Original subtitles

[ Man Narrating ] The strange circle at Stonehenge.

A towering Mayan pyramid.

The obelisks of ancient Egypt.

Massive stone monuments...

the conceal a mysterious ancient code...

linked by the big history...

of the sun.

We think of history as a timeline...

a series of events stretching a few thousand years into the past.

It's time to think bigger.

Instead of a line, imagine a web of infinite connections...

interacting over billions of years...

linked together to create everything we've ever known-

our universe, our planet...

and us.

History as we know it is about to get big.

[ Narrator] Across the ancient world...

massive monuments rise in perfect alignment...

so that in the right place, at the right moment...

the people can behold a god-

the sun.

Traditional history tells us that sun worship is an ancient superstition...

but big history reveals there's truth behind the myths...

that the sun is a creator...

a master of reality and time.

[ Clock Ticking ]

[ Man ] The way we view time is shaped...

by the fact that we grew up on this planet...

with this sun...

with this cycle.

And it dictates so much about our bodies and our brains...

and our social organization.

You can't even imagine what life would be like without the sun.

[ Narrator] Night always becomes day...

and days become years.

The sun sets the rules of time on Earth-..

Rules we must follow to survive.

[ Markley] if your calendar is not in sync with the sun...

it's disaster for your farmers.

They don't know properly when to plant. They don't know when to harvest.

If you don't get it right, you could starve.

[ Narrator] Our early monuments aren't just temples...

they're the first calendars.

Big history connects...

to southern England.

On the first day of summer...

the sun rises over Stonehenge...

until I! seems to balance on one of the main stones...

marking the longest day of the year.

And to Mexico...

when the sunset over the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzé...

creates a serpent of shadows on the central pyramid...

to mark the first day of spring and fall.

And to Egypt...

where massive obelisks are giant sundials...

that mark the hours of the day and the passage of seasons.

[ Man ] it's pretty clear that ancient peoples...

tracked the motions of the sun over the course of the year...

and built their structures to some degree...

to agree with those directions.

[ Narrator] From monuments to calendars...

we create tools to help us make sense of the sun.

But big history reveals we've always had the key...

to crack the solar code...

hidden within us.

You are not in control of your own body.

The sun is your master.

Inside nearly every one of your cells...

tiny proteins run on a 24-hour cycle-

a clock set to the sun...

that tells your body what to do and when to do it.

These clocks control every animal on earth.

They first evolve in single-celled organisms...

that sync themselves up with the sun...

for the same reason ancient humans do.

[ Man ] When you have big changes in the environment...

and they're very predictable...

this encourages the evolution of a timing system to follow them.

[ Man ] When you think about this cycle of day to night...

which occurs so regularly here on our planet...

it's the most dramatic regular change, if you like...

that organisms at all levels had to cope with, had to deal with...

had to adjust to in different ways.

So we see that during the evolution of the earliest cells...

this change was recognized as being so significant...

for all the activities that cells needed to undertake...

that it was encoded even from the very beginning of cellular activity...

into the very D.N.A. of cells.

[ Narrator] The human body has trillions of cells...

so there are trillions of individual clocks...

and one master clock that rules them all.

[Ticking ]

A small structure in the brain...

that controls the body's coordinated timing system...

the circadian rhythm.

It works independently of our thoughts...

and can even run outside of our bodies.

It's possible to take the central clock out of an animal, put it in a dish...

and these cells will keep track of time, keep running for years.

[ Narrator] The big history perspective reveals a profound pattern.

Just as civilizations build megastructures...

to track the movement of the sun...

to know the best times to plant and harvest...

the body's microstructures do the same thing from the inside...

telling us when to work, to eat, to sleep.

Circadian rhythms fine-tune our bodies to the time of day...

speeding up metabolism before sunrise to give us energy...

and preparing us for sleep at night...

by lowering blood pressure and slowing down the activity in our brain.

The system has such powerful control over us...

it works even when we're not exposed to sunlight.

Miners trapped underground for weeks...

still wake and sleep on a 24-hour cycle.

This is such a powerful regulator of our body's physiology and cell biology...

that the individual cells will continue to follow a near 24-hour oscillation...

even without any sunlight at all...

because it's part of our biology, part of our D.N.A...

is to have this timing system...

where everything in our body is designed to follow the sun.

[ Narrator] From our cells...

to our bodies...

to our civilizations...

the sun shapes how we perceive time.

But big history reveals...

the sun also defines what we believe is real...

and what lies in the shadow world...

just beyond the realm of our perception.

- [Creature Growls] - [ Man Groans]

[ Narrator] Big history is a new way to see the world.

It reveals that civilization thrives...

in the same way our cells do-

by syncing up with the sun...

the timekeeper at the center of our solar system.

When we sync up with the sun...

we're tracking two different kinds of time:

a year, the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun...

and a day, the time it takes to spin in and out of the sun's light.

But time, as we know it, is unique to planet Earth...

because every planet journeys around the sun in its own way.

Venus is so close to the sun and rotates so slowly...

that its day is longer than its year.

Jupiter spins so fast...

its day is less than 10 hours.

Beyond our solar system, there are worlds that don't rotate at all.

One side remains in permanent daylight...

while the other is stuck in a constant fleeze of darkness.

It's hard to imagine life on Earth...

without the 24-hour pattern of sunrise and sunset...

sweeping across the globe.

