Big History

https://www.amazon.com/Plagues-upon-Earth-Princeton-Economic/dp/069119212X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691192123/plagues-upon-the-earth

Plagues upon the Earth is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity’s escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilizes the environment and fosters new diseases.

Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanity’s path to control over infectious disease—one where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies. The book reminds us that human health is globally interdependent—and inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself.

Putting the COVID-19 pandemic in perspective, Plagues upon the Earth tells the story of how we got here as a species, and it may help us decide where we want to go.

Many believe that the nature-based narrative of Big History presents a new, emergent and profoundly important learning opportunity for humanity. However, I suspect that the prevailing modes of formal education, and perhaps the learning paradigms behind them, may be inadequate to deliver on this potential. My goal is to develop practical improvements in the way Big History is taught and communicated by arguing for the lived-experience to go hand-in-hand with the intellectual dimensions.  Therefore, I argue for the value of experiencing Big History as opposed to only knowing it.

As humanity enters an uncertain time known as the Anthropocene, proponents of an emerging subject called Big History claim it provides a promising educational framework capable of eliciting transformative learning. Yet no one has empirically examined the cognitive elements of that transformation or articulated how it may propagate systemically into broader domains of culture, society or the biosphere; which are issues central to the Anthropocene. This thesis takes a highly reflexive approach to explore how Big History education and the Anthropocene may be meaningfully linked and how such linkages may inform better pedagogical and cultural communication of Big History in the Anthropocene.
Much of this research is built on a centrally positioned and empirical qualitative study that revealed several cognitive elements of Big History transformative learning. These included narrative awareness and disruption, urgency and amelioration, reflexivity, causal thinking, empowerment and participation, gratitude and appreciation, transcalar- fractal thinking, and emergent-future thinking. A secondary analysis then revealed how these experiential elements correlate with fundamental perceptual and behavioral changes that experts suggest may form an appropriate response to the Anthropocene. These data and the concepts that emerged over the research were constructed into a general framework that integrates: phenomenology, narrative, tacit knowledge, transformative learning, emergence, transcalar-fractals, enactivism, cybernetics, and systemic reflexivity. This framework may be the first such attempt to explain, with sufficiently broad reflexivity, how the naturalized cosmology of Big History can propagate systemically from personal experience to culture and the biosphere and thus suggest how Big History education can provide an appropriately foundational (i.e. cognitive) response to the Anthropocene.


This document is the Special Issue of the First International Conference on the Evolution and Development of the Universe (EDU 2008). Please refer to the preface and introduction for more details on the contributions. Keywords: acceleration, artificial cosmogenesis, artificial life, Big Bang, Big History, biological evolution, biological universe, biology, causality, classical vacuum energy, complex systems, complexity, computational universe, conscious evolution, cosmological artificial selection, cosmological natural selection, cosmology, critique, cultural evolution, dark energy, dark matter, development of the universe, development, emergence, evolution of the universe evolution, exobiology, extinction, fine-tuning, fractal space-time, fractal, information, initial conditions, intentional evolution, linear expansion of the universe, log-periodic laws, macroevolution, materialism, meduso-anthropic principle, multiple worlds, natural sciences, Nature, ontology, order, origin of th...

The requirement to living and hence evolving system to sustain homeostasis imposes on the evolving system the demand for its ability to sustain adaptive engineering dynamics in response to the changes in its environment. Physics based mechanism of these changes' assessment is offered. Therefore the neurophysiology-grounded mechanism of adaptive behavior of the actor on the ground of adaptive stress-release difference-making reaction may be worked out on that basis. Via probabilistic results of difference-making neurophysiological activity of the structurally evolving actors the information on their structure gets fixed into materialistic changes in their environment. These changes are facilitating simultaneously both the increase of engineering efficiency of energy-conversion via social activity, and optimization of the social energy-conversion structures in order to decrease the waste energy loss 24-1-20

