Escaping Shallow Time Discipline
This book’s introduction described a host of powerful cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that today, unfortunately, trap billions of minds in the narrowness of the now. Imposing shallow time discipline across populations, these forces of short-termism may seem so deeply rooted that, when reformers call for change, our guts tell us progress is impossible. These forces may feel so familiar that, when critics scorn the risks they pose, it begins to sound like a stale cliché. This, however, does not mean that our mission should be abandoned; it simply underscores the problem’s prevalence. The past four chapters have shown that today’s societies, fortunately, already have many little-known, personally enriching, practical ways of resisting shallow time discipline at their fingertips. Our challenge now is to discover creative ways of learning from these expertise-driven long-termisms during the Anthropocene. It is also to help them gain greater visibility across society, media outlets, and political debates during the deflation of expertise.
In chapter 1, we learned how Safety Case experts drew on archaeological and geological evidence to make analogies that stretch widely across distant times and places. In chapter 2, we learned how they drew on simple, repeating, organizing patterns like input/output to help make quantitative models of far future Finlands. These chapters closed with reckonings that took the approach of “How can we begin changing the world by changing ourselves?” They brainstormed starting points for long-sighted thought experiments and open-minded intellectual attitudes that any of us can adopt. In chapter 3, we learned how Safety Case experts zoomed in and out on visions of deep time from multiple angles, perspectives, and scales. In chapter 4, we learned how they grappled with the untimely death of a crucial deep time reckoner, plus the personnel- and knowledge-loss consequences it triggered. These chapters closed with reckonings that took the approach of “How can we change society by reforming how today’s thought-leaders operate?” Suggesting that we bring long-termist expertise closer to the center of societal decision-making, they asked us to consider possible transformations in how institutions, experts, and societies organize their deep time reckoning projects.
Together, these strategies can inch us closer to achieving our long-termist goals. Unfortunately, though, one anthropologist’s long-termism would never be enough. Nor would that of a few dozen Safety Case experts from Northern Europe. Entire populations must commit to pursuing adventurous, ongoing, long-termist learning. Individuals must voluntarily take up this mission in whatever ways best suit their unique personalities, circumstances, and talents. Bjornerud has argued that “building a more robust, enlightened, time-literate society” that makes “decisions on intergenerational timescales” requires a shift in our very perception of time.1 This is likely so. To survive the Anthropocene, billions of us must work toward widening our intellects’ time horizons. Changes are needed at the societal level and on the global scale. We must learn to reform our basic intuitions and rise above the short-termist incentives before us. We must resist the deflation of expertise and seek out highly trained deep time reckoners in our midst. Those in positions to push for systemic change in today’s centers of power must also take up this cause.
Of course, this is a tall order. But if this thought-revolution sounds absurd, I reply: is it really any less absurd than staying on our current course, careening toward an Anthropocene cliff?
With these challenges in view, we can close by drawing on the case studies and reckonings of chapters 1 through 4—pulling them together and setting them into motion, with an eye to the future. In this spirit, I present two final thought experiments. Both, in chapter 3’s terms, take a step back from, zoom out from, or think bigger-picture about where this book’s reckonings could lead us. The first asks if what we need is a radically new education program. This program would introduce entire populations to humanity’s inventory of long-term thinking techniques from an early age. Works like Deep Time Reckoning would be but one assignment in a broader, more long-sighted curriculum. How would societies’ decision-making customs change if, before reaching adulthood, everyone had already considered, debated, and digested dozens and dozens of tools for long-term thinking, including the Safety Case experts’ analogue, modeling, and scenario forecasting methods? The second thought experiment zooms out even further to ask: How could a hypothetical society, already steeped in long-termist learning, be organized differently? How could it better override shallow time discipline?
Taking these two hypothetical worlds as inspirations, we can then reflect on how to overcome rampant shortsightedness before any hopes for human flourishing succumb to the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise.
In 2013, SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk asked: “Where will we be in one hundred thousand years if we continue anywhere near our current pace?” Musk answered himself: “Either extinct or on a lot of planets.” This may sound like a bit of a gimmicky question. It may sound like a quirky way to jog the imagination—or the oddball musings of a science fiction enthusiast. Or maybe it sounds like the out-of-touch fantasy of a pompous tech billionaire, seeing himself as an elite vanguard of innovation, shepherding humanity into the future. But what if we had been taught, from an early age, that Musk’s query is one of the most important questions we can ever ask ourselves? What if we truly believed it was our job, and not just some eccentric billionaire’s job, to answer it? What if we had been raised to see long-term thinking as our civic duty—told that, like avoiding littering, it is essential to responsible citizenship? What if our journey of long-termist learning had begun at a much earlier stage of our development into adults?
