It has also been fostered in New Zealand in A Walk Through Deep Time, as walkers 'followed a farm fenceline of 457 metres to represent 4.57 billion years' alongside 'astronomers, geologists, physicists and biologists as well as matauranga Maori practitioners, philosophers, artists, teachers and a wider public.'Īt my own academic home base, Cornell University, an archaeology course has challenged students to imagine 'the Cornell campus as it would look 1,000 years from now.' A course named Global Weirding: Climate Change & Culturehas challenged freshmen to explore how philosophers' musings on ' awe' and ' the sublime' could alter how we view climate change, the Anthropocene and deep time. Rudwick's Scenes from Deep Time, Daniel Lord Smail's On Deep History And The Brain, and Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle have compelled us to envision distant pasts and futures.ĭeep time thinking has been fostered in the Finnish Society of Bioart's Deep Time of Life and Arttrips to ancient paintings found on 550-million-year-old rocks located atop Finnish Lapland's the two-billion-year-old bedrock. National Academy of Sciences' Imagining Deep Time art exhibition.īooks like Gregory Benford's Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across the Millennia, Martin J.S. Initiatives to promote communion with deep, geologic, planetary timescales have been hatched in the Friends of the Pleistocene community, in the Making the Geologic Now e-book project and in the U.S.

Initiatives to extend our thought's reach further into the future have been hatched in Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, in Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in San Francisco's The Long Now Foundation and in the RAND Corporation's Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. I do this because of my feeling that something about our collective experience of time is now undergoing a profound transformation.Ī look at a few notably longsighted ventures that have already sprouted up around the world can give us a sense of this transformation's character. Now, though, I'm going to take a step back and think about deep time - our very distant future - in a more holistic, speculative and global way.

I explored how these experts dealt with geological, ecological and climatological changes that might occur over the coming millennia. The past two Sundays I reflected, here and here in 13.7, on my anthropological fieldwork among experts developing a Safety Case supporting what might, in Finland in the early 2020s, become the world's first working geological repository for high-level nuclear waste.

Time's arrow time's cycle