The History of Our World in 18 Minutes

In his 18 minute summation of the history of our world (from the big bang), he made sure to spend a great deal of time concerning the more scientific aspects in order to point out with painstaking grandiosity the area where humans excel.

 Collective learning. David Christian highlighted the very thing that separates humans from the rest of life on our planet, our ability to pass knowledge from one generation to the next. We alone have developed methods of ensuring a detailed record, a way to accumulate our knowledge and be able to look backward in our efforts to move forward. Seeing as we as a species are reliant upon the record, it seems that one important aspect regarding the record was left absent during his talk. While he indicated the dangers that could come to pass due to the still present weapons meant to kill the world haven't gone anywhere, he neglected to mention the importance of exactly how history is written is more important at this moment than it has been at any other time.

We have access to fantastic amounts of data, and hold the means to access it nearly endlessly and also to make it more available than any other time in our history; yet we fail to use it to our potential, almost resentfully so. As we now have unprecedented access to vast knowledge, we are concurrently losing our ability to think critically and have become almost laughably susceptible to outside influences. As much as I hope in my heart for this better future based on knowledge and fact and humanity along with David Christian for the sake of coming generations, I'm not really convinced that hope is where I'd place any bets. On a side note, the collective knowledge conspicuously seems to represent the global community only so far as that globe is within the confines of trade and commerce interests and the influence of Eurocentric thinking.