawatts). This would include harnessing, for example, tidal, thermal, atmospheric, nuclear, fossil, internal geothermal and other planetary sources of energy.

*   **Type II: stellar.** A Type II civilization is the one which harnesses all of the energy output of its star, something on the order of $10^{26}$ W = $100 \times 10^{24}$ W = 100 YW (yottawatts). This includes collecting all of the radiant energy of the star, and might perhaps even include harnessing the energy contained in its gravitational field.

*   **Type III: galactic.** A Type III civilization is the one which has managed to harness the energy of an entire galaxy, something like $10^{36}$ W, although because galaxies vary considerably in size, this figure is somewhat variable. A civilization capable of using energy at this scale could probably make itself visible, if it chose to, throughout most of the observable universe.

The energy difference between adjacent types is ten orders of magnitude – a factor of 10 billion (i.e. $10^{10}$). Astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that a decimal interpolation be introduced between the main levels, whereby each factor of 0.1 represents a ten-fold increase on the previous level (Sagan 1973: 234). Thus, a Type I.5 civilization uses ten times more energy than a Type I.4, which uses ten times more than a Type I.3 and so on. In this view, Earth is usually considered to be an approximately Type 0.7 civilization.
It is fairly simple to state the characterization of a civilization as 'using energy on a galactic scale', the definition of Type III, but it is not quite so simple to imagine what that situation might entail in terms of artificial structures we might be able to detect. Does it imply a vast system of beacons, each pulsing out transmissions in the tens of millions of yottawatts range, or would it be something more subtle, such as the ability to move whole star systems around at will, in order to reconfigure the wider structure of the galaxy? Is the energy usage expanded in a single or small number of artefacts or activities, or is it spread out over innumerable activities whose aggregate total is of the order of magnitude considered galactic in scale?

In the Kardashev scheme, Dyson's idea of re-engineering a star or
star system – now usually called 'astroengineering' – is considered to be
an example of a Type II civilization. The nature and possible structure of
Type III civilizations has received somewhat less attention, although
there have been some researchers who have thought along these lines
(Annis 1999; Bradbury et al. 2011; Carrigan 2012; Cirković 2006). When
this question has been considered in the literature at all – which does
not appear to have been often – it has usually looked to expanding the
scale of Type II civilizations into the galactic context. For example, Car-
rigan (2012) wrote of 'Fermi bubbles' or 'voids' as places where there is an
apparent dearth of visible stars due to the existence of large numbers of
Type II civilizations or Dyson Spheres. Such a void or bubble of reduced
optical stellar density could, in principle, be detectable by our instru-
ments, owing to the infra-red blackbody radiation signature it would still
emit, combined with the unusual appearance that such a structure would
produce. However, Carrigan also noted that detection of such voids in
spiral galaxies is somewhat more difficult than in elliptical galaxies, ow-
ing to the presence of comparable voids that are naturally found in spir-
ral galaxies. The few efforts made to date do not appear to have found
definitive examples of galaxy-scale artificial activity (Annis 1999), but it
would be very interesting to search the literature more exhaustively
than has been possible for this paper.

What would a Type III Civilization Actually Look Like?

The ideas to be presented here arose in part from asking the question
'I wonder what a Type III civilization would actually look like?' as well
as from some related exploratory investigations into the parameter
space for possible scenarios of 'contact' – the usual shorthand term for
the discovery of extra-terrestrial life, including intelligence. That paper
is currently in preparation (where the technique is described in more
detail), but, in brief, the 'scenario space' of contact – that is, the range of
possible scenarios under which contact might occur – is assumed to be
characterized by several parameters, including (among others): the na-
ture of the entity (biological, post-biological, hybrid); the complexity of
the entity (simple, complex, intelligent); the form of 'signal' (electro-
magnetic, artefactual); the intentionality of the signal (deliberate, inci-
dental); and the Kardashev type (0, I, II, III). One can see that the initial
form of orthodox SETI (i.e., deliberate or incidental leakage radio sig-
nals), later forms of orthodox SETI (e.g., deliberate optical signals), and
Dysonian SETI (incidental artefact-producing activities) are all accom-
modated in the parameters characterizing the form and intentionality of
the 'signal'. The meaning of 'artefactual' is deliberately left somewhat
open so as to encompass Dyson's own suggestion in his Rule 1 of look-
ing for 'artificial activities', and is taken to mean any objects or artefacts
produced by any such 'artificial activities'.

This parameterization can be expanded into a many-dimensional
(one dimension for each parameter) combinatorial 'morphological
space', following a technique devised by Fritz Zwicky in the early part
of the last century, whereby every parameter value is systematically and
exhaustively combined with every other parameter value for all pa-
rameters (Zwicky 1967, 1969). This results in a very large number of
possible 'configurations', numerically equal to the product of the num-
ber of parameter values of all parameters. Zwicky used this technique to
great effect in his scientific work (Zwicky 1947, 1948). Every distinct
configuration of parameter values could, in principle, be examined for
its characteristics, although in practice not all configurations necessarily
appear as 'solutions' because some parameter value pairs may not be
mutually 'consistent' and would thereby be excluded from the total 'so-
lution space' (see Voros 2009 for a more detailed explanation of this
method). By way of illustration, our own cultural leakage signals - for
example, *I Love Lucy* - can be characterized by the following set of the
above parameter values: biological, intelligent (or so *we* might think!),
electromagnetic, incidental (i.e., unintentional signalling), Type ~0. More
colloquially, this might be rendered as incidental electromagnetic signals
(i.e., 'leakage') from an intelligent, biological, Type ~0 civilization.