As a social phenomenon, is war subordinate to politics, as Carl von Clausewitz argued in the early nineteenth century, or, instead, is it the product of an instinctive ‘warrior culture’, common to all peoples and times and beyond politics, as John Keegan suggested in the late twentieth? Should we emphasize ‘essential historical elements in the search for a tem-poral continuum in warfare? In this article, we stress the relevance of the ‘perennity of war’ thesis, and the impropriety of a dichotomy between political rationality vs. instinct. The results of the clash between these two strands of thought about the origins of warfare face limitations due to the absence of a temporal ‘play of scales’, so that short-term approaches emerge as incompatible with macro-historical views. We suggest that a deep understanding of the phenomenon of warfare must consider the interaction and the feedback between processes at different time scales.

ABSTRACT. Working out  reliable scientific – not ideologically-biased -  model of social evolution, defining the criteria for Natural Selection any any level of  complexity or Universal Darwinism, and  sociobiology theoretical  rethinking therefore

We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future--to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene epoch, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise-- today's institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository "Safety Case" experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands-or even hundreds of thousands or millions-of years. They are not pop culture "futurists" but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/deep-time-reckoning

Australia has a 30-billion-dollar knowledge industry, yet this industry barely recognises Indigenous Australian knowledge developed for over 60,000 years. This knowledge is important to understanding life on this planet. A 2012 regional Aboriginal education report noted "These ways of thinking and planning are our great gift to a world that desperately needs solutions...Unfortunately, this gift has not been accepted yet, or even noticed" (NSW Department of Education and Communities). Through continued denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience, their knowledge is largely hidden from mainstream Australia and to the rest of the world. This study examines what inhibits appreciation of Indigenous Australian knowledge through two sequential interviews with 26 non-Indigenous senior managers in business, finance and economics.

The debate on ethics has shown two broad orientations. Ethics may appear as a spontaneous manifestation of a behavioral portfolio with strong innate foundations (for example, altruism, cooperation, rewards and punishments); or it emerges as a phenomenon dependent on the capacity for rational self-reflection, so that an action is truly ethical insofar as the responsible agent is voluntary and conscious of the act he performs. Considering that the great African apes, including Homo sapiens, live in large stable social groups with an increased potential for conflict between individual agendas, a reasonable volume of evidence has suggested an instinctive and ethological basis for intrasocial ethical behavior. If so, there would be some innate and ethological behavioral basis for ethics in human intersocietal relations, whether in war (provinding the limits to the exercise of hard power), or in peace (establishing standards for preservation of intersocietal non-hostility)? As an hypothesis, we suggest that human exclusivity in the exercise of the ethics of war and peace (absent in the intersocietal relations among chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes) is a product of the human transdominial cognition, capable of recombining and re-signifying innate behavioral algorithms through culture, and devote them to absolutely innovative functions. We conclude that the schism between nurture vs. nature is a false question in this debate ////////////////////////// Os debates sobre a ética têm demonstrado duas grandes orientações. Em uma delas, surge como manifestação espontânea de um determinado conjunto de comportamentos com forte base inata (por exemplo, altruísmo, cooperação, recompensas e punições); em outra, surge como fenômeno dependente da capacidade de autorreflexão racional, de modo que uma ação se mostra verdadeiramente ética na medida em que o agente responsável é voluntário e consciente do ato que realiza. A partir da consideração de que os grandes símios africanos, dentre os quais Homo sapiens, vivem em grandes grupos sociais estáveis com ampliado potencial de choque entre agendas individuais, razoável volume de evidência tem sugerido uma base instintiva e etológica do comportamento ético intrassocial. Se for assim, existiria, analogamente, alguma base comportamental inata e etológica para a ética nas relações intersocietárias humanas, seja na guerra (que determine os limites da projeção e do exercício do hard power), seja na paz (que estabeleça as normas para a preservação da não hostilidade intersocietária), e que se some à cultura e às instituições? Sustenta-se aqui a hipótese de que a exclusividade humana no exercício da ética da guerra e da paz (ausente nas relações intersocietárias entre chimpanzés-comuns, Pan troglodytes) é tributária da cognição transdominial humana, capaz de recombinar e ressignificar algoritmos comportamentais inatos através da cultura, e voltá-los para funções absolutamente inovadoras. Conclui-se então que a clivagem entre nurture vs. nature caracteriza-se como uma falsa questão nesse debate.

