Some universities are now including an emerging subject in their curricula called Big History. This discipline seeks to understand, in a unified and interdisciplinary way, the histories of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity, starting from the Big Bang up to the present day. Big History grew out of a project initiated by Bill Gates[1] and David Christian[2], and it has gained importance in academic circles due to the breadth of disciplines it integrates, the scope of topics it addresses, and the profound questions it attempts to answer.
I find this subject particularly relevant because it provides the reader with an essential overview of the broad sequence of events referred to throughout the development of the first question.
The historical process of the formation of all things, as explained in this discipline, presents a completely naturalistic perspective—one that, as expected, contains significant gaps and assumptions. The sequence of events it outlines often coincides with the biblical version, which is why it is worth presenting here. It should be noted that, scientifically, everything we know about the origin of the universe begins a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. From that point forward, the laws of physics and chemistry can be applied. But before the Big Bang, no physical or chemical law can describe what might have occurred. There is no logic or theory that can be definitively applied to the origin of the explosion itself. In other words, prior to the Big Bang, science offers only naturalistic theories, none of which can be verified, since no known laws can be applied to the “singularity” from which everything emerged.
This Big Story can be summarized as follows: approximately 13.7 billion years ago, neither time nor space existed. There was only a tiny “ball” of energy—slightly larger than a dot[3]. Scientists refer to this as a “singularity.” This assumption, the foundation of all naturalistic models, presents many challenges—challenges that conflict with both logic and the laws of physics.
First, there is the logical problem: scientists describe the singularity as having a “size,” comparable to that of a small atom. But we cannot speak of “size” without space. Talking about the size of anything only makes sense if there is space to contain it. Second, they cannot explain its origin—hence, they call it a “singularity.”
All the matter that would eventually form everything in the universe—every celestial body seen in photographs and films, all the stars, moons, comets, meteorites, and everything on Earth—was supposedly contained in that tiny “ball” of energy.
According to science, this singularity began to expand at an incredible rate. During the first second, energy fragmented into various forces, including electromagnetism and gravity. Then the energy underwent a process that seems almost magical—it began to “freeze” into matter: Quarks formed protons and leptons formed electrons.
Within just one second, the two forces that govern matter already existed, along with their first building blocks.
It took around 380,000 years for the universe to cool enough to allow the formation of the first hydrogen and helium atoms. These atoms formed vast, formless clouds. At this point, gravity began to act: where atoms gathered in slightly higher concentrations, gravity pulled in more nearby particles. The more mass present, the greater the gravitational pull, and so the clouds continued to grow.
Eventually, these massive clouds became so dense that they produced extreme pressure at their centers, initiating the process of fusion, which released vast amounts of energy as heat. After more than two hundred million years, the universe saw the birth of its first stars.
Stars, however, do not last forever. Though their lifespans stretch into millions of years, they are not immortal. Once a star exhausts its fuel, it dies. What happens next depends on its size. The largest stars—more than a thousand times the mass of our sun—collapse and explode. These supernovae create temperatures so intense that they fuse atoms together, producing all the elements in the periodic table: Carbon, oxygen, gold[4], iron, mercury, uranium, copper, silver, and so on.
Smaller stars, like our sun, do not go out so dramatically. They become cold, dense spheres, frozen in silence—unremarkable remnants destined for cosmic stillness.
As stars died, the universe became increasingly chemically complex. At about one billion years, a rudimentary periodic table could already be formed. This process continued until, about five billion years ago, our solar system was formed from the debris of these dying stars. That is why the Earth is much more complex than any star: its existence can only be explained with the full periodic table of elements.
Roughly one billion years later, the first unicellular organisms appeared on Earth—marking the beginning of life. These were the only lifeforms for four billion years. Then came multicellular organisms, and our planet became populated by an astonishing number of species, colonizing water, air, and land.
Most of these species have since gone extinct, but those that survive continue to amaze us with the richness and variety of life. Among them, about 200,000 years ago, human beings appeared—the most unique and significant species to ever live on Earth.
Was this entire sequence of events guided by a higher being, or was it the result of random, natural processes?
This question divides opinion within the scientific community. Some scientists reject the idea of design, proposing instead that matter possesses the remarkable ability to generate its own complexity, organizing itself through chance and natural law, working in tandem with physics and chemistry to give rise to everything we see.
Others—including religious thinkers and some scientists—assert that a higher, intelligent being—a true Creator—must have infused matter with the necessary information for it to organize itself and form everything that exists.
[1]William Henry Gates III, commonly known as Bill Gates, is an American businessman, computer engineer, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of the software company Microsoft.
[2]David Christian is a historian and professor specializing in Russian history, formerly affiliated with Oxford University. He is also widely known for pioneering the interdisciplinary field of Big History, which examines history from the Big Bang to the present.
[3]Hard to understand? It certainly is. Yet the genius of Albert Einstein grasped it so profoundly that he was able to express it in a remarkably simple formula: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared—E = mc².
[4]That gold chain you might be wearing around your neck likely originated from an exploded star. The elements it contains were forged in the heart of a dying star and released into space during a supernova. Over time, gravity drew this stellar material back together, eventually forming new celestial bodies—among them, our own planet.