Introduction

Imagine being tasked with narrating the entire human story to an alien. It’s a fascinating and daunting endeavor.

As you begin, you quickly realize that our story isn’t just about us. Take, for example, the simple act of buying an iPhone for $1,000. This small story involves a world with iPhones and dollars, and if we delve deeper, a world where beings communicate using languages. Hence, our story is intertwined with our world of iPhones, dollars, languages, cultures, and about 200 countries.

But remember, this is the “human world” that we humans have created. The physical world— our planet Earth — started with none of these. In fact, we go further back, there was a time when even Earth didn’t exist.

The Story of Two Halves

If you think about it, our story spans from the origin of the Universe to significant milestones like the origin of Earth, right up to the origin of humans. From there on, it transitions to the “human world” that we know today. This way, our story can be divided into two halves:

Physical World with Humans
Human World by Humans

As humans, we love to talk about ourselves and our achievements, it’s natural to focus on the second half of the story. However, in the grand timeline of the Universe, the human-created world is just a tiny fraction. To put it in perspective, our Universe is about 13.4 billion years old, while the first primitive human-like creatures appeared only 2.5 million years ago. This means our human story, the second half, makes up less than 0.02 percent of the Universe’s entire timeline.

The Story of Science and History

To narrate the first half of the story, we rely on science, for science helps us understand the important “why” and “how” of the physical world. Whereas for the second half, we need more than science, as we humans are complex beings.

Like our example of the iPhone and $1,000, to explain how humans created “money” or how the “dollar” became the most dominant currency, we need more than scientific theories. This is where history comes. To explain money and the dollar, we need to cover milestones like the origin of money, the rise of nation-states, and the discovery of America.

Even within history, it’s simpler to narrate our journey through two characters: Religion and Money. These two human creations have significantly shaped our modern world. Lastly, our journey is not only through time but also space. So, it would be cool to cover — or at least scan — as many regions of the world as possible.

And that, my friend, would be our story on earth.