For our purposes here, it suffices to say that by combining different
classes of parameter value it is possible to systematically generate ideas
for different potential scenarios for further consideration and investiga-
tion. One of these configuration classes (by which is meant that some
parameters are left 'free' without being assigned a specific definite value
so as to describe a range of related configurations) was as follows: intel-
ligent, artefactual, incidental, Type III, with the nature of the entity left
open. This may be characterized more colloquially as a galaxy-scale ar-
tefact created by, or perhaps galaxy-scale artificial activities undertaken
by, some form of intelligent entity going about its own business; in oth-
er words, galaxy-scale macro-engineering.

In what follows, I would like to consider two possibilities for how
galactic-scale changes brought about by macro-engineering activities
might manifest in terms of structures we might be able to detect over
intergalactic distances. The timeframe for this scale of engineering is
probably rather long, and might run to many tens of millions, or perhaps
even hundreds of millions of years. Dick (2003) has called thinking on
these immense timescales ‘Stapledonian’ and suggests that such a long-
term thinking is a necessity when considering the question of intelli-
gence in the universe. In the spirit of Dyson’s rules, however, we are
only concerned here with artefacts or artificial activities that we could
actually detect over intergalactic distances and not with what might be
considered an ‘average’ level of macro-engineering for a ‘typical’ engi-
neering species. That is, we are concerned only with the biggest, most
astonishingly vast engineering projects of which we can possibly con-
ceive – so, we will be thinking along the lines of what Ćirković (2006)
has characterized as ‘macro-engineering in the galactic context’.

Multi-system Exponentiating Dysonian Astroengineering

Firstly, let us imagine a long-lived Dyson/Type II species branching out
from its initial home system, which would likely have been somewhere
in the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ) (see, e.g., Prantzos 2008) where they
most likely first arose as a biological species – although by this stage
they may well have moved to a ‘post-biological’ form (Dick 2003, 2009).
Over numerous iterations, new stellar systems are reached by a vanguard
group sent from an existing ‘Dyson-ified’ system and subsequently engi-
neered into new Type II systems, from which new groups are sent out,
and so on. This is clearly a geometrically exponentiating process so that,
over time, there will end up being a *very* large number of Type II/Dyson
civilizations, spreading out in a roughly spherical bubble from the home
system. This is similar to the scenario of Fermi voids or bubbles that
Carrigan (2012) has imagined. However, we can push this idea a bit fur-
ther by considering what an initially-spiral galaxy might look like some
way further along the exponentiating process. Owing to slight differ-
ences in the orbital speed of star systems around the galactic centre due
to differences in radial distance from the centre, this expanding bubble
is not likely to remain completely spherical, and may end up getting
progressively 'smeared out' by differential rotation at the different radii (an admittedly fairly small effect). Over Stapledonian time-frames, however, comparable to several galactic rotations (say ~10⁹ years), this process, which might otherwise have led to a (so to speak) Fermi 'arc' around the centre of the galaxy, could very likely end up filling out into a fully-blown 'gap' that completely separates the galactic core from the rest of the outer stellar disk, through the still-continuing process of diffusion from existing engineered systems into new un-engineered ones.

The radii of this 'gap' in the galactic disk would likely be determined, respectively, by the intensity of the radiative flux from the galactic core or bulge, for the inner, and by the availability of metal-rich stars which contain planetary and other materials suitable for disassembly and re-use for engineering purposes, for the outer. The resulting gap may end up encompassing much of what might have been considered the GHZ of the galaxy, at least to the outer radius in the galactic disk. It is also possible that the inner radius might extend even further inward towards the centre of the galaxy, if the species 'goes post-biological' and no longer has to worry about the effects of what would otherwise be lethal environmental conditions for a biological species. In this case, 'post-biological' is a general term which may be inferred to include machine-based intelligence, or an intelligence based on a technological/artefactual substrate. In SETI, this situation is sometimes referred to colloquially as the question of these intelligences either *having* machines or *being* machines, and the question itself is sometimes regarded as mere hair-splitting.

**Galactic-Structural Macro-engineering and Stellar-System Removal**

In the second possibility, we imagine a long-lived, most-likely a post-biological species inhabiting a spiral galaxy that either does away altogether with its earlier exponentiating Dysonian astroengineering program in favour of, or perhaps moves directly to, the even grander project of seeking to re-engineer the spiral-galactic structure as a whole. If this species transitions to a post-biological form while still planet-bound, or relatively early into a nascent exponentiating astroengineering phase, then this latter trajectory may perhaps be more probable.