Let’s imagine we are in junior high school. We are not only taking a history class, but also a deep history class and a futures class. These are part of a multiyear Anthropocene civics course that begins in elementary school and continues through high school. We go on field trips to local geological formations to help us make deep time analogies like those found in chapter 1. We do homework assignments stringing together threads of futurological thought, using input/output and if/then thinking patterns like those examined in chapter 2. We spend weeks learning about the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, the formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, the rise of life, the age of the dinosaurs, the evolution of Homo sapiens, humanity’s migrations across the continents, the causes of the Anthropocene, the history of technology, and more. We learn about Thomas Edison’s 1911 prediction that, liberated from poverty in 2011, we would see houses furnished top-to-bottom with ultra-lightweight steel, including steel baby cribs and dinner tables. We learn about economist John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 prediction that technological progress would deliver advanced economies fifteen-hour work weeks by the year 2000.2 We learn about other early- and mid-twentieth century unfulfilled predictions that, today, we would see flying cars, immortality pills, force fields, colonies on Mars, and teleportation devices.3 Then we learn about the many economic, cultural, scientific, and historical reasons that none of these visions come to fruition.
We learn about today’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault project to back up plant seeds in an Arctic gene-bank repository to ensure against genetic diversity loss during future global crises. We learn about climate modelers’ visions of future ecosystems, about the US WIPP nuclear waste repository’s proposed warning monuments, and about indigenous peoples’ “distant time stories” of ancestral pasts.4 We learn about how human language has changed across millennia, plus the world origin stories of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and other traditions. We learn about cosmological assumptions made by past societies—from the ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs to Shang Dynasty China. We reflect on what it must have been like to see the world through their eyes.
Discussing how Earth’s population could grow to nine or ten billion by 2050, we speculate about what it might be in 102,019 CE. We reflect on notions like the ancient Norse wyrd, which is about appreciating the past’s presence in the present.5 We ask how these notions, when coupled with geological knowledge, can help us see how the distant past is still alive in today’s rocks, glaciers, ecosystems, and terrains. We examine dozens of other long-termist case studies, and we write detailed essays about them, called “reckonings.”
Now let’s imagine we are in high school. We watch short films on multitimescale awareness released by experts from the Global Deep Time Reckoning Association proposed in chapter 3. We write essays critically analyzing influential renderings of the future. These include Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity,6 Marxists’ past visions of coming communist utopias,7 and Alan Weisman’s The World without Us.8 We take notes on astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell’s how-to manual for restarting human progress after global collapse, titled The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch.9 We write book reviews of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels like Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.10 We are assigned textbooks showcasing long-termist tools stored for posterity in the Global Deep Time Reckoning Information Repository proposed in chapter 4.
We learn about the tools that actuaries and underwriters in the reinsurance industry use when trying to, decades in advance, shield insurance companies from insolvency due to future calamities like hurricanes, earthquakes, or wars. We learn about techniques the Catholic church has developed to transmit messages, archive information, oversee property, and maintain institutional continuity across centuries and millennia. We learn about the deep time reckoning techniques developed in the nuclear waste management programs of Canada, Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
We learn about problems of knowledge loss posed by digital obsolescence: when a digital file is no longer openable because of outdated software or bygone hardware needed to run it. We learn how philanthropic organizations, run by the ultra-rich, plan humanitarian projects in multidecade timescales. We also learn about how some see their special privilege to do so as plutocratic. We learn how different languages have different ways of articulating time. Finnish, for instance, has no future tense. We learn about different cultural attitudes toward futures: a Finnish informant’s favorite phrase pessimisti ei pety (“A pessimist is not disappointed”) comes to mind. We discuss how future cyborg technologies and genetic modification techniques could alter humans’ physiologies and mental abilities. We ask if this could create even more inequalities if the enhancements are not shared across society. We debate when and if robots and artificial intelligence will supersede organic human intelligence. We consider the Future of Life Institute’s work to highlight the risks that artificial intelligence may pose. We examine dozens of other long-termist case studies too, again writing about them in term paper essays called “reckonings.”
