David Baker

David Baker is lecturer of Big History at Macquarie University. He blends approaches from the natural and social sciences to explore broad historical trends on multiple timescales, whether it be mathematical patterns in human history, or the relationship between thermodynamics and complex systems across billions of years of cosmic evolution. He has designed numerous university courses including those available on Coursera, contributed to the Bill Gates and Macquarie high school curricula, and was the writer of 'Crash Course Big History' which cumulatively has over 12 million views on Youtube. His broad scope perspective allows him to combine the fields of Big History and Cliodynamics with the frameworks of Strategic Foresight to forecast scenarios in the near and remote future, in order to elucidate the potential challenges and technologies that may emerge in the next century as well as to describe what increasing complexity may look like if its acceleration continues unabated on massive timescales of thousands, millions, and billions of years into the future.