Analogously with Dyson's original astroengineering proposal to harvest stellar energy, although on a much larger scale, this species decides that it wants to directly access and capture all of the luminous energetic flux emanating from the entire galactic core or bulge. Unfortunately, there is usually a considerable amount of intervening material in a typical spiral galaxy which occludes some of this radiant energy from regions further out in the galactic disk by the absorption of some wave-
lengths – this is why we ourselves do not see the centre of the Milky Way from Earth in visible light. A post-biological species would likely not have need of planets as habitat, and would most probably be able to exist in interstellar space, absorbing the radiant energy directly in a way analogous to our current solar panels, although undoubtedly much more efficiently. Such a species would not be constrained by biological timelines, and – if our own considerations about the implications of the Singularity on Earth are anything to go by (Eden et al. 2012; Kurzweil 2006; Smart 2003; Tucker 2006; Vinge 1993) – would effectively become immortal, subject only to accidental destruction, or a conscious decision to power-down.

An effectively-immortal species which wants to gain access to as much of the galactic centre's radiant energy as possible without it being degraded due to absorption and re-emission would likely consider clearing out the intervening material between itself and the galactic core/bulge. This would be macro-engineering on a truly galactic scale. One can imagine a number of possible scenarios for how this might proceed. The asymptotic end-state of these activities on Stapledonian timescales would likely be: a central core of stars, surrounded by a 'gap' in which there are relatively much fewer or perhaps even no stars or other natural material – and which contained uncounted octillions of post-biological entities orbiting the galactic core absorbing the unimpeded radiant flux as they go about their unfathomably post-biological business – with a ring of stars further out remaining from the initial structure of the spiral galaxy. The removal of intervening materials might include combinations of 'lifting' stars entirely for later re-use of their materials (Criswell 1985), or perhaps simply moving entire star systems further out into the stellar ring region, by means of some form of propulsion such as Shkadov thrusters or related 'stellar engines' (Badescu and Cathcart 2000, 2006a, 2006b). Or, it might perhaps be through a combination of lifting stars into Jovian planet – or brown dwarf-sized non-fusioning agglomerations for more convenient storage and then moving these with gravitationally-bound 'solar sails' utilizing the radiation pressure from the galactic centre. In this case, as well, one ends up with a core of stars surrounded by a quasi-toroidal region devoid of stars, ultimately out to a more distant ring of stars, whose inner radius is determined due to the radiant flux from the core being too weak for the post-biological species to utilize, whether directly or for propulsion. This argument is in direct contrast to the 'migration hypothesis' of Ćirković and Bradbury (2006) who have argued for a mass migration of
post-biological species to the *outer* regions of a galaxy, for computing-
thermodynamic reasons.

Galactic Structure Arising from these Macro-engineering Projects

In both of these cases, the galaxy eventually ends up having a core + 'gap' + ring morphology, reminiscent of the planet Saturn, where the apparently empty 'gap' might merely be comparatively darker due to the presence of a vast number of Dyson spheres, or may actually have been emptied due to the original material having been cleared away - through star lifting, star system re-positioning or similar forms of removal - to make for more open 'living' space for the post-biological entities. We will consider further below some possible empirical observations that could be made of any such candidate galaxy. But for now, of course, the question arises: are there any examples of galaxies that have this morphology? And the answer is: yes, there are.

Hoag's Object – a Lovely Ringed Galaxy

The nature and structural characteristics of the beautiful ringed galaxy known as Hoag's Object, which has the formal designation PGC54559, have long been the subject of debate and speculation (Brosch 1987; Gribbin 1974; Lucas 2002). It was discovered by Arthur Hoag in 1950, who reported it in the scientific literature as a 'peculiar object' (Hoag 1950), hence its common name 'Hoag's Object'. It lies about 600 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens and is something like 100-120,000 light-years across, making it roughly comparable to or slightly bigger than the Milky Way (Brosch 1985; O'Connell, Scargle and Sargent 1974; Schweizer et al. 1987). Detailed analysis shows that the galactic plane is almost directly face-on to us, deviating from perfect alignment by only about 20 degrees or so (Schweizer et al. 1987). The interested reader can see a high-quality Hubble Space Telescope image of Hoag's Object at the Astronomy Picture of the Day web site for August 22, 2010 (Lucas and NASA Hubble Heritage Team 2010). There are several other such 'Hoag-type' galaxies known (O'Connell et al. 1974; Wakamatsu 1990), including the one that is, coincidentally, visible through the gap feature in Hoag's Object itself (Lucas and NASA Hubble Heritage Team 2010).

