Chapter 1: The Great Monotony

Ft. David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant

The first chapter from the documentary I’m creating is now live.

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Transcript

Imagine condensing the universe’s 13.8 billion year history into a single day. What would we see? What would we learn about our place in this grand cosmic story?

At the stroke of midnight, an unfathomable explosion—the Big Bang—sets our cosmic clock ticking.

In mere fractions of a second, space, time, and energy burst into existence. As our imaginary clock ticks, we witness the birth of the first atoms… the ignition of the first stars… the formation of the first black holes… the assembly of the first galaxies.

All of this cosmic drama unfolds in the early hours of our universal day, long before the first light of dawn.

But then... silence. Cosmic monotony sets in.

For what seems like an eternity—billions of years in real-time—the universe enters a creative slumber. No fundamentally new astronomical objects emerge. The cosmos, vast and wondrous as it is, becomes predictable. Repetitive.

During this era, there is nothing new under the sun–nor in any other direction. Novelty becomes alien to the cosmos.

But wait. In the final moments of our cosmic day, with mere seconds left on the clock, something remarkable happens.

Something that would seem utterly insignificant compared to the astronomical events that had defined the universe until that point.

People. Us. Homo sapiens. Rising from the evolutionary crucible, we emerge as a species with an unprecedented capacity for creativity and progress.

But our story echoes that of the cosmos. For thousands of centuries, we too seemed trapped in stasis. Generation after generation lived and died, facing the same challenges, rarely seeing meaningful change.

David Deutsch: Those people were intellectually our equals, and yet made no progress.

Naval Ravikant: The cavemen, or the Paleolithic ancestors, had access to all the same resources we did. They were living on the same Earth. And by the modern environmentalist arguments, they had a better Earth, they had more to do things with. Yet, they couldn’t do anything. They weren’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination.

Unlike the stars and galaxies, we harbored the potential for radical change.

Only a few hundred years ago, we escaped this hellish cycle of stasis, and we’ve been making real progress ever since. Now, no Western person experiences the same world as a child that he does as an adult.

How did we make our escape? How did we go from stasis to dynamism? What was the spark that ignited humanity’s ascent to ever-greater heights? And why did it happen when it did?

As we explore these questions, we’re not just uncovering the story of our species. We’re discovering the next–and easily most interesting–chapter in the cosmic story itself. Could we, humans, be the universe’s way of breaking free from its own stasis?

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P.S. In case you missed it, HumanProgress.org published an excerpt from my documentary script. Click here to read it.