Nick Nielsen: Big History for ETI

Nick Nielsen Big History for ETI: Recognizing Parochial and Non-Parochial Forms of Complexity

Traditional historians, when they paused their work in history to reflect on historiography, often discussed objectivity in history. Is it possible? Is it desirable? In what would historical objectivity consist? The problem of historical objectivity has dogged historians since the advent of the discipline. Big history, as a form of scientific history, can refer to standards of scientific objectivity as a model, but, in focusing on emergent complexity as the spine of the cosmological historical narrative and the basis of periodization, novel problems arise. How much of known emergent complexity is parochial and endemic to Earth? And if known emergent complexity is endemic to Earth, what other forms of emergent complexity are to be found in the universe? Would an ETI recognize big history as being its history also? A big history adequate to the history of the cosmos entire, and not merely to the history of Earth alone, would comprise all forms of emergent complexity, and would place each in the context of the other. For a non-parochial big history, we must expand the scope of our historical inquiry.

J.N. ‘Nick’ Nielsen is an independent scholar from Oregon who studies emergent complexity, especially as it relates to civilization and its future in the context of big history. He has spoken about the future of civilization at several conferences (100YSS, Icarus Interstellar, SSoCIA), including the 2014 IBHA conference in San Rafael, the July 2019 IBHA symposium in Milan (where he spoke on ‘Peer Complexity during the Stelliferous Era ’), and the 2020 webinar, Being A Good Ancestor (speaking on ‘Scientific Approaches to Civilization’).