You have been in development for literally billions of years.
Thankfully, you don’t have to be around for billions of years to understand how that happened and how you got here. In a video from last year, YouTube creator Bill Wurtz manages to capture the history of the world in a bizarre but highly entertaining 20 minutes.
Wurtz starts with a simple observation: “Hi. You’re on a rock, floating in space. Pretty cool, huh?” From there, he goes into a deep dive of world history: the formation of the universe; the development of our solar system and Earth; the evolution of species, including humans; the dawn of civilization; the creation of religions; wars; the explosion of technology — and the global population — in the past two centuries; and much, much more.
The video does not contain every single detail of world history. After all, that’s just not possible to capture in even 20 minutes. It doesn’t go too deep into, for example, how the Black Death ravaged Europe or how Genghis Khan’s empire killed so much of the world’s population.
But it does manage to capture the big points in a way that’s typical of Wurtz’s videos: funny, a bit satirical, and very informative. And it does so in a way that’s not too focused on the West and America — also (briefly) covering the history of powers like China, Persia, and India, which don’t get that much attention in a typical world history class in America.
If one video isn’t enough for you, Wurtz’s previous history video focused on Japan, and it’s also highly entertaining and worth watching. And if you want to learn more about the topics Wurtz goes into, there are plenty of podcasts — such as The History of Rome, History of Japan Podcast, Revolutions, and BackStory — that are worth listening to.
