1. Big History — the eight thresholds
Big History organises 13.8 billion years into eight moments where new complexity appeared, each needing its own "Goldilocks conditions." Click a threshold on the timeline to read its detail. The bar is drawn on a logarithmic time axis, so the last sliver holds all of human history.
2. Cosmic clock — scrub 13.8 Bya to today
Compress all of time into a single year (the "Cosmic Calendar"). Drag the slider to move through history and watch how almost everything humans ever did is crammed into the final seconds of December 31. Recency dominates — the modern era is a blink.
3. Diffusion of innovation — adoption S-curves
New technologies spread slowly, then explode, then saturate — a logistic S-curve $f(t)=\dfrac{1}{1+e^{-k(t-t_0)}}$. Compare the telephone, radio, TV, mobile and the smartphone, and tune the steepness to see how diffusion has sped up over the centuries.
4. Accelerating returns — exponential vs linear
Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns": innovation compounds, so capability grows exponentially, $N(t)=N_0\,(1+r)^{t}$. Moore's-law-style doubling looks like a wall on a linear axis but a straight line in log scale. Toggle the axis to feel the difference.
5. World population through history
Population stayed almost flat for millennia, then leapt at each great innovation: agriculture, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and modern medicine. Drag the marker to read the estimate and which threshold drove the jump. A log scale reveals the deeper structure.
6. The map of ideas & innovations
Ideas build on earlier ones. Click any node to highlight what fed into it and what it made possible — a small genealogy of innovation from writing to artificial intelligence, in the spirit of Joler's Calculating Empires.
Arrows point from an idea to what it made possible.
7. Rising complexity & Goldilocks conditions
Each threshold creates more complex structures with denser flows of energy — but only in narrow "Goldilocks" windows: too cold and nothing forms, too hot and it falls apart. Move the conditions and watch how much complexity can survive.
8. Revolutions of science & technology — pan & zoom
A pannable, zoomable timeline of major turning points from the syllabus, Stone-Age tools to ChatGPT. Drag to pan, use the zoom slider to expand a span. Click an event to read it. Notice the events bunch ever tighter toward the present.
9. Collective learning — information compounds
Humans are unique in collective learning: each generation passes on more than it received, so knowledge accumulates. With more minds and better media (writing, print, internet) the stock of shared information snowballs. Tune the channels and population to see the stock grow.