Quantum physics shows that unpredictability is built into the very nature of our universe. It's not just that we don't know enough about it. The first is that there are no guarantees. How do you think seriously about the future? Well, there are some simple rules.

Well, think stock brokers or futures fund managers make lots of money by thinking with some skill about the future. Oddly, this is something that many business people know perfectly well. Is the world in trouble? Will they or their grandchildren live in a degraded world? Or, are we on the verge of building a much better life and one that's sustainable for many generations and perhaps many centuries? I think it's vital for the generation of young people to think seriously about these issues because they will be taking many of the crucial decisions about the future. Whether or not my own ideas were right or wrong, I found that my students too were excited to use the trans-disciplinary thinking that Big History provides to think seriously and carefully about the future and in particular about their own future. In fact, I believe that part of the point of looking at the past is to help us also to think about the future, but once I got going, I found it was actually very exciting for a historian to think about the future. Collingwood, once wrote that, 'If you hear a historian talking about the future,' and I'm quoting now, 'you know something has gone seriously wrong.' Well, I now think he was wrong. After all, historians deal with the past, not the future. What we have to do is we have to toss a coin in front of everyone and decide who's the optimist and who's the pessimist.' And for two or three years we did that, it was a lot of fun, but I have to admit that as a historian, I didn't find it easy thinking about the future. A colleague, David Briscoe, a biologist who was teaching the Big History course with me said, 'OK. You have to ask where is it all going.' Well, I decided immediately that she was dead right and since then, our Big History courses and many taught in other universities as well as the Big History project for schools have all ended by thinking seriously about the future. You have to look at the future because you built up so much momentum over 13.8 billion years. It was a student who said to me, 'In a course like this you can't just stop dead in the present. The big question for this segment is, what might Threshold 9 be? Where is it all going? When I first began teaching Big History, I stopped dead at the present moment.

David christian big history