History as a subject presented in schools and universities is a barrage of important-looking facts to memorize; and it's usually how it is presented online as well. It can be made entertaining, like in bill wurtz's "history of the entire world, i guess."

But the particulars of history are ultimately less important than the overall takeaways and important trends. I want to write a concise explanation of history in a way that fundamentally doesn't give a flying fuck about who was the first emperor of China or what was the exact migratory path of the Indo-Europeans.

History as an area of knowledge and a practice human beings concern themselves with deserves a separate discussion that I would want to postpone for now.

The universe began as an assemblage of particles in space and time, moving in accordance to their laws and properties.

Most of the exact laws and properties are unimportant for our purposes.

But there are three highly important facts about them that will shape everything that follows.

1) There are a lot of them. Like a lot a lot. Like, an unimaginably huge number of them in the known universe, which we have no reason to suppose is all of it.

2) Their laws and properties are, or at least appear to ultimately be, simple. This doesn't mean that they are intuitive to a human mind, they're really not, but they at least don't appear to have innate complexity of something like a macroscopic organism or mechanism. If you tell Alexa to play you a song, it will produce extremely complicated patterns of motion in the air, but as far as we understand particles, they entirely operate on principles not unlike "if you push this, it will move away, and if you push twice as hard, it will move away twice as fast." Although it would be really funny if we discover that a specific neutron collision plays despacito or a specific incantation throws a fireball. Fingers crossed, but don't bet on it. 

3) The particles were, from the beginning, distributed in a very atypical manner. This is the most important fact about our reality and requires further elaboration.

Picture a deck of ordinary playing cards. There are a lot of arrangements a deck of cards could be in. 52! is a very large number.

Most of the possible arrangements of a deck of cards look quite unlike the arrangement in which a newly packaged deck of playing cards usually arrives. That arrangement exactly sorts the cards by suit and then by rank.

If you pick up a deck in that arrangement without any prior knowledge about it, and reveal cards one by one, it will not be difficult to guess that after 4 or hearts, 5 of hearts, and 6 of hearts, the next card is going to have hearts on it as well, and in fact one more than the previous one; and then when an ace of clubs is revealed, two of clubs is also a correct guess that can be made more easily than the king of diamonds.

This is, however, exactly what is not true for most arrangements that a deck could be in. In truly shuffled decks, the next card after the ace of clubs will be as often a king of diamonds as it will be the two of clubs, as long as neither of the two have been previously revealed. No amount of previous inspections will seem to inform the context of the next.

And if you make changes to the order of cards a deck, some of them, like cutting it exactly in half repeatedly, will not change this property, and some specific ones may even reduce it, but most of them (like, say, "take card #12 and if it's a heart or a spade, move it to #47") are more likely to make the next card harder to predict based on previous ones. (By "most of arbitrary transformations" I mean that for almost any given length for a minimal description of a transformation, more transformations described by a description of that length result in less predictability when applied to most starting orders.)

This is precisely the consequence of there being more random-lookling orders of cards than orderly-looking ones. Moving from one arrangement to another will usually result in decrease of predictability because possible arrangements are typically unpredictable.

It's also possible to have a set of transformations that when applied keeps some forms of predictability in the system (say, doesn't tend to shuffle black and red cards with each other), but usually most of the other traits will get increasingly unpredictable when it is applied (most of the transformations that don't shuffle red and black cards together will make a newly packaged deck into a mess by shuffling spades with each other and mixing them with clubs, etc) 

This is analogous to the way the laws and properties of our universe keep certain things invariant, but if a predictable (not thoroughly shuffled) arrangement of particles is left to transform over time in accordance to physical laws, it will usually become overall less predictable (more thoroughly shuffled) over time.

Analogized to a deck or cards, the particles of our universe began their existence in a very, very atypical order. Many millions of years after, the order is still atypical, and it seems that it will probably remain so for an unimaginably long time, but not forever.

In particular, you are not a typical arrangement of particles, and over a long time, most possible transformations of universe's arrangement of particles will not include you. Unless we come up with something unimaginably clever. You never know. But more on this later. Back to history, or maybe cosmology.