Hoag initially thought it might be a possible example of gravita-
tional lensing, the ring being an optical effect caused by the bending of
light from a more-distant galaxy by an intervening elliptical galaxy lo-
cated by chance directly in line-of-sight between us and the more dis-
tant one. Later spectroscopic work showed this not to be the case
(O'Connell *et al.* 1974), and as both the core and the ring appear to have
the same redshift, they are almost certainly co-located (Schweizer et al. 1987). A variety of other hypotheses have also been proposed for the origin of this lovely galaxy. They include: a 'bulls-eye' type collision between two passing galaxies – however there does not appear to be any sign of the putative 'bullet' galaxy in the vicinity (Schweizer et al. 1987); a dynamical instability in what was previously a barred-spiral galaxy, which case can be recovered from adjusting the parameters modelling the galactic dynamics in certain ways (Brosch 1985; Freeman, Howard, and Byrd 2010); an accretion event, wherein the object we see is a late stage in the coalescing process of two colliding galaxies merging into one system (Schweizer et al. 1987); and, more recently, that the structure we see can be modelled by a particular type of pressure wave in a self-gravitating gas (Pronko 2006). The last three of these appear to remain viable hypotheses.

However, given our use here of Dysonian thinking over Staple-
nian timeframes, and the sometimes finely-tuned adjustments in the
parameters that appear to be necessary to recover the structure of
Hoag's Object via models of natural processes, what if we instead ask
the question that is now almost begging to be asked: Is Hoag's Object
actually an example of galaxy-scale macro-engineering? Or, put more
simply:

Is Hoag's Object an Artefact?

Having asked this question, of course, the next step is to consider how
we might go about answering it. This requires thinking about potential
empirical observations that could be undertaken in order to look for
'signatures' that would indicate artificial activities rather than be expli-
cable as due solely to natural processes.

There appear to be at least four empirical observations that could be
made with respect to the question of the artificiality or otherwise of
Hoag's Object. They range from rather less direct to considerably more
direct, and are as follows:

1. *The distances from the centre of the galaxy of the major structural discontinuities - the outer core/inner gap, and outer gap/inner ring radii - with regard to what these distances might be expected to be from theoretical considerations arising from different scenarios leading to the core/gap/ring morphology.* If stars or stars systems *are* being moved outward by radiation pressure, for example, then there will be a certain radial distance at which the inward gravitational attraction, set by the core mass, and the outward radiation pressure, set by the core luminosity, are in balance. This would form the boundary of the core and gap. Similarly, the outer gap radius could also
be limited by the intensity of radiation pressure for moving material outwards. However, the outer radius of the gap might not be so strongly constrained if the stars are being moved using Shkadov thrusters. If the 'empty gap' appearance is caused by Dyson spheres rather than lack of material, there may perhaps be a different implied radius for the core/gap boundary. Comparisons of different theoretical values, obtained from imagining different scenarios, with the empirical values obtained from direct observation might reveal some interesting correspondences. This may well require more accurate observational data than currently appear to exist.

2. *The spectral profile of the 'gap'*. The difference between a 'gap' consisting of, say, almost empty space containing octillions of post-biological entities as compared to a volume of space filled with billions of Dyson Spheres should, in principle, be discernible, but in reality might be very difficult to determine conclusively. If there are Dyson spheres of the type considered by Dyson himself, these will emit blackbody radiation consistent with a temperature of ~300 K. However, if the engineering is very advanced – and we almost must assume it to be – then the efficiencies possible by use of a structure similar to, say, a 'Matrioshka Brain' (Bradbury 2001b) could produce waste heat with a blackbody radiation profile close to the temperature of the cosmic background radiation of space itself, ~3 K. Similar considerations for thermodynamic efficiency would probably also drive the construction of the substrate for the post-biological entities. This could make it very difficult to distinguish such structures from background empty space. In this instance, possible occlusion or diminution of radiation intensity from beyond the galaxy due to intervening absorptive material might be one way to probe the nature of the 'gap'.

3. *The metallicity profile and chemical composition of the ring*, with respect to anything 'unusual' compared to what is expected of the 'typical' composition of the interstellar medium (ISM) in a galaxy in which the normal processes of stellar evolution are occurring. A species that is converting gap-region star systems into Dyson spheres and not moving materials further outward would not therefore alter the composition of the ring region to any appreciable degree beyond what would be expected from the normal processes of enrichment over time of the ISM in a spiral galaxy. However, if the species *is* moving gap-region materials further outward, then this probably *would* alter the chemical composition and metallicity profile of the ring region and such an 'anomalous' composition might be detectable via spectroscopic observation. The ring structure in Hoag's Object also shows what Schweizer and co-workers (1987) characterized as an 'osculating braid', a smaller brighter ring within the main
ring, touching the inner and outer edges of the main ring at different
places; it is clearly visible in the Hubble image mentioned above. The pre-
cise nature of this 'braid' is of some interest. It has the appearance of what
are in other galaxies considered to be regions of relatively new star forma-
tion, although, if so, how so much star formation has managed to be so
apparently spatially synchronized raises an intriguing speculation. Is the
braid simply a pressure-shock effect caused by multiple and perhaps cas-
cading supernovae events, or could it be due to the deliberate synchro-
nized 'seeding' of new star systems? And to what end? It is possible to
imagine that an effectively-immortal post-biological species which is al-
ready moving material into the outer ring region might decide as part of
this project to undertake a further program of seeding the creation of new
stars with the materials so displaced in order to create the potential for
the emergence of new biological species. In other words, to perhaps 'cul-
tivate' the sort of conditions conducive for the arising of new biological
species (in a region of the galaxy for which they themselves have no di-
rect use) perhaps for subsequent longitudinal observation and study. Or
it might simply be to produce an aesthetic effect that changes relative po-
sition within the ring over very long timescales, possibly even as a signal
to other galaxies. The prospect of effective immortality might require
commensurately long-term projects to keep one occupied over the aeons.