Como fenômeno social, a guerra está subordinada à política, como defende Clausewitz, ou, ao contrário, é produto de uma "cultura guerreira" instintiva, comum a todos os povos e tempos e para além da política, como sugere Keegan? Devemos enfatizar "elementos históricos essenciais" na busca de um contínuo intertemporal para a guerra? Neste artigo, enfatizamos a relevância do postulado da "perenidade da guerra" e a impropriedade de uma dicotomia entre racionalidade política versus instintividade. Os resultados do choque entre essas duas correntes de pensamento sobre as origens da guerra enfrenta limitações devido à ausência de um "jogo de escalas" temporal, de modo que as abordagens de curta duração emergem como incompatíveis com visões macro-históricas. Sugerimos que uma compreensão profunda do fenômeno da guerra deve considerar a interação e a retroalimentação entre processos em diferentes escalas de tempo, do episódico ao evolucionário.

As a social phenomenon, is war subordinate to politics, as Clausewitz argues, or, instead, is it the product of an instinctive 'warrior culture', common to all peoples and times and beyond politics, as Keegan suggests? Should we emphasize 'essential historical elements' in the search for a temporal continuum in warfare? In this article, we stress the relevance of the 'perennity of war' thesis, and the impropriety of a dichotomy between political rationality vs. instinct. The results of the clash between these two strands of thought about the origins of warfare face limitations due to the absence of a temporal 'play of scales', so that short-term approaches emerge as incompatible with macro-historical views. We suggest that a deep understanding of the phenomenon of warfare must consider the interaction and the feedback between processes at different time scales.

Книга рассказывает о важной количественной закономерности, выявленной в развитии социальных и биологических систем. Численность населения и ряд других макросоциологических параметров (степень урбанизации, грамотности и т.д.), растут по гиперболическому закону (скорость роста показателя пропорциональна квадрату его значения в данный момент времени). Авторы монографии – биолог А. В. Марков и историк-социолог А. В. Коротаев – выявили такую же закономерность в динамике родового богатства морской и континентальной биоты в течение последних 540 млн лет. Сходство столь разных процессов, по-видимому, не является случайным и объясняется в обоих случаях наличием нелинейной положительной обратной связи второго порядка. В человеческом обществе эта связь опосредуется научно-техническим прогрессом и ростом несущей способности Земли, что ведет к дальнейшему росту населения, который, в свою очередь, способствует дальнейшему ускорению научно-технического прогресса. В биоте аналогичная связь опосредуется ростом сложности (видового богатства) экосистем, что приводит к снижению темпов вымирания видов и к росту темпов видообразования. Как в обществе, так и в природе гиперболический рост не может продолжаться вечно и рано или поздно начинает через тот или иной фазовый переход трансформироваться в иного вида динамику. В книге анализируются причины и механизмы гиперболического роста, рассматриваются математические модели, помогающие понять наблюдаемые в природе и обществе процессы. Для верификации моделей привлекаются обширные массивы историко-социологических и палеонтологических данных.

Reseña del libro Homo Deus del historiador israelí Yuval Noah Harari. Se recomienda leer primero dos artículos del autor de la presente reseña que también están publicados en esta red académica: El Gran Relato y Reseña de Sapiens o De animales a dioses de Yuval Noah Harari.