Following the laws of particle behavior, the arrangement of particles in the universe went through a series of global transformations. At the macroscopic scale - the scale most interesting to humankind that largely operates inside it - the two main laws that govern the behavior of objects are the electromagnetic force and gravity. Gravity (the force that keeps you bound to the Earth) pushes particles towards each other over long distances with strength proportional to mass; electromagnetic force (the force that comprises literally every single aspect of your day to day life other than not flying off of the Earth) causes both attraction and repulsion at smaller scales, with repulsion spiking in conditions of high density. Over long time and large distances, gravity pulls large quantities of particles together; but when that much matter is gathered densely into one place, electromagnetic repulsion starts to push back, preventing particles from attracting into a single point. That interplay between these forces causes matter to take a form of a huge ball, which is why matter in space is usually shaped like giant balls.

Roughly speaking:

If the amount of matter pulled together this way is small, gravity cannot overpower repulsion enough to form a tangible ball, and matter remains a disjointed cloud.

If the amount is medium (by this I mean it's comparable to Earth), the result is a planet, in which the repulsive electromagnetic forces spike due to density, enough so that they and the attractive gravitational forces calmly counterbalance each other.

If the amount of matter is large (a few times bigger than Jupiter), the repulsive electromagnetic forces start to break down under immense gravity, and other, more exotic and smaller-scale forces enter the picture. These forces result in a process of transformation of mass into massive quantities of free-roaming electromagnetic energy (light, pretty much) by way of nuclear fusion, and that energy bolsters the repulsion of matter while slowly leaking, and as it leaks, more mass is transformed into energy, once again forming an overall balance (though it is an unstable balance, in this case, and when enough mass have transformed into energy and leaked, it eventually transitions into some different state). The result here is a star. 

If the amount of matter pulled together by gravity is truly, truly enormous, and no amount of matter-energy conversion can push it towards an equilibrium, gravity succeeds in pulling a bunch of matter into a single point, forming a black hole.

(All of this is way more complicated in practice; notably, a planet formed in this straightforward way would be a gas planet, not something like Earth. The creation of solid-matter planets with a relatively thin atmosphere involves complicated aftereffects of the formation of the star.) 

These giant balls shaped by the interplay of gravity and electromagnetism and sometimes fusion then attract to each other via gravity, but over distances between them even gravity is extremely weak. Motion residual from their formation is generally enough to counteract the pull and run circles around each other for a very long time rather than colliding. At larger scales, assemblages of matter orbit different assemblages of matter; at even larger scales, things are drifting apart for poorly understood reasons.

Various permutations and shapes of these arcane and arbitrary processes solely dictated the shape of everything in our universe for, give or take, ten billion years.

Now, let's recall the analogy between rearranging a deck of cards and rearranging the particles in the universe.

Clearly, these processes that shuffled the particles since the beginning of the universe didn't at any point turn it into anything close to a smoothly shuffled and wholly unpredictable slop. This thing here is a planet, that thing there is a black hole, and between them is a giant heap of nothing. The planets and the small gas clouds by themselves are stable, which translates to the matter on and around them not being shuffled around that much by itself.

The stars and black holes, though, are not stable. The black holes accumulate mass by sucking it into their event horizon while radiating Hawking radiation and heat in their accretion disks, which are topics we will ignore. The stars are even less stable, constantly transforming huge amounts of matter into energy in perpetuating their equilibrium. In terms of the analogy between transformation of arrangements of matter and those of playing cards, the stars are the places of rampant shuffling, where universe's homogenization progresses at it's fastest. On and near stars and black holes, stable and predictable and orderly arrangements of particles (like, say, a mechanical clock!) will turn into bland superheated paste. On and under the surfaces of cold lonely planets, or inside cold and lonely gas clouds or vacuum, they will remain exactly as they are for centuries.

But the particle shuffling of stars emits electromagnetic energy (basically light) in prodigious quantities. That energy proceeds to shuffle anything it falls upon, and through electromagnetic forces those things will shuffle whatever is adjacent to them a little bit in turn. When light of a close star shines upon the surface of a planet, a steep entropy gradient is created, an area where some spaces are rapidly shuffled, some are stable, and the separation between the two is thin and uneven and shifting and complicated. This is where the most interesting things can happen, and one might reasonably suppose that's where the most interesting things started, and one would be totally wrong. 

The most interesting things seem to have started in a different steep entropy gradient, formed near the openings on the surface of the Earth, where it's hot core met it's surface layer of water.

Wait, where did that come from? Why is there a steep entropy gradient on a planet, aren't they supposed to be totally stable and boring?

