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Big History Project
Course: Big History Project > Unit 10
Lesson 1: Looking Back | 10.0- ACTIVITY: Timeline Review
- WATCH: Unit 10 Overview - The Future
- ACTIVITY: Unit 10 Vocab Tracking
- WATCH: The History of Everything—TED
- ACTIVITY: DQ Notebook 10.0
- ACTIVITY: Scale
- ACTIVITY: What Do You Know? What Do You ask?
- READ: Gallery — Earth From Space
- Quiz: Looking Back
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ACTIVITY: Scale
Purpose
This activity reinforces how important scale is to understanding the Big History story.
Process
Think about the resources and activities that have focused on scale throughout the course. Pick out two resources or activities that you think have had the most powerful impact on your thinking about scale – note that they can’t both come from the same unit.
For Further Discussion
In the Questions Area below, share one of the things you picked and write an explanation of why that choice was so important to your understanding the significance of scale in Big History. Then, comment on someone else’s choice – did that choice impact you as well, or did that justification change your thinking about the importance of scale?
Want to join the conversation?
These are my two favourite quotes from the course that have changed my thinking about scale:
What Did Stars Give Us
It's unfathomable to think about the massive amount of hydrogen needed to fuel a big star for millions of years. Once its hydrogen is exhausted, the collapsing and fusing process accelerates:"A star 25 times more massive than the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen in its core in a few million years, will burn helium for half a million years, and, as the core continues to contract and the temperature continues to rise, will burn carbon for 600 years, oxygen for six months, and silicon for one day."
https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/big-history-project/stars-and-elements/creation-complex-elements/v/bhp-what-did-stars-give-us
Human Ancestors
How many generations were responsible for me being alive, here today? It boggles the mind to think of all our ancestors that came before us:"Try visualizing it like this. Imagine your mother holding hands with her mother, who is holding hands with her mother, and keep going back in time for 5 million years. The final clasping hand would belong to an unknown kind of an ape whose descendants evolved into chimpanzees, bonobos, and, ultimately, your mother. If we count each generation as averaging 14 years, there would be about 360,000 hand-holders in the hominine line. "
https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/big-history-project/early-humans/how-ancestors-evolved/a/lucy-and-the-leakeys(10 votes)
I did really appreciate the Human ancestors holding hand visualization. I also visualized the future and wonder what our ancestors will look and be like after 360,000 new generations.(0 votes)
I would say the timeline of our earths or rather our universes history make me think of scale tremendously as it seems it took a very long time for enough conditions to become right or rather goldilocks conditions in order for us to experience advancement toward our civil stipend as we know them today which are inter advancing at much much quicker rates it's ever increasing in progression which is intriguing.(3 votes)- The gold locks conditions wete lile how u can follow it like a time line(0 votes)
- Video from Unit 1.1 on Scale – the Power of 10 video. Going from the picnic blanket in Chicago to outside of our Galaxy and then back to the nucleus of the carbon atom within the DNA of cell under the skin. It really shows our insignificance in the Big History. Our solar system, the earth, and we as its residents are but an insignificant speck of dust amongst Billions. Distance was reflected well.
the PDF of Big History Timeline infographic
https://school.bighistoryproject.com/media/khan/KU10.0.1_BH_Timeline.pdf
One half of the page represents one million years. To get the scale of the beginning of time, if it was on the same scale of half the page to one million years, would require a PDF 6,850 times larger than the above document.
In the newest version of Cosmos, narrated by Neil Degrasse Tyson, a calendar is used to represent the time since the big bang. The last few moments of the last hour of the last day of the year represents the presence of homosapiens with the last minute being longer than the period in which we have recorded history.(0 votes) - I believe us sharing our knowledge was critical beause if we had not travel for more information or bridged the information gaps things wouldve been harder for our people here and the same for those far away we were split up and learned differently aswell as learned different things so coming together even just with communication and compare and contrast of findings and assumptions broadens our chances of survival and allowed us to last a lil longer.(0 votes)
- My focus was mainly earth and what happened to the water is my main concern.(0 votes)
I liked the Activity “My Timeline” because it has me see my scale and impact and story, even if my last 16 years are just a little dot on the last 13.7 billion years.(0 votes)- The Silk Roads intrigued me with learning about how goods started trading for food, clothes, weapons and many more goods and about the 3 men that went on voyages and wrote about them so that we knew who found what lands and how they got there.
I also thought that learning about the 4 world zones was fascinating. It was interesting learning about Afro-Eurasia and how humans only existed there then how homo sapiens migrated to Australasia . The Americas which are North, Central and South America and islands like the Caribbeans. The Pacific which are Island societies . All of them were interesting in there own way. I really enjoyed both topics.(0 votes)- I thougjt the silk roads was interesting because how they had to travel and were they went and what they need to get there and survive(0 votes)
- https://cdn.kastatic.org/KA-share/BigHistory/KU10.0.1_BH_Timeline.pdf
This PDF will have to be first out of all of what I have learned because it's sparked my interested one hundred percent. It's awesome to see this laid out for the individual because before now I had no idea that they had it broken down into thresholds.
Just like someone else below this is also what sparked to me.
Try visualizing it like this. Imagine your mother holding hands with her mother, who is holding hands with her mother, and keep going back in time for 5 million years. The final clasping hand would belong to an unknown kind of an ape whose descendants evolved into chimpanzees, bonobos, and, ultimately, your mother. If we count each generation as averaging 14 years, there would be about 360,000 hand-holders in the hominine line.
The reason being is because I've always wondered about scale and just how far back my bloodlines reach. It's awesome to have it put into prospective for you.(0 votes)- I would say going back in time caught my eye because it eas digferent then(0 votes)
What Emerged from the big bang?
Currently we have no way of compressing water! It just seems so unrealistic that the universe was once smaller than the size than an atom. But you also respect the power of chemistry and how all of the different element's work, by themselves or together!(0 votes)