This thesis applies narrative as theory and method to explore a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that connects a holistic and process understanding of the world (a “New Story”) with social and ecological justice (or “positive peace”). First, the indirect violence of global poverty and environmental destruction are examined in terms of the dissipation of individual responsibility amid political, economic and social institutions. Second, a connection is made between these structural forms of violence and one-dimensional narratives. Drawing from an argument shared by process thinkers Charles Birch, Alan Watts and Thomas Berry, I critique the “Old Story” of one-dimensional religious narratives, and one-dimensional reductionistic narratives of the “Modern Story”. These stories are contrasted with a multi-dimensional and ecological worldview that Berry calls a “New Story”, which narrates an understanding of the self, humanity and the cosmos as one interconnecting process. This process understanding of the world is shown to be located in a rich and vast history of panentheistic theology. This research concludes that the narratological “New Story” engages conflicting worldviews, enables “positive conflict” and motivates action toward a long-term vision of positive peace.

Key words: Structural violence, New Story, narratology, process thought, ecological worldview, panentheism, positive peace, positive conflict

Abstract: Toward developing of comprehensive engineering (dynamic) evolutionary paradigma  via structural analysis of behavior motivation  in eco-evo sequences  following by history of humanity, on the basis of correlational changes in thermodynamics of evolutionary Semi-Open System of Biosphere+Anthroposphere in Antropocene, realistic but probabilistic, materialistic, with no esoteric mysticism, natural-science-based ones, that analyses  reasons of changes in the  interaction of the information and energy-matter-works dynamics    by structural analysis  for physical dynamical interactions among components of the ComplexAdaptive System of the Biosphere dynamics
20July19

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether such projects should be built are highly and systematically misleading. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying. The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.

The  process of complexity rise is  both causal and casual simultaneously, one of both probabilistic and highly ontogenesis-depending nature, highly causal and casual  simultaneously. That  ambiguitu of the process always confused specialists working in the field “knowledge sciences”, :” human” ans “social sciences” and regarding puzzles  of social evolution therefore.  This confuse makes such experts always diving into so-called "quantum misticism" and discussing "semiotics of the  “Devine nature of Knowledge evolution" - Knowledge is usually written by them with CAPS LOCK:;-)
here I took the assumption to figure out what that "Knowledge" means in fact, without any CapsLocks To do it I had collected a lot of . empirical materials on the consequent stages of that process in the current  I took the assumption to figure out what that "Knowledge" means in fact, without any CapsLocks To do it I had collected a lot of . empirical materials on the consequent stages of that process In this article  the  neurophysiologically verified neuropsyсhological researches are presented, that provide verified by experimental results on adaptive  stress-releasing activity' motivation of causal activity of Complex  Dynamic Adaptive system, integrated by cause-effect relations in making differences in interactions with environment. Environment may be  both  as "traditional", "material" or” rigid”, so the more “flexible-liquid” social one, That allows reestablishing the cause-effect relations between the Information Theory in the understanding of Shannon, and “traditional vision”’s of    non-quantum physics, one of Newton-Maxwell, and geometry of Pithagoras

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictoriness of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant
misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally predominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities
and who confront directly in their research all the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task
of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer
detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simplemacrolaws.
This book discusses general regularities of the World System growth. It is shown that they can be described mathematically in a rather accurate way with rather simple models.

La Gran Historia es un enfoque reciente que presenta una visión unitaria de la historia desde el big-bang hasta nuestros días, propuesta por el historiador australiano David Christian en 1991 y desarrollada en sus libros. Presenta, por lo tanto, la formación de los primeros átomos, la de las estrellas y del planeta Tierra alrededor de una de ella, la evolución de la vida sobre la Tierra, la aparición del hombre y su evolución para llegar al presente. La última época, con la interacción del hombre sobre la superficie de la Tierra misma modificándola, recibe hoy el nombre de Antropoceno (últimos 200 años). Sobre la Gran Historia se basa el proyecto educativo "Big History Project", para su enseñanza a nivel de universidad y escuela secundaria, que se encuentra ya establecido en muchas partes a nivel mundial.