4. *The existence of a time-keeping signal beacon* at or near the galactic core. If there are large-scale engineering activities going on which could be up to many tens of thousands of light-years apart and which may require some type of co-ordination, then it would be useful to have a time signal that would act as the standard clock by which these activities could be synchronized – a kind of Galactic Mean Time, as it were (Shostak 1999). A logical place for such a beacon would be at the galactic core, or perhaps immediately nearby, slightly above the plane of the galaxy, as the exact centre may not be feasible due to a black hole or other sources of possible interference with what would need to be a reliable signal. It is most unlikely that such a beacon would be broadcast isotropically – that would be a distinctly inefficient use of energy. An immortal species that is re-engineering a galaxy over Stapledonian timescales is quite likely to be somewhat careful in its use of energy, perhaps even frugal, as it would probably be thinking very much of the long term – and it would certainly have the luxury of time enough to use the most frugally efficient means possible. As such, the signal would most likely be directed mostly along the galactic plane (Shostak 2011: 363) to the regions where it would be needed. Given that Hoag's Object is almost directly face-on to us, this makes the detection of any potential beacon signal of this kind some-
what difficult, although one might hope for some re-emission scattering
echoes being deflected in our direction. However, if there were other
activities being undertaken further out in the galactic halo, the signal
might then be broadcast somewhat more widely, so we might possibly
get lucky. Needless to say, a very sensitive receiver would be required for
carrying out such an observing program.

**Concluding Remarks**

This paper has been an attempt to apply ‘Dysonian’ thinking to the
question of what galaxy-scale macro-engineering might look like when
undertaken over ‘Stapledonian’ cosmological timeframes by intelligent
species that are long-lived enough to do so, and which have very prob-
ably transitioned to an effectively-immortal ‘post-biological’ form
(Bradbury *et al.* 2011; Ćirković 2006; Dick 2003).

By generalizing Dyson's original idea of an engineering species in-
terested in harnessing ever more amounts of radiant energy from a sin-
gle solar system to an entire galaxy, we arrived at the intriguing notion
of a purposely re-engineered galaxy eventually having a core + ‘gap’ +
ring morphology, somewhat reminiscent of the planet Saturn. When we
look to the sky, we find that there are indeed several examples of such
galaxies, the most well-known ‘type specimen’ of which is Hoag's Ob-
ject, PGC54559. The unusual structure of this beautiful galaxy has long
been remarked upon, and the attempt to resolve the question of its ori-
gin has seen a variety of hypotheses advanced based on the assumption
of natural processes. Here a different question was posed concerning its
origin – namely, whether it might actually be the result of artificial ac-
tivities. Thus we asked: Is Hoag's Object an example of galaxy-scale
macro-engineering? Several theoretical considerations were discussed
and four specific empirical observations were suggested that could be
carried out in order to begin to investigate this wonderfully beguiling
research question.

Mounting a search for evidence of galaxy-scale macro-engineering, and the thinking required to seriously contemplate the possible forms such projects might take in order to be able to do so, could be one way to help us think much longer-term – something humankind would seem to be in desperate need of right now. If nothing else, simply entertaining the idea that someone somewhere in the Universe might have been able to successfully navigate the dangerous time Carl Sagan called ‘technological adolescence’ can give us some hope in our own ability to do the same at this critical point in the history of our species. Better yet, finding a definite example of such a success could be the very stimulus we need
that prompts us to begin to take our future seriously enough to guide it
consciously, responsibly and foresightfully. A search for evidence of
this kind would be relatively inexpensive to conduct. But it just might
end up being an immeasurably valuable – perhaps even absolutely
priceless – piece of information to possess. It could not hurt to have
a careful look...

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III. TEACHING BIG HISTORY

15

**Big History and Elementary Education**

Michael Duffy and D'Neil Duffy

Abstract

Big History can be viewed as a comprehensive origin story of everything in the
universe. It is perhaps the most important piece of scientific literacy that every
well-educated person should know, at least in its general outlines. For this to
happen, society cannot wait for the university level to begin teaching the story.
Happily, there is already such a curriculum at the elementary grade level that
has existed within the Montessori education community for most of the last
century under the rubric of 'Cosmic Education'. Through a series of lessons
that roughly track the thresholds of David Christian, Montessori elementary
teachers provide their students with basic impressionistic concepts and a sup-
ply of materials for them to explore each chapter of the story.

Keywords: Montessori, Cosmic Education, elementary education.