One principle guiding our education would be ecologist Aldo Leopold’s call to think about the living world more holistically “like a mountain.”11 A second would be Finland’s Safety Case experts’ principle of interdisciplinary inquiry, known as “multiple lines of reasoning.” A third would be legal scholar Frank Pasquale’s principle of “attunement”: an embrace of receptivity, sensitivity, and appreciation of one’s wider world as opposed to yearning for mastery, escapism, and mechanistic thinking. Pasquale’s attunement principle’s spirit of self-searching was inspired by Pope Francis’s “sensitivity to time and speed.”12 A fourth principle would be this book’s contention that, during the Anthropocene, everyone has something to teach and something to learn. A fifth would be the view that “imagining diverse futures” can “reveal unseen pathways and can inspire human ingenuity” while also revealing the “limitations of human agency in a complex world.”13
With these pillars instilled in us, we would read case studies in building more long-sighted societies. We would learn how certain hunting communities have rich knowledge of long-term wildlife population management and sustainable hunting practices. We would learn about inner-city communities that have insights into gentrification and urban planning futures. We would learn how certain evangelicals have developed subtle ways of navigating the long-term past and future narratives presented in both Christian creationist theories and secular biological evolution theories. We would examine dozens of other communities as well—widening not only our time horizons, but also our vision of humanity.
We would explore barriers to long-term thinking. We would examine how humans and their biological ancestors have, over millions and millions of years, evolved to react mostly to short-term crises (think lion attacks, droughts, warfare raids, feuds in one’s community, food shortages, providing for one’s kin, competition for social status, sex, and reproduction). We would reflect on how environmental disasters looming two centuries from now—like those considered in the Safety Case—rarely send people’s fight-or-flight reflexes into panic mode. We would ask why appeals to “slow violence” often fail to win hearts and minds or incite political action in today’s spectacle-driven media landscape.14 Slow violence refers to the gradually occurring, slow-moving destruction caused by deforestation, climate change, toxic chemicals spreading in ecosystems, and so on.
In debating whether the Anthropocene calls us to rethink the “role of traditional scholarly activities” and usher in a “new Earth politics,”15 we would examine why futures thinking has been ruled by popular books, articles, and TED Talks from science journalists, science fiction authors, Silicon Valley insiders, Wired magazine devotees, “transhumanist” human enhancement tech enthusiasts, life extension aficionados, and environmental activists. We would ask: why let these familiar futurologists dominate the conversation? After all, hundreds of geotechnical engineers, repository safety modelers, geologists, and nuclear waste regulators out there have already, for decades, been reckoning futures near and deep in just as, or perhaps more, rigorous ways. Why not add greater disciplinary, cultural, racial, gender, age, and class diversity to the array of voices speaking for the future today? Why not get more social scientists and humanities scholars involved?
After years of education in long-term thinking, Musk’s one-hundred-thousand-year question would not only seem a lot less wacky and aloof; it would also seem more accessible. We would be equipped with far more ideas, information, frameworks, concepts, methods, principles, and vocabularies to draw on when answering it. This would help us avoid getting mired in the bipolar extremes of “horror and hope, nightmare and dream, destruction and creation, dystopia and utopia,” which often accompany futures thinking.16 It would help us feel less paralyzed by overwhelming Anthropocene pessimism and feel less “abstracted out of significance” by deep time’s harrowing breadth.17 It would provide counterpoints to the sensationalized deep time aesthetics of sublime awe, terror, mystery, horror, profoundness, and unsurmountable complexity described in chapter 2. It would provide alternatives to the feelings of existential anxiety, cosmic loneliness, or meaninglessness they can evoke. It would train us in the “art of noticing,”18 helping us reveal short-termist blind spots in our thinking that might otherwise go unnoticed.
All of this would prepare us for our final capstone essay assignment. Before graduating high school, each student would need to answer the question: “How can I be a good ancestor?”19 With long-termist learning as our common educational core, we would feel more open to engaging with the complex, uncertain tomorrows before us. From there, we could begin building more long-sighted worlds.