Prepared for the Teachers for Social Justice Conference

This workshop looks at rage as an adaptive mechanism spanning the nearly fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution. Recently, the so-called Big History Movement has emerged as a transdisciplinary approach to understanding history as an integrated whole. After providing an overview of key themes and skills such an approach takes (using claimtesters to understand threshold moments, etc.), we will discuss the advantages of seeing socioecological problems as a deprivation of energy glows, using the Big History perspective to evaluate complex problems while proposing innovative solutions in and out of a classroom environment. Finally, we will consider lessons for mass movements and discuss rage as an evolutionary capacity to change our environment, with time devoted to imagining "living cosmology" projects that draw from the teachings of the universe to effectively redistribute its primacy to the earth community.

Megaproject Planning and Management: Essential Readings contains the seminal articles from the growing body of research on megaproject planning and management along with an original introduction by the editor, Bent Flyvbjerg. The leading and most cited authority in the field, Flyvbjerg has used crowdsourcing and 25 years of experience to cherry-pick from several hundred articles and books the writings that define the field. This volume will be an indispensable source for those wishing to speak with authority about how megaprojects are prepared, delivered, and fought over. The target audience is students, academics, practitioners, and media pundits alike, as well as communities affected by megaprojects.

Extremely simple mathematical models are shown to be able to account for 99.2–99.91 per cent of all the variation in economic and demographic macrodynamics of the world for almost two millennia of its history. In this article we show that it is in no way coincidental that the world GDP dynamics in 1–1973 is approximated so well with a quadratic hyperbola, whereas the world population one does with a simple hyperbola. This appears to suggest a novel approach to the formation of the general theory of social macroevolution.

The idea that in the near future we should expect “the Singularity” has become quite popular recently, primarily thanks to the activities of Google technical director in the field of machine training Raymond Kurzweil and his book The Singularity Is Near (2005). It is shown that the mathematical analysis of the series of events (described by Kurzweil in his famous book), which starts with the emergence of our Galaxy and ends with the decoding of the DNA code, is indeed ideally described by an extremely simple mathematical function (not known to Kurzweil himself) with a singularity in the region of 2029. It is also shown that, a similar time series (beginning with the onset of life on Earth and ending with the information revolution – composed by the Russian physicist Alexander Panov completely independently of Kurzweil) is also practically perfectly described by a mathematical function (very similar to the above and not used by Panov) with a singularity in the region of 2027. It is shown that this function is also extremely similar to the equation discovered in 1960 by Heinz von Foerster and published in his famous article in the journal “Science” – this function almost perfectly describes the dynamics of the world population and is characterized by a mathematical singularity in the region of 2027. All this indicates the existence of sufficiently rigorous global macroevolutionary regularities (describing the evolution of complexity on our planet for a few billion of years), which can be surprisingly accurately described by extremely simple mathematical functions. At the same time it is demonstrated that in the region of the singularity point there is no reason, after Kurzweil, to expect an unprecedented (many orders of magnitude) acceleration of the rates of technological development. There are more grounds for interpreting this point as an indication of an inflection point, after which the pace of global evolution will begin to slow down systematically in the long term.

La tesis de doctorado tiene como objetivo principal estudiar los procesos de coevolución que la vida desarrolla en la “Gran Historia” desde hace billones de años, con la intención de identificar sus estrategias y principios operaciones, para promover alternativas biomiméticas sostenibles que hagan frente a la encrucijada civilizatoria que representan los “Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible” (ODS) propuestos por las Naciones Unidas para el año 2030. Se trata de una investigación cualitativa, de carácter exploratorio, descriptivo y analítico que unifica, integra e incluye la historia del universo, del sistema solar, de la Tierra y de la vida junto a la historia del ser humano. Para el desarrollo de esta “ecología de saberes” se combina la metodología transdisciplinar con la Teoría de la Complejidad con la finalidad de comprender todas las leyes físicas que reinan en los diferentes niveles ontológicos de la naturaleza y del universo, así como sus correspondientes niveles gnoseológicos del sujeto- observador. Las observaciones más relevantes muestran que la vida viene desarrollando estrategias coevolutivas sostenibles en la naturaleza desde su propia aparición hace unos 3.800 millones de años. La discusión teórica tiene como resultado la identificación de diferentes principios operacionales coevolutivos de cooperación ecosistémica que deben ser copiados, emulados y perfeccionados biomiméticamente para desarrollar procesos socioeconómicos humanos más sostenibles y resilientes. Para ayudar a conseguir los ODS, también se aborda la “Educación para la Ciudadanía Mundial” (ECM) propuesta por la UNESCO en el marco de acción post-2015, por ser una herramienta epistémica transformadora que ayuda a reducir la inmensa huella ecológica y social actual. Las conclusiones se apoyan en los artículos y entrevistas publicadas en “Global Education Magazine”, cuyo estudio de caso representa un método de evaluación cualitativo. En suma, la investigación propone recomendaciones biomiméticas y transdisciplinares con el objetivo de prevenir escenarios futuros donde la escasez crónica de recursos naturales impida el desarrollo humano digno y la proliferación de la vida.