The teaching of Big History should begin in elementary schools – and Montessori education provides a model for this to happen. The all-inclusive theory that science has developed, particularly over the past half century, attempts to explain everything from the Big Bang to modern human societies. By the time students finish their undergraduate degree, they should have a general knowledge of this theory to provide the context for any field of study they have chosen to pursue.

For this to happen, society cannot wait for the university level to
begin teaching the story. The university structure is so geared toward
specialization that this kind of general theory can easily be bypassed
in favor of major-driven curriculum requirements that leave little time
for such Renaissance outcomes. Hopefully, that is beginning to
change. ‘There is a growing sense, across many scholarly disciplines,
that we need to move beyond the fragmented account of reality that
has dominated scholarship (and served it well) for a century’, notes
David Christian, one of the founders of the Big History movement
(Christian 2004: 3).

But even before the university level, some familiarity with the full
scope of the story should be part of every high school curriculum. And,
even before that, it should be incorporated into the elementary and
middle school curricula. Each level should build upon the previous one
so that the story of the universe is visited in ascending cycles that lead
students to an ever deeper appreciation of the full scope of the story.

Happily, there is already such a curriculum at the elementary level
that has existed within the Montessori education community for most of
the last century under the rubric of Cosmic Education. While elemen-
tary schools do not have to become Montessori schools to implement
the major portions of this curriculum, much can be learned from the
Montessori experience about how to translate the overall Big History
message into terms that can be understood by children between the ages
of 6 and 12. The pedagogy to deliver the content of Big History to
younger students is a contribution that Montessori educators can make
to the movement to make this all-inclusive story more familiar to all
educated people.

Maria Montessori, the Italian physician who founded the Montes-
sori method of education in the beginning of the 20th century, concluded
from her work in the field of education that everything needs to be un-
derstood in the largest possible context.

Let us give the child a vision of the whole universe... If the idea of
the universe be presented to the child in the right way, it will do
more for him than just arouse his interest, for it will create in him
admiration and wonder... The knowledge he then acquires is
then organized and systematic; his intelligence becomes whole
and complete because of the vision of the whole that has been
presented to him... No matter what we touch, an atom, or a cell,
we cannot explain it without knowledge of the wide universe
(Montessori 1973: 8-9).

As a result of this vision, so similar to the basic tenets of Big His-
tory, Montessori's pedagogy for the elementary aged child is based on
putting everything in the context of the universe and gradually working
inward toward the child and his immediate world. Every subject is
studied as part of an integrated, step-by-step exploration of the unfold-
ing of the universe, of the solar system, of our Earth, of life on this
planet, and finally of the human race.

In *Children of the Universe* (Duffy M. and Duffy D. 2002), we depict
this as a series of concentric circles representing the successive chapters
of the story, with each chapter representing a story within the previous
story and all of them contained within the story of the universe itself.

Thus, the story of the stars and the solar system (Chemistry and
Physics) is part of the story of the universe (Astronomy and Cosmol-
ogy), the story of the Earth (Geology and Geography) is part of the story
of the stars and solar system, the story of life (Biology) is part of the
story of Earth, and the story of early humans (Archeology) and written
history (History) is just part of the story of life on this planet.

<figure><img src="image_27.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1</figcaption></figure>

This is exactly parallel to the approach taken by Christian in his lecture
course on Big History.

Big History surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional
history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the univer-
sal scales of cosmology. It weaves a single story, stretching from the ori-
gins of the Universe to the present day and beyond, using accounts of
the past developed within scholarly disciplines that usually are studied
quite separately.

Human history is seen as part of the history of our Earth and bio-
sphere, and the Earth's history, in turn, is seen as part of the history of
the Universe. In this way, the different disciplines that make up this
large story can be used to illuminate each other. The unified account of
the past assembled in this way can help us understand our own place
within the Universe (Christian 2006).

In his book, Christian explains that the creation stories involved in
this approach to history 'offer answers to universal questions at many
different scales, which is why they sometimes appear to have a nested
structure similar to a Russian *matryoshka* doll - or to the Ptolemaic vi-
sion of the universe, with its many concentric shells' (Christian 2004: 6).
This is the vision embodied in the cover illustration of our book, *Children of the Universe*, following the original insight of Maria Montessori about the unified nature of the story of Cosmic Education. Christian's questions – 'Who am I? Where do I belong? What is the totality of which I am a part?' (Christian 2004: 1) – are very similar to the questions we express as the basic search of Cosmic Education – 'Who am I? Where do I come from? Why am I here?' (Duffy M. and Duffy D. 2002: 4–5)

Montessori and those who embraced her method developed an entire curriculum and collection of teaching materials to make the unified account of the past accessible to elementary-aged children. Spread throughout the curriculum are a series of timelines that highlight various chapters of the story, physical representations of each period that can be studied and manipulated by the students in many cases to construct their own versions of the timelines.

