I am an "idea person." I get ideas all the time, big ideas, small ideas--everything from massive, interconnected visions of the best possible future for our planet and ourselves complete with road maps for how to bring it all about to ideas for inventions that make everyday living a tiny bit better.
One idea that has been close to my heart for 15 years or so is an educational website that has a globe on the front page. The globe is interactive. You can go anywhere in the world, and any WHEN in the world, and zoom in on particular points in time and what was going on then and there. Sort of an endless history lesson. You can spread it out flat, too, so that you can compare, for example, civilizations across the globe as they alternately flower and fade throughout the eons. You could also set it on "auto-play" so that you can watch the history of the world as it unfolds from primordial ooze to space travel.
Balance is a powerful thing. Having the kind of interactive tool I just described would be wonderfully fun and illuminating to play with, and it would offer a less ethnocentric historical framework with which to understand our existence. The Mayans, for instance, had thriving metropolitan centers before the oldest known city in France was even founded, about 3000 years ago, and the Chinese had entire, record-keeping dynasties about 1000 years before that. Wouldn't it be wonderful to watch our planet's history bloom in this way? And also to be able to stop it, to zoom in, on any and every point that captures your attention?
To my mind, the best benefit from the tool would not only be a deeper, more fluid understanding of how our world got to the point it is at today, from a historical perspective, but more importantly it would give individuals a better concept of the ebb and flow--the balance--of the rise and fall of civilizations on our small blue planet.
Over the years, a number of tools have been developed out in the wide world that offer a close approximation of what I had always longed for. One of them has recently come to my attention (because my husband is a fascinating and intellectually curious man who has a knack for finding such gems) and it is called Chronozoom. Wikipedia explains the purpose of ChronoZoom as this:
"The primary goal of ChronoZoom is to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a "master timeline" tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past.[6]. ChronoZoom is planned as an educational tool as well as a research tool, by allowing researchers to plot various time series data next to each other for comparison."
Talk about Big History! It is still in the early phases of the project, from what I can tell, but there is enough there now, in the form of short video tours spread along the timeline, that everyone should be able to find something fascinating and entertaining to zoom in on, in chronological order, no less.
Please go check it out. It's grand in a way that we don't get to experience personally in life very often, and I have no doubt we will all be enriched by interacting with it.
One idea that has been close to my heart for 15 years or so is an educational website that has a globe on the front page. The globe is interactive. You can go anywhere in the world, and any WHEN in the world, and zoom in on particular points in time and what was going on then and there. Sort of an endless history lesson. You can spread it out flat, too, so that you can compare, for example, civilizations across the globe as they alternately flower and fade throughout the eons. You could also set it on "auto-play" so that you can watch the history of the world as it unfolds from primordial ooze to space travel.
Balance is a powerful thing. Having the kind of interactive tool I just described would be wonderfully fun and illuminating to play with, and it would offer a less ethnocentric historical framework with which to understand our existence. The Mayans, for instance, had thriving metropolitan centers before the oldest known city in France was even founded, about 3000 years ago, and the Chinese had entire, record-keeping dynasties about 1000 years before that. Wouldn't it be wonderful to watch our planet's history bloom in this way? And also to be able to stop it, to zoom in, on any and every point that captures your attention?
To my mind, the best benefit from the tool would not only be a deeper, more fluid understanding of how our world got to the point it is at today, from a historical perspective, but more importantly it would give individuals a better concept of the ebb and flow--the balance--of the rise and fall of civilizations on our small blue planet.
Over the years, a number of tools have been developed out in the wide world that offer a close approximation of what I had always longed for. One of them has recently come to my attention (because my husband is a fascinating and intellectually curious man who has a knack for finding such gems) and it is called Chronozoom. Wikipedia explains the purpose of ChronoZoom as this:
"The primary goal of ChronoZoom is to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a "master timeline" tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past.[6]. ChronoZoom is planned as an educational tool as well as a research tool, by allowing researchers to plot various time series data next to each other for comparison."
Talk about Big History! It is still in the early phases of the project, from what I can tell, but there is enough there now, in the form of short video tours spread along the timeline, that everyone should be able to find something fascinating and entertaining to zoom in on, in chronological order, no less.
Please go check it out. It's grand in a way that we don't get to experience personally in life very often, and I have no doubt we will all be enriched by interacting with it.
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