Представление о том, что в ближайшее время нас ждет некая «Сингулярность», стало в последнее время
достаточно популярным, прежде всего благодаря деятельности технического директора Google в области
технического обучения Рэймонда Курцвейла и его книге The Singularity Is Near (2005). Показано, что
математический анализ приводимого им ряда событий, начинающегося с возникновения нашей Галактики
и заканчивающегося расшифровкой кода ДНК, действительно практически идеально описывается
(неизвестной самому Курцвейлу) крайне простой математической функцией с сингулярностью в районе
2029 г. Показано также, что составленный в начале 2000-х (совершенно независимо от Курцвейла)
российким физиком А. Д. Пановым аналогичный временной ряд (начинающийся с возникновения жизни
на Земле и заканчивающийся информационной революцией) также практически идеально описывается
(не использованной А. Д. Пановом) математической функцией (крайне сходной с вышеупомянутой) с
сингулярностью в районе 2027 г. Показано, что эта функция также чрезвычайно сходна с уравнением,
открытым в 1960 г. Х. фон Ферстером, показавшим в своей знаменитой статье в журнале Science, что она
практически идеально описывает динамику численности населения и характеризуется математической
сингулярностью в районе 2027 г. Все это говорит о наличии достаточно строгих глобальных
макроэволюционных закономерностей, которые могут удивительно точно описываться крайне простыми
математическими функциями. Вместе с тем продемонстрировано, что в районе точки сингулярности
нет основания вслед за Курцвейлом ожидать невиданного (на много порядков) ускорения темпов
технологического развития; имеются бóльшие основания интерпретировать эту точку как индикатор зоны
перегиба, после прохождения которой темпы глобальной эволюции будут систематически в долгосрочной
перспективе замедляться.

Big historians are attempting to construct a general holistic narrative of human origins enabling an approach to studying the emergence of complexity, the relation between evolutionary processes, and the modern context of human experience and actions. In this paper I attempt to explore the past and future of cosmic evolution within a big historical foundation characterized by physical, biological, and cultural eras of change. From this analysis I offer a model of the human future that includes an addition and/or reinterpretation of technological singularity theory with a new theory of biocultural evolution focused on the potential birth of technological life: the theory of atechnogenesis. Furthermore, I explore the potential deep futures of technological life and extrapolate towards two hypothetical versions of an ‘Omega Civilization’: expansion and compression.

Back cover text: Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multi-billion dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory, experience and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations and five continents that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be the standard reference for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians and interested citizens for many years to come.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

Big History is a new interdisciplinary field that looks at history in the broadest possible scientific contexts. It begins at the Big Bang, and ends in the distant future at the heat death of the Universe. Hence it starts long before humans arrive on the scene, and ends long after they are gone. It utilizes physics, astronomy, geology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and history. When it focuses on human history it does so through the longue durée, and employs environmental, biological, geological, geographical, and cosmic perspectives. It takes thresholds of increasing complexity as its major turning-points. Pedagogically, Big History is useful because it unites all fields of knowledge into an integrated schema. For the instructor teaching it, its breadth is breathtaking.