Well, earthlike planets have their own weird exotic process of matter-energy conversion that arises out of extreme density - fission. It's not much, it's nothing compared to stars and black holes, but it kept to core of Earth warm for a long time. And the surface of Earth is exposed to space, and it slowly leaks the converted energy out, and so a smooth and boring entropy gradient is formed between the core and the surface. But in the aftershocks of Sun's birth, and in the violent light of the Sun, there is plenty of drama happening on Earth's surface - meteor collisions, tectonic shifts, extreme weather. And so, sometimes, the smooth gradient is disturbed, and magma of the mantle directly and for a long time collides with cool surface water that is also a solvent that dissolved all sorts of interesting minerals, and a thermoregulator, and a radiation shield, and in a space where some particles are rapidly shuffled and some adjacent ones are largely left alone, unusually interesting things may actually start to happen.

Or maybe it was not the bottom of the ocean but it's surface after all. I don't know, I wasn't there.

In either case, 3-4 billions of years ago or so, something very interesting indeed happened on a random planet in the middle of nowhere. In the process of shuffling the particles around, the laws of physics happened to assemble some particles into a shape that, under the conditions it was in, started to assemble surrounding particles into imperfect copies of itself.

Well, it's not too uncommon in our universe for a structure to propagate itself around. Crystallization can be exactly that, atoms voluntarily assembling themselves into neat grids. But these kinds of structures thrive at the stablest places, lowest points of entropy, so they don't change much over time. The structure propagates through still particles and makes them even more still, frozen in place, maybe for billions of years. Then, if something disturbs the system, brings it into vigorous motion, it melts at once or shatters into pieces that will probably never find conditions to grow again. 

The thing that arose at this anonymous planet, though, was much different. It funneled the shifts of motion from the hotter higher-entropy parts of reality around itself to the colder lower-entropy parts, with some of that motion becoming the driver of it's replication, and it itself was hotter than water but colder than magma (or was it sunlight?); hot enough and entropic enough to be subject to much change and motion, yet cold enough to retain structure over time, submerged in a dynamic but not shapeless environment between and around all three states of matter. It may have resembled a typical physical/chemical process like crystallization initially, but soon, very different patterns started to take over. 

It seems an extraordinary coincidence, for such an unlikely structure to form. If you left the particles that comprised it and it's environment in a box for a million years, applying just the right entropy gradient, the chance of it forming would be beyond negligible. But it didn't need to form in a box. It needed to form anywhere in existence for us to discuss it, anywhere at all, at any moment. And one of the most important facts about our universe is it's utterly unfathomable size. The scale of our universe, even the visible portion of it that we have no reason to assume is the only portion of it, completely shatters imagination; and it has to be multiplied by it's unfathomable age. The conditions within which it arose were hardly unique, as there exist great many planets orbiting stars at a roughly correct distance for liquid water (and hey, is liquid water really necessary? it does look uniquely convenient, but maybe it could arise in lakes of ammonia or something, for all we know.). It happened at a random planet in the middle of nowhere because it was remotely possible and as such could be expected to happen somewhere.

And that's the start of what will be later called life on what will be later called Earth; and not long after, the causal relations between some of the particles in the universe will, despite following the exact same laws as before, take on entirely new shapes.

The thing that shifts organic life from a chemical/physical curiosity to something with the potential to change the fate of the universe is evolution. And the reason evolution is not a chemical curiosity is that it's not, at it's core, a "chemical/physical process". Or even "a biological process". It is an informational process, and arguably the very first informational process to happen in our universe. Of course, it happened in accordance to the very same unchanging laws of physics, it was comprised of chemical reactions, and it happened in what we study as biological, but all of this is completely incidental. Evolution could happen with things completely devoid of carbon atoms, so long as the informational conditions are met, it can happen in the patterns of electric signals inside the circuits of your computer, or within the confines of human brains, or in logically possible worlds with physical laws that haven't ever heard of an "electromagnetic force".

Evolution results in aggregation of correspondences between the evolving things and the reality surrounding them, whatever those are and whatever it is. Evolution is, in a sense, a language that is spoken without an interpreter. It is the thing that, unlike any process before, is fundamentally only made possible by the distribution of particles being atypical in the sense of being patterned and predictable and not fully shuffled. It is the start of multiple megapatterns in reality that will define the flow of history, one of them being the abovementioned aggregation of correspondences.

Here's how it works:

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