• Timeline:
  • 14 billion years ago: Big Bang created space, time, and energy
  • 12-13 billion years ago to present: no fundamentally new astronomical objects have emerged
  • Hundreds of thousands years ago: people arose – the antithesis of the universe’s bland monotony
• Memes: (like genes) units of cultural transmission – ideas, behaviors, and traditions that spread from person to person. Dawkins: what makes a meme die out isn’t its benefit to its holders or society as a whole, it’s the successful variant changes the behaviors of its holder in a way that makes it more likely to be passed on to others than its rivals.
• Static societies: e.g. 5 century BC Sparta of Ancient Greece
  • Individuals who “offered” alternative memes punished or killed
  • Disable source of new ideas – human creativity – exploit childen’s psychology to entrench themselves in their minds
• Dynamic societis: e.g. Athens during the “Golden Age” or “Age of Pericles” – Plato and Aristotle
  • Idea of Platonism and Idealism, and ideas about learning by studying and interacting emerged
  • Memes survived by criticism
• Enemies of Civilization:
  • Socialism: advocates centralized institutions to take means of production away from citizens, believe weath is fixed pie.
  • Environmentalism (or degrowth movement): advocates that humanity minimize its impact on the environment by having fewer children, consuming less energy, and releasing less carbon into the atmosphere
  • Scientism: false idea that scientific knowledge trumps all other kinds of knowledge, that science can give us answers to all our questions
  • Relativism: the idea that there is no difference between right and wrong, good and evil
  • Dogmatism: idea that is considered, implicitly, or explicitly uncriticizable, the final truth, known with certainity, never to be changed
  • Doomererism: idea that humanity has no shot at continuing to make progress, or that our extinction is just around the corner, we are just one innovation away from guaranteeing our decline
• Transformation that Nature allow for (including star becoming a black hole, heilum atoms fusing to become carbon and iron inside the star, particles or antiparticles colliding and producing high energy photons) « Transformation that life can cause (human genome alone can cause hundred thousand different proteins)
• Humans are the only species that can bring about any transformation that is allowed by the laws of physics. If there were a thing that we can’t achieve no matter what knowledge we bring to bear, then there is another (testable) law of physics that says we can’t do that.

Knowledge Centered History of Everything