# 1. The Universe Story and the Story of the Stars

The story begins with the emergence of the universe itself in the Big Bang and the formation of the first stars and galaxies. The parts of the Montessori curriculum devoted to this chapter are the equivalent of the first three thresholds in Christian's course – Creation of the Universe, Creation of the Stars, and Creation of Chemical Elements in Dying Stars. The Montessori curriculum covers this for elementary-aged children in a simplified version with materials that help make the story accessible.

The elementary-level story told in the Montessori tradition is the youngest elementary child's introduction (in the equivalent of Grades 1-3) to the study of chemistry and physics. The story is followed by a collection of experiments (called 'Nature of the Elements') that the children can carry out on their own, with a series of trays containing the required materials and command cards to direct their work. For example, there is a tray with three glasses where students are directed to leave one with nothing in it but air, fill another with water, and a third with ice to demonstrate and experience the three states of matter. There are also simple experiments to distinguish the concepts of mixture, suspension and solution; saturation and super-saturation; and the effect of gravity on substances that have different densities (METTC 2013b: 80–83).

Some schools, seeking a more scientifically modern version of the story of the early universe for young children, use resources like Jennifer Morgan's *Born with a Bang* to tell this chapter. Her book, the first in a trilogy that tracks major elements in Montessori's Cosmic Education curriculum, is a beautifully illustrated and solidly scientific story about the early universe found in many Montessori classrooms (Morgan 2002). James Lu Dunbar's 'Universe Verse' comic book trilogy, starting with *Bang!* Is an-
other child-friendly resource that tells the comprehensive story of Big History – and Cosmic Education – in a form that is pedagogically accessible and engaging for elementary-aged students (Dunbar 2009).

At the upper elementary level (equivalent to Grades 4–6), some Montessori schools have developed a ‘Timeline of the Early Universe’ to explain how atomic matter came to be from the Big Bang through the successive Quark Era, Hadron Era, Lepton Era, and Radiation Era.<fnref n="1" /> This is told in story form that first introduces the students to the main characters of the story – atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, and quarks; then it traces the drama of the unfolding story as energy turns into particles of matter, quarks bind into protons and neutrons, protons and anti-protons nearly annihilate each other, electrons and anti-electrons go through a similar near annihilation, photons dominate for a time after these epic struggles, then the atoms we know emerge with electrons orbiting a nucleus of protons and neutrons.

Many other Montessori schools who have students at this level study the ‘Life Cycle of the Stars’, from small stars to medium to giant stars that end up as supernovae, so they can understand how stellar nucleosynthesis produces the elements of the periodic table above the early Big Bang elements of hydrogen and helium (using marbles and other models to illustrate nucleosynthesis). This is their introduction to ‘Evolutionary Chemistry’ – and the discovery for the students that we are all literally made of stardust (CMTE/NY 2012a: 9–12 Evolutionary Chemistry Resources).

This first chapter in the story – encompassing three of Christian's thresholds – is the least developed in the traditional Montessori curriculum, partly because much of the science behind it was not widely known by the time of Montessori's death and partly because it is more removed from the experience of children.

Montessori teachers could take advantage of resources developed by authors within the Big History community to flesh out their own understanding of the science behind the story, in this and the following chapters, particularly since the approach of those who teach Big History is rooted in telling a comprehensive story about the universe. Storytelling is the preferred technique for delivering information in a Montessori environment, and the accounts of those who teach Big History – science in the form of story – provide ready-made material for that approach for teachers whose preparation does not necessarily include a heavy background in science.

<footnote n="1">¹ See Duffy 2011. Also *The Timeline of Light* which is an artistic depiction of part of the story of the Universe, created in scroll form by John Fowler.</footnote>
## 2. The Story of the Solar System and Earth

The next chapter in the Montessori curriculum corresponds to the fourth threshold in Christian's course, Creation of Planets and Earth. For the lower elementary level (Grades 1-3), there is a series of manipulative-based lessons called 'Sun and Earth'. Young children are taught about night and day with the rotation of a globe around itself as it faces a light bulb, about the year by the revolution of the globe around the light, and the 'reason for the seasons' by the effect of the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun as it makes its yearly dance (METTC 2013b: 103-128). In this series, the students learn about the equinoxes, the solstices, and the origin of the imaginary lines of the Equator, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles.

With a series of studies called 'Composition of the Earth', these younger students are taught about the formation of the early planet by the forces of gravity acting on particles left over from the Sun's formation following a supernova explosion of our Mother Star. They learn about the layers of the Earth - crust, mantle, and core - using clay models and other didactic tools. And they learn why the Earth is still alive with earthquakes and volcanoes (METTC 2013b: 129-148). Jennifer Morgan's *Born with a Bang* and *From Lava to Life* (Morgan 2002, 2003), while not specifically part of the official Montessori curriculum, flesh out these parts of the story beautifully and are widely used in Montessori classrooms.

The upper elementary grades, and even the lower elementary grades at times, expand on these subjects with studies called 'The Work of Air' and 'The Work of Water'. Both involve a series of lessons and activities on the part of the students with collections of materials to demonstrate major concepts about how the Earth is shaped and changed by air and water. The Work of Air begins with a number of simple experiments to explain the origin of the movement of air in our atmosphere and how wind patterns are formed (METTC 2013b: 149-153). The Work of Water consists in an examination of the impact of water on the planet as it creates rivers and causes erosion on its way to the sea in the water cycle (Ibid.: 172-190). Upper elementary students often expand on the lower elementary geography studies with a more advanced examination of tectonic plates, Pangaea to today's continents, formation of the Earth's major mountain ranges, the geology of rocks and minerals and similar studies.

As with the first chapter of the story, Montessori offers pedagogical tools to tell this part of the story to young children - and Montessori teachers can enhance their own scientific background by reading the works of Big History proponents.
### 3. The Story of Life

This chapter in the Montessori curriculum corresponds to the fifth threshold in Christian's course, the Creation of Life on Earth. As a physician before she became an educator, Montessori was particularly interested in Biology, and the traditional Montessori curriculum contains many lessons and materials to teach elementary children the story of the evolution of life on this planet.

The simplest of these for the emerging readers of first grade are a collection of classified cards called the 'External Parts of Animals'. They consist in a series of line drawings of a sample animal from each of the five familiar types of vertebrates, with each part highlighted in red. Each picture is accompanied by a label that names the part and a brief paragraph describing its function. There is a collection of these cards for the fish, the frog, the turtle, the bird, and the horse to introduce the very youngest of elementary children to the evolutionary order of familiar classes of vertebrates (METTC 2013a: 12–20). There is a similar series of cards to introduce children to the 'External Parts of Plants,' including seaweed, moss, fern, conifer, and flowering plant, again in evolutionary order (Ibid.: 21–27).

For the more advanced readers in the middle of lower elementary, there are the 'First Knowledge of Animals and Plants' cards, broadening the selection of plants and animals and introducing some of their primary characteristics with accompanying 'Who Am I?' cards that make a game out of guessing the right match from a carefully crafted description (children can check their work on their own with a control booklet once they have done their best to match the cards themselves) (METTC 2013a: 28–45). These young children are introduced to the rudiments of research with a series of 'Question and Answer' cards to apply to the First Knowledge cards – asking such questions as 'What does the animal eat?' with possible answers of 'plants', 'animals', or 'plants and animals' or 'Where does the animal live?' – water, land or air.

Another material, the 'Clock of Eons,' is in the form of a clock, with successive sections after the starting point of 12 o'clock indicating the passage of the Hadoop, Archean, Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic eons (METTC 2013c: 37–46). This traces the evolution of the Earth itself and introduces the children to a formal study of the evolution of life on this planet, a study that is continued with the 'Timeline of Life'. This timeline, generally introduced to third grade students, is a series of poster-sized panels that move them through the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. These charts depict a representative sampling of animals and plants from the various eras and periods, and a mute chart with loose pieces allows the students to learn from hands-
on manipulation where each organism fits in the overall scheme of liv-
ing creatures (METTC 2013c: 47–58).

Finally, the oldest children in lower elementary are introduced to
‘First Classification’ studies. This consists in a series of poster-sized
charts to introduce them to the five-kingdom classification system and
from which they can learn the principal characteristics of the different
phyla, classes, and down to the level of orders for the most prevalent
kinds of plants and animals. This at once reinforces the information
from the Timeline of Life and gives characteristics that help explain the
evolution and emergence of various groups of animals and plants with-
out getting into a discussion of the mechanisms of evolution that would
be beyond the developmental level of these young students (METTC
2013a: 62–85).

At the upper elementary level, the students begin (at the equivalent
of 4th grade) with a study of the ‘Vital Functions of Animals’. This con-
sists in a series of materials to track the growing complexity of organ-
isms in the animal kingdom along the evolutionary trajectory from sin-
gle cell animals to mammals in relation to the functions of nutrition,
respiration, circulation, support and movement, sensation, and repro-
duction (CMTE/NY 2012a: 7–21). This series of matching activities and
accompanying descriptions provide a fairly dramatic lesson on the place
of complexity in the forward movement of evolution as outlined by
Christian in his course. It highlights the emergent characteristics at each
higher level of complexity.

Students in the middle of upper elementary class do a more ‘Ad-
vanced Classification’ study, moving all the way down to the level of
genus and species for some organisms and learning to distinguish for
themselves the ways to separate one group of organisms from another
with a nesting box system of materials. After doing this work with ani-
mals, many of the students are equipped to create their own classifica-
tion nesting boxes for plants with a little guidance from their independ-
ent research (CMTE/NY 2012a: 62–71).

Finally, the oldest students at this level (equivalent to grade 6) study
‘Human Biology,’ surveying the anatomy and physiology of the systems
of the human body dedicated to digestion, respiration, and circulation,
the muscular-skeletal, immune and central and peripheral nervous sys-
tem, and reproduction. Coming in the context of previous studies, this
places the study of humans in the context of other developing life forms
(Ibid.: 72–87).

Given the richness of this part of the Montessori curriculum, there
are numerous pedagogical tools that are available to make the Big His-
tory chapter on the emergence of life and biological evolution compre-
hensible to younger students.