Let’s continue our thought experiment. Let’s imagine we live in a society very different from our own. We recently completed our formal education. We live in a city dotted with signs and plaques describing how local landscapes appeared at different points in geological history. Their inscriptions bring features of past glaciers, asteroid collisions, flora and fauna, volcanic activity, and waterways into our everyday awareness. Smartphone map applications not only help us navigate what regions look like today, but also depict what regions looked like decades, centuries, and millennia ago. We read news articles about popular augmented reality applications that, with the help of a special headset, immerse us virtually in our region’s distant past.
In this alternative society, a program called Future Sister Cities, now widely popular, has been inspired by the CGIAR climate analogues project described in chapter 1. Through it, thousands of towns, cities, and villages set up knowledge-sharing partnerships with counterparts elsewhere in the world—with communities harboring ecosystems resembling those that their own town, city, or village is forecasted to harbor after decades of climate change. Equally popular is a program called Past Sister Cities, inspired by Safety Case experts’ natural analogue studies. Through it, thousands of towns, cities, and villages partner with still other far-off communities—those home to ecosystems similar to those alive in their town, city, or village’s very distant past. The communities present local artifacts to one another as gifts. The artifacts become Analogue Monuments in one another’s public squares. The monuments help locals achieve distance from their present-day surroundings. All these tools provide us with, to use chapter 1’s terms, interscalar vehicles for moving, intellectually, across time and place.20 They help us see “every outcrop” as a “portal to an earlier world,” or to a coming one.21
Catering to publics with a wide-ranging time-literacy education, popular podcasts and radio talk shows host lively discussions about time. They consider philosopher Edmund Husserl’s notion of internal time consciousness,22 philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories of time duration,23 Albert Einstein’s understanding of space-time, and long-sighted books like anthropologist David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.24 They discuss the The Reckoning of Time, a treatise written by the eighth century English Benedictine monk Bede, which examined the ancient calendrical systems of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Greeks, Hebrews, and Egyptians. J. G. Ballard’s 1962 science fiction novel The Drowned World inspires a blockbuster film widely seen as foretelling climate change’s looming perils.25 The film is about a globally warmed Earth struggling to adapt to flooding cities, melting polar ice caps, thawing tundra, and rising sea levels.
On the internet, netizens square off in public contests in which competitors propose, debate, and scrutinize propositions about the future. The competitions are set up similar to debate team matches. Often, these events are organized around the simple logical patterns such as if/then or input/output—or other patterns we drew on to speculate about futures in chapter 2. On television gameshows, contestants face off in tournaments modeled on social scientists Ranjit Singh and Joan Donovan’s “The Future Will Be Terrible” exercise: they envision “techno-dystopias” by taking two existing technologies and imagining how they could be combined in insidious ways. They then try to “sell” their sinister innovations as profitable to a mock panel of angel investors.26 This ironic show not only entertains audiences who see it as a matter of pride to be a sophisticated futures thinker—much like it is to be a skilled orator, a quick wit, or a trivia whiz. It also raises awareness about future threats, and helps officials working for the Secretary for the Future develop new policies. (The Secretary for the Future is a presidential cabinet position Kurt Vonnegut proposed shortly before his death in 2007.)
Corporations, agencies, and institutes with long-term impacts often host the multitimescale awareness training courses, boot camps, and employee retreats proposed in chapter 3. They house chapter 3’s long-term safety departments too: a days division, a decades division, a centuries division, and a multimillennial division. To help employees achieve distance from their work, they set aside quiet meditation rooms for doing introspective thought experiments in tacking back-and-forth across different timescales and other perspectives. The multimillennial division practices self-critique similar to the biosphere experts’ knowledge quality assessment work described in chapter 1. It has, on its walls, motivational posters displaying its mantra: “Accept Futility, Reckon Deep Time Anyway.” Other posters, at odds with Seppo’s screensaver, read: “More Deep Time Research Is Needed.” The division develops data-driven ways of weaving models and scenarios together into complex depictions of future worlds. They draw on number crunching, information collection, and computer-simulation techniques like those the Safety Case experts used in chapter 2. However, following the “multiple lines of reasoning” principle, they also develop detail-driven qualitative scenarios, analogue arguments, and more freewheeling speculations. Their work routinely captures the imagination of society as a whole, which tends to associate high intelligence with one’s ability to toggle back and forth or zoom in and out on different timespans, much as we did in chapter 3.