Big history reveals that even from 93 million miles away...

the sun has the power to control our lives.

It shapes our perception of what is real..

What we see...

and what we can't.

Our eyes are designed to do one thing-

make sense of sunlight.

The light we see is less than half of what the sun beams to us.

It's all part of a spectrum...

made up of different wavelengths of light.

Humans can only see light in the middle of the spectrum.

Our eyes can't perceive light waves that are too long or too short-

the infrared and the ultraviolet.

It's a world that's invisible to us...

but not to every animal.

- Some hawks can see ultra violet' light. - [ Shrieks ]

An adaptation that allows them to track prey from above...

as the light bounces off urine that rodents use to mark their trails.

Pit vipers evolved special organs to sense heat...

so they can track their prey with infrared light...

that we could never see.

If we could see it all, we'd be oven/vhetroed.

So our eyes evolved to pick out the parts of the sun's light we need the most.

Most mammals see the world like this.

Their eyes only have cells to detect two colors-

blues and greens.

But humans have a third type of cell for detecting reds.

Soto us...

the same scene looks like this.

Why can we see colors that other animals can't?

Big history links back 20 million years.

It starts with our early ancestors-

primates who live in the trees...

where the ability to see red is an advantage.

It allows them to spot brightly colored fruit...

against a background of green leaves.

Humans inherit this full-color daytime vision...

which gives us an edge.

[ Benjamin ] Humans are exquisitely adapted for daytime activity...

which meant that we were able to hunt so successfully...

and eventually regulate all of our activity...

to the sun, to this regular cycle of day and light.

[ Narrator] But there are always trade-offs in evolution.

Full-color vision is good for finding food in daylight...

but eyes that see color well...

don't see well at night.

The color-detecting cells in our eyes turn off...

and change our perception of reality...

to muted shades of gray.

Our night vision cells are 100 times more light sensitive...

but they're simpler than the cells that perceive color.

[ Benjamin ] The view we get of the dark is much less clear.

It's more mysterious.

We don't see this great spectrum of colors or anything with clarity.

[ Narrator] This makes night a world of mystery and danger...

where a daytime predator can suddenly fall prey...

To a creature evolved to see in the shadow world.

- [ Growling ] - [ Man Groans]

[ Narrator] Big history reveals how this adaptation to the sun...

connects to our psychology.

For humans, light is good.

Darkness is evil.

In so many origin stories, we have light piercing the dark.

And we equate that light with the divine itself.

And we equate what we don't like and what we don't want with dark.

And what we see there is a rise of duality.

Once you worship the sun, you must fear the dark.

[ Narrator] The fight between good and evil...

Connects mankind's religions to the secrets of the sun.

But there's an even bigger link between the sun and our beliefs.

And it's hidden in the very moment of creation.

[ Narrator] Big history uses science to see the world in a new way.

It reveals that the sun controls our minds...

from our perception of time...

to our view of reality.

The sun has the power to shape us.

And while traditional history tells us that many ancient civilizations...

believed the sun is a god...

big history connects these ancient religions-

[ Screams ]

To the birth of the solar system.

This is our cosmic neighborhood nearly five billion years ago...

a time before the sun.

[ Thunderclaps]

[ Man ] if we go back before the sun came into existence...

what we would see is sort of a vast cloud...

of gas and dust...

about a light-year across and containing the entire mass of the sun.

[ Narrator] An ancient star explodes nearby.

It unleashes a shock wave that rips through the gas cloud...

and sends it into a tailspin.

[ Filippenko ] That started collapsing due to its own weight.

And it spun faster and faster as it collapsed.

[ Narrator] Gravity pulls together a dense cluster of debris in the center.

The remaining cloud flattens out around it.

[ Benjamin ] So now we have a great spinning disk.

And in this spinning disk, the sun eventually coalesces under gravity...

reaches this incredible temperature of 10 million degrees Celsius and lights up.

The sun lights up.

Let there be light.

[ Narrator] The sun is born.

And in its wake, something else appears.

[ Filippenko ] The sun gobbled up 99% of the matter in the cloud of gas.

But a little bit was left over in this flat plain...

and it coalesced into the different planets.

[ Narrator] Planets like Earth.

So just as the ancients believed, the sun is the creator...

the giver of life.

And big history reveals the way our planet is made...

makes us who we are.

The Earth is born in a spinning disk...

and it never stops spinning...

both on its axis and its orbit around the sun.

And it's these spins that are encoded in everything-

from our civilization...

to ourselves.

[ Benjamin ] These two principal spins that really affect life here on Earth-

the great orbiting of our planet around the sun on an annual basis...

and this 24-hour spinning cycle-

are both embedded in the way species evolved here...

the way we perceive of time on an annual basis, on a daily basis...

the way we understand forces of light and darkness...

that's influenced our psychology, our philosophy and our religion and so on.

And these initial forces created by this vast spinning disk...

that coalesced into a sun...

is therefore embedded in our everyday reality.

It's astounding how much is influenced...

by the early creation of the solar system.

[ Benjamin ] We are very much creatures of this planet...

and this sun.

[ Narrator] But the story of the sun is just the beginning.

There's a much bigger puzzle hidden in big history.

Each episode unlocks a clue.

Everyday things like we fer. -.

Silver...

and salt...

hold the key.

Watch them all, and you'll see this grand mystery revealed.

The big history of time, of space...

the big history of us.