Meanwhile, chapter 3’s Global Deep Time Reckoning Association unites thousands of long-sighted experts from different fields into a vibrant community with vast influence. Membership is seen as a prestigious honor. Members envision future worlds from several different scales, levels, and frames of analysis, as they socialize and tinker with long-term ideas in its Perspective-Exchanging Parlors. They discuss how ancient bacteria has reawakened because of rising global temperatures, after being frozen in Siberian soil for hundreds of thousands of years; they debate the merits of the RAND Corporation’s long-term probability forecasts and strategic planning methods, which the US military has used since the 1950s. Arguing over whether postmodern cynicism has fostered widespread distrust in human hearts’ and minds’ capacities for achieving a more perfect long-termism, they ask whether left-leaning activists and critical scholars have grown too pessimistic about technology, melancholic about environmental futures, or shy about answering grand theoretical questions. Scrutinizing Christian concepts of time such as eternity, everlastingness, sempiternity, and foreverness, they reflect on theological concepts such as the nunc aeternum (the “eternal now”)27 or the pro chronon aionion (the Bible’s time before time started).28 They consider the Long Now Foundation’s proposal that, to help us think in ten-thousand-year timespans, we should express, say, the year 2020 instead as “02020.” Some ask whether “00002020” would be more appropriate.
The members of the Global Deep Time Reckoning Association develop a policy brief on whether the fossil fuel, nuclear, or plastics industries should require special training and certification in long-term planning, ethics, and stewardship. Some suggest that this should apply not only to the industries’ experts and CEOs, but also to their assistants, administrators, accountants, IT personnel, lawyers, and others across the organization. Before working in the industry, they argue, all must first be made aware of the long-term costs versus benefits, to humanity and to the planet, of doing so.
Corporations, agencies, and institutes that employ deep time reckoners document, catalog, and disseminate their knowledge so it does not vanish when they die. Pressured by publics who support long-termism, they afford deep time reckoners special privileges and responsibilities. As proposed in chapter 4, they have deputies and protégés on standby as replacements. When they travel, they do not share the same vehicles. Their group work is distributed across different office locations. Successors take seriously their duties to inherit and refine their predecessors’ long-termism.
Anthropologists, hired as consultants, interview deep time reckoners and their colleagues to help back-up their thinking in databases. Each deep time reckoner’s most important findings, forecasts, scenarios, ideas, models, interview recordings, meetings transcripts, and notebooks get backed up in several archives in several vaults across the world. To reduce digital obsolescence risks, archivists and librarians store key information on “Rosetta Disks”: glass and steel orbs with over 26,000 pages of text carved into them, which they hope will be readable by any future society with technology that can magnify the words to one thousand times their size.29 The idea is that societies of tomorrow will be more likely to have simple microscope-like technology than any specific digital storage hardware or software of today. These sturdy, fire-resistant orbs are seen as a more durable form of long-term information storage than paper as well.
UNESCO oversees the Global Deep Time Reckoning Information Repository. Concerned citizens regularly collect expert-vetted information from its archives to sharpen their sophistication in doing chapter 1 and 2’s futurological mental workouts. They also learn from the Global Deep Time Reckoning Association’s policy proposals, publications, think-pieces, and YouTube videos. Bloggers, media pundits, government staffers, and academics draw on these sources to make long-termist arguments, while billions hope that we, over the next few decades, will slowly inch toward accomplishing our shared mission of fending off Anthropocene planetary collapse.
We do not, of course, live in these imagined worlds. In this sense, they are unreal—merely fictions. However, our capacities to envision alternative futures, and to work toward building them, are very real. Depictions of utopian or dystopian tomorrows, even those millennia from now, can have powerful, concrete effects on the world today. Engaging with them can help us build more time-literate societies. That is why futurological thought experiments like these are not playful games; they are serious acts of intellectual problem-solving. It is why the Safety Case’s analogue studies of far futures are uniquely valuable, even though they are, at the end of the day, mere approximations. It is why Safety Case models can be enlightening even if they never offer perfect representations of what will definitely happen in the future. It is why, in each chapter, I have invited anyone who picks up this book to join me and my informants in reckoning futures in all sorts of ways. After all, the reckonings of Deep Time Reckoning were not final verdicts; they were open-ended brainstorming pathways handed off to fellow denizens of the Anthropocene who will, I hope, continue on in their own long-termist journeys—even after putting this book down.
Luckily for us, our world is already home to many different inspirational expert tools for widening the timescales of our thinking. Most are overlooked by the public at large. My examples were drawn from the deep time reckoning Safety Case experts of Finland’s nuclear waste repository. But many others out there are just waiting to be popularized, repurposed, and mobilized to help dial back some of our most self-destructive shortsighted tendencies. Librarians and library science educators are, for instance, increasingly developing long-term information storage projects in response to today’s fast-changing publishing landscape. What can we learn from their efforts? What can we learn from the long-sighted work of climate scientists, reinsurance industry professionals, archaeologists, strategic planners, urban infrastructure designers, or existential risk scholars? Quite a lot, I reckon. And this is grounds for optimism.
Yet our optimism must remain guarded and measured. Expertise is not dead, but it has been deflated. Experts’ futurological methods are more sophisticated than ever. Long-sighted curricula, institutions, and societies are more necessary than ever, as new barriers to long-termism have taken root. Countless experts—historians, astrophysicists, geophysicists, nuclear regulators, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, archaeologists, and others—face political climates highly skeptical of expert knowledge. If their repertoires of long-termist techniques were to win more hearts and minds, the deflation of expertise could begin to reverse, despite the obstacles that remain.
One challenge, for experts and laypeople alike, is to find ways of recasting experts’ long-sighted techniques in more publicly accessible, attention-grabbing, exciting formats. These formats must avoid alienating the public with too much jargon, while still doing justice to expert techniques’ complexity and rigor. A second challenge, in cosmologist Martin Rees’s words, is to counter the common “misperception” that there is something inherently “elite” about scientific thought. We need fresh formats in which sophisticated science can be “accessed and enjoyed” by all in “nontechnical words and images.”30 A third challenge is to show the public that “soft” disciplines like anthropology, philosophy, and history are equally as important for ensuring our long-term survival as “hard” disciplines like physics, engineering, or mathematics. A fourth challenge lies in overcoming biases against experts who boldly embark on Promethean endeavors to reckon deep time. It would be naïve for us to think that these experts’ forecasts could ever be totally accurate (or even mostly accurate). However, it would also be naïve to reject the possibility that experts can progress, over time, in developing more robust, credible, nuanced methods of future-gazing.
My strategy has been to combine the methods of academic Anthropology, the long-termism of Finland’s nuclear waste expertise, and the writing style of popular science journalism. What emerged is a format that resists both Anthropocene ecological degeneration and the intellectual downturn of the deflation of expertise. Taking a full twelve years to develop, my anthropological exploration was out of sync with today’s twenty-four-hour news cycles’ nonstop feeds of shocking stories. It plodded on slowly and carefully amid online media’s whirlwind of information and disinformation, hysterical speculations, and fractious debates. Yet this book constitutes just one form of intellectual resistance. There are many other ways of countering shallow time discipline already out there today, just waiting to be discovered. If we all find our own, then real progress is possible.
1. Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2018), 20.
2. David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” Strike! (August 2013).
3. David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” Baffler 19 (2012).
4. Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
5. Bjornerud, Timefulness, 162.
6. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Press, 2005).
7. Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970 [1880]).
8. Alan Weisman, The World without Us (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
9. Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
10. Walter Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (New York: HarperCollins, 1959).
11. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).
12. Frank Pasquale, ed., Care for the World: Laudato Si’ and Catholic Social Thought in an Era of Climate Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
13. Andrew Merrie, “Can Science Fiction Reimagine the Future of Global Development?” Re.Think (2017).
14. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
15. Simon Nicholson and Sikina Jinnah, New Earth Politics: Essays from the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
16. Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 286, 291.
17. Richard Irvine, “Deep Time: An Anthropological Problem,” Social Anthropology 22, no. 2 (2014): 162.
18. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015): 37.
19. This question is inspired in part by conservation biologist David Ehrenfeld’s book on balancing nature, community, and technology, Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
20. Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018).
21. Bjornerud, Timefulness, 163.
22. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964 [1928]).
23. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1889).
24. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011).
25. J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (New York: Berkley Books, 1962).
26. Ranjit Singh and Joan Donovan, “The Future Will Be Terrible,” Annual Meeting: Society for Social Studies of Science (September 4–7, 2019).
27. Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Scribner, 1963).
28. William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2001), 19.
29. “The Rosetta Project: Disk,” The Long Now Foundation Library of Human Language, http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ (accessed January 1, 2020).
30. Martin